Friday, September 14, 2012

The Midagedgamer Report for 9-14-2012


This week...

Thunderbolt, not just for Apple anymore, New details about Haswell, kinda, A new NVIDIA driver and more!

For those of us who are crazy enough to pay the extra price premium to get decent gaming performance on a laptop it's a given that there's going to be tradeoffs.  Graphics performance on these platforms will always outperform the meager integrated offerings but it's still not the same performance we're used to on a desktop.  Lest we forget the issues with power, weight, and of course heat with these mobile monsters. 

So when an option comes along that can make just about any mobile platform a gaming powerhouse with minimal effort I'm going to perk up. 

Apparently Lucid, you know the guys who were trying to make NVIDIA and ATI play nice in the same rig?  Well, it appears they've come up with a solution to leverage the bandwidth and connectivity of Thunderbolt to connect an external graphics adapter to your laptop.  Laptop Magazine tried this out with a thunderbolt enabled motherboard and external graphics adapter.  The difference between the performance with the external adapter and without was dramatic.  A link to the video has been provided.


Remember that Thunderbolt has a direct pipeline to the PCI-E bus so  there's nothing  really stopping a vendor from producing an add-in external graphics product.  There's also nothing saying an inexpensive desktop PC with a thunderbolt connection  couldn't do the same thing.  Think of the possibilities, gaming performance without the overhead. and high price.  The only thing that stands in its way is public adoption.
 There has to be a mainstream desire to do more than play angry birds on their laptop for something like this to gain a foothold.  It's up to laptop and graphics vendors to make them see the light.


In platform news Intel released a few details about the upcoming Haswell processor family.  Unfortunately unless you're really into 10Watt CPU's and multithreaded memory it isn't going to be that big a deal over Ivy Bridge.  The big push with haswell is platform portability so that the same architecture that powers your desktop PC can power your tablet as well. 


In steam news the first Greenlight Titless have been chosen among them a graphics overhaul mod to the original Half Life called Black Mesa. 

While certainly a work deserving of the spotlight,  I still don't see Valve's $100 toll to get on the community ballot as fair.  Also Interesting to note that the first game featured in the list of winners is an update to one of valve's own titles.  Talk about free labor!


By the way, Black Mesa is scheduled for release on Steam's Greenlight Friday September 14th.  With the buzz around this game expect the same slow download times and delays as the recent Team Fortress 2 co-op. 


In the strange but true department...

It appears violent video games can raise your pain threshold.  A study in the UK found that people who played violent video games for 10 minutes could keep their hands in ice cold water longer than those who didn't. 

So will it be long before we treat ourselves to a half hour of resident evil or Battlefield 3 instead of anesthesia before undergoing surgery?  Ok that's a stretch but it is an interesting study. 


In somewhat related news a stroke victim that hasn't been able to send an email or even type on a keyboard due to a condition called aphasia was able to communicate using a hacked Kinect sensor.  The victim's son figured out the specifics to allow his mother to again communicate with the outside world. 
Nice to see Kinect useful for something other than flailing around in your living room while yelling at your big screen tv.


Ha! I knew it!
Valve, parent of Steam has been pursued by EA and offered up to 1 Billion dollars for the developer and game outlet.  Now we know where Origin came from.  Guess EA figured if it couldn't buy them they'd try to beat 'em!

In our can Gabe Newell be any more hypocritical department...

Ol' Gabe is at it again issuing a dire warning to Microsoft about "Trying to copy Apple"  Gabe's rumbling over the closed marketplace of the Microsoft Store and it's barriers to a free marketplace.  Yeah Gabe and about that Greenlight toll thing?? Yeah, thought so....


In overpriced gaming news...

Borderlands is due out on September 18th, we all know that.  But if you just can't wait to start building your character there's a skill calculator designed to give you a template to make him/her as badass as you dare.  Ah well, the marketing departments are busy.  Still waiting for a Steam sale in 2014...


For the TF2 cult members out there...

 Team Fortress 2 is looking for Halloween designs for its upcoming event.  Special maps and bonus items are a tradition around Halloween and this year is no different.  If you're one of those who knows their way around the Steam Workshop you best get your creative juices flowing before the October 1'st start of TF2's Scary season.


For all of you fans of Team Green, Nvidia has a new driver for you that among other things enables TXAA and fixes some issues with SLI in the 6x series of cards.  Even my old 260M in my laptop gets this new driver Nvidia is calling the R304.  Note that Nvidia says this is it for the 7x and 6x series of cards being included in regular driver releases moving them to "legacy" status.  The next release dubbed R310 will not include them.


Finally,

Thanks to all those viewers of the 2 part Windows 8 Enterprise Eval videos I posted last week.  In fact they were so popular (relatively speaking, I mean look at my numbers...) That only my vids on BF3 shortcuts and some weather videos rate higher.  So I can only assume that my viewing public Loves to play BF3 on a Windows 8 virtual machine during a thunderstorm while counting the remaining minutes left on the eval..

Thanks!

No comments: