Month: January 2019

UPDATE: Ubisoft has reversed its decision to implement the planned aesthetic changes to Rainbow Six Siege following plenty of vociferous fan feedback. These changes were set to include the removal of gambling, violent, and sexual-themed content in Siege, in a move that was initially designed to prepare the game for the Asian market.

“On November 2nd, we shared an article detailing the Aesthetic Changes coming with Operation Wind Bastion,” wrote Ubisoft. “Since then, our community and players have raised concerns. We have spent the last week working on solutions and have decided that we will be reverting all aesthetic changes.

As for why these changes are happening, it’s a result of community feedback and, apparently, Ubisoft trying to remain as true to its original vision for Rainbow Six Siege as possible. “We have been following the conversation with our community closely over the past couple of weeks, alongside regular discussions with our internal Ubisoft team, and we want to ensure that the experience for all our players, especially those that have been with us from the beginning, remains as true to the original artistic intent as possible,” said Ubisoft.

While Ubisoft expects there to be a minimal impact on the reversal of these changes, it may mean a slight delay to the release of the upcoming Year 3 Season 4 on content for Rainbow 6 Siege. Well, it’s either that or “some instability” as testing times for the update will be shortened.

The move was evidently spurred on by members of Siege’s fanbase. They weren’t overly keen to see this instance of self-censorship despite Ubisoft’s efforts at expanding the global appeal. Splintering off into two distinct branches appears to be the smarter move, although there’s a question as to whether the damage has already been done.

Original Story: 04-Nov-2018 – Violent, Gambling and Sexual Content to be Removed From Rainbow Six Siege

Ubisoft has announced a raft of frankly bizarre aesthetic changes being made to Rainbow Six Siege next season as it prepares to expand into Asian territories. More specifically, it appears to be a move to cater to the Chinese market.

These changes include reworking each and every map in R6 Siege in order to remove all references to gambling, sexual content, death, and even blood spatter. Yep, you heard that right, as of Rainbow Six Siege Year 3 Season 4, there will be no blood spatter whatsoever.

Crucial to all of this is that Ubisoft is making these changes globally. Rather than branch out different versions of Siege, it wants to maintain a single build that streamlines production time and increase efficiency. The downside, naturally, is we all have to have the same version of the game, censorship and all.

Getting down to the nitty-gritty of what will be removed and what will be altered, blood is arguably the biggest game changer. Blood splatter can help indicate both a successful hit and warn of the direction of gunfire before rounding a corner. But not anymore.

Any sexual content in Rainbow Six Siege is also being thrown out. Instances of this are few and far between, but the strip club in Clubhouse, for example, is having its neon-lit stripper light removed.

All environmental gambling objects are also set to be deleted. This includes the slot machines in levels such as Clubhouse, as well as the Casino on Yacht. Ironically, the loot crate ‘Alpha Packs’ will remain, so fictional gambling is being removed, real gambling is allowed to stay.

Lastly, allusions to violence are being removed, from the game about shooting people in the face. Any depictions of skulls are out, including skulls on skins, within the level design, or on the kill feed. The melee icon has also been changed from a knife to a fist.

Ubisoft has said the changes will not impact the core of Rainbow Six Siege whatsoever. “We have a commitment to ensure that the Rainbow Six Siege experience remains true to its roots. We are adjusting art and visuals, but are not compromising what makes Rainbow Six Siege the game you know today.”

I beg to differ. Removing slot machines is going to change lines of sight, while blood splatter is an obvious gameplay element that will be missed. There are also a number of weapon and player skins that feature skulls and would need to be redesigned, so a refund has to be on the cards for players who’ve forked out for these. It’s frankly all a bit bizarre, and the blog post detailing these changes sits directly above another blog post about Halloween bundles that feature several skull and zombie masks available to buy that probably won’t transition to the new version.

Needless to say, the Siege subreddit currently looks like a pit of hellfire in regards to this controversial topic. Fans are not happy with the changes being made at all, so it remains to be seen whether Ubisoft backs down on the changes.

What are your thoughts on censoring content in a shooter three years after its launch? Should Ubisoft be splitting Siege into two different versions? Let us know your thoughts!

