Assassin's Creed 3 is arriving a bit late on PC, but according to comments from the Ubisoft team in a recent Reddit AMA, it'll come with some extra visual polish. DirectX 11 features like tessellation will smooth out those polygons and we can look forward to textures that, in some cases, will be four times the resolution of the console versions.

Community developer "UbiGabe" also says that "when PC launches, it will include ALL of the console patches out at the time (so, that includes any patches we might be releasing in between now and PC launch). In addition, PC has a special patch designed to ensure that everything runs as smoothly as possible."

Textures will be "double-res in most cases, but quadruple in some," and there will be "some other shader improvements that will have an impact, but aren't all that sexy to enumerate in a reddit post." UbiGabe should drop us a line, NOTHING IS TOO UNSEXY FOR US.

But seriously, other important issues were raised during the Q&A, like the vital question "Do you think Connor would rather fight 100 duck-sized horses, or one horse-sized duck?" to which the predictable response was "I think Connor's speed and size would prove to be the difference maker in the battle against the mob of horse-ducks so I lean towards them."

This brilliant Assassin's Creed Kinect April Fool video also came up again, which is all the excuse I need to embed it on my forehead to amuse everyone I meet today. Also here:

This week's PC download chart is a battleground that spans the ages, and sees Football Manager 2013 knocked off the top of the table by a bunch of people wielding pitchforks. And, no, we don't mean Millwall fans.

Up from number two to take over the top spot like a charging knight trying to save a damsel in distress, only with a mace and more bloodlust than a viking on a rugby tour, is medieval battler Chivalry.

Just behind it, flexing what appears to be a cheese wire and sporting a menacing look, is Hitman: Absolution, the subject of our 35% discount offer.

The single new entry in the chart is Battlefield 3 Premium Edition, an add-on which offers players all five Battlefield 3 expansion packs - and you get them two weeks earlier than the rest of the grunts out there.

Here's the global top ten from Green Man Gaming in full...

1. Chivalry
2. Hitman: Absolution
3. XCOM: Enemy Unknown
4. Football Manager 2013
5. Borderlands 2
6. Borderlands 2 Season Pass
7. Battlefield 3 Premium Edition
8. Assassin's Creed III
9. Guild Wars 2
10.Dishonored

Brought to you in association with Green Man Gaming.

Valve fired the starting pistol on the Saxxy video awards back in August, inviting fans to create the best videos they can using the Source Filmmaker tool released earlier this year. The entries are in, and the voting has started. You can start dishing out thumbs-ups and thumbs-downs by logging in and working through the queue on the Saxxy Steam page.

The quality is mixed, as you'd expect, but every so often you run into a gem that makes it worthwhile. My favourite so far is the Midnight Power short embedded below, a slow pan out on a fight scene that stretches the number of moving objects and characters the filmmaker can handle to its limit.

Discover more great filmmaker videos in our round-up of ten of the best.

The excellent Awesomenauts is free to play until Sunday, and will be available to buy half-price for the duration. Awesomenauts cheerily translates the levelling, lane-pushing and tower bashing of Dotalikes onto a 2D plane and dresses it up as a Saturday morning cartoon punch-up. It feels like Bucky O'Hare has teamed up with Captain Planet to fight the Ninja Turtles, but with more robots and less IP infringement. Read our full verdict in the Awesomenauts review, and download it now via Steam.

Yesterday's patch for Torchlight 2 has added a couple of new critters to the pet roster. An angry badger and a noble owl can tag along to help you in combat and sell off unwanted loot in town, which must look more like a zoo than a market by now. Free updates are always appreciated, but fans on the Runic forums do note some suspicious similarities between the new Owl pet and the Hawk. Runic's community manager, Brian W, explained the resemblance with this helpful image.

The patch also makes a few balance changes to class skills, adds a new set of pants and fixes a few bugs. Once loving and gullible minion gels have grown cynical in the face of repeated beatings and now "cannot be charmed." On the plus side, "Legendary wand Earth Dies Screaming can no longer crash the game." Thank goodness for that. Grab the full patch notes on the Torchlight 2 forums.

The TITAN system based at Oak Ridge National Laboratory has usurped IBM's sequoia to become the fastest supercomputer in the world, the Economist report. It took three years to build 200 cabinet mega-PC, which has managed to boost ahead of its closest rival with some help from the tech we use in our graphics cards every day.

Titan replaces Oak Ridge's Jaguar computer, a powerful system that ran on traditional CPU chips. Titan uses GPUs to reach greater speeds more efficiently. "Titan’s peak performance is more than 20 petaflops – or 20 million billion floating-point operations per second – about 90 percent of which comes from 18,688 NVIDIA Tesla K20 GPU accelerators," they say on the Nvidia site.

Titan is an "open-science" system, which means research and industry groups can bid for calculation time to solve the most pressing questions of our generation, like where do all the spare socks go, and how do separate cables manage to become irreversibly entwined the moment you leave them unwatched in a drawer. Titan's closest competitor, Seqouia, is busy running nuclear weapons simulations for the US National Nuclear Security Administration, which means it's out of bounds to those of us who want to set some serious benchmarks.

