They have kind of snuck it in without any fanfare, but Ubisoft has updated Tom Clancy’s The Division with DirectX 12 support. Microsoft’s fledgling graphics API can now be enabled if you play the public test version of The Division.

In terms of performance the difference is extremely marginal, often in the realm of 1 or 2 frames per second gained so nothing major. Those likely to see the biggest benefit are those with lower-end CPUs. The CPU will be able to give instructions to the GPU faster and more efficiently, offloading some of the heavy work.

Every little helps though so everyone should be able to enable DX12 once it rolls over to the live version, presumably alongside the Survive DLC.

It makes Tom Clancy’s The Division the 16th game to support DirectX 12, with Watch Dogs 2 and Star Citizen to come. A slow but steady start and Microsoft’s graphics API is slowly gathering momentum. Whether gamers will notice a difference another matter entirely.

Release Games With DirectX 12 Support

Gears of War: Ultimate Edition
Caffeine
Star Wars Battlefront
Rise of the Tomb Raider
Hitman
Ashes of the Singularity
Quantum Break
Total War: Warhammer
Deus Ex: Mankind Divided
Forza Motorsport 6: Apex
Halo 5: Forge
Forza Horizon 3
Gears of War 4
Battlefield 1
Civilization VI
The Division

If you were wondering where 4A Games has been the last three years, wonder no more. Tucked away on Metro author Dmitry Glukhovsky’s website is a timeline of the books and games. And right down at the bottom? ‘The next Metro video game’, coming in 2017.

The last book in the trilogy, Metro 2035, was published in 2015, so it’s presumed the sequel will follow the events in the latter half of this book, or perhaps pick up after. (Metro 2035 was based on the events of Metro: Last Light). In Glukhovsky’s brief description he says “It all adds up to something. Where the books end their story, the game will pick it up. An era of great discoveries lies ahead.”

 

4A Games has certainly built a bit of a name for itself in terms of creating graphical powerhouses so we’ll certainly be interested to see what it can do next. They use the custom 4A Engine so there’s nothing really to compare it to, but I’d imagine 4A has been busy beavering away on a host of visual upgrades.

That’s not to forget as well that both Metro 2033 and Metro: Last Light are sublime first-person shooters. Deeply atmospheric and with the sole focus on single-player, they’re the sort of shooter campaigns which are a bit of a lost art these days.

From the looks of things then we can expect to see Metro 2035 launch in 2017. A PC version is an absolute cert but we’ll have to wait and see about PS4 and Xbox One.

Excited to see the return of Metro? Where do you hope to see 4A Games take the series next?

Arkane Studios is launching Dishonored 2 this very Friday (Thursday if you brave a pre-order), this time with two playable characters and more corpses to send your rat army to munch on than you can shake a bloodfly at. Unsurprisingly it's joined by a launch trailer. Even less surprising is it looks incredible. That's not all though, because we've got also got a look at Dishonored 2's graphics options and video settings, detailing every little tweak you can make in order get optimum performance in Dishonored 2.

Dishonored 2 Video Settings

• Screen resolution

• Windowed mode: Windowed, Fullscreen, Borderless windowed

• Brightness

• Field of vision: 65 > 110

• V-sync: Yes / No

• Adaptive resolution: 50% > 100%

• Nvidia HBAO+: Yes / No

 

• Presets: Auto; Very Low / Low / Medium / High / Very High / Ultra

• Texture details: Very Low / Low / Medium / High / Very High / Ultra

• Model details: Very Low / Low / Medium / High / Very High / Ultra

• Environment details: Very Low / Low / Medium / High / Very High / Ultra

• Water quality: Very Low / Low / Medium / High / Very High / Ultra

• View distance: Very Low / Low / Medium / High / Very High / Ultra

• Shadow quality: Very Low / Low / Medium / High / Very High / Ultra

• Decal quality: Very Low / Low / Medium / High / Very High / Ultra

• Fog quality: Very Low / Low / Medium / High / Very High / Ultra

• Anti-aliasing: Off / FXAA Low / FXAA High / TXAA 1x

• Bloom: No / Yes

• Depth of field: No / Yes

• Lens flare: No / Yes

• Volumetric lighting: No / Yes

• God Rays: No / Yes

• Rat shadows: No / Yes

• Bloodfly shadows: No / Yes

A very decent select of graphics options for Dishonored 2, all said and done. What is particularly interesting is there are a total of six presets. Normally we have three or four, but Arkane Studios has allowed for a very granular approach to visual settings. It does mean it could require a little more effort on your part to achieve desire performance but it does also allow you more accurately tune Dishonored 2’s graphics settings to the capability of your hardware.

All the anti-aliasing options are resource light but not terrible effective so there might be a slight blurriness to image quality. Your best bet here is to crank up the resolution as high as you can.

Rat shadows and bloodfly shadows seem to be extremely specific. It's unlikely these are going to be very noticeable at all so these probably be your first port of call when it comes to disabling settings.