Turn-based strategy fans will be all-to-aware The Bearded Ladies could be cooking up something pretty special with Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden. The tactical strategy game takes combat cues from XCOM but also includes full-blown exploration and stealth between combat segments, providing a more story-based, adventure experience. That and you can play as a shotgun-toting duck. MYZ: Road to Eden is coming to PC this December, but in the meantime here are the official PC system specs for Mutant Year Zero so you can make sure you’re good and ready.

Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden Minimum System Requirements

OS: Windows 7 64-bit CPU: Intel Core i5-760 2.8 GHz or AMD Phenom II X4 965 3.4 GHz RAM: 6 GB System Memory GPU RAM: 1.5 GB Video Memory GPU: GeForce GTX 580 or Radeon HD 7870 DX: DirectX 11 HDD: 8GB Available Hard Drive Space

Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden Recommended System Requirements

OS: Windows 10 64-bit CPU: Intel Core i7-6700K 4.0 GHz or AMD Ryzen 5 1600X 3.6 GHz RAM: 8 GB System Memory GPU RAM: 4 GB Video Memory GPU: Nvidia GeForce GTX 970 or AMD Radeon RX 480 4GB DX: DirectX 11 HDD: 8GB Available Hard Drive Space

Funcom has set a wide bar for Mutant Year Zero’s system requirements, stretching from low-end minimum specs up to a set of recommended requirements that align fairly neatly with modern game demands.

Down at the low-end, the minimum suggested CPUs for MYZ: Road to Eden are positively ancient. Either a first-gen Intel Core i5-760 or AMD Phenom II X4 965 should do the job. Just about any modern processor can compete with these two, and most offer performance far in excess. They’ll need to be paired with a video card with at least 1.5GB of VRAM, such as the GTX 580 or Radeon HD 7870. Something a little more accessible for today’s users would be the GTX 750 Ti or Radeon R7 270, neither of which should run into much trouble when playing Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden.

If you are hoping to max out the graphics settings in Mutant Year Zero though, then you will need a considerably more powerful system. The ever-reliable GeForce GTX 970 will do the trick, or a Radeon RX 480 4GB if you’re that way inclined. The recommended CPU requirements for MYZ: RTE are huge though, but this could well help with speeding up AI turn times. It’s unlikely to have a major impact on Mutant Year Zero’s frame rate though, so don’t worry if you’re hovering between the minimum and recommended spec processors.

 

Ah, and one final thing for you FCKDRM aficionados out there – Mutant Year Zero will use Denuvo Anti-Tamper DRM for its copy protection. Take that for what it’s worth, although these days we understand it only has a negligible impact on performance. There are many other reasons to oppose Denuvo of course, but it shouldn’t really affect MYZ: Road to Eden’s frame rates.

As ever, remember you can always check out how well your PC can run Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden System Requirements here, where you can check benchmarking and performance from other users. Compare your graphics card to Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden GPU benchmark chart and we also have a Mutant Year Zero: Road to Eden Frames Per Second system performance chart for you to check.

Pretty much every major game of 2018 is now on store shelves, with one or two exceptions. Just Cause 4 is one of these final holdouts, penciled in for a December 4th launch. December releases are notoriously dangerous, coming as they do in the footsteps of dozens of major releases, Black Friday shopping, and before the imminent holiday sales.

Square Enix is keen to remind us Just Cause 4 exists though, and the new Deep Dive trailer provides just about all the information you could hope for in regards to Rico Rodriguez’s physics-based mayhem.

While much of Just Cause 4 looks to be business as usual for the JC series, JC4 does feature four distinct biomes for more varied environments, as well as the upgraded Apex game engine that allows for dramatic weather effects. Wind now actually has a physical impact in the world, such as blowing debris across the battlefield or even a tornado tearing up entire merc bases.

Just Cause 4 is coming to PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One on December 4th.

Nvidia has unveiled its new Adaptive Shading technology, a new feature enabled specifically for its GeForce RTX 20 series graphics cards. While the innovation was briefly touched on during the GeForce RTX reveal in September, Adaptive Shading’s capabilities remained largely a mystery to us.

