This is not a 300 Series card, but it is black and red and covered in AMD logos.
AMD is "putting the finishing touches" on its Radeon 300 Series, the next generation of the company's flagship graphics card family, according to a Facebook post. The post came from the official AMD Facebook account in reply to a fan who recently sold their GTX 970 and was wondering if the R9 390X or 380X would be coming any time soon.
"Hey mate, we don't have an official date to share just yet but the second we know, we will definitely announce it on Facebook," the post said. "We're still putting the finishing touches on the 300 series to make sure they live up to expectation. Can't wait to reveal them though. We're pretty excited."
Of course, AMD's reply doesn't mean the company's next GPUs are due next week or next month—it's a casual response. But this information corroborates previous reports and claims from AMD that a "graphics refresh" would be coming in Q2 2015. AMD CEO Lisa Su cited that time frame in an earning call a few week ago.
Additionally, a number of retailers have listed R9 300 series cards on their websites in recent weeks, such as the Fiji XT GPU which will reportedly feature a high-bandwidth 3D stacked memory configuration that could be as much as nine times faster than GDDR5, though the first round of new AMD cards using the memory probably won't see that dramatic a performance jump immediately.
Republique raised more than $555,000 on Kickstarter in May 2012, a figure that's particularly remarkable because it was originally envisioned as an iOS exclusive. But it actually struggled to reach its goal until developer Camouflaj announced, midway through the Kickstarter campaign, that it would be released for the PC and Mac as well. And now, finally, it's on the way as Republique Remastered.
Republique is a stealth-survival game in which players aid a woman named Hope as she attempts to escape an oppressive, dystopian regime inspired by works like 1984 and Brave New World. Three episodes of the original iOS version—Exordium, Metamorphosis, and Ones and Zeroes—have already been released to good reviews, but the Republique Remastered edition for the PC has been "rebuilt from the ground up" in the Unity 5 engine, with enhancements including physics-based shading, real-time global illumination, and reflection probes.
"Ever since we committed to doing a desktop version of Republique, we ve been haunted by the task for delivering something truly special for PC players," designer Ryan Payton. "When we got a glimpse at the next iteration of Unity we realized that this was the answer—beyond redesigning the game s controls and UI for desktop, we ve completely gutted all the game s art, rebuilding everything using Unity 5 s cutting-edge graphical features. The result is something you have to see to believe."
Republique Remastered will hit Steam, GOG, and the Humble Store on February 26.
The second season of the Smite Pro League will have teams battling through three separate "Splits"—Spring, Summer, and Fall—after which the top teams in each region will square off in LAN tournaments to determine who will be invited to the 2016 World Championship.
All teams, except those who have already qualified for the Smite World Championships, must take part in the Spring Split Qualifiers in order to earn a shot at the title. The top qualifying teams will make it into the Spring Split, while the rest must duke it out in the Challenger Cup for a chance to take part in the Summer Split.
The first qualifier will take place over February 14-15, with two more following on February 21-22 and February 28-March 1. The Spring Split itself will see the top six teams—two from the Worlds and four from the Qualifiers—battling in best-of-three competitions over a five week period from March 5 to April 5, while the single-elimination Challenger Cup will run simultaneously from March 5 to April 19. Once the Spring Split LAN is wrapped up, teams from the Challenger Cup will face teams from the Spring Split Pro League for relegation into the Summer Split.
There will also be a multi-region LAN event on April 25-26, in which the top two North American and European teams from the Spring Split will face off for "a big chunk of money" as well as a trip to Brazil to compete at XMA-X5 Mega Arena. And finally, there's an event coming up this weekend: The Smite PTS Showdown—Viewer's Choice, featuring both pro and amateur teams dueling on a new map with new items, and which for the first time ever will allow viewers to choose which games are streamed and broadcast.
Details about the Season Two format changes and Spring Split qualifiers are here. More information about the Summer and Fall Splits will be announced as the season progresses.
The March 2015 issue of PC Gamer US is on newsstands now, and with it comes previews of the PC games we're most looking forward to this year (and it's looking like a hell of a year!). We also discover Creative Assembly's ambitious plans for Total War: Attila, get our first look at Hellblade, the new game from Ninja Theory, and test the best liquid coolers.
Jump over here for instructions on how to subscribe to the print or digital versions (get the latest issue free when you subscribe digitally), or buy the single issue in print.
This month we...
Investigate the series-spanning changes of Total War: Attila.
Talk to Ninja Theory about Hellblade, their first independently made action game.
Round up the best-looking games of the coming year in our ultimate guide to 2015.
Review Metal Gear Solid: Ground Zeroes, Far Cry 4, The Crew, Never Alone, Lara Croft and the Temple of Osiris, Dead State, The Talos Principle, and Game of Thrones: Episode 1.
Supertest the latest water coolers and find out which deserves a home in your overclocked PC.
