Welcome to the PC Gamer Ultimate Christmas Giveaway! This is the biggest competition we've ever done: packed with peripherals, games, and exclusive items signed by some very important people. Why are we doing this? Because it's Christmas! And we love you.

The Ultimate Christmas giveaway will run until Christmas Eve. Every day we'll be posting about a new prize that's up for grabs, and you'll have 24 hours after the time of publishing to enter. Sadly, we're only able to open this competition to UK residents.

We at PC Gamer understand that not everyone who reads our website has a supercooled doomrig of awesome, we know some of you are gaming on older PCs, which is why we're giving you the chance to win a new graphics card and some RAM. We've got a PNY GeForce 550 and a PNY 4GB DDR3 RAM kit up for grabs, enough to suddenly propel your struggling old PC into the latest generation of gaming.

Check inside for details of how to win.

To win these lovely prizes just answer me this question:

What's your excuse for not upgrading yet?

The best, most creative, funniest and most obviously fraudulent excuse will win the prize. If you win, you'll get a private message via the forums. Let us know your address and we'll send you your prizes shortly after Christmas. Remember, this competition is open to UK readers only. Also, if you don't claim your prize within three weeks of being notified we'll offer it to someone else. Full terms and conditions can be found here.

Good luck everyone! Come back tomorrow at 4.30 for the next prize, which involves pimps, hos and the colour purple.

Hideo Kojima’s much loved Metal Gear Solid series rarely appears on the PC, but there’s a chance that his new project might get an airing on our beloved black boxes. Dubbed “Project Ogre”, very little is known about the game, other than it’s going to be an open-world adventure. As reported on 1UP, Kojima told CNN that the new game will have, “A very wide entrance, a very open entrance,"

It will also be a step away from the blockbuster approach of the Metal Gear Solid, in favour of Skyrim-style exploration - albeit with a modern day setting, according to the screenshots. "Rather than making something very cinematic, make something very free," Kojima said.

The game is thought to run in Kojima’s Fox engine, which 1UP reported on back in June. It’s said to be multiplatform, and compatible with a PS3 controller, an Xbox controller, and - crucially - a mouse. Of course, the mouse could just be standing in for the Wii U’s weird new controller, but it’s more than likely that the game will arrive on the PC.

1UP also posted an image from Kojima’s Twitter that showed a Fox engine render of one of the game’s programmers, allegedly put together in about an hour. Apparently it's also capable of translucent clothing and realistic dust particles. It seems like an impressive engine, with the screenshots recalling Far Cry 2’s lush tropics. But we’re not sure if Kojima will be able to let go of his more constrained, linear roots in console gaming.

Did Piranha Bytes decide to set Risen 2 on a series of pirate island so they could turn their studios into a pretend jungle? Possibly. The latest developer diary reveals more about Risen 2's factions and creatures and gives the devs the opportunity to squat in the middle of their cardboard forests like real adventurers. The inquisition return from the first Risen game, and it looks like we'll be choosing to side with them or the island natives over the course of the sequel. The RPG will come out in April. It looks interesting, but will we have tired by Skyrim by then?

Revolutionary 3D web engine Unity will launch its 3.5 public beta at 4pm today, according to our superfriends over at Edge. The free engine will include Flash support for the first time, which means developers can export their projects quickly and easily to the ubiquitous Flash interface.

As reported in Edge earlier this year, the Flash export requires absolutely no additional coding on the developer’s part, and will bring the engine to a larger userbase, albeit with fewer features. “In the beginning the Unity Player will have better performance, and some features that Flash doesn't have,” Unity engineer Lucas Meijer said. “But we hope that they will catch up with us - we're not happy that that feature gap exists, we're sad that it exists.”

The Flash engine has already been demonstrated with Unity’s open source shooter Angry Bots, and you’ll be able to download it from Unity’s official site later today. Unity will also launch a competition to create a flash game, with $20,000 up for grabs.

Star Wars: The Old Republic's world can sometimes feel a little lonely. Companions are good for crafting and questing but they don't do much dancing or streaking of their own accord. And some of them get annoyed if you farm bodies for dark side points. Eh... MAKO?

