Wednesday, October 7, 2009

IT News HeadLines (Elite Bastards) 07/10/2009


Elite Bastards
Elite Bastards review: Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising (PC)

Anyone who remembers the Operation Flashpoint name will doubtless remember a gaming experience very different from other first-person war-based titles of the day, which featured a sandbox world coupled with an extremely realistic depiction of war from the front lines.آ Now the Operation Flashpoint brand is back in business, courtesy of a new title from Codemasters subtitled Dragon Rising.آ Can it recapture the tension and realism of the original game?

Let's not beat about the bush here - Dragon Rising is hard.آ There's no room for heroics, or even moderate risk-taking more often than not - Simply choosing the wrong moment to pop your head out from cover or move out into an open space can mean the difference between completing a mission or having an out of body experience and watching yourself slowly bleed to death on the battlefield.آ Slow and steady wins the race here, as you pick your way through the grasses, woods and undergrowth of the island, trying to remain in constant awareness of your current situation, surroundings and mission status, and marshalling your troops as effectively as possible to achieve your goals without any casualties.

Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising (PC) review

As always, your thoughts and comments on this review are most welcome, and can be left in our forum.


Read More ...

NVIDIA can disable some Fermi features for gaming graphics boards?

Given what seemed to be a very compute-centric launch of NVIDIA's Fermi architecture, some questions have been mooted as to how (if at all) desktop graphics boards may differ from those offered up as Tesla-branded parts once GF100-based boards are available in retail.آ Along those lines, NVIDIA seem to be suggesting that they will indeed be changing certain parts of the core beyond simply disabling Stream Processors for the mass market.

At its GPU Technology Conference (GTC) last week Nvidia specifically noted that it paid a lot of attention on boosting double-precision floating point computational performance on its Fermi-G300 chip (about 750GFLOPs) and thus will be able to address new several new markets, e.g., high-performance computing. However, DP performance is rarely needed by average consumers on the desktop or laptop markets. Obviously, in order to create power efficient version of Fermi for notebooks or low-cost desktops, Nvidia will have to sacrifice some of its capabilities.

“We're not talking about other (chips) at this point in time but you can imagine that we can scale this part by having fewer than the 512 cores and by having these cores have fewer of the features, for example less double-precision,â€‌ said Mr. Dally, who did not explain how it is possible to reduce double-precision floating point performance without decreasing single-precision point speed, something which is needed by video games. In fact, Mr. Dally’s comment may imply that non-flagship Fermi derivatives will have not only be slower in terms of performance, but will be seriously different in terms of implementation.

X-Bit Labs has more on the story.

View/Post comments


Read More ...

NVIDIA GeForce WHQL driver 191.07 released

The NVIDIA drivers are coming thick and fast at the moment, and yesterday saw the release of a new WHQL GeForce driver set which boasts a handful of performance improvements and OpenGL 3.2 support amongst its features.

  • Adds support for OpenGL 3.2 for GeForce 8, 9, 100, and 200-series GPUs and ION GPUs.
  • Accelerates performance in several gaming applications. The following are examples of improvements measured with version 191.07 drivers vs. version 190.62 drivers (results will vary depending on your GPU, system configuration, and game settings):
    • Up to 12% performance increase in ARMA 2
    • Up to 8% performance increase in Batman: Arkham Asylum
      with GPU PhysX enabled
    • Up to 50% performance increase in Call of Juarez: Blood in Bound with SLI enabled
    • Up to 14% performance increase in Fallout 3 (indoor scenes) with antialiasing enabled
    • Up to 10% performance increase in Far Cry 2 (DX9 version) with antialiasing enabled
    • Up to 34% performance increase in Prototype with antialiasing enabled
  • Adds SLI support for Aion, Darkfall, Dawn of Magic 2: Time of Shadows, Dreamkiller, Fuel, Majesty 2: The Fantasy Kingdom Sim, Need for Speed: Shift and more.
  • Includes numerous bug fixes, including the following key fix (additional bug fixes can be found in the release notes on the documentation tab): For graphics cards supporting multiple clock states, 3D clocks correctly return to 2D clocks after exiting a 3D application.

You can download these drivers from the links below:

Download NVIDIA GeForce WHQL driver 191.07 for Windows Vista (32-bit)
Download NVIDIA GeForce WHQL driver 191.07 for Windows Vista (64-bit)

Download NVIDIA GeForce WHQL driver 191.07 for Windows 7 (32-bit)
Download NVIDIA GeForce WHQL driver 191.07 for Windows 7 (64-bit)

View/Post comments


Read More ...

Modern Warfare 2 for PC delayed

If you've been looking forward to the sequel to Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, the cunningly titled Modern Warfare 2, on the PC, then it appears that you're going to have to carry on looking forward for just a little bit longer...

Activision has delayed the PC version of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 it seems, pushing the multi-platform game back by two weeks on the PC, but not on other platforms.

Activision has yet to explicitly confirm the delay by the looks of it, but it's hardly an unlikely scenario given how many multi-platform games are being delayed on PC nowadays over fears of piracy.

Still, at least the good news is that you have a little longer to save up the extortionate amount of money that this title will cost.آ Thanks to bit-tech for the news, and in the meantime I suppose you'll just have to make do with this new and pretty Modern Warfare 2 trailer.

View/Post comments


Read More ...

Canon EOS Rebel T1i DSLR camera review

Does anyone really need a digital SLR camera capable of recoding 1080p video?آ Who knows, but that's exactly what Canon have brought to the table with their new EOS Rebel T1i - Hot Hardware check it out to see if it's worth the big cash outlay.

The Rebel T1i is the successor to the hugely popular EOS Rebel XSi. You’ll find many external similarities between the two models.آ They have similar weights and dimensions, but the newer Rebel T1i inherits a number of features from the higher-end EOS 50D and EOS 5D Mark II models such as the DIGIC 4 Imaging Processor and the ability to process full HD video.

There are still some key differences between the Rebel T1i and its higher-end counterparts, however. For starters, the Rebel T1i has half the data transfer rate, which causes the Rebel T1i to have a slower continuous shooting rate than the EOS 50D and EOS 5D Mark II. This transfer rate also means that the Rebel T1i’s 1080p video mode is only able to capture video at 20fps (there’s also a 720p / 30fps mode.) Since we would expect Canon’s consumer-grade, entry-level Rebel line to offer fewer features than the semi-pro and professional models, these differences don’t necessarily signal a disappointment, at least for the mainstream target end user this camera appeals to.

Read the full review here.

View/Post comments


Read More ...

No comments: