Available today, the latest Extreme Edition Core™ i7-3970X processor and the Extreme Series Intel® Desktop Board DX79SR codenamed “Stormville” will unleash new PC performance for enthusiasts. This is Intel’s highest performance Extreme Edition processor with 6 Cores, Intel® Hyper-Threading technology, 15 MB cache, and 4 Channels of DDR3 memory.
This driver introduces significant performance improvements for many games across ALL 28nm AMD Radeon™ HD 7000 Series products: HD 7700, HD7800 and HD7900.
Please note that AMD Catalyst 12.11 Beta 7 includes all of the fixes found in previous versions of AMD Catalyst 12.11 Beta
In what can surely be perceived as good news, BioWare has announced that Mass Effect 4 will utilize the Frostbite engine from DICE. The Mass Effect trilogy (which used the Unreal Engine 3) has been plagued with problems for Eyefinity and Surround users. The first two titles simply offered no support, even after ME2 was teased as supporting Eyefinity. The final title offered support for Eyefinity users, but not NVIDIA Surround owners.
By way of comparison, recently released titles using the Frostbite 2 engine - Battlefield 3 & Need for Speed: The Run - were both Certified upon release for having perfect multi-monitor support. After years of poor to mediocre multi-monitor support, in 2009 DICE publicly came out in support of multi-monitor gaming. Whether ME4 uses Frostbite 2, or a possible future version such as 2.5 or 3.0, the move away from UE3 can only be good news for Eyefinity and Surround users.
On October 23rd, 2012, both AMD and NVIDIA released new beta drivers that made claims of significant performance gains for their respective GCN and Kepler architectures. AMD released Catalyst 12.11 Beta, which AMD is claiming is its "Never Settle" driver. NVIDIA released ForceWare 310.33 Beta with up to 15% better performance in some games and improvements across the board. Voices cheered across the internet as more performance was unlocked for video cards for free, but we wanted to know whether it was a true game changer or just another press release.
Blades of Time is a hack-and-slash action-adventure game developed by Gaijin Entertainment and published by Konami. The game is a spiritual successor to Gaijin Entertainment's past work, X-Blades. Blades of Time was released on April 21, 2012 followed by the Mac OS X version a few days after.
In a recent post on the Microsoft Answers forum, Microsoft employee Daniel Moth stated, "DirectX 11.1 is part of Windows 8, just like DirectX 11 was part of Windows 7. DirectX 11 was made available for Vista .... but at this point there is no plan for DirectX 11.1 to be made available on Windows 7."
From Neowin
I'd like to thank everyone for their great response in our previous donation drive. You helped us cover our first half hosting costs, and the awards for 2011. We are coming to you one more time to ask for help, for our second half hosting costs and the 2012 awards.
As before, donating $25 will net you an "I Donated" badge, and donating $100 or more will get the "Like A Boss" badge added. All donations here will be cumulative for the year. If you donate more than $200, talk to me and we'll see about getting you a custom one-of-a-kind badge.
Please note - Prior to the donation drives, the *ONLY* people on the site to have the "Like a Boss" badge are the four-man Admin Team (skipclarke, AussieTimmeh, CrackerJackMack and Delphium).
Previously, we had stated that the badges would be on your profile for just 2012. I have decided that this is our last formal donation drive for hosting costs (we'll set up a generic donation button for 2013 onward), and I've decided that the donation related badges will stay on your profile permanently.
Below is the Q&A from the original donation drive earlier in the year.
What do I get for donating?
You get a nice warm fuzzy feeling in your heart. If you donate $25 or more, I'll add the "I Donated" badge to your profile. If you donate $100 or more, I'll also add the "Like a Boss" badge to your profile.
Runaway: A Twist of Fate (also known as Runaway 3: A Twist of Fate) is a point-and-click graphical adventure. It is a game developed by Péndulo Studios and is the third and final chapter in the Runaway series.
The game has a 2D appearance, however only the backgrounds are in true 2D because the characters are rendered in 3D using cel-shaded animation.
Microstuttering is a defect in image quality, where small pauses appear, creating less smooth movement in games. The effect is shown in this short article from Extremetech.
Microstuttering has plagued SLI and Crossfire setups for a very long time now. Nvidia has spent much effort in reducing this by introducing hardware based frame metering with Keplar.
A new review from Toms Hardware regarding AMD's 7990 and Nvidia's 690 had some really interesting results in their tests. It seems that when they apply Dynamic V-sync control with the third party app RadeonPro, microstuttering is reduced to almost nothing. The graphs shows that crossfire are even smoother then single card solutions with DVC applied.