That all changed for me at 10pm on launch day. The above footage was taken at the steps of the Sith Academy in Korriban; it's the busiest I've ever seen an area in TOR, the greatest moment of my Old Republic experience so far, and a testament to the awesomeness of PC Gamer's EU guild: The Mint Imperials. Thanks to all that attended, danced and streaked. And apologies to anyone who couldn't join the instance because Bioware's server was imploding.

The EU guild is not currently recruiting, but we'll be accepting new members after January 3. Any members who've applied to join pre-launch, and have been accepted, will need to log in to the game client in order to confirm their slot before that date. We're on the Nightmare Lands server. Alternatively, sign up for the Revel Alliance - our Republic rivals. They're also on the Nightmare Lands server.



US PC Gamers should sign up to PC Gamer US's guild, The Coconut Monkeys. I'm sure they'll be equally heart-warming scenes on their server: The Crucible Pits. For more infomation on either guild, check out our forums.

Our review of The Old Republic will be online as soon as possible. Until then, check out our Beginner's Guide.

/DANCE.

AMD's dropped an almost unexpected Christmas present into our laps this morning: the launch of the company's latest flagship graphics card, the Radeon HD7970. As well as stealing the 'fastest single chip graphics card' title back from NVIDIA for the time being, the HD7970 is the first card manufactured on its microscopic 28nm process and is the first to use the all-new 'Graphics Core Next' (GCN) architecture.

But what does that mean, and is it any good for gaming?

For the time being, at least, the issue is a little moot. AMD's festive gift turns out to be more like getting vouchers than an actual present. The Radeon HD7970 isn't expected to be available for sale until after January 9th, and priced at around £450 it's not exactly a new year bargain either.

Still, it is one of the more interesting tech developments of the last few months. The HD7970 is the first card that's compatible with the next version of DirectX, 11.1, which will be added into Windows next year. And GCN is quite a big departure for the company.

So far, all of AMD's post DirectX 10, unified shader cards have used a technique based around combining computations into 'Very Long Instruction Words' and clusters of four or five processor cores to run them. With GCN, however, the company has completely broken from this design and adopted one which is more similar to that used by rival NVIDIA. Each processing core is a more or less autonomous unit capable of running a single instruction at a time. This scalar architecture isn't necessarily better for gaming graphics operations, but it is arguably more efficient for the other stuff today's graphics cards are supposed to do, like physics and GPGPU supercomputing.

There are still a lot of shader cores though. The Radeon HD7970 boast 2048 versus the older HD6970's 1536, and runs them at a massive 925MHz. Coupled with 3GB of GDDR5 memory clocked at 5.5GHz (equivalent) with a 384-bit interface, this new card has a truly phenomenal amount of processing power packed into its 4.31billion transistors.

So what is GCN capable of? In terms of new features, the biggest difference is support for something AMD is calling 'Partially Resident Textures' (PRT), which is a hardware implementation of the megatexturing technique pioneered by id Software. This reduces the amount of memory bandwidth used up by transferring textures around system, as it allows games designers to create very large, high resolution images which the GPU then divides up into smaller tiles to work with as and when required.

Performance-wise, the last minute rush to get this announcement out before Christmas means we've not had a card in the office yet, so can't say definitively whether or not AMD's new architecture works. But news from around the web suggests that the HD7970 is between 15 and 30% quicker than previous cards.



Here's what the tech sites are saying.

Our colleagues at TechRadar seem vaguely unimpressed with the HD7970, but largely because recent price cuts have made NVIDIA's GTX580 almost 100 cheaper.

Anandtech meanwhile, is impressed by performance of the HD7970, especially by its lead at the highest resolutions. But again the worry is about price - specifically the relatively good value of a double chip HD6990.

Tom's Hardware hedges its bets and calls its benchmark fest a preview, but says it prefers the HD7970 to a dual chip card for the price. The hope here is that non-reference designs are a bit quieter than the stock samples.