We've seen with the original Dishonored that Arkane has a real knack doing a lot with a little, presenting beautiful environments through a unique artstyle and gorgeous lighting (on PC at least). Enabling God Rays and Volumetric Lighting is key to this, but the latter in particular is likely to be hugely demanding.

Fingers crossed we'll be able to put all these settings to the test for you tomorrow so keep your eyes peeled for a Dishonored 2 performance breakdown.

Ah, and the video I promised you. Feast your eyes on this little lovely.

Steel yourself for some feather ruffling because Bethesda has updated the Steam store page for Dishonored 2 to highlight the upcoming stealth-em-up will be burdened with the dreaded Denuvo anti-tamper DRM. You know, the infamous DRM which developers have said can affect performance but has already been busted wide open by crackers. So, er, not really seeing the benefit of this situation here. As per usual with Denuvo Antitamper, you will be restricted to activating Dishonored 2 on a maximum of five different PCs with a 24 hour period. Denuvo has built up quite a reputation for itself over the years. Not only for being extremely effective but also due its purported impact on game performance and the requirement of an internet connection. Should the Denuvo servers ever close down for whatever reason, you would lose access to the games you have bought. Over the last three or four months Denuvo has been cracked successfully for the first time however, so it was presumed it would be falling out of favour with the big name AAA publishers. Bethesda’s taken a very different approach to that taken by Shadow Warrior 2 developer Flying Wild Hog, who said last month “Denuvo means we would have to spend money for making a worse version for our legit customers. We don’t support piracy, but currently there isn’t a good way to stop it without hurting our customers.” Dishonored 2 is out this very Friday, November 11th, for PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. Due to Bethesda’s new fangled review code restrictions, don’t expecting many reviews to crop up before next week. Fortunately it does look awesome, so there probably isn’t a great deal to worry about on this front.

The Steam Store front page has been overhauled with an makeover Valve is calling Steam Discovery Update Update 2.0.

Obviously you can just, you know, go to Steam to look at it, but Valve has also provided a visual guide to new features.

In the left column you’ll find links to a bunch of useful sections as well as short list of recently-viewed items, which is handy indeed.

The rest of the page is composed of modules like carousels and lists, but what makes them interesting is that every game tile offers quick access to a personalisation menu where you can add a game to your wishlist, mark it as “not interested”, or go off to edit your preferences. This should make it quicker and easier to hone Steam’s recommendations so you see stuff that interests you more often.

The main real estate of the page seems to be devoted to two carousels – one of featured games and another of featured deals. There’s more information on these panels than the old banner ad-style ones. We know Steam front page placement can be vital to the success of PC games so hopefully the new carousels encourage more diverse discovery.

Down below are some big blue buttons – Valve’s description – which give you different ways to browse, and then a section devoted to Steam curators for those who want someone else to help them make purchasing decisions (alas, there’s no “financial advisor” curator who cuts up your credit card and makes you finish doing your budget for the month).

Further down there’s a sub-$10 queue, a second list of deals and offers, and the option to keep browsing recommendations. If you’re logged in, you’ll also see what’s trending among your friends, your personalised discovery queue, and more tailored selections in each module.

Wow, it’s easier than ever to find things to spend your money on. I have very mixed feelings on this. One the one hand, I’ll be so glad to see worthwhile and interesting games getting more love. On the other, I’m desperately going to miss my grocery budget when I start digesting my own organs.

As a lot of you have probably noticed already, there have been some major changes sweeping into Steam overnight. Valve has totally overhauled the Steam store, rejigging just about on the home page in what is presumably an effort to get you all buying more games.

Down on the left column you’ve now got access to a lot more of the most popular Steam pages and game tags, including new releases, VR games, specific genres and tags based on the games you buy and play.

 

Up top the featured section has been rejigged a little. This presents a scrolling selection of 10 games based in a combination of new releases, special offers and genres you may be interested in. Each of the games here now also has a selection of preview screenshots and details on why it was recommended for you. If you head to your account preferences you can actually personalise this to your taste, excluding specific tags or games you’ve marked as ‘not interested’. I’ve already blocked ‘anime titties’ and my life is infinitely better.

Below that you now get the biggest special deals which used to sit in a box on the right-hand side. Rather than scrolling between these they now all sit in a row so you can see them at a glance.

After that it’s an array of curator recommendations, trending among friends, recently updated titles and then, finally, the new releases section. If you’ve been complaining there’s too many releases on Steam you’re now in luck; they’re so far down you’ll probably never get to them.

 

Below this and you can keep scrolling and keep getting recommendations, pretty much forever. It looks like recent Steam sales in this session, presenting an ever changing list based on an algorithm of the games you like / hate but can’t stop playing.

It’s not often I get to bring you news of an ‘un-delay’ but it looks as if Watch Dogs 2 has been brought forward from its November 29th release date on PC, to launch day and date with the PS4 and Xbox One editions on November 15th. That’s two whole more weeks Watch Dogging (ooh er) in the year 2016.