Blast off to Kerbal Space Program to see how it's getting along.
Assassins are dangerous dudes. If you're going to hunt them, you need the right equipment. A sword. A gun. A hidden blade strapped to the inside of your wrist. And a PC. Specifically, this PC.
OS: Windows 7 SP1 or Windows 8/8.1 (64 bit versions only)
CPU: Intel Core2Quad Q6600 @ 2.4GHz or AMD Athlon II X4 620 @ 2.6 GHz
RAM: 2GB
Video card: nVidia GeForce GTS450 or AMD Radeon HD5670 (1024MB VRAM) or Intel HD4600
DirectX: DirectX June 2010 Redistributable
Hard disk: 11.4 GB
Sound card: DirectX-compatible sound card with latest driver
Supported peripherals: Xbox 360 controller, Tobii EyeX Controller, SteelSeries Sentry
Supported video cards at launch: NVIDIA GeForce GTS 450 or better, GeForce 500, 600, 700, 900 series, AMD Radeon HD 5670 or better, Radeon HD 6000, 7000, R7, R9 series Intel HD4600, HD5200 (Note: Laptop versions of these cards may work but are NOT officially supported.)
As noted, that's the minimum system requirement. We don't have a recommended spec as of yet, so I'll make a recommendation myself: Don't try and play it with minimum-spec hardware. Sure, it might run, but it probably won't run very well. Save yourself the hassle and the heartache, and save your money for some upgrades.
And as promised, the launch date: Assuming no unfortunate delays (and I will leave it up to you to decide if that assumption is safe), Assassin's Creed: Rogue will be out on March 10.
Last night I lost a game of Captain's Mode to a team that randomed two of their heroes. Their captain was AFK. Our captain wasn't AFK—he was, well, me—and I figured that I could easily counterpick a team that was lumbered with a Lina and an Elder Titan that they didn't plan to play. The draft didn't matter much, as it happened. They outplayed us from the moment the laning phase ended, fighting better, rotating better and generally closing us out of the game before we could bring our non-randomly-generated plan to bear.
There are two meagre reasons why this was not entirely an unbearable experience. The first is the single message their team transmitted in English over the course of the game: a lonely 'sick my duck', perhaps an Outkast reference, perhaps simply a wonderful typo. The other is that it was a relatively straightforward loss. These have seemed harder to come by, lately: I don't know about you, but for me and mine 6.83 has been the era of the throw.
It's simply easier to lose control of a lead than it used to be. It only takes a single teamfight to completely reverse the momentum of a game. Sometimes, it's less than that—the pick-off kill that means your next engagement ends disastrously, the sneaky Roshan attempt that you forget to check for. I don't feel like we've been losing more games than we generally do, but I definitely feel like we've thrown away more advantages.
It's no longer safe to snowball, and early leads need to be treated with a mixture of respect and caution—both by the team that's ahead and the team that's behind. The rewards for storming ahead in the early game aren't what they used to be, and transitioning into the kind of lead that actually ends the game takes skill and careful mitigation of risk. It's this latter element that I've been thinking about a lot recently. Dota 2 is a game of numbers, chance, percentages: most throws begin the moment you forget that.
Two weeks ago I talked about how a team that is in an advantageous position needs to identify their 'victory switch'—the set of collective strategic and psychological shifts that allow them to properly end a game. As part of that shift, it's increasingly important to define your team's relationship with the game's unpredictable elements.
A few weeks ago I read this guide to Hearthstone's Arena mode by VivaFringe. I don't play a lot of Hearthstone, but what drew me to it was this line:
When you re ahead, try to minimize variance. When you re behind, try to maximize it.
What VivaFringe refers to as 'variance' could also be described as chaos or unpredictability. In Hearthstone, this is fairly easy to locate: there are a lot of random elements, from the behaviours of individual cards to the card-drawing process itself. 'Randomness' in Dota 2 is a little subtler. It means more than just Phantom Assassin's chance to crit or Chaos Knight's chance to get a four-second stun. It means everything your team can't directly control, from the positioning of enemy wards to the chance that the support you've spotted wandering alone is actually bait for a smoke gank.
Here's a scenario that demonstrates the type of variance that I'm talking about. One of your team's core heroes is mobile, good at taking down single targets, and has had a good start—Storm Spirit, maybe. Your advantage going into the midgame has been built on the back of lots of individual plays. From an even start, your team has more gold and experience because risks were taken—and paid off.
Let's say that Storm Spirit has a 80% chance of succeeding at any given solo kill attempt. That's an arbitrary percentage: it's intended to express the idea that a player with a lead will normally do well, but that something can always go wrong. When all else is equal, it is absolutely worth taking that 80% chance of success. As the game progresses, however, the one-in-five chance of failure means more. In the lategame, the 20% you can't control could mean ceding a huge gold and experience bounty to an enemy carry, a lengthy respawn, an expensive buyback, or any number of other penalties. Eventually, Storm Spirit's solo gambits will present a bigger opportunity to your opponent than they do to your own team, because your opponent has a meagre (but not impossible) chance to win big from them.