Well, Nvidia Adaptive Shading (NAS) is an advanced shading technique that provides developers with an additional means to improve performance, and it’s making its debut today in a new patch for Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus.

While there’s obviously a ton of complexities going on behind the scenes, the end result is actually fairly simple to parse. NAS analyses factors such as colour coherence and spatial movement within each frame to learn what areas remain the same from frame to frame. Rather than totally re-render those same pixels, the shading rate can then be lowered for successive frames and that performance can be diverted elsewhere. It’ll be useful for just about anything that’s largely static in a scene, such as the in-car dashboard in a racing game.

Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus is the first such game to support Nvidia Adaptive Shading in a new patch. You can see in the image below how the Adaptive Shading works. In the scene, the pixels are colour coded to demonstrate their rendering priority. The static details on the panels are basically untouched, while the red areas are being frequently re-rendered. The blue areas are being re-rendered infrequently while the green pixels are frequently updated.

Nvidia has also provided benchmarks of the NAS future, although they’re basically useless as a point of comparison. Nvidia has pitted the GTX 1070 against the RTX 2070, and the GTX 1080 vs the RTX 2080, etc, rather than the same GPUs against one another to compare performance before and after enabling NAS.

Still, here are the benchmarks if you can extract some use out of them:

Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus RTX NAS Update Patch Notes

Added support for NVIDIA Adaptive Shading on NVIDIA RTX series GPUs. (Improves frame rate by dynamically adjusting the shading resolution in different areas of the screen, without affecting fidelity). Ensured that, on multiple GPU systems, the discrete GPU is preferred over an integrated GPU.

Players can now choose to ignore/suppress warnings when the selected video settings exceed the amount of dedicated VRAM available on the GPU
Fixes for skinning issues on GTX 970

What are your thoughts on this neat little advancement then? Another decent reason to pick up an RTX GPU, or do you expect it to only have a minor impact on performance? Let us know!

A rumour has emerged that Microsoft is planning to embrace the all-digital future with an Xbox One S that doesn’t have a disc drive.

Microsoft gurus Thurrott.com say they’re expecting the console to cost less than $200 in stores, and that Microsoft will be launching the console alongside an initiative whereby physical games can be traded in at participating stores for a digital download code.

“Microsoft is moving forward very carefully with this product as it knows that a sizeable portion of its users do prefer to buy physical games and not download them,” says Thurrott, alluding to the controversy that surrounded the reveal of the Xbox One and the game licenses that were going to originally tied to discs.

It could be a cut-price way for fans to get their hands on an Xbox One, although it will mean owners could only purchase games from the Xbox and Microsoft stores. Being a walled ecosystem this would generally mean paying full whack for a game outside of digital sales. Here in the UK, for example, games are up to £20 more expensive to buy digitally than they are in stores. If users could buy a physical game and then trade it in for a digital code, this could nearly circumvent that particular issue.

The other factor is the Xbox Game Pass, which has just passed 200 games. For about £8/$10 a month, players have access to this complete library. All they’d need then is this cut-price console and they’d be able to play all of the Microsoft exclusives, which isn’t a bad deal at all.

What do you think then, is it about time for consoles without disc drives? Do you see this as being a test bed for future Xbox console designs? Let us know!

Battlefield V
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DICE has dropped the official trailer for Lightning Strikes, the next season of content coming Battlefield V’s way. Tides of War Chapter 2 – Lightning Strikes is due to kick off on January 17th and includes a trio of modes, map updates, new vehicles, weapons, and company gear.

 

Things will kick off on the 17th with the arrival of Squad Conquest, a new 8v8 mode set on smaller versions of Rotterdam, Arras, and Hamada. There are only three capture points and players can only spawn at their home base. Once a team runs out of tickets, they lose. It sounds like a bit of a mix of Domination and Conquest, and not being able to spawn on capture points should lend it a more rigid, tactical structure. Squad Conquest is playable January 17- January 30.

Then in February, it’s time for Combined Arms, the four-player co-op PvE mode that was hyped before launch. Varying objectives, locations, challenges, and difficulty levels are dished out, challenging squads of players with besting the AI.