The news, such as it were, comes via a number of sources. Steam, the Ubisoft Store and the US Uplay have all independently been updated to "Available November 15 on PS4, Xbox One & PC". Ubisoft previously said Watch Dogs 2 would be coming to PC on November 29th, saying this was “To ensure that these and other features are polished and optimized to meet the development team’s standards, the PC version of Watch Dogs 2 will now be released on November 29.”

There is no official confirmation from Ubisoft on the matter, but you’d suspect it wouldn’t go changing its release date at the last minute if this wasn’t happening.

Potentially great news for PC players if true. It’s always a little disheartening to see console players jump in early so any parity is good news. What it does also do however is heap pressure on Ubisoft to push out a very capable PC version. If it performs like it could have done with another few weeks in the oven for the some fine-tuning and bug testing, fans are going to question why Ubisoft didn’t stick to the original schedule.

Would you like to see Watch Dogs 2 come out a fortnight earlier than you expected on PC? Or would you like to see Ubisoft give itself more time to optimise PC performance and push out the best version if possibly can? Let us know!

The Division’s 1.5 update and its upcoming Survival expansion have gone live on the PTS (Public Test Server), Ubisoft has announced. This is the first we’ve heard of what Survival actually is, and on the surface it sounds absolutely awesome. 24 players are dropped onto the outskirts of The Division’s city limit and must make it to the centre in order to retrieve life-saving antiviral drugs. Everyone starts in a different spot and with no gear, tasked with making it the centre within two hours.

As you may have guessed, Survival is all about, well, survival. On top of your usual concerns in The Divison, you must also wrap up warm against the cold (all clothing items now have a warmth rating), eat food to keep hunger at bay, drink water to stay hydrated, and take medication to avoid falling sick. Let any of these slip and you’ll face varying effects from slow health regeneration to limited vision and, eventually, death.

Throughout the city you’ll be able to scavenge for these resources along with better gear and loot. In this sense The Division - Survival is a little like a roguelike, each match starting you with nothing and tasking you with making it as far as you can. You start with no skills and only the most basic weapons and clothes.

For those who don’t want to go full Battle Royale, there is a choice between PvP and PvE modes. If you opt for PvE you will get less points, although you are still battling with other players over scarce resources.

I have to say from what I’m hearing this sounds all sorts of cool. Dropping players in with next to nothing levels the playing field so it should also be great for newcomers as well. Ubisoft has said there’s going to be no level requirements for accessing Survival.

It feels like the last six days since the Mass Effect: Andromeda N7 teaser trailer was revealed have been an eternity, but rejoice dear companions, the reveal has finally happened upon us. It turns out that what we were waiting for in the Andromeda Initiative was in fact, as some of you might of guessed, a brand spanking new cinematic trailer. With the right amount of tease, right amount of info and the perfect amount of loud foreboding music, this trailer made our hairs stand on end here at GD.

Before we get into it, why don't you check it out yourself, headphones recommended:

Everything We Can get From The Trailer So Far

So first off we’re told of the initial situation our spacey chums find themselves. After hundreds of years of being suspended in time they finally arrive at our neighbouring Andromeda Galaxy, it seems, in the hope of starting a new life. What, will this entail for the characters that will accompany us? Maybe looking to escape their pasts or possibly just with pious intent? While also, having been frozen for hundreds of years, could this possibly mean that we could see some crossovers from the previous trilogy? Having been set at least 400 years before this one definitely gives it a possibility.
We find out that we will likely be playing as the character dubbed the pathfinder in ME: Andromeda, or at least someone who finds paths at some point, not much can be learnt from this (other than it just kinda sounds badass) but could maybe hint into some form of destiny your character is apart of. The Alien voice stating “Now I know what makes you… special” definitely seem to imply this. While the characters confusion during many parts might be telling us that there is something well beyond their knowledge going on.
We got confirmation of your new ship, The Tempest, and your new planetary rover, the Nomad (the new incarnation of the original Mako) here’s hoping it’ll control a little better than its ancestor.
Everyone we see who isn't part of the group doesn’t appear to be any type of alien that we’ve seen before, maybe this means we’ll get a whole new roster of alieny chums, or in fact there maybe a complete galaxy baron of anyone you can chill out and chat about things with.
There seems to be some big old beasties you can tangle with, like an alien gorilla bear near the start of the trailer and an absolutely massive flying sand snake you can hopefully have a pop at some point. Following off the last two bullet points, maybe this Mass Effect will be more about planet exploration in your Nomad and going toe to toe with slobbering alien beasts than its mostly corridor based shooting shenanigans, who knows?

Well for now that's all the speculation we can come up with right now for the elusive Mass effect 4 based off this trailer. Sadly, there’s no official release date announced #jonwasright, but hopefully we should see it rear it’s head at some point, our guess is the game probably still has quite a way to go and so the folks over at BioWare don’t want to make any promises just yet.

 

Bethesda has pushed out a beta 1.1 patch for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim - Special Edition, tackling a number of key performance issues and quashing the sound quality problem which managed to slip through Bethesda’s notoriously creaky bug testing process.