When you're ahead, then, you need to stop gambling. The odds haven't changed, but the scale of the reward has. Stop seeing it as an 80% chance to bump your K/D/A, and start seeing it as a 20% chance to lose the entire game. Secure your lead by 'minimising variance'. Prompt teamfights. Take other objectives. Transition in sync with the changing mathematical landscape of the game.
This is often the opposite of what a snowballing player wants to do, and the inverse is true of players who are on the defensive. Simply being behind suggests that conservative play is the only way to win: you lost out in the early game, so there's no way you're going to gamble with what you've got left. Well, that line of thinking goes both ways. As the enemy pulls ahead in gold and experience, you can do more with each kill you manage to get. The one consistent element of unpredictable situations in Dota 2 is that they are dangerous. People make mistakes. People die. This is the last thing you want if you're winning, but exactly what you want if you're behind.
'Maximise variance' in this regard by making plays that feel unsafe. Go for that smoke gank. Contest Roshan. Push a tower and force the other team to come meet you, then run away. Sometimes they will respond perfectly and you'll lose anyway, but that's unlikely. By taking chances you increase the chance that they'll slip up, and when they lose a vital core hero for a full ninety seconds without buyback you'll have just won your way back into the game.
To put it another way: only winners can throw a game. There's a choice you need to make, when you've built up that comfortable lead, to hold on to it. And when you're losing the best thing you can do isn't hole up in your base or repeatedly farm the two jungle camps left to you: it's to strike out and invite the other team to take a risk. Think about every time you've thrown a game because you wanted one more kill, or to show off, or to end the game because you need to make dinner—then encourage that mindset in them. Not the dinner thing, I guess. But if you want, try typing 'brb 1min need to eat delicious pizza' in all-chat. It can't hurt. Beats 'sick my duck', anyway.
If you remain unconvinced, please enjoy this brief four-minute musical essay on the importance of being mindful of the numbers powering every Dota 2 match you play.
10% luck. 20% skill. 15% concentrated power of will. 5% pleasure. 50% slam. 100% reason to remember the jam.
This is as close to a perfect mathematical summation of Dota 2 as you will ever get.
Ubisoft has announced that PC gamers will have a unique and potentially groundbreaking way to play the upcoming Assassin's Creed: Rogue: With so-called "infinite screen" eye tracking technology that links the player's view directly to that of Shay Patrick Cormac's.
The system works with the SteelSeries Sentry, an eye-tracking device announced last summer. The mouse and keyboard inputs work as they usually do, but when the player looks to one side of the screen or the other, the character does as well, and the camera will pan in the same direction to create what Ubisoft calls an "Infinite Screen experience." It also pauses and resumes the game automatically when the player looks away from, and then back to, the screen.
"Eye tracking is such a natural way to interact with a game and creates tons of potential opportunities for gameplay immersion," Ubisoft Kiev Producer Corneliu Vasiliu said in a statement. "We are one of the first to integrate this technology in a video game, and the first to implement eye tracking as a gameplay input in a game of that scale—providing Assassin s Creed: Rogue gamers with an entirely new, complementary input to the keyboard and mouse."
It's not entirely new. The ARMA series and other sims have used head-tracking technology in similar ways, using peripherals like TrackIR. At $200, the SteelSeries Sentry isn't cheap, but as of today, anyone who purchases one (up to the first 5000 customers) will also get a free copy of the full version of Assassin's Creed: Rogue when it comes out. It's currently scheduled for release in March.
What do The End Times look like in a universe where there is only war? Rats, apparently, and lots of them. Fatshark—of War of the Roses fame—has just announced Warhammer: End Times Vermintide. It pits you and some friends battle against a literal tide of vermin.
The vermin in question are Skaven, Warhammer's race of anthropomorphic rat-bastards. The co-op FPS will challenge four players with surviving the hordes of ratmen that infest the city of Ubersreik.
"Working together cooperatively," explains the press release, "players must use their individual attributes to survive an apocalyptic invasion from hordes of relentless, power hungry Skaven, across a range of environments stretching from the top of the Magnus Tower to the bowels of the Under Empire."
Vermintide is due out this year for PC, PS4 and Xbox.
Take a stern look at your opponent. Shore yourself for battle. Torpedo their hopes for victory. Expect these and other ship puns to be deployed frequently in the playing of World of Warships. That or some 12-year-old will say a mean thing about your mother.
A new trailer for Wargaming's ship-shaped free-to-play shooter shows off some in-game footage of the game being played. In it, big boats fire at other big boats with big weapons. Sometimes a big explosion happens.
WoWS's beta testing phase is due to begin early this year.