Also coming next month is Battle of Hannut, a new Grand Operation set within December’s Panzerstorm map and Arras. DICE says it’s been tweaking Panzerstorm to better suit Grand Ops, although I’ll admit being a little skeptical just how well suited it is.

Finally, in March there’s the return of Rush. It’s been a heck of a long way for this fan favourite, although in a bitter twist this mode is only back for a limited time. It’s kind of mind-blowing why DICE would do this but Rush will only be playable from March 7 – March 20. Perhaps the smaller player base is taking its toll.

Aside from that, there’ll also be the weekly challenges, new weapons like the  Zk-383 submachine gun, the Modele 1944 semi-automatic rifle, and the M1922 MMG, the Tank Hunter vehicle and two new reinforcements for squad leaders – Sector Artillery and Smoke Barrage.

Right at the end the trailer above there’s also another teaser for Firestorm, Battlefield V’s battle royale mode that’s due in March. This includes the pretty major news that a tractor will be coming as a new driveable vehicle for the mode.

Ahead of Chapter 2: Lightning Strikes there’s also a new patch rolling out tomorrow, barring any unforeseen delays. The full patch notes can be seen here. It tackles a few key fixes but also has plenty of glaring omissions, including no confirmed fix for the bugged challenge progression.

Resident Evil 2 Remake
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The Resident Evil 2 / Biohazard RE:2 demo went live at the weekend, giving PC players the opportunity to go hands-on with this total remake of one of the most beloved survival horror games of all time. This means the graphics options for Resident Evil 2 on PC are now out in the wild and Capcom looks as if it’s provided comprehensive support for the PC version.

Resident Evil 2 Remake Video Settings

HDR Mode – On/Off Brightness Display Area Reticule Colour Dot Sight Tutorials – On/Off HUD – On/Off Colour Space Presets – Recommended/Max/Graphics Priority/Balanced/Performance Priority Graphics API – DirectX 11 / DirectX 12 Display Mode Resolution Rendering Mode – Normal / Interlaced Image Quality (Resolution scale) – 50%-200% Refresh Rate Frame Frate – 30/60/Variable V-Sync

Resident Evil 2 Remake Graphics Options

Antialiasing – Off/FXAA/TAA/FXAA + TAA/SMAA Texture Quality – Low/Medium/High Texture Filter Quality – Bilinear/Trilinear/Anisotropic Filtering 2x/4x/8x/16x Mesh Quality – Low/Medium/High/Max Shadow Quality – Min/Low/Medium/High/Max Shadow Cache – Off/On Contact Shadows – Off/On Screen Space Reflections – Off/On Subsurface Scattering – Off/On Volumetric Lighting Quality – Off/Low/Medium/High Particle Lighting Quality – Low/High Ambient Occlusion – Off/SSAO Limited/SSAO Full/HDAO/HBAO+ Bloom – Off/On Lens Flare – Off/On Motion Blur – Off/On Depth of Field – Off/On Lens Distortion – Off/On/On with Chromatic Aberration Film Noise – Off/On

Fans of Resident Evil 7 will be in instantly familiar territory. While Capcom has jumbled up the order, the graphics settings for Resident Evil 2 Remake are basically the exact same graphics settings present in RE7. RE2 Remake runs on the same RE Engine as well, giving us a prime indicator of how we can expect the launch version of Resident Evil 2 to run.

In terms of what’s on offer here, Capcom has once again provided a fantastic set of graphics options to tweak in Resident Evil 2 Remake. PC players will be able to fine-tune performance to their heart’s content, with dozens of potential FPS/visual trade-offs. We will also have our graphics options performance breakdown with you shortly if you’re keen to know which graphical effects in RE2 are the most demanding.

The only potential for disappointment here comes in the limited antialiasing options. None of the implementations of AA in RE2 are particularly great, all of them muddying the image through some quite intense blurring techniques, despite doing a great job at removing the jagged edges.

Look out for plenty more on Resident Evil 2 shortly, and remember the PC demo is out now on Steam if you want to give it a shot yourself.