In terms of the latter, Skyrim - Special Edition had sound quality lower than the 2011 original on both PC and Xbox One. This was down to over-compressing the audio rather than an attempt from Bethesda to de-master Skyrim, so you should now notice a boost in sound quality. Unless you’re gaming with a pair of tinny speakers that sound like they're submerged in the Mariana Trench.

Onto performance and Bethesda promises a general boost in frame rates and performance across a variety of hardware setups. In our Skyrim - Special Edition benchmarks we found it performed pretty great anyway though, and can even be pushed to 4K with comparative ease by some of Nvidia’s more powerful GeForce GTX 10 Series graphics cards.

Skyrim - Special Edition 1.1.51 Patch Notes

FIXES
General performance and optimization improvements
Fixed rare issue with NPCs not appearing in proper locations
Fixed issue with saves erroneously being marked as Moddded, even though no mods are active
Updated some sound files to not use compression

To grab this update you will have opt into the beta branch of Skyrim - Special Edition.

To do this, right click Skyrim Special Edition in your Steam library and select ‘Settings’.

Select the ‘Betas’ tab.

In the drop down menu select ‘beta - 1.1.51 Beta Update’

Close the window and the Skyrim beta patch will download. It’s approximately 945MB.

How have you found your first week with the Skyrim Special Edition? Have you got lost in Tamriel all over again?

Have you been sat there wondering if your PC has what it takes to be able to whisk you off to the world of Virtual Reality? Is your PC VR ready? It’s an expensive gamble to buy a headset and just find out the hard way, but not to worry Futuremarks’s on the horizon. Futuremark has recently released VRMark, their new and improved benchmarker for VR, complete with two tests that can be done on monitor or on a connected VR set so you can find out with ease if your rig cuts the mustard headset or without. And hey, guess what, there’s a free version! We couldn't help but let you know.

Featuring two rooms, imaginatively called the Blue Room and Orange Room (see if you can guess why from the video below) the orange tests to see if your computer can handle the recommended requirements for the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive, while the Blue Room cranks it up to 11 with all the bells and whistles turned on. Passing the Blue Room means that your rig can handle the highest settings at 60FPS on VR games out today.

With an easy to digest yay or nay to VR after each test and genuinely just a beautiful experience regardless, this benchmark is well worth a look. You can get the Free version which allows you to use the Orange Room, allowing you to test your rig without any of the hassle of actually having a headset as well as being able to enjoy the Orange Experience Mode that allows you to wander around for fun. While if you want entrance into the Blue Room, to really put your PC through it’s paces ,it currently cost $19.99, this version also comes with the Blue Experience mode as well as access to custom settings.

US tech giant Microsoft has ended sale for both the Windows 7 and Windows 8 operating systems and these can no longer be bought with a new PC.

"End of sales refers to the date when a particular version of Windows is no longer shipped to retailers or Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs)," Forbes.com reported on Thursday.

 

Examples of OEMs include Dell and Toshiba, PC manufacturers who often pre-install Windows software.

While Windows 7, launched in 2009, was on sale for seven years, Windows 8/8.1 was on sale for just four years.

Despite ongoing updates support for Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 until January 2020 and 2023, the end of sales is likely to give the flatlining Windows 10 a boost, the report said.

Earlier this year, Microsoft announced that it would roll out two major updates for Windows 10 next year.

According to Windows Central, while the first major update for 2017 -- codenamed Redstone 2 -- would release in the early part of 2017, the second one -- codenamed Redstone 3 -- might be released in 2017 summer

Hit by the Note 7 fiasco, Samsung Electronics has now decided to recall about 2.8 million top-loading washing machines due to risk of impact injuries.

The affected washers are manufactured between March 2011 and current production dates.

 According to the US Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), the washing machine top can unexpectedly detach from the washing machine chassis during use, posing a risk of injury from impact.

"The voluntary action was driven by reports highlighting the risk that the drums in these washers may lose balance, triggering excessive vibrations, resulting in the top separating from the washer," Samsung said in a statement on Friday.

"This can occur when a high-speed spin cycle is used for bedding, water-resistant or bulky items and presents an injury risk to consumers," it added.

This recall involves 34 models of Samsung top-load washing machines, CPSC said.

Samsung has received 733 reports of washing machines experiencing excessive vibration or the top detaching from the washing machine chassis. There are nine related reports of injuries, including a broken jaw, injured shoulder, and other impact or fall-related injuries, it added.

"This is a recall of certain Top-Load washers manufactured between March, 2011 and current production dates. Front Load Washers are not affected," Samsung added.

Consumers can choose either a free in-home repair that includes a free one-year extension of the manufacturer's warranty; a rebate to be applied towards the purchase of a new Samsung or other brand washing machine; or a full refund for consumers who purchased their washing machine within the past 30 days of the recall announcement, CPSC said.

Good morning once again our computer game compatriots! We hope your Saturday was a swinging one and you are enjoying the last lie in of the week, make sure you make it count. As another weekend morning treat we’ve plucked a great trailer that we’ve enjoyed recently so that you don’t have to, and have brought it on a silvery internet platter to relax with with your morning beverage. Today it’s that of something only know as Project Wight, in early development by David Goldfarb and co, a man known for working on the Battlefield series and Payday 2. We’re very excited to see how this game will play out and hope once you've seen the trailer you are too.

