Infinity Ward community manager, Robert Bowling, has confirmed that downloadable content for Call of Duty 4 will be available this spring. The first map, Chinatown, is based on the Call of Duty 2 map, Carentan. It is a rain soaked, dark map that is illuminated only by the moon and the soft neon glow of signs. The other maps include a wide-open village ravaged by combat called Creek, an enemy communications building named Broadcast and a desolate training warehouse filled with a variety of building mock-ups, labelled Killhouse. Unfortunately, there’s no word yet on whether PC users can expect to see the content in the near future.
After Perpetual Entertainment gave up on developing this game project, rumors that Cryptic Studios (City of Heroes) will continue this project started circling. Even though these rumors are out there for months now, there is no official confirmation made by Cryptic.
Trekmovie.com claims that they have information from reliable sources that Star Trek Online is already in the hands of Cryptic studio.
On the official game site, words “coming soon” are written again, and in some way that is the confirmation of these rumors. However, Cryptic is not yet giving any official information on this. It is possible that they will wait to develop something they can present to the public.
Source: http://www.fudzilla.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=6331&Itemid=39
When AMD launched the Radeon HD 3800 series, they included some screenshots from their Ping Pong DirectX 10.1 Demo inside the HD 3800 series launch presentation, and in the DirectX 10.1 whitepaper. Now it’s seems that a Chinese website is offering that demo to the public. You can download it here. Anyway, in-order to run the Ping Pong demo you need a Radeon HD 3800 card, Windows Vista SP1 (?) and the latest DirectX Redistributable from March.
Source: http://www.ngohq.com/news/13621-amd-ping-pong-directx-10-1-demo.html
Last week at the CeBIT I was lucky enough to see a running version of the DX10 based S.t.a.l.k.e.r. Clear Sky. Pretty amazing to look at to be honest. Somehow pcgameshardware.de was abale to snag screenshots of that demo, check it out. You’ll love the new DX10 scenery with the God-rays and all.
The demo was running on a new Series 9 card, not yet real smooth .. but for work in progress, fairly impressive graphics. Hit the link for more screenies.
Source: http://www.guru3d.com/newsitem.php?id=6644
Soon enough and most likely fake enough, the first Crysis 2 screenshots are here. Nobody knows how these have made their way out of the Crytek HQ, but Czech website InCrysis.cz reports them as Crysis 2 screens.
It won’t be extremely long anymore before FutureMark will release the follow-up to 3DMark06. We have some screenshots of the new and coming benchmark available.
Check ‘em out folks, click in the screenshots to get a full-sized version. And they are d-e-licious:
It sounds like Nvidia is not going to require users to buy an Ageia card after all. In fact, it may be that the physics coprocessor is going the way of the VGA chip.
As part of Nvidia’s fourth-quarter earnings report, Nvidia chief executive Jen-Hsun Huang revealed that the company will port the Ageia code base to its GeForce graphics chips using the CUDA technology, allowing them to run on an idle GPU.
“Physics processing and the AGEIA engine happens to be extremely computationally intensive,” said Jen-Hsun Huang, Nvidia’s chief executive, in a transcript provided by SeekingAlpha. “It requires just a lot of processors to deliver the type of real time performance that the games need.
“Our strategy is to take the AGEIA physics engine, which has been integrated into tools and games all over the world, and we’re going to port the AGEIA physics engine onto CUDA,” Huang added. “You know, you heard in my comments that CUDA has now shipped into 50 million processors, GeForce 8 series processors and over the next several years, we’ll ship a few hundred million more. The ability to port the physics engine on top of CUDA and accelerate the physics is going to add a ton more value to gamers around the world.
“Our expectation is that this is going to encourage people to buy even better GPUs. It might and probably will encourage people to buy a second GPU for the SLI slot and for the highest end gamers, it will encourage them to buy three GPUs, potentially two for graphics and one for physics or one for graphics and two for physics, or any combination of — you know, any dynamic combination thereof,” Huang said.
Huang also said that the Ageia technology could be run on any one of a number of cores inside the GPU, as well as across the idle GPU.
Nvidia’s fourth-quarter net income rose 57 percent to $257 million, or 42 cents per share, from $163.5 million, or 27 cents per share, a year ago, Reuters reported. Revenue rose 37 percent to $1.20 billion. The company’s GPU business was up 11 percent on the strength of the 8800GT, but Nvidia’s consumer business dipped 18 percent.
Approaching the February 20th release date, Futuremark’s 3DMark Vantage was pictured once more. This time we have some benchmark scores. The 3DMark Vantage RC0 build interface and some of the future tests are pictured below. The card that was running the benchmark and scored 4203 marks is supposed to be a GeForce 8800 GTX.
Source: http://www.techpowerup.com/index.php?52632
Ubisoft has announced that Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Vegas 2 for PC, PS3 and X360 will hit North American retailers on March 18th, with the publisher offering up special limited edition for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 versions. Priced at $69.99, the limited edition of the Sin City shooter will pack a poker chip keychain and a video disc filled with strategy movies, interviews, and a peek at the upcoming Tom Clancy RTS EndWar. Feel free to visit Rainbow Six Vegas 2 home page for more info.
Source: http://www.techpowerup.com/index.php?52808
GameSpot has managed to acquire some new Far Cry 2 screenshots as part of an article about the game. You can see all five of the new screenshots below, with all of the older screenshots available to look at here.