Resident Evil 2 Remake comes to PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One on January 25th.

SK Hynix has revealed the first DDR5 memory that’s fully compliant with JEDEC standards, showcasing 16GB DDR5 RAM that can far outperform today’s current DDR4 standard.

The DDR5 memory is clocked 5200 MHz, whereas typical DDR4 memory tops at 4600 MHz, with most commercially available DDR4 memory hovering around the region of 3200 MHz. It’s unclear where SK Hynix’s DDR5 module is the fastest it can push the new standard or an example of a more typical mid-range offering. For a point of reference, the first DDR4 RAM modules shown had clock rates of 2133 MHz, so they typically low-ball it with the initial spec.

There is potentially a lot of headroom above the already impressive 5200 MHz DDR5 memory. At 5.2 GHz the SK Hynix DDR5 DRAM can deliver 41.6 GB/s of data.

As we’ve come to expect, the DDR5 memory will also have greater power efficiency than DDR4, running at 1.2V rather than 1.1V and consuming 30% less power.

“Based on technological advancements that allowed the industry’s first DDR5 DRAM to meet the JEDEC standards, SK Hynix plans to begin mass producing the product from 2020, when the DDR5 market is expected to open, to actively respond to the demands of clients,” said SK Hynix vice president Joohwan Cho.

There’s little need to worry about DDR5 memory just yet though. SK Hynix is targeting a 2020 launch for the first DDR5 DRAM modules. They’re typically prohibitively expensive at launch but the price should drop dramatically after about 12 months or so. You will need a DDR5 compatible motherboard though, so this is one for a future build.

It’s a big day for Nvidia today as the GeForce RTX 2060 has officially launched. The cheapest RTX graphics card yet is now available to buy, although ‘cheap’ is subjective when the GeForce RTX 2060 will set you back $349/£329. As always with a new graphics card release, that means a new Nvidia GeForce GPU with official support for the RTX 2060.

Nvidia’s GeForce 417.71 graphics drivers bring support for Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 graphics cards so if you’re picking one up today this will be a necessary download.

That’s not all either as this update also includes the first support for Nvidia G-Sync on compatible FreeSync monitors. Details on the monitors supported is still a little bit flaky with Nvidia confirming just 12 have received the official G-Sync certification. It does sound as if adaptive sync tech will work on Nvidia GPUs and pretty much all FreeSync monitors, although results could vary.

Once the GeForce 417.71 GPU driver is installed, Nvidia G-Sync can be enabled the control panel to enable VRR (Variable Refresh Rates) features on compatible displays. The full list of officially supported monitors can be seen here. There are a couple of further caveats to the new functionality as well. Firstly, G-Sync support is only possible on Nvidia Pascal and later GPU architectures. That’s the GeForce GTX 10 Series or newer. Secondly, G-Sync can only be enabled on a single display. There is no multi-monitor support at this point.

Other changes in this driver release are comparatively minor although there are a handful of new fixes, including a fix for Shadow of the Tomb Raider crashing while running in DirectX 12.

GeForce 417.71 GPU Driver Fixed Issues

[GeForce GTX 1080]: GPU clock speed does not drop to idle when three monitors are enabled. Black screen when resuming from monitor sleep on some DisplayPort monitors. [Notebook]: Fixed lockup that occurred when resuming from sleep on MSI GT83 notebook. [GeForce GTX 1060 Notebook][Gu Jian Qi Tan 3]: The application hangs during launch. Fixed black screen on BenQ XL2730 monitor at 144Hz refresh rate. [Windows 7][G-SYNC]: Game FPS drops when G-SYNC is used with V-Sync. [SLI][3D Gaming][TU104][PG 180][Multiple apps][Win10RS5x64]Blocky Corruption when application is switched to certain resolutions. [Shadow of the Tomb Raider]: Fixed occasional application crash in DirectX 12 mode.

