Russia is fast becoming the new national home of FPS game development. We had S.T.A.L.K.E.R. - The shadow of Chernobyl (and we are awaiting its prequel S.T.A.L.K.E.R. - Clear skies), but an old project that was known to some but nearly never discussed before just surfaced in the flow of video game information news:
Cryostasis: Sleep of Reason arrives to transport us in year 1968 north of the Arctic circle in a Russian polar station named “Pole 21″. The hero will be able to crawl in the entrails of an abandonned nuclear ice-breaker. Abandonned, but not really empty.
After years of preparation and beta-phase, finally, Wine has been able to reach launch as Wine 1.0. Why is it significant? Because this is the software package designed to be able to run many Windows applications from a GNU/Linux distribution. If you want to switch to Linux, you may not be willing to abandon some of the applications that were developped for Windows.
Wine is there to solve the problem. It runs many games and it runs Photoshop CS2 and CS3 from the box (I did not test it myself, though). It was the plain objective of Google when they allocated money and developers to support this project. They reached their goal.
It is probably the right time to try OpenSuse 11.0 (one of the best new Linux distributions) with Wine.
We have been used to receiving one update of Crysis, the PC FPS video game of the year, for a long time. But it seems that there is now an upcoming change: No update, just a new extension named Warhead or Crysis Warhead.
Crytek was a little imprecise on this, but there is one major advantage to it: It will bring enormous performance increases. It is ssaid to be able to run Crysis at high-quality settings on a $600 or 400€ budget PC. Probably nearly any PC a gamer could buy will be able to get max quality.
Unfortunately, all photos I could find are just plain bad.
“When hell freezes over“. This expression has been replaced by “When Duke Nukem Forever is ready for launch” in some circles of PC gamers, of FPS gamers. This video game has been 12 years in the making. Announced about once per year for more than a decade, but never really seen, nobody really expected it to be delivered to the market. But, this year, there is something totally wacky: In a video, the game itself seems to be appearing. As if it existed in alpha or beta status…
As if the guys had really been working on it all these years.
3D Realms may finally be able to launch such a game. But when? Will the game play reaching the level expected by hard core gamers of today? Will the graphic design have stayed back in time with a disappointing quality? Only time will tell…
I was very troubled by the initial annoucement of Far Cry 2. This FPS game, taking after the exceptionally good Far Cry, was not really a sequel and not even done by the same team. So, what would you expect? Probably a major failure merely re-using the name of a previous hit. But, months after months, news after news, we discovered that the development team was really working to make it nice and big. An enormous area where you will be able to move around, a Wild African landscape with lots of efforts put in making the changes to the environment as credible as possible (some day-to-night effects that should make it interesting even after STALKER similar effects).
So, before the full availability (sometime in September according to our latest information), it is important to try and check the PC requirements for the FPS gamer willing to run Far Cry 2.
Minimum requirements
Processor: Pentium 4 3.2 Ghz, Pentium D 2.66 Ghz, AMD Athlon 64 3500+ or better
Memory: 1 GB of SDRAM
Graphics: GeForce 68xx or Radeon X1650
Recommended requirements
Processor: Dual core CPU (Intel Core 2 Duo, AMD 64 x2 5200+, AMD Phenom or better)
Memory: 2 GB of SDRAM
Graphics: GeForce 8600 GTS or Radeon X1900 series (Shader model 3.0 and 512 MB of graphic memory)
After some searching, it seems possible to announce the very probable prices of the upcoming cards from nVidia and AMD-ATI:
GeForce GTX 260: $449 (or maybe $399) in the US, 399€ (maybe 349€) in Europe
GeForce GTX 280: $649 in the US, 599€ in Europe (street price at 575€)
Radeon HD 4850: $249 in the US
Radeon HD 4870: $349 in the US
It is worth noticing also that the performance of the nVidia GeForce cards starts to be evaluated by some web sites. It seems that -for the first time- it will be possible to buy a card able to run Crysis in its highest settings (there was none up to now). The nVidia GeFroce GTX280 should be capable of 30+ fps in High quality settings, 1920×1200 resolution (no AA). Of course, this shows that two GT 280 will be able to run Crysis to Maximum settings, on an enormous screen configuration of 2560×1600 with FSAA4x. That should make a blindingly fast and nice configuration, but power dissipation (heat! burning heat!) will still be enourmous.
At a lower performance level, people want to compare the HD4870 with the GTX 260. But we do not seem to have figures for the best AMD Radeon parts. Only for the Radeon HD 4850. The board should be roughly equivalent to a GeFroce 9600 GTX.
Last minute correction (via The Inquirer): There is a Turkish web site outting details and the Radeon 4870 will shoot the existing nVidia 9800GTX out of its water (performance improvements between 38% and 48%), while the Radeon 4850 is aiming at the 8800GT (performance improvements between 36% and 48%).
All in all, this is going to really create the anticipated earth-quake. All fans of the Green Goblin (nVidia) will find reasons to rejoice about the stratospheric performance point reached by the GT280. The fans of AMD-ATI (and some stock market investors) will remind us that performance is not all; The AMD products are perfectly aimed to grab the central market of most users (around and over $200) in the coming months.
The newest graphics cards from nVidia are upon us. In less than a week, they should be officially launched, but nearly everybody seems to know what there is to know about this new generation of cards targetting both avid video gamers and lovers of cinema-on-the-PC. Let’s do a small summary.
