Latest Articles (Page 1023)

Just six weeks ago, the notion that Nvidia's GTX 970 replacement could offer Titan X-level performance seemed like a product of wishful thinking. But the GTX 1080's comprehensive takedown of Nvidia's previous GPU flagship was so overwhelming that what many thought was fanciful thinking is now a cold, hard reality. The bottom line is that GTX 1070 isn't just on par with Titan X. It's actually a touch faster, and a whole lot cheaper.

Just a couple of weeks after the launch of AMD's mainstream-friendly Radeon RX 480, Nvidia enters the fray with its own pitch to the more value-orientated gamer. The new GeForce GTX 1060 is pricier than both of the Radeon RX 480 SKUs - and it loses two gigs of VRAM compared to AMD's 8GB offering. However, Nvidia hopes that the extra power on offer makes the difference, promising GTX 980-level performance. Two years ago, that would have set you back £430/$550. Today, thanks to GTX 1060, it's £240/$250. That's a highly attractive proposition but the question is, does the product fully deliver?

The 3GB version of Nvidia's GTX 1060 is a curious product. Is it actually a GTX 1060 at all? The cutbacks made to this product aren't just memory-based in nature. In addition to chopping down the full-fat product's memory allocation, we also see a drop in available processing cores. The full complement of 1280 shaders drops to 1152 - and most of the time, this tends to be accompanied by a change in name. GTX 1050 Ti any one? Scratch that, it's taken, GTX 1060 LE perhaps?

Nvidia's Pascal architecture continues its top-down steamrolling of the graphics product stack, with the arrival of the first of two more budget-orientated parts - GTX 1050 Ti and GTX 1050. It's the first card we're looking at today, highlighting the debut of the fully enabled version of Nvidia's GP107 processor, offering performance significantly ahead of PlayStation 4 and paired with a useful 4GB of GDDR5. GTX 1050 Ti can get you to 1080p60 in most titles with careful tweaking, but really this class of GPU is all about matching ballpark console performance with improved visuals and more consistent frame-rates.

Years in development, the new Radeon RX Vega line is finally arriving - AMD's return to the higher-end of GPU performance after concentrating its efforts more on the mainstream and budget sectors of the market. There's no shortage of cutting-edge tech here: the Vega processor utilises 12.5 billion transistors on a very large 486mm2 area of silicon, the chip paired with two 4GB stacks of cutting-edge HBM2 memory. It's a bigger chip than Nvidia's GTX 1080 Ti and it has more memory bandwidth - however, the top-end RX Vega 64 offers performance more in line with GTX 1080, while the cut-down RX Vega 56 reviewed here is clearly aimed to compete with the GTX 1070. It does this job rather well.

It may have been a Sony E3 media briefing short on new announcements, but there was no shortage of spectacle. Alongside The Last of Us Part 2, the gameplay debut for Ghost of Tsushima took us to the war-torn grasslands of 13th century Japan, depicted via a masterclass in real-time rendering, animation and physics simulation. Looking at its stunning opening vista shot, you'd be forgiven for thinking this is running on future Sony hardware - a prototype PlayStation 5, perhaps. At first glance, the environment animation, particle effects and lighting look a generation ahead - and certainly it's a big stylistic jump from the studio's previous work on InFamous First Light. But as the end credit tile reveals, the demo runs on hardware you may already own. It's a PS4 Pro, and so, the real surprise is the technical ingenuity going on in order to achieve such great results on existing console technology.

'D-do you fancy playing some Sea of Thieves later tonight?' I ask, although not sure how I managed to stutter seeing that it was a WhatsApp message. I waited for a response, feeling actually pretty awkward. Oh god, blue ticks but no reply.

Kotaro Uchikoshi, creator and director of the wonderful visual novel mystery series Zero Escape (which spans 999: 9 Hours 9 People 9 Doors, Virtue's Last Reward, and Zero Dilemma), has revealed first proper details of his latest venture - murder yarn AI: The Somnium Files.

Developer Lab Zero Games has announced that striking 2D fighter Skullgirls is coming to Nintendo Switch in its most recent, expanded 2nd Encore guise.

Fortnite is currently the game most associated with meme culture, but back in the day, Team Fortress 2 was responsible for some incredible viral creations of its own. One of these memes, a crustacean sensation known as the Spycrab, became a huge part of the Team Fortress 2 community and was immortalised after achieving official recognition from Valve.