GeForce 417.71 GPU Driver Known Issues

[SLI][Shadow of the Tomb Raider][G-SYNC]: Flickering occurs in the game when launched with SLI, HDR, and G-SYNC enabled [HDR][Ni no Kuni 2]: Enabling HDR causes the application to crash when launched. [ARK Survival]: Multiple errors and then blue-screen crash may occur when playing the game. [Firefox]: Cursor shows brief corruption when hovering on certain links in Firefox. [G-SYNC]: Random flickering occurs when connecting G-SYNC monitor + non-GSYNC HDMI monitor with G-SYNC enabled.

As always, you can grab the latest driver release directly from Nvidia’s site, or you can just auto-update through your current GeForce Experience installation.

Last week’s 18% stock drop wasn’t just a blip for Nvidia, with Team Green’s share value tumbling even further during the start of this week, down an additional 12%.

Nvidia’s share value currently sits at $144.70, down from $289.36 on October 1st. Basically, over half of Nvidia’s entire market cap has been wiped off in just seven weeks. This has undone around 15 months of steadily increasing value.

This is a massive setback for Nvidia, which could ultimately come down to the bubble bursting on the cryptocurrency market, resulting in a surplus of inventory for previous-gen graphics cards.

We’re also hearing murmurs that demand for GeForce RTX 20 Series GPUs is slower than anticipated due to the inflated pricing. The GeForce RTX 2070 is the cheapest model in the GeForce RTX family and would typically set you back around $600. Hardly an impulse purchase then, and it seems plenty of folks are content to wait this generation out for now.

The silver lining is that Nvidia is still an absolute giant and worth considerably more than it was in 2016. Its market cap of $87.98 billion compared to AMD’s $19.10 billion showcases its current dominance over the graphics card market despite its rocky patch.

Original Story: 18-Nov-2018 – Nvidia Shares Plummet 18% in a Single Day Due to GPU Oversupply and Lack of Crypto Demand

 Nvidia’s share value has plummeted over the past few days, dropping 18% in value since Team Green shared its latest financial results.

The overall results for Nvidia were actually impressive despite the precipitous share value drop. Record revenue was attributed to Nvidia’s automotive, data centre and workstation visualisation sales; enough for Nvidia to tell shareholders dividend payouts would actually be 7% higher than previously anticipated.

“AI is advancing at an incredible pace across the world, driving record revenues for our datacenter platforms,” said Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. “Our introduction of Turing GPUs is a giant leap for computer graphics and AI, bringing the magic of real-time ray tracing to games and the biggest generational performance improvements we have ever delivered.”

So why the big drop? Well, despite the strong showings in various divisions, Huang said this is the result of a correction taking place after the cryptocurrency boom. The crypto mining fad has slowed considerably and Nvidia is now sat on a lot of excess stock of graphics hardware. Nvidia increased its holding inventory five times during this quarter.

Our near-term results reflect excess channel inventory post the crypto-currency boom, which will be corrected,” said Huang.

There’s a kind of two-fold damage coming Nvidia’s way here. Firstly, old stock is still filling up retailers and storage and needs to be moved on. Compounding this is expected lower sales for the upcoming quarter. Retailers aren’t needing to order more stock as they’ve already got plenty backed up after over-ordering to meet crypto demand.

While conjecture, for now, it also wouldn’t be too surprising if demand for the GeForce RTX 20 Series wasn’t as high as for previous-gen launches. The new graphics cards are prohibitively expensive, while there are also reports of faulty RTX 2080 Ti’s and widespread disappointment over the RTX ray tracing capabilities of the GPUs, even at 1080p.

The end result is an Nvidia that looks in worse shape than it has for a while. It’s certainly nothing approaching disastrous but share values declined 18.76% on Friday, dropping from $202 down to $163. Nvidia’s share value is now almost half what it was during its peak of $289 in late September, right before the RTX 20 Series graphics card launches.

Our Favorite Comments

59

“"Lack of Crypto Demand"That’s what I call good news”

FEAR810 –

37

“If they’re trying to get rid of them, why don’t they just drop the prices. 1070s for 250$ would sell like hot cakes.”

ExtremyMan –

26

“Cryptocurrency or not, Nvidia will do everything they can to squeeze all the money from their consumers’ pockets. They have already halted the production of 1080ti to create an artificial shortage of the GPU.”

NEON10338 –