Hardware

A little over a month ago, Gamasutra editor Chris Remo revealed on his own personal blog site that Electronic Arts was planning to market a pre-built gaming PC designed specifically to run the upcoming shooter Crysis Warhead at a resonable price. Remo has since updated his blog site with more info on this project, stating that the PC will sell for $699.

The actual rig will be built by a company called UltraPC but EA, Crysis Warhead's developer Crytek and video chip company Nvidia were all involved in the development of the PC. The specs for the PC include an Intel Core 2 Duo e7300 processor running at 2.66GHz along with an Nvidia 9800GT based video card (no word on what company provided the card) and 2 GB of RAM. The dev team got Crysis Warhead to be optimised to run on the machine at high detail running 30 frames per second. Supposedly pre-orders will be accepted this week with shipment to begin on Sept. 16, the same day that Crysis Warhead will ship to stores.

As the world tries to move to a more conservative energy policy, including electronic devices, there's one rather large exception to this trend: PC gaming rigs. News.com has an interesting look at this trend which has seen power requirements for the high end gaming PC skyrocket up in the last few years.

It's not hard to see why; gaming rigs now have multi-core processors and many graphics processors, whether it's AMD's Crossfire solution or Nvidia's SLI set ups. As a result power supplies for these rigs have got up to as much as 1,200 watts which is three times what the high end was just three years ago. Some gamers may require new electric wall sockets or even new breakers be installed in their homes just so their gaming PC can run. PC makers don't see this trend stopping anytime soon. Kelt Reeves, the founder of PC maker Falcon Northwest, stated, "Eventually these chips get so hot that their own heat becomes a barrier to performance."

We have seen programs like Punkbuster designed to fight off cheating in online PC games but what about protecting your PC from issues while you are playing? There are a number of security programs on the market but Bullguard has just announced a new product that is designed specifically to keep your PC secure while playing games.

The Bullguard Gamer's Edition costs $49.99 for a year's subscription and according to their press release, the program not only is a full PC security program with anti-virus, anti-spyware and firewall prorection it also allows people to set up game profiles that will have gamers to set up full protection while playing over 80 supported games (more will be added in the months ahead).

The press release claims that the Bullguard Gamer's Edition will allow messaging will be disabled while games are being played. Also, no updates to the program will be run while games are being played and it will take a minimal amount of PC resources to run. SteelSeries, the PC gaming keyboard and accessories company, has been "closely involved" in the development of the product.

Digital Illusions' first person free-running sci-fi action game thingie Mirror's Edge has gotten a lot of attention and thankfully the developer will be bringing this game to the PC as well as consoles. But what about those ever-so-important system requirements for the game? Gamecyte states it has some preliminiary info on that very subject.

The info, gleaned from the game's appearance at Nvidia's Nvision event las week, states that the PC version will require Windows XP or Vista (naturally) with a Pentium 4 at 2.4 Ghz, 1 GB of RAM and at least a GeForce 6 family of video card with 256 MB of memory. Keep this info in mind with a little grain of salt as PC games tend to be optimized near the end of their production cycle. Mirror's Edge is still due for release sometime this fall.

Chances are you are not one of the folks lucky enough to get tickets to the October 10-11 Blizzcon. Blizzard's sort-of annual event sold out of their regular ticket pool a number of days ago and the announced lottery has only 1,500 picks left. However, SteelSeries, the PC gaming keyboard and accessory company, is running a content where two people can win tickets to the event.

Not only that but SteelSeries will fly them to the event on their dime, put them up in a hotel room and give them $200 in spending money (which should buy them a couple of meals in the highly expensive concessions set-ups in the Anaheim, CA Convention Center). There are a number of other prizes that can be won if you don't get the grand prize.

PC gaming has prided itself at time for having the potential to wipe the floor with any console game in terms of graphics and hardware needs. But is that time past? Gas Powered Games' Chris Taylor says, "Yes." In a new chat with Gamasutra, Taylor believes that PC gaming doesn't need to have the fastest processor, the most memory or the swiftest graphics card in order to be successful.

Gas Powered Games is currently working on their fantasy strategy game Demigod and Taylor states, "If you look at Demigod, it's still wildly state of the art -- in our trailer, people asked if that was prerendered or from the game, [and] it's all in-game. But it's scalable; there's level of detail [adjustment]." Taylor feels that hardware requirements might become a thing of the past for PC gaming, saying "I think five years from now, you won't even have to ask what kind of computer you have. You'll just ask, 'Do you have a PC?' We'll get right back to that place."

We have been waiting for this day for a while now and in just over a month, residential customers of Comcast will become the first major US users to have a broadband cap on their Internet usage. According to News.com, Comcast will impose a 250 GB cap on broadband usage beginning on October 1. People who violate this policy the first time will get a warning but the second time will get their broadband immediately cut off; it will be an entire year before those customers can use Comcast as their Internet provider again.

Of course 250 GB sounds like an awful lot and most customers should be OK with this new limit but as the article points out Comcast offers no way for people to monitor exactly how much bandwidth they are actually using. Comcast imposed this limit to curtail peer-to-peer downloads (most of which are illegal) for a small percentage of their customers. However we are seeing the PC game industry using the download business model more and more and a cap on bandwidth, even as one as generous as Comcast's, could curtail that business, especially if more ISPs follow Comcast's wake.