Project Wight let’s you play as less than cuddly creatures in an eternal struggle with a burly Viking Civilisation. Set in the early Viking era yet in a world where there are intelligent monsters hanging about, you must continue the fight with your monstery chums against being eradicated by these pointy hatted plonkers. With a system of ageing where younger creatures are weak, small and nimble while their dads are well harder than yours. With the graphics looking like they do this early on, this is definitely one we’re going to be keeping an eye on. 

Enjoy Below:

Titanfall 2

Release date: Oct 28, 2016 ▪ Developer: Respawn ▪ My Score 8.5/10

With the addition of a single-player campaign and no season pass to divide the community, Titanfall 2 sheds two common complaints about the original—and also does what it does fantastically. "If this were a game from the late nineties or early noughties, we'd likely look back at the mission 'Effect and Cause' as one of the greats of the genre,". The multiplayer is better than before as well, but there's one worry—Titanfall 2's population could suffer from its proximity to Battlefield 1 and Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare. Let's hope it doesn't.

Battlefield 1

Release date: Oct 21, 2016 ▪ Developer: DICE ▪ My Score 9/10

The leap back in time to WWI had good results, as Battlefield 1's focus on infantry combat pairs well with more meaningful planes and tanks, and its finicky guns slow things down a little, giving us more time to move and more pride in our good shots. The campaign is enjoyable too, which hasn't quite been the case in a Battlefield game for some time, So it brings much needed change of pace.

Civilization 6

Release date: Oct 21, 2016 ▪ Developer: Firaxis ▪ My Score 8.4/10

There's of course room for improvement, but Civilization 6 is nevertheless the "ultimate digital board game," as we put it in our review. It's the most transformative version of Civ so far, changing the rules of city-management and tweaking just about everything else. And Civ 6 will only get better with expansions and user-made additions—even though the mod tools aren't out yet, the modders are already at work.

So here’s an exciting breakthrough in CPU technology that’s happened recently. Researchers from Intel and North Carolina State University have managed to make a breakthrough into making multi-core cpus, especially 8, 10 and 16 core CPUs much more effective than before. To set the scene, Dual and Quad cores have massive benefit in performance compared to a single core, but as soon as you start going to much higher core counts the boosted performance becomes less and less for each additional core. These researchers have managed a way to get round this, achieving result as much as 2000% performance in data processing from a 16 core CPU.

The reason why this bottleneck occurs is due to the communication that these cores need for them all to work together. This communication comes with a significant overhead per core relationship so the more cores there are, the more relationships, and therefore diminished performance increase. For anyone who wants the maths, the number of relationships for n cores is n(n-1)/2, which as you can imagine get’s pretty big pretty quick.

So is there any way we can get around this? Well the solution these researchers came up with was moving the software queue to hardware. Not exactly a clear idea but we’ll try and our understanding on what appears to be happening. Instead of the cores having to constantly “remember” what each other core was doing, their system moved the queue of what was to be done to a hardware source. So instead of the CPUs having to manage these relationships, they only had to go to one place, the queue of operations that needed to be done. The three steps they explained that the cores had to worry about being: add data to the queue, take data from the queue, and put data close to where it's going to be needed next, a lot simpler as you can imagine.

Currently this system has been called hardware queue management device or QMD and as said before, in data processing QMD had massive performance increases for large multi-core CPUs, while also this QMD logic has been shown to increase performance in other core communication dependent tasks. Hence will possibly have a much larger scope, even for us gamers!

Just think about it for a second, if this technology was backwards compatible, the mind boggles, a 7 year old Intel i7-950might play GTA V on Ultra or an FX-6300 could play Dishonored 2 on Max Settings at 60FPS plus. Processors could be given a whole new lease of life. Unlocking all that performance that was lost for so little gain, future proofing them for years ahead of their time. An exciting prospect for sure and one that would change the face of our future proofing function beyond recognition. The days of whether I should buy an i7 or i5 are seemingly whizzing by us.

Whether this technology will start cropping up in future products is unsure right now, it is still in very early development, but to us it definitely feels like a step in the right direction for the utilisation of more cores ready for the future of processors. So if you are currently thinking about upgrading your PC maybe consider how many cores your new CPU will have, as it could mean Ultra gaming for the next decade, that or until those awesome game developers start to push to the new performance boundaries.

The Wi-Fi Alliance this week began to certify products featuring wireless modules compatible with the 802.11ad standard (aka WiGig). The certification will help to ensure that all WiGig-branded devices, which have been around for some time, can flawlessly operate with each other and deliver expected multi-gigabit performance over 60 GHz spectrum.