A week ago, indie developer Tyler Glaiel suggested a new method to estimate the number of copies a game had sold on Steam. He did so via a Medium blog post, which gathered a fair amount of interest.

We all have one, don't we? A game that no-one else remembers, that we take every opportunity to espouse the virtues of with alacrity whenever anyone will listen.

UPDATE 2.30PM BST: I've received an official ArenaNet statement. It reads: "We strive to cultivate an atmosphere of transparency around the making of our games and encourage our teams to be involved in open, positive discussion with our community. Earlier this week, two of our employees failed to uphold our standards of communication with our players and fans, and they are no longer with the company."

The spiritual successor to Burnout we've been waiting for is coming - but perhaps not quite in the way you might have imagined. Danger Zone 2, a current-gen revamp of Burnout's crash mode, arrives on July 13th on PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC, courtesy of Three Fields Entertainment. Meanwhile, further on down the road, Dangerous Driving is the circuit-based Burnout successor that follows it, arriving as soon as this winter - and developed by the same close-knit team of just seven people.

Hello! Excuse the interruption, but the tech team here at work has asked me to draw your attention to a vacancy we have open and a great opportunity to join the Gamer Network family.

Splatoon 2 is coming up to its first anniversary, and not only is there a new Splatfest imminent to help celebrate (it's pitting squid versus octopus, don't you know) but there's also a new set of amiibo coming along next week.

It's currently 30C outside and football's coming home, but we're looking to the future - the cooler, darker evenings of autumn - and Halloween.

Fortnite Battle Royale's sandboxy Playground mode will be taken offline next week, on Thursday, 12th July.

There's a part of me that wants to say the inside of Creatures Inc., the Tokyo company where Pokémon cards are made, is exactly what you'd expect. That it is everything you've imagined. A Wonkalike dream factory of wonder and weirdness, hidden in plain sight.

Microsoft's July update for Xbox begins rolling out today, bringing with it a range of system improvements, including better games and app organisation, and the new FastStart feature first touted at this year's E3.

Developer Digital Sun has revealed that it's working on a sizeable amount of free new content for its wonderful shopkeeping-and-adventuring RPG Moonlighter, and there's an accompanying roadmap outlining exactly what 2018's remaining months will bring.

Jagex has announced that the Android version of Old School RuneScape, its long-running fantasy MMORPG, has entered public beta, and is available to download now.

Developer Psyonix's supremely popular four-wheeled footie game Rocket League is having another free weekend, and proceedings are now underway.

Opinions might be divided on Far Cry 5, but there's little argument that its recreation of the lush Montana landscape is very pretty indeed. And the game's latest update on Xbox One, PS4, and PC takes full advantage of that fact, offering up a brand-new Photo Mode.

Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice isn't exactly Dark Souls with a ninja reskin. For starters, Sekiro's protagonist is a set character, not a customisable avatar as per previous From Software titles. This titular playable character is a ninja sworn to protect a young lord - the ten-year-old boy seen in Sekiro's announcement trailer. There's something special about this boy and his bloodline that makes him a target to outside influences, and a clan called the Ashina send a samurai to capture him. In trying to protect his charge, the ninja hero has his arm cut off and is left for dead, and the young lord is taken. When the hero wakes up, he's got a strange contraption where his arm used to be that From is calling the Shinobi Prosthetic, and it's put there possibly care of the ambiguous character currently referred to as The Sculptor, who does most of the talking in the games's E3 trailer.

Talim is in Soulcalibur 6, Bandai Namco has announced.

It will have taken two years for No Man's Sky to finally land on Xbox One, but when it does arrive you'll be able to cosplay as the Xbox console logo.

Shroud of the Avatar: Forsaken Virtues, Richard Garriott's spiritual successor to the legendary online role-playing game Ultima Online - and for a long time the second-most-crowdfunded game around (with more than $10m raised) - launched a only a few months ago, 27th March 2018. Did you notice? I don't blame you, because it appears to have been a flop.

UPDATE 4/7/18: Developer Nyamakop has unveiled a release date for Semblance, its lovely-looking "playdough platformer". The game is now scheduled to launch on Switch, PC, and Mac on July 24th.

In May, publisher Deep Silver announced a significant delay for Metro Exodus: from autumn 2018 to February 2019.