If you are heading up to Seattle to attend the 2008 edition of Penny Arcade Expo and have a few dollars that you don't have any plans on spending, you might want to check out this special limited editon version of the DeathAdder PC gaming mouse from Razer. Only 400 of these will be made and they will be sold only at PAX starting tomorrow at the Razer booth for $60. As you can see from the picture it will have the PAX 2008 logo.

Razer will also be holding a mod contest at their booth during PAX, teaming up with Modders-Inc.. According to their press release, "They were given the SilverStone TJ10 ESA case, the Razer Lachesis, the Razer Lycosa, the Razer Piranha and the Razer Destructor to mod, with the finished mod being showcased at the Razer booth. Attendees will be able to vote for their favorite out of three at the Razer booth and those who voted for the winning case will have a chance to win the case. Attendees can also vote for their best modder at www.razerzone.com.

If you live on the wild side like we do you likely want to have your hot dogs without mustard, watch football games on TV with the volume really low and download new graphics card beta drivers. So we have a deal for you. Nvidia this week released some new GeForce beta drivers (177.92) for all of their current chips. These include the newly released 9400 GT, 8500 GT, 980 GT and 9800 GTX+ models.

The release notes for the new beta drivers reveal a number of game related issues that have been addressed in this new download including Prey. F.E.A.R and City of Heroes. There's also some performance improvements for games like BioShock, Assassin's Creed and Call of Duty 4. As usual, this is a beta release and thus is not officially supported by Nvidia.

There have been tons of different approaches for making PC games and then projecting them into 3D space. Nvidia believes it has a new solution and showed off their plans at their own Nvision conference this week. Our sister site Game Daily has a report on some of Nvidia's plans for this subject.

Nvidia is partnering up with TV manufacturers like Mitsubishi and PC LCD monitor makers like Viewsonic (like the one pictured above) to support their upcoming GeForce Stereoscopic technology. Nvidia will release an emitter and 3D glasses in the new future that will allow anyone with a PC rig with an Nvidia Geforce 8 graphics card or higher to view over 350 PC games released in the last five years in 3D. Pricing for the GeForce Stereoscopic technology, along with a release date, has yet to be announced. Meanwhile, San Diego based iZ3D already sells a similar technology along with their own $600 22-inch monitor that they claim supports over 400 PC games in 3D.

I must not overheat.
Heat is the chip-killer.
Heat is the thermal death that brings total obliteration.
And when it comes, I will turn the fans on to speed its path.
Where the heat has gone, there will be processing.
Only my FPS will remain.

Last week, we talked about the importance of feeding enough watts to your components to allow them to perform their best. The other side of that coin is dealing with the waste heat that is a byproduct of all that high-speed math. Heat's pretty much as far down the entropy scale as you can get -- most of what we do turns organized energy, one way or another, into heat. The problem with this state of affairs, at least for electronics, is that they are happier the colder their environment is.

Nvidia has been pushing out the press releases lately promoting the use of its recently acquired PhysX game physics tech by other game developers. Now PhysX's leading rival Havok (owned by Intel) has announced a deal of their own with MMO game developer Turbine.

As reported by Game Daily, Turbine has signed a deal to access the Havok Physics, Animation, and Behavior 6.0. middleware technology. The developed, best known for their MMO work on Asheron's Call, Dungeons and Dragons Online and Lord of the Rings Online, will use the Havok tech in future unnamed games. Turbine recently raised $40 million in venture capital money to help fund those upcoming titles.

Last week Futuremark announced the first details on their first PC game, the space-based zero-gravity themed first person shooter Shattered Horizon. Now comes word that Futuremark has decided to ally with graphic processor maker Nvidia by joining the company's "The Way It's Meant To Be Played" marketing program.

Basically, Shattered Horizon's dev team will work with Nvidia's engineers to make the game run well on Nvidia's GeForce processor and will also implement the PhysX game physics software support. The game is also being shown at the Nvision conference in San Jose that began on Monday.

In the latest salvo made in the graphics wars, AMD today announced that they are cooperating with a number of game developers to make their PC games work well on DirectX10.1. AMD claims that only their ATI Radeon graphics cards offer full "top to bottom" DirectX10 graphics support.

The specific games mentioned as receiving full DirectX10.1 support from AMD are Battleforge, the fantasy RTS game from Phenomic and Electronic Arts, Stormrise, the sci-fi RTS game from The Creative Assembly and Sega and the little known RPG title Cloud 9 from NHN Games. AMD has also released a small "Ping-Pong" interactive demo to show off their use of the DirectX10.1 demo. The demo requires Microsoft Vista Service Pack 1. and ATI Radeon HD 3600 series or an ATI Radeon HD 3800 series graphics card with at least 512MB of video memory, the ATI Catalyst 8.3drivers or higher, a dual- or quad-core CPU and 2GB of RAM. Folks without those requirements can download a video showing the demo in action.