First, there will be a very large line of different cards. There will be a GeForce 9300 and GeForce 9400, both based upon the previous generation of technology, but hitting the market at very low prices - 120$. Higher in the range, there will be first the GTX 260 then the superb (and probably expensive) GTX 280. Performance figures start to flow onto the Internet (apparently many people have difficulties complying with the confidentialty clauses of the NDA signed with nVidia). Both cards will be VERY powerful, but the GTX280 seems to be longer than usual (and so, may not usable in some PC).
Finally, let’s not forget that nVidia should launch all this on June 17th June 16th. Only a few days to wait before every web site will show us all the details.
So, the newest graphics line from AMD ATI will be known collectively as Radeon HD 4800 and will contain more precisely two major cards: Radeon HD 4850 and Radeon HD 4870. It is even clear that the first one will be sold around 200$ (so notably under 200€) and the second around 300$.
AMD announced, in the recent presentation at Computex, that there will be quite a number of improvements in these cards to support nearly cinematographic quality in games, named Cinema 2.0. This was a surprise and it means that AMD is going to hit as hard as possible on nVidia.
The other muddy issue is the exact date of the launch. It was initially expected in May 2008. But it has been delayed (obviously) apparently for technical problems had to be solved in the last minute. AMD will not be able to hit the streets before nVidia can launch the GTX200 line (on June 17th), but it should arrive only a few days later. Some people say June 23rd (just enough time for the news people to move from one place to another), and it is now possible that both cards will arrive at the same time (initially the high-end Radeon HD 4870 was expected only for September).
Usually, I would not comment about upcoming software applications and tools, but today there is an rumour that may be very important. We all know that switching from Windows to Linux is a difficult move because we have been used to so many applications available on one Operating System but not on the other (in my case, how could I do without Photoshop?)
Here comes Wine, an open source tool supposed to allow you to run native Windows applications in your Linux PC. In beta during years, Wine was incomplete and unable to provide the ultimate dream of OS migration, but things seem to be changing. Google invested a lot of effort, and it is said that version 1.0 of Wine is upcoming.
One of the important things I noticed, of course, is that there are plenty of games now supported (Baldur’s Gate II - Throne of Baal, Call of Duty 2, World of Warcraft, etc.) and I see that both Photoshop CS2 and CS3 are also in the list.
The video game saga collectively known as F.E.A.R. (FPS games with an horror/terror ambiance) keeps pushing news opus. Before the end of 2008, we should see F.E.A.R. Project Origin on PC, PS3, XBox 360. It will be hard judging from the pre-beta demo here.
Beware: This is violent and bloody. Really not for sensitive minds.
Every rumour points at a change of pace in the war between GPU designers (designers of processors for graphics cards), nVidia and AMD are preparing a big battle for this Summer.
While we have been observing a rush for always bigger GPU (G80 and R600 from nVidia and AMD-ATI are even bigger than central CPUs from Intel and AMD), we should see the arrival of the first modular processors for grpahics cards: one chip only for cheap products, but 4 or 8 for the high-end graphics card. It will be easier to design the silicium, and you will only have to choose how many GPUs you need on the video card. The question is still to know if this will be refelcted in the announcements of this Summer or in 2009.
The long-expected HD4800 series from AMD will arrive on June 18th (with two cards: HD4850 and HD4870). The only limitation would be waiting for availability of GDDR-5-type memory (yet another memory technology for a new graphics technology). A turbo version HD 4870X2 (two high-end chips GPU on the same board) would be ready in Fall.
The HD4850 should be a performance boost over the current HD3850, but the HD4870 is expected to be a plain twice more powerful than the already nice HD3870X2. Let’s kick ass…
nVidia just revealed its low-cost GTX260 and a hig-performance GTX280. These would be the last launches before modular series. Under the public name of GT 9800 GTX with no less than 240 shader processors, 32 raster units, 1 GB of GDDR3, and a moderate 512-bit memory interface. The fastest version should be named GT 9900 GTX.
So, let’s look at the laucnhes in the sun and let’s watch the technological announcements for Fall (AMD R700 and nVidia G9x). The marketroids from both companies are cleaning their weapons under the eyes of video game players.
It’s coming! The new FPS video game for PC is arriving. We had seen the first opus of the saga hitting our minds and PCs in 2007: S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl. A game definitely attractive, where the player can really go anywhere in several square kilometers, where there is always something happening (you’d better be cautious). Now comes the prequel (not the sequel, but the a part of the story coming before the original title) under the -always too difficult to type- name of S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky (or STALKER: Clear sky, for lazy typists).
It seems that the game is pretty well done and a few interesting bits are leaking on the Internet.
Always the same lovely atmospheres of abandonned landscapes around the old soviet nuclear power plant. But you can’t really consider this as a poster for tourism in modern Ukraine.
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After years of preparation and beta-phase, finally, 
So, before the full availability (sometime in September according to our latest information), it is important to try and check the PC requirements for the FPS gamer willing to run Far Cry 2.
At a lower performance level, people want to compare the HD4870 with the GTX 260. But we do not seem to have figures for the best AMD Radeon parts. Only for the Radeon HD 4850. The board should be roughly equivalent to a GeFroce 9600 GTX.