“Science and technology have always been our primary goal, and Titan is a groundbreaking tool that will allow researchers worldwide to leverage GPU-accelerated computing to make unparalleled breakthroughs,” says Oak Ridge's associate lab director for computational sciences, Jeff Nichols, “The new Tesla GPU accelerators offer the performance and energy efficiency that enable Titan to scale to unprecedented performance levels without consuming the energy equivalent of a small city.”

But what if we were to use the energy equivalent of a small city to overclock it? WHAT THEN? I've got about 55p in my pocket if anyone wants to go in on a bid.

Thanks to Tom Foster for the heads up.

Can you hear the sleigh bells jingling, jingling, jingling and reminding you of the impending hell of Christmas shopping? The impatient throngs of miserable people! The life-sapping chill of the wind! Every tinsel-throttled street haunted by the dread spectres of Cliff Richard and Noddy Holder! Instead, why not pick up the latest issue of PC Gamer UK and settle down by the fire - or should I say, Firefall? I should! For it is our cover star - and its open world jump-pack action is a guiding light to eSports and MMO fans even in these dark times.

What's more you get a free beta code to Firefall with the mag! Christmas has indeed come early; every single page of the magazine is a gift in itself.

Issue 247 should be on shelves today and will be available digitally soon. There's also always the option to subscribe and get each issue delivered to your door, earlier and for less money! Sweet. Hit the jump to see the exclusive subs cover, and discover what other treats await: news, previews, reviews, retrospectives, tech tests and more!



This month we...

get in-depth with Aliens: Colonial Marines, Total War: Rome 2, Shootmania Storm, Company of Heroes 2, Star Citizen and more
take to the field with the ten military sims currently answering the call of duty
guide gamers through Windows 8's unfamiliar terrain.
drop scores on Hitman: Absolution, Need For Speed: Most Wanted, Hotline Miami, Medal of Honor: Warfighter, Football Manager 2013 and more
test the best CPUs on the market
discover Uplink's origins and the making of Introversion
revisit Wing Commander II
and loads more!


And once your done, you can use the pages as makeshift ear-plugs to stop the sounds of Paul McCartney's Wonderful Christmastime burrowing into your mind like a Ceti eel.

Enjoy!

If you were planning to grab a copy of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City this weekend to calm your nerves following a week of GTA V hysteria, then you're out of luck. In a statement, Rockstar Games has confirmed that Vice City has been temporarily removed from digital PC outlets.

"Due to some music licensing issues, we've had to temporarily remove Vice City PC from digital stores. We'll make it available again as soon as possible," the statement read. After a little bit of sniffing around, Cinema Blend has established that it's probably Sony Music Entertainment causing the problems with a claim on 'Wanna be Startin' Something' by Michael Jackson.

The temporary removal shouldn't affect the forthcoming iOS version of Vice City. Thanks to Game Informer for the tip.

It's highly unlikely, but if you haven't seen the GTA V trailer yet you can do so here, but there's still no PC release confirmation. For a selection of hilariously inane responses to the trailer, this Tumblr blog has you covered.

 

Lukewarm Media announced today the first DLC for its outrageous multiplayer dino-thon Primal Carnage, craftily titled "Get to the Chopper," breaks out of its cage later this month. Presumably lacking musclebound Austrians politely reminding you to board flying contraptions naow, Get to the Chopper nevertheless adds a new mode for hungry, hungry dinosaurs and tiny, tiny humans to roar and Wilhelm scream at each other, respectively.

Like Left 4 Dead, Get to the Chopper tasks humans with barreling down a linearly constructed path to an awaiting chopper at the end. Instead of special infected, the opposing team fields a dino defense in the hopes of stopping escapes by way of impromptu human snacks. The mode's design certainly affords great tug-of-war moments through ambushes and coordination, especially during the last panic-filled moments of the homestretch after locking sights on your escape. Unlike Left 4 Dead, dinosaurs aren't as smelly as zombies. We think.

The International 2 was Valve's second-annual tournament for Dota 2. Even with the game still in beta, a $1.6 million prize pool (with $1 million awarded to the champs) was dangled before teams, a purse exceeded in eSports only by League of Legends' Season Two Championship.

To coincide with the tournament, which took place at PAX Prime during the days connecting August and September, Valve commissioned a documentary that finally released today. The video features interviews with the 16 teams who competed, following them from the preliminary stages (held at Valve's offices) through to the finale itself.

What a strange, happy thing it is to have two technically independent developers--Valve and Riot Games--trying to out-spectacle one another as eSports. Though technical issues and instances of cheating slightly soured the League of Legends' Season Two Championship, it was a delight to watch. We're gaming in an exciting time, aren't we?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eqk9C1wVT0U

The Dota 2 YouTube channel has plenty of other video bits and interviews from The International 2, if you're hungry for more.