The WiGig technology (IEEE 802.11ad) is a short range communication standard that enables compatible devices to communicate at up to 7–8 Gb/s data rates and with minimal latencies, using the 60 GHz spectrum at distances of up to ten meters. Since 60 GHz signals cannot penetrate walls, the technology can be used to connect devices that are in direct line of sight. Given the limitation, WiGig cannot replace Wi-Fi or even Bluetooth, but it can enable devices like wireless docking stations, wireless AR/VR head-mounted displays, wireless high-performance storage devices, wireless displays, and others devices which need a lot of bandwidth.

To date, Intel and Qualcomm have released several tri-band chipsets that support the 2.4 GHz, 5 GHz and 60 GHz spectrums as well as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and WiGig technologies. The Wi-Fi Alliance has already certified Intel’s Tri-Band Wireless 18260 (Maple Peak) and Qualcomm’s QCA9500 802.11ad-compatible chipsets as well as multiple devices that use them (including Dell’s Latitude E7450/70 as well as 802.11ad 60 GHz USB adapters from Peraso and Socionext). Going forward, the organization will certify other products, including smartphones and docking stations.

It should be noted that the start of WiGig certification on its own isn't going to be the catalyst to cause WiGig adoption to take off, but it will increase chipset developers', device makers', and end users' confidence in the standard. Designers of Wi-Fi chipsets and manufacturers of actual systems have been reluctant to adopt 802.11ad so far because the infrastructure is absent and so is demand, a classic chicken and egg dilemma. With the official certification process things will likely get a little better, mainly because of added confidence.

Meanwhile, analysts from ABI Research believe that 180 million of WiGig-enabled chipsets will ship inside smartphones already next year with 1.5 billion WiGig devices shipping in 2021.

Ever complained that why doesn't your Far Cry 3 does not have neon, dinosaurs, synths and robotic arms? Not to fear as Ubisoft are bringing Christmas early. After an elaborate internet cat and mouse game of hide and seek befitting to the comedic 80s fest that Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon is, it has now been the title confirmed that Ubisoft will be chucking at us later this month. 

Continuing with their genial mood this year celebrating their 30th anniversary, Ubisoft has announced their giving us another great title to add to the already mounting collection of stellar freebies. All you need to do is visit their website, sign up for a free Ubisoft Club account and you will be able to download this title when it comes out later this month. Although nothing’s been confirmed, last month's free release of Beyond Good and Evil, which is still free by the way if you have a Uplay account (seriously, go get it), was released on October the 12th, so we wouldn’t be mocked for assuming it might be a similar date this month for our neon dinosaurs to arrive.

It’s been well worth keeping an eye on Ubisoft this year as (not to rub it in if you missed it) they have already given us The Crew, Rayman Origins, Splinter Cell, and Prince of Persia Sands of Time. So make sure to note it in you diary as it’d be another cracking title to miss. Oh and hey, if you’re pining for a free time, make sure you hit up beyond Good and Evil, so good it might even get a sequel.

The Monstrous Fall Sale – one of the grandest sales of this year – has begun! Join us for 10 days of new deals up to 90% off, free games to unlock, and surprises yet to come!

So it seems unfair for us not to give a heads up on this one if you haven’t heard, the guys over at gog are having their “Monstrous Fall Sale” at the moment and you should definitely go check it out, there’s some cheap buys to be had. When better to check out and ponder the bargains than on a crisp autumnal night whilst you sip hot chocolate by the hearth... Or, y’know with the central heating on and a beer in your flat, either or really.

With The Witcher 3 GOTY in all of it’s entirety being available for £21, Faster than Light only being £2, SUPERHOT close to half price, Stardew Valley and much more being sliced in price it’s well worth a look. We know we are, seriously though, go check it out, it’s pretty great over there. Abe’s Odyessy New ‘n’ Tasty’s there, Darkest Dungeon's about, the other two Witcher’s have rocked up at crazy cheap prices, F.E.A.R’s passed out from over indulgence, it’s a hell of a party.

Samsung presented these new technology offerings at the Samsung Foundry Forum to foundry customers and partners. The event was held at its Device Solutions America headquarters today, where the company elaborated on the details of new technology offerings including 14LPU and 10LPU.

Samsung’s fourth-generation 14nm process technology, 14LPU, delivers higher performance at the same power and design rules compared to its third-generation 14nm process (14LPC). 14LPU will be optimally suited for high-performance and compute-intensive applications.

Samsung’s third-generation 10nm process, 10LPU, will provide area reduction compared to its previous generations (10LPE and 10LPP). Due to limitations of current lithography technologies, 10LPU is expected to be the most cost-effective cutting-edge process technology in the industry. Together with the second-generation 10nm process (10LPP) that offers an extra performance boost from 10LPE, 10LPU is positioned to meet the needs of an extended range of applications that can benefit from the advanced 10nm process.

On top of the new process offerings,

Samsung also updated its 7nm EUV process development status and showcased its 7nm EUV wafer.

What does this mean for us?

