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. 

Ubisoft has released three full games on FilePlanet for download completely free of charge. However these games are supported by ads which appear during loading screens. These titles include Far Cry, Prince of Persia: Sands of Time and Rayman Raving Rabbids.

I personally tried Farcry and PoP: Sands of Time earlier and they are two of my favorite games. Its really interesting to see these games available for free download. If you really wish to play these games, don't hesitate to download them right away as we don't know if these games will be free forever.

PS: FilePlanet's download service sucks though unless you are a premium member. 

Jekyll & Hyde.

What can be said about this game? It has every right to be a big hit: graphics, storyline, playability (according to reviews), you name it. But just check this article at the inquirer and you will probably think twice before buying it.

Are these people out of their minds? Do they want to fight piracy or to promote it? DRM is bad enough, but the things described about this title and the way it's being commercialized are utterly unacceptable. Really, I can't add anything more to this debate without consulting our legal department first. Draw your own conclusions.

To help you do that, here you can see some screenshots and here is one of the praising previews. 

Another DX10 title, another RTS game. But if we are to believe the previews this is not just another one among the bunch. Also, from what we can see in the screenshots, graphics look great. Add to that, the use of Havok for physics, and this time we are dealing with something big. Mark the developers words:

"[...] there will be DX10-exclusive features in the game. There will be one or a few of those, and they will look pretty amazing. We're not telling what they will be yet, but they're up and running at our office right now, and we're experimenting with them, but they look amazing.".

World in Conflict is set to hit stores on September 18th. This Sierra publishing contiues an old tradition that can be tracked down as far away as "Operation: Cyberstrom", where you don't get to build massive armies like you would while playing an "Age Of Empires" or "Command And Conquer" series of games. You get to focus on fighting tactics by having limited credits to buy units with, for each mission. No building/collecting to distract you from the killing. A different approach to that of Blizzard, but with similar results.

Massive Entertainment has released a demo that weights no less than 1.2Gb, the demo offers a singleplayer tutorial and mission, one multiplayer map with 16-player support and a skirmish mode. You can grab it here.

It' not a secret that Windows Vista requires a lot more memory to run that Windows XP did, but part of the problem when playing a game is the in the way the OS handles the video drivers. To solve that particular behaviour, Microsot has a hotfix in the works. It's not recommended to install it just yet, but keep an eye on the publishing date (August 23rd) because this seems to be one of those really usefull hotfixes.

Anandtech tested it with Company of Heroes, STALKER and Supreme Commander. Memory usage goes down the hard way and it doesn't look like there's any performance penalty at all from using this hotfix. CoH, in particular, goes from 2110 Mb to 1480 Mb (only 12% more than Windows XP). I'm telling you, this is one HOT fix!

If you can't wait a whole week to get it, try here (x64 version) or here (x86). Remember to check for viruses and apply latest video drivers before installing.

And speaking of waiting, here you have one that's almost over. YouGamers has the story:

"As previously reported from their conference call, EA announced that Crysis will be available "early November" - however, we can now confirm that the actual date will be the 16th of November!"

This is supposed to be the real deal, a game developed with DX10 in mind (although it will also run on DX9 hardware) by a team that already delivered an AAA game as Far Cry. A multiplayer beta should be available soon, to ease the final weeks before Crysis day.

Finally, all those who bought a Geforce 8800 a year ago, will have a game to play on it that will make it justice.

Three years and counting.

- id Tech 1: Doom 1 and Doom 2

- id Tech 2: Quake 1 and Quake 2

- id Tech 3: Quake 3

- id Tech 4: Doom 3 and Quake 4

And it's a new game for a reason, it won't just be a first person shooter, it will incorporate vehicles meant for racing, not just for dull driving. It will also feature an open and non-linear enviroment; forget those claustrophobic rooms. Well, in this case I will miss the closed, dark hallways, they added to the atmosphere of the game.

Link: Firing Squad. 

Not dead yet, but almost.

Not having games is one of the bad things Ageia has to face, but not the only one. The option to  calculate physics on GPUs through software is there since Q2 of 2006 with Havok FX. No game use it but the problem is that nobody knows which way of bringing physics to games will eventually succeed.

So many delays will probably end up leaving everything more or less as it was two years ago: with the CPU in charge of the physics calculations. As more cores are added to CPUs, it's FPU weakness will be less evident, and the need for a dedicated piece of hardaware (or an engine that offloads the task to the GPU) will dissappear. More details at Anandtech.

In the meantime, hardcore gamers who bought a PhysX card are left without the possibility to experience true interactivity in their games. Shame on the developers!

The guys at TweakTown have performed their usual tests on the latest ATI driver release and the news aren't good this time around:

"This is one of the worst driver sets we have seen in some time. Not only did performance go nowhere on our lineup of games, but Company of Heroes actually took a small step backwards.

An even bigger issue we had with the drivers was the constant random crashing when starting COH."

Lets make clear that this is the DX9 version of Company of Heroes, so this is rather unexpected. It's not a dealing-with-a-new-API related problem.

The frame drop is mostly suffered when using a high end card, whether it's a brand new HD2900XT or a previous generation X1950Pro doesn't really matter.

This driver release is supposed to improve Far Cry performance, but even if that's the case, doing it at the expense of other games is not the way to go.

Not long ago, while talking about the Lost Planet DX10 demo, I hinted that Fraps could be used with that version of the game. Wrong. As I discovered a little bit later, at that time, this application was compatible with Windows Vista but not with DirectX 10 games. Since then, I have waited for a new Fraps release to add support for them.

Earlier this month, beepa made version 2.9 available. Only two days later the bugfix 2.9.1 was also ready. If you want to try the unregistered version, you can download it here.

Mistake corrected, now let's see what the upgrade offers. Apart from the benchmarking, the in-game video capture and the option to save screenshots, there's a nifty new use you can give to this progam: monitor Vista's desktop. Since the Vista Desktop Window Manager runs through DirectX, you can now take screenshots and record video from the desktop just like any other 3D application. Now it's easier than ever (without leaving home) to make that friend of yours understand where the system properties are to be found!