The original rumor was true as Microsoft has officially announced DirectX 11. Details below:

Features include new shader technology that begins to allow developers to position GPUs as more general-purpose parallel processors, rather than being dedicated solely to graphics processing; better multi-threading capabilities; and hardware-based tesselation.

Said newly promoted Microsoft’s Entertainment Business Division CTO Chris Satchell during a Gamefest keynote, “We want to break away from purely having a paradigm of pixels, vertices and shaders.”

DirectX 11 will be backwards compatible with DirectX10/9. Though with the lack of DirectX10 applications/game and the miserable adoption rate (due to consolization), it’ll be interesting to see how well DirectX 11 is received.

The latest Call of Duty game will once again be deprived of any DX10 goodness. According to Cesar Stastny of Treyarch:

Cesar Stastny: Maybe if there is a compelling benefit to doing so, such as new superior hardware which requires DirectX 10.

That’s quite alright, PC Gamers are now used to getting left out anyway.

Another Team Fortress 2 update that fixes some age old exploits like intel clipping and also fixes the broken medigun taunt. (HAHA! Octoberfest!)

Team Fortress 2

• Fixed rcon crash caused by too many incorrect password attempts
• Fixed clients experiencing connection problems during round restarts
• Fixed flares not always being removed on impact
• Fixed 32 player servers not working correctly with SourceTV enabled
• Fixed dropped flags sometimes falling through the world
• Fixed number key menu input sending 2 key events
• Fixed PING field being clipped in the scoreboard at 800×600 resolution
• Fixed broken Medigun taunt
• Changed mat_showmiplevels to only be allowed when cheats are on

As always, available from Steam.

According to Crytek, Crysis: Warhead will be playable at High settings at 30-35fps on a $653 PC. The engine is said to have gotten tons of optimisations and there’s a fair chance that these optimisations/tweaks will make it to Crysis itself. Crytek didn’t reveal the resolution, though.

With everyone shooting their mouth off regarding PC gaming, it’s about time the graphics card giant nVIDIA said something about it:

I think we have to face the facts - the value of consoles is such that no-one is going to make a PC-exclusive game in the future. Why would they? Why would they ignore consoles?

You can read the full interview here.

Futuremark has finally release Vantage, the next installment of their popular benchmark tools. Unlike previous version(s) of 3DMark, Vantage is DirectX10 ONLY and will ONLY run with Windows Vista. Full press release below:

Futuremark (www.futuremark.com) brings users one step closer to understanding the performance potential of their personal computers with the launch of 3DMark® Vantage. Gamers, media and OEMs now have a modern gaming performance benchmark to measure native DirectX 10 and multi-core CPU performance with large amounts of physics, AI and graphics. Read the rest of this entry »

The 3D programming guru John Carmack sat down with PC Perspective to discuss games programming related matters. Carmack shared his opinions on Ray Tracing, Multi-GPU systems as well as upcoming sparse voxel octree technology and id Software’s very own Tech 6 engine. here’s a snip:

PC Perspective: Let’s just jump right into the issue at hand. What is your take on current ray tracing arguments floating around such as those featured in a couple of different articles here at PC Perspective? Have you been doing any work on ray tracing yourself?

John Carmack: I have my own personal hobby horse in this race and have some fairly firm opinions on the way things are going right now. I think that ray tracing in the classical sense, of analytically intersecting rays with conventionally defined geometry, whether they be triangle meshes or higher order primitives, I’m not really bullish on that taking over for primary rendering tasks which is essentially what Intel is pushing. (Ed: information about Intel’s research is here.) There are large advantages to rasterization from a performance standpoint and many of the things that they argue as far as using efficient culling technologies to be able to avoid referencing a lot of geometry, those are really bogus arguments because you could do similar things with occlusion queries and conditional renders with rasterization. Head to head rasterization is just a vastly more efficient use of whatever transistors you have available.

Full interview after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »

NordicHardware has what they claim to be the pricing of nVIDIA’s upcoming GeForce 9 series of graphic cards. According to them, three graphic scard launches are scheduled. namely: GeForce 9800GX2, 9800GTX and GeForce 9800GTS.

GeForce 9800GX2 will be the first high-end card of GeForce 9 series and will feature 256 stream processors (twice of those found in 8800Ultra/GTX) 675MHz core and 2.0GHz memory and will be launched at March 19th retailing at $599; GeForce 9800GTX will be the mainstream high-end card and will feature 128 stream processors, 675MHz core and 2.2GHz memory and will launch on March 25th retailing for $399; GeForce 9800GTS will come clocked with 600MHz core and 1.8GHz memory. All of these cards will use 65nm manufcaturing process.

Interestingly, from what we’ve seen so far (in terms of specs) GeForce 9 series feels like a GeForce 8 rehash, rather than a incredibly technology leap nVIDIA took with GeForce 7 to GeForce 8.

by NordicHardware

Image Courtesy: NordicHardware

Official Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures site now lists the minimum and recommend PC specs required to play Age of Conan, upcoming MMORPG from Funcom.

Minimum Requirements:
Processor: Intel Pentium 4 3.0 GHz
Memory: 1GB Ram
Video Card: Shader Model 2.0 compliant, nVIDIA GeForce 5800/ATI Radeon 9800 or higher
Operating System: Windows XP, Windows Vista (for DX10)

Recommend Requirements:
Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 2.4GHz
Memory: 2GB or more
Video Card: nVIDIA GeForce 7950GX2 1GB or better
Operating System: Windows XP, Windows Vista (for DX10)

Read the rest of this entry »

Futuremark Corporation (Creator of widely popular 3DMark) was in quite a bit of a controversy after their plans of Trademarking “Pwnage” were publicly reported by several news sites. Jukka Makinen, Executive Producer of Futuremark’s Game Studio, has made a post in regards to this in the YouGamers forums:

Fellow gamers,

Our purpose in filing for trademark on the name “Pwnage” is not to charge money or stop people from using the expression. That’s not what a trademark is for. Instead, we want to protect ourselves from squatters (or what I call campers) - people looking to trademark the name on false pretenses, just to make a claim against Futuremark Games Studio for its use.

Jukka Mäkinen, Executive Producer, Futuremark Games Studio