Well, despite the fact that Samsung’s mobile business is,going up in smoke at the moment. They still have quite a large sway in the Silicon manufacturing business, being the leader of the 14nm node at the moment. They’re rumoured to be maybe looking into working with AMD, have been dabbling in working with Nvidia and have even been partnered in some aspects with Intel so it’s not impossible that this could maybe cross over or, on the flip side, widen the competition. Maybe we'll be surprised where these crop up? Who knows, it’s just speculation at this point as we won’t know likely find out more on where these little guys will be heading until their designer kits are available in the second quarter of 2017. As you can imagine these things are usually kept very close to the chest, but these things have happened before.

In other Samsung news, upon releasing this new information, customers and partners a like were given a chance to look at their still very much in development 7nm EUV Wafer process, rumoured to be given a bigger update in 2017. A mind boggling size but so we’re told, will one day be commonplace in consumer products. Bring on the future.

After a of a couple of months of their Pascal launch, NVIDIA is back again to launch a new Pascal desktop product. Following their near-perfect top-down launch schedule that started with GeForce GTX 1080 in May, being announced today and formally launching next week is the GeForce GTX 1050 Ti and GeForce GTX 1050. Aimed at the entry level discrete video card market, these products will round-out the GeForce 10-series desktop lineup.

Launching their low-tier cards last instead of first for the Pascal generation marks an inverse of what happened with the Maxwell generation. In 2014 it was the low-end Maxwell 1 parts that launched first, only to be followed up by the other Maxwell 2 parts later on in the year. As a result, the Maxwell 2 family went through a full cycle – from release to retirement – before NVIDIA’s entry-level cards were refreshed.

And to that end, here we are with the GeForce GTX 1050 series. The previous GeForce GTX 750 series went very well for NVIDIA, so much so that the new 1050 series follows a number of beats laid out by its predecessor. NVIDIA is launching two cards – both of which are based on the new GP107 – which setup a two-tier product offering for the entry level market. The faster of the two cards is the GTX 1050 Ti, while the GTX 1050 follows closely to offer a bit less performance at a lower price point. And in order to maximize compatibility, both cards are being offered in configurations that draw their power entirely from the PCIe bus, Which in my opinion is there biggest selling point.

        NVIDIA GPU Specification Comparison

	GTX 1060 3 GB	GTX 1050 ti	GTX 1050	GTX 750 ti	GTX 750
Cuda Cores	1152	768	640	640	512
Texture Unit	72	48	40	40	32
ROPs	48	32	32	16	16
Core Clock	1506MHz	1290MHz	1354MHz	1020MHz	1020MHz
Boost Clock	1709MHz	1392MHz	1455MHz	1085MHz	1085MHz
Memory Clock	8Gbps GDDR5	7Gbps GDDR5	7Gbps GDDR5	5.4Gbps GDDR5	5.Gbps GDDR5
Memory Bus Width	192-bit	128-bit	128-bit	128-bit	128-bit
VRAM	3GB	4GB	2GB	2GB	1GB
FP64	1/32	1/32	1/32	1/32	1/32
TDP	120W	75W	75W	60W	55W
GPU	GP106	GP107	GP107	GM107	GM107
Transistor Count	4.4B	3.3B	3.3B	1.87B	1.87B
Manufacturing Process	16nm	14nm	14nm	28nm	28nm
Lunch Date	18/08/16	25/10/16	25/10/16	18/02/14	18/02/14
Launch Price	$199	$139	$109	$149	$119

If we look into the specs, we’ll start with the GTX 1050 Ti. It is fully enabled GP107 GPU, this card is arguably the backbone of NVIDIA’s entry-level offerings. All-told, it has 6 SMs enabled – 60% that of GP106/GTX 1060 – so GP107 is a bit more than half of a GP106. The rest of the Pascal architecture has been scaled similarly; GP107/GTX 1050 Ti retains 2/3rds of the ROP and memory controller configuration, meaning we’re looking at 32 ROPs attached to a 128-bit memory bus. Notably, this is double the number of ROPs found on GTX 750, so all other factors held equal, GTX 1050 Ti will see a massive jump in ROP throughput compared to its predecessor.

So Ubisoft has just released a trailer that has given an in depth walk through of all five parts of DLC that one can expect with a season pass for Watch Dogs 2. Weird timing some might say for a game that isn’t even released for almost another two weeks, set to come to a platform near you on November 15th.

If you’ve been around for any length of time in the modern gaming community, you probably know of the gamble that is buying a season pass. “Hey we’re going to make a load of cool stuff for this game, why don’t you save some money and buy them all now before we’ve made them?” says the developer, “Sure I’ll bite, that sounds like a great idea” you retort, unaware of the contractual gamble you’ve just signed with usually no idea of what you’ve actually parted with money for. What happens if they don’t deliver on valuable content and it’s just a collection of really expensive horse armour? Well as the Yiddish fox said to the arse of a turtle, tough tuchus.

With that in mind, having a look at the trailer we can’t say we’re massively impressed on the apparent amount of content that they’re charging pretty much the retail price of the actual game for, at $39.99. At least they’re telling us what’s in store for the season pass holders, something that’s a rarity, but it seems weird that they’re describing a collection of content that would likely disappoint if one actually waited to see what they would get.