HardOCP really likes the HD7970, very enthusiastically so and with exclamation marks. There's two apparent reasons. Firstly it draws no more power than the older Radeon series, and secondly it's a single chip card capable of powering a three screen set up (says the reviewer).

What everyone's agreed on is that this is a big shift in strategy for AMD, which in recent years has built cards which compete more on value than out and out performance, with really good Crossfire scaling. Radeon HD7970 is a throwback to the old days of monstrous cards, monstrous performance - but at a monstrous price. If you're prepared to pay it, it looks like a winner.

We'll be able to confirm or deny that when we get hardware in the new year.

Sony are taking beta sign-ups for Planetside 2 beta right now. Massively mention that you can drop your name in the hat on the Planetsdie 2 beta page. Simply sign in with your Sony Online Entertainment Station login details for a chance of grabbing a spot. If you don't have a login, you can set up an account pretty quickly here. Of all the games you could get into early next year, Sony's massive MMOFPS sequel is a very hot ticket.

The beta application will only take your email address, for now. A note from SOE that appears during the signup process says that the beta will be "ramping up slowly" testers will be under a non disclosure agreement to begin with. It sounds as though Planetside 2's development is going smoothly. "A few weeks ago after a lot of really intense work we completed a major internal milestone on the game," writes creative director Matthew Higby in a recent blog post. "Everyone here at SOE is seriously stoked on where the game is at and where we’re heading."

Planetside 2 is an exciting prospect. It'll feature battles between hundreds of players on eight-by-eight kilometre continents. Find out more in our Planetside 2 preivew.

Top-down indie heist ‘em up Monaco: What's yours is mine has a new trailer, according to those lovely chaps over at RPS. Soundtracked with an authentic-sounding plinky-plonk piano, it highlights the multiplayer portion of the game. It’s definitely best viewed in full-screen at 1080p, otherwise it just looks like something a nine-year-old made in the 1995 Micro Machines engine. It still looks like damn good fun, though, and it's hugely impressive due to the fact that it was born of the depression of one man.

In this paragraph, I was going to discuss the games it reminds me of. But for the purposes of this news story, I’ve decided sentences are for wimps, so I’m just going to make a list instead.

GAMES MONACO REMINDS ME OF:

Frozen Synapse
The Heist
Splinter Cell
Gauntlet
The original GTA
Hitman
Cluedo


If you feel some more games should be added to my list, stick ‘em in the comments below.

Spec Ops: The Line had been lost in the sands until the appearance of last month's trailers. Here's another one, featuring more punching, occasional shooting and narration from a suspicious sort in a dark room with a microphone. Where do these madmen keep coming from?

The Gears of War influence is obvious. Beyond the unusual setting, it'll be interesting to see if Spec Ops does anything new with the familiar cover-to-cover scrambling of the modern third person shooter. The treacherous dunes of an unstable desert city make Spec Ops stand out from the throng, but the early trailers are heavy with the tang of testosterone. We'll have to wait and see if Spec Ops' characters do anything to stretch the angry-bro-in-big-armour template. It's due out next Spring.

The well-meaning earnestness and awesome gaminess of the Humble Indie Bundle IV are being exploited by evil internet users who would probably sell their own grans to be in with a chance of winning the latest Steam competition.

According to the Humble Indie Bundle blog, distinctly un-humble buyers are using the Steam codes from the Humble Indie Bundle to legitimise throwaway Steam accounts created specifically to enter Valve’s current raffle. “It’s a lose-lose situation for the indie developers, charities, Valve, and Humble Bundle,” says the blog.

To combat this, the minimum you’ll have to spend in order to get Steam keys in your Bundle is $1, instead of 1 cent. If the Scrooges among you can’t afford the $1 minimum you can contact the Humble Indie guys and they’ll send you the Steam keys - if you promise not to resell them or otherwise abuse them.

The incessant, nauseating loop of Band Aid on the radio and tear-jerking ads for homeless dogs on the telly are there to remind us that Christmas isn’t just about being drunk for a whole day, but that it’s also about donating to charities and hard-up indie game developers. Let's just hope the Humble Indie guys don't lose faith in the goodness of humanity.