Ready for fall gaming?

Winter is coming, and that means new titles, less time spent outdoors and more time in front of the TV and monitor. For us gamers that’s a blessing in disguise, I’m sure my gym going routine will suffer a bit. 

I recently picked up the Gigabyte Radeon HD 7970 OC Windforce… that’s quite the mouth full if I might say so myself. This is essentially the R9 280, minus 100MHz on the core clock and 125MHz on the memory clock. It’s missing a couple of features as well, but at the steal that I found this at I have no qualms about picking it up. You could catch this up to the R9 280 frequencies with a simple OC, but unfortunately Gigabyte locked the voltages on this line. Either way I was ready to upgrade from my dual 5870s, and the performance boost will be most welcome. I’m going from 1GB to 3GB RAM and this is necessary for the Ultra settings in any game. Well actually you could get away with 1GB GPU RAM but then the computer needs more than 8GB of RAM. Either way BF4 will look better than ever, and so will the other titles this winter.

For those that already own 7970 cards and wish to update to the new R9 series from AMD, have I got a little treat for you. You can go a step further and crossfire the 7970 with a R9 280X. That’s right folks, since they share the same silicon they can be crossfired. The only down side to this,  if one card has a higher clock than the other, the one with the higher frequency will be down clocked to match the slower card. The same goes for the other R7 series cards. Now that is what I call customer service and good old fashined Canadian engineering. If you want to read a little more about this head over to Hardware Canucks they will explain it to you in grater detail. http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/forum/hardware-canucks-reviews/63551-will-crossfire-r9-280x-hd-7970-scaling-tested.html

Then comes Mantle, for those of you not familiar with this term this is AMDs new API. This API gives developers direct access to the silicon and all the features it comes bundled with. It supposedly eliminates the unnecessary overhead of DirectX and OpenGL, improving performance and giving greater control of the hardware to the developers. Currently developers are slaves to the likes of DirectX and OpenGL, and these APIs do not support all the features of the GPU. With Mantle Game Developers will have the same API for the PC, Xbox One, Wii U, and PS4. BF4 will be patching their game in December to utilize the Mantle API from AMD. It will be interesting to see some benchmarks on this to test the performance. While Nvidia spent 5 million on optimization for a couple of Ubisoft games this fall, AMD paid DICE 8 mil or so to essentially design or rather optimize their Mantle API for the Frostbite 3 engine. This encompasses all platforms and a plethora of upcoming games. Whereas Ubisoft is notorious for ignoring the PC gaming space and releasing less than stellar software for it, Ghost Recon Future Soldier comes to mind for me. GRFS was unplayable for 3-4 months after being released on the PC. Go online now and it’s a barren wasteland. Looks like Nvidia is backing the wrong horse. AMD got the better deal and made a smarter business decision in the long run.

There is a lot of exciting and interesting things happening in the PC gaming space right now. Steam is at the fore front of all this trying to Steam roll all the competition/consoles and make it’s way into the living room. It already has into mine. Me being a PC gamer and a member of the Glorious PC Gaming Master Race, this is very exciting in deed. Steam and Valve have the potential to shut those console peasants up for good. I kid, I kid, I own consoles as well and use them as paper weights and book ends, ha ha ha.

Here is a video demonstration of the Steam controller.

Happy gaming to you all.