BioWare have just released a new Mass effect: Andromeda trailer for us to feast our eye. The big news is that practically everyone (or thing) you knew or loved in the original Mass Effect trilogy is dead. Probably.

Exciting times for all you Mass effect fans out there and perhaps those who aren't, but we'll get to why later.  Even with it being a teaser trailer we feel there are already hints to the new Mass Effect: Andromeda that has a release date supposedly in March 2017.

The trailer, above, is a teaser for for an upcoming "Andromeda Initiative" scheme to become a trailblazer to the Andromeda Galaxy, set to hit us on November 7 2016 (N7 if you missed it, BioWare you wits!). What this is set to be, your guess is as good as ours, but our money's on it being a large release of information about ME Andromeda, something that's been lacking considerably for a game pencilled in for a March 2017 arrival.

Regardless, these trailers have confirmed some juicy info. Mass Effect Andromeda will be set hundreds of years after Mass Effect 3 (at least 400-600 depending on what year the trailer's narrator is talking about) and so would confirm that previous choices in the first Mass Effect trilogy will have no effect on this game's worlds (great news for us that missed the first three). Other than that we guess we'll just have to wait for November 7th to roll around til we can find out more, let the hype commence and the human civilisation flourish across all the galaxies!

We had the pricing details yesterday, but now according to a report we can get our hands on Intel’s Kaby Lake desktop prcoessors sooner than expected.

The latest reports suggest they’ll be available on January 5th, 2017, coinciding with an official reveal at CES (Consumer Electronics Show) 2017 in Las Vegas.

If the report is correct then we can see that kaby lake will lauch head-to-head with amd's zen chips processor.

CPU	Cores / Threads	Clock Speed	L3 Cache	Price
Intel Core i7-7700K	4/8	4.2 GHz	8MB	$349
Intel Core i7-7700	4/8	3.6 GHz	8MB	$309
Intel Core i5-7600K	4/4	3.8 GHz	6MB	$239
Intel Core i5-7600	4/4	3.5 GHz	6MB	$219
Intel Core i5-7500	4/4	3.4 GHz	6MB	$199
Intel Core i5-7400	4/4	3.0 GHz	6MB	$189

As for the chips themselves, Kaby Lake is seen as a bit of a stop gap more than anything else.Intel recently shifted away from the Tick-Tock cadence to Process>Architecture>Optimization. Kaby Lake is the latter,so it doesn't mean a process shrink like 14nm Broadwell and it also means no new architecture like Skylake. Instead it's a refinement of what's already there thanks to maturation of the manufacturing process.

We'll know for sure whether Intel Kaby Lake desktop CPUs are worth early next year.

It’s taken its sweet time coming, and yet finally the pricing details have arrived for the imminent launch of Intel’s new Kaby Lake family of processors. The seventh generation Core CPUs are spearheaded by the high-end Intel Core i7-7700K, the fastest processor. The i7-7700K will be coming in at a pretty reasonable $349, and as per the 'K' suffix will be unlocked to enable out-of-the-box overclocking. The Core i7-7700K is quad-core CPU with eight threads, clocked at 4.2 GHz base clock. It’s joined by 8MB L3 cache and guzzles down 91W TDP. It’s the best of the bunch but also the most expensive. Things get a little cheaper as we head through the currently announced Kaby Lake chips. The flagship i5 model, the 7600K, can be had for $239. This one’s quad-core with single-threading, clocked at 3.8 GHz. It has a slightly lower 6MB L3 cache yet has the same 91W TDP. Down at the lower-end of the family the current cheapest Intel Kaby Lake CPU according to available pricing is the Core i5-7400. It can be had for $189 and is a little pared down compared to the 7600K, particularly considering we’re only talking a $50 price difference. Again it’s quad-core, yet base clock is just 3.0GHz, and of course it isn’t unlocked for overclocking.

Cpu	Cores / Threads	Clock Speed	L3 Cache	Price
Intel Core i7-7700K	4/8	4.2 GHz	8MB	$349
Intel Core i7-7700	4/8	3.6 GHz	8MB	$309
Intel Core i5-7600K	4/4	3.8 GHz	6MB	$239
Intel Core i5-7600	4/4	3.5 GHz	6MB	$219
Intel Core i5-7500	4/4	3.4 GHz	6MB	$199
Intel Core i5-7400	4/4	3.0 GHz	6MB	$189

Along with this there will also be a few other Kaby Lake chips down at the entry tier, including some i3 CPUs and a few Pentium models, but pricing is not currently available. If you’re thinking of picking up an Intel Kaby Lake CPU then you will need a LGA1151 compatible motherboard. The only previous chipset to support LGA1151 is the last-gen Skylake, and I doubt anything here is worth an upgrade for current Skylake owners. Switching to Kaby Lake therefore might require a hefty upgrade on your part, however you are then future proofed for Cannonlake support when that drops late next year. These CPUs will be manufactured on the 10nm process (compared to 14nm Kaby Lake) and should in theory be a more sizable jump in performance.