Looks like the Duke is ready to come out of hiding and start ramping up the media hype. 11 years in the making and a hundred game engine changes later, the almost total media silence from 3Drealms about their follow up to the hugely successful Duke Nukem 3D game has lifted with a teaser trailer for Duke Nukem Forever. In typical 3Drealms fashion it shows little more than some cut scene footage of Duke weight training and gives no real indication to the quality of the game engine they are now using. But who cares. The good news is that there really is a Duke Nukem game in the pipeline and just maybe 2008 could be the year we all get to kick some alien butt and chew bubblegum. The loyal fans on the 3Drealms forums are over the moon - you just can't keep a Duke fan down and the promise of more media footage must mean 3Drealms are getting close to the goal post.  For now here's the Duke pumping up. Asta la vista baby.

This week, Crysis has finally been released. You know about it's beauty, and you also know you'll be needing quite some hardware to get the most out of it. Does that include a quad-core processor?

Cervat Yerli, from Crytek, was reported by The Inquirer as saying that a quad should be at the top of anyone's upgrade list for playing Crysis. "If [your system is] balanced, we are more CPU bound than GPU [...] We recommend quad core over higher clock."

PC Perspective does show numbers regarding both a Quad and a Duo, but DX10 and DX9 are thrown into the mix (as well as a GPU change). 

Lastly, let's mention that some comparison done at Tom's Hardware, between the demo and the real deal, shows the demo being actually a little bit faster. That same review points out proper utilization of all the cores on their Quad, but specific performance gains aren't given.

The latest release, Ubuntu 7.10 "Gutsy Gibbon" is compared at Phoronix with the Windows version still used by most gamers out there: XP SP2. To get both 3DMark01 Second Edition and 3DMark03 working under Linux, WINE 0.9.46 is used.

Test system: ASUS P5E3 Deluxe motherboard (Intel's X38 Chipset), 2GB of OCZ DDR3-1333 memory,  Mushkin 780W PSU, Intel Pentium D 820, ASUS GeForce 8600GT 512MB and GeForce 6600GT 128MB graphics cards. Drivers were ForceWare 163.71 for Windows and nVidia's 100.14.19 for Linux.

3DMark01 is a complete win for Microsoft here, but some 3DMark03 tests are more even. Multi-Texturing Fill Rate was very close for the 6600GT (there's some performance issue with the 8600GT keeping it down to 6600GT levels). Something similar happens with the Ragtroll test, where Linux wins with the 6600GT but doesn't improve when moving to the 8600GT. The CPU test is a clear win for Linux.

Despite inconviniences typical of a beta, this Unreal Tournament III demo must be enough, for the time being, to get an idea of the requirements of this game.

An important point to remember is that, although the final version will be more "polished", the frames per second we see in this Anandtech article are probably higher, because it's not testing with high quality textures and the scenarios are devoid of characters.

Among the most relevant conclusions we can come to, let's say that cache size brings up to a  20% performance increase for the Core 2. Another element to take into consideration is the number of cores the processor has, which can translate into a 60% gain (when going dual) and a 13% one (when going Quad). On the other hand, raising the frecuency  of a Core 2 Duo from 2 GHz to 3,33 GHz only gets us a 28% boost.

And what of the graphics cards? nVidia wins, although AMD keeps pace at the same price range (Radeon HD 2900 XT and X1950 XTX vs NVIDIA GeForce 8800 Ultra, 8800 GTX, 8800 GTS 320MB and 7900 GTX).

Shacknews attends in Cary, North Carolina, an Unreal Tournament 3 press event, where Epic's vice-president Mark Rein, issued this statement Monday night:

"The development team feels they're pretty close to being ready to release this," said Rein on the Epic forums, "so it could come out this week but for safety sake I'd say it should be out within two weeks."

Rein specifies that the demo will feature standard online play, as well as single player mode:

The Settlers is an strategy game based on building more than fighting. In that respect, is closer to Caesar than Starcraft. Up to version 5, the chains of production were quite long, so they have decided to trimm them a little, to make the game more accessible. But there's still only three wall breaking machines and you can just create are archers and swordsmen. This would still give you some tactical options, but since the units form in groups, the second they come into contact with another group, things turn out pretty chaotic. Wins who has a bigger army. Building is no longer as entertaining, it seems, and combat hasn't been improved. Not much to say in favor of it's gameplay.

Turning to graphics things are somewhat better, since the last installment came out, The Settlers left aside it's cartoonist look and geared towards a more realistic approach that made it the best looking strategy game in the market until Age Of Empires III was released. The sixth part continues this vein and gets the game up there with the best ones, but there appears to be some major bugs: you canÙt save the game and you probably wonÙt be able to play for more than an hour due to some crashing that happens randomly.

If this problems are sorted out via a patch, the game could still be recommended to fans of the genre almost solely on it's nice looking graphics.

Link: Driver Heaven.

¿Do you have an "old" PC? ¿Any intention to play Half Life 2: Episodio 2? Then you won't want to miss this review where Anandtech takes a look at a good deal of processors and graphics cards to see how they handle both indoors and outdoors situations.

The processors: they chose basically among dual core offerings, which is good given their current price point. From a Pentium E2140 to a Core 2 Duo E6750, from an Athlon 64 X2 4000+ to a 6400+. Several quads (QX6850, Q6700 and Q6600) are also included. Aside from the fact that, once again, Intel tops all the charts, it's interesting to see the Core 2 distributed in groups that relate to cache size. Over the weeks prior to it's release, there was quite some controversy regarding Conroe's dependency on L2. Now that we have 1, 2 and 4 MB models, we see that Half-Life 2 is affected by it. So it is by FSB, quite a benchmarking tool, this game.

The graphics cards: they didn't come short on them, neither. We get entry level, mainstream and performance segment representatives from both nVidia and ATI. All of them are tested at different resolutions, under indoors and outdoors scenarios and even with some AA benchs.

Minimum System Requirements
• Windows XP SP2 or Windows Vista
• 2.0+ GHZ Single Core Processor
• 512 Mbytes of System RAM
• NVIDIA 6200+ or ATI Radeon 9600+ Video Card
• 8 GB of Free Hard Drive Space

Recommended System Requirements
• 2.4+ GHZ Dual Core Processor
• 1 GByte of System RAM
• NVIDIA 7800GTX+ or ATI x1300+ Video Card
• 8 GB of Free Hard Drive Space

Those are the requirements, where's the oddness? As GPUReviews points out, this is a "The Way It's Meant to be Played" game, so it should favor nVidia hardware. But it doesn't. Unless they've found some serious problems with Geforce cards, there's no way a 9600 can catch up with a 6200 (128 bit?). And mixing in the same bag a 7800GTX with an X1300 is simply hilarious. Again, maybe there's something wrong with the game, but even if their internal testing suggests these kind of pairings, they should ask a little bit more from the ATI camp.

I'll believe they are actually recommending those requirements when I get one copy of the game from the selves and turn it around.

Morgan from Web Alert (the hot chick from the news video to your left) reports the takings for Halo 3 for the first 24 hours of sales. Are you sitting comfortably - 170 million.

 Is the game anygood? Yes. Brilliant. It's bigger, better and just what Xbox 360 owners expected. The graphics are stunning, the maps huge (you really do need a 42" HD Plasma to start to do it justice) and the AI on harder settings a real bitch. We haven't even got to multiplayer yet although split screen Co-op is a little disappointing due to the forced 4:3 aspect - it's hard to play as the maps are so huge you can't see the enemies shooting at you in the distance. Online the playability should be tremendous with 4 player Co-op through the entire campaign and a host of other multiplayer options.

Sure everybody was expecting even more from this final episode but given the limitations of the 360, we think Bungie have done us proud.

When a game is so graphically stunning as this one, you need to know what options are there, which ones are important, what impact do they have on performance and what (in essence) can you expect from your hardware. Will it be up to the task?

As described in the article, the main options are:

- Texture Quality (High, Medium and Low)

- World Detail Distance (again, three settings)

- Water Quality (with the two options you can see above)

- Anti-Aliasing (4x, 2x and Off are compared)

The whole list takes several pages long, but you can always use presets for a quick tuning. Even the medium preset could do the job of delivering nice looking images, but it will quite taxing on your machine anyway.

Link: Bit-tech.