gaming

amd-says-top-tier-ryzen-9900x3d-and-9950x3d-cpus-arrive-march-12-for-$599-and-$699

AMD says top-tier Ryzen 9900X3D and 9950X3D CPUs arrive March 12 for $599 and $699

Like the 7950X3D and 7900X3D, these new X3D chips combine a pair of AMD’s CPU chiplets, one that has the extra 64MB of cache stacked underneath it and one that doesn’t. For the 7950X3D, you get eight cores with extra cache and eight without; for the 7900X3D, you get eight cores with extra cache and four without.

It’s up to AMD’s chipset software to decide what kinds of apps get to run on each kind of CPU core. Non-gaming workloads prioritize the normal CPU cores, which are generally capable of slightly higher peak clock speeds, while games that benefit disproportionately from the extra cache are run on those cores instead. AMD’s software can “park” the non-V-Cache CPU cores when you’re playing games to ensure they’re not accidentally being run on less-suitable CPU cores.

We didn’t have issues with this core parking technology when we initially tested the 7950X3D and 7900X3D, and AMD has steadily made improvements since then to make sure that core parking is working properly. The new 9000-series X3D chips should benefit from that work, too. To get the best results, AMD officially recommends a fresh and fully updated Windows install, along with the newest BIOS for your motherboard and the newest AMD chipset drivers; swapping out another Ryzen CPU for an X3D model (or vice versa) without reinstalling Windows can occasionally lead to CPUs being parked (or not parked) when they are supposed to be (or not supposed to be).

AMD says top-tier Ryzen 9900X3D and 9950X3D CPUs arrive March 12 for $599 and $699 Read More »

“literally-just-a-copy”—hit-ios-game-accused-of-unauthorized-html5-code-theft

“Literally just a copy”—hit iOS game accused of unauthorized HTML5 code theft

Viral success (for someone else)

VoltekPlay writes on Reddit that it was only alerted to the existence of My Baby or Not! on iOS by “a suspicious burst of traffic on our itch.io page—all coming from Google organic search.” Only after adding a “where did you find our game?” player poll to the page were the developers made aware of some popular TikTok videos featuring the iOS version.

“Luckily, some people in the [Tiktok] comments mentioned the real game name—Diapers, Please!—so a few thousand players were able to google their way to our page,” VoltekPlay writes. “I can only imagine how many more ended up on the thief’s App Store page instead.”

Earlier this week, the $2.99 iOS release of My Baby or Not! was quickly climbing iOS’s paid games charts, attracting an estimated 20,000 downloads overall, according to Sensor Tower.

Marwane Benyssef’s only previous iOS release, Kiosk Food Night Shift, also appears to be a direct copy of an itch.io release.

Marwane Benyssef’s only previous iOS release, Kiosk Food Night Shift, also appears to be a direct copy of an itch.io release.

The App Store listing credited My Baby or Not! to “Marwane Benyssef,” a new iOS developer with no apparent history in the game development community. Benyssef’s only other iOS game, Kiosk Food Night Shift, was released last August and appears to be a direct copy of Kiosk, a pay-what-you-want title that was posted to itch.io last year (with a subsequent “full” release on Steam this year)

In a Reddit post, the team at VoltekPlay said that they had filed a DMCA copyright claim against My Baby or Not! Apple subsequently shared that claim with Bennysof, VoltekPlay writes, along with a message that “Apple encourages the parties to a dispute to work directly with one another to resolve the claim.”

This morning, Ars reached out to Apple to request a comment on the situation. While awaiting a response (which Apple has yet to provide), Apple appears to have removed Benyssef’s developer page and all traces of their games from the iOS App Store.

“Literally just a copy”—hit iOS game accused of unauthorized HTML5 code theft Read More »

amd-radeon-rx-9070-and-9070-xt-review:-rdna-4-fixes-a-lot-of-amd’s-problems

AMD Radeon RX 9070 and 9070 XT review: RDNA 4 fixes a lot of AMD’s problems


For $549 and $599, AMD comes close to knocking out Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 5070.

AMD’s Radeon RX 9070 and 9070 XT are its first cards based on the RDNA 4 GPU architecture. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

AMD’s Radeon RX 9070 and 9070 XT are its first cards based on the RDNA 4 GPU architecture. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

AMD is a company that knows a thing or two about capitalizing on a competitor’s weaknesses. The company got through its early-2010s nadir partially because its Ryzen CPUs struck just as Intel’s current manufacturing woes began to set in, first with somewhat-worse CPUs that were great value for the money and later with CPUs that were better than anything Intel could offer.

Nvidia’s untrammeled dominance of the consumer graphics card market should also be an opportunity for AMD. Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 50-series graphics cards have given buyers very little to get excited about, with an unreachably expensive high-end 5090 refresh and modest-at-best gains from 5080 and 5070-series cards that are also pretty expensive by historical standards, when you can buy them at all. Tech YouTubers—both the people making the videos and the people leaving comments underneath them—have been almost uniformly unkind to the 50 series, hinting at consumer frustrations and pent-up demand for competitive products from other companies.

Enter AMD’s Radeon RX 9070 XT and RX 9070 graphics cards. These are aimed right at the middle of the current GPU market at the intersection of high sales volume and decent profit margins. They promise good 1440p and entry-level 4K gaming performance and improved power efficiency compared to previous-generation cards, with fixes for long-time shortcomings (ray-tracing performance, video encoding, and upscaling quality) that should, in theory, make them more tempting for people looking to ditch Nvidia.

Table of Contents

RX 9070 and 9070 XT specs and speeds

RX 9070 XT RX 9070 RX 7900 XTX RX 7900 XT RX 7900 GRE RX 7800 XT
Compute units (Stream processors) 64 RDNA4 (4,096) 56 RDNA4 (3,584) 96 RDNA3 (6,144) 84 RDNA3 (5,376) 80 RDNA3 (5,120) 60 RDNA3 (3,840)
Boost Clock 2,970 MHz 2,520 MHz 2,498 MHz 2,400 MHz 2,245 MHz 2,430 MHz
Memory Bus Width 256-bit 256-bit 384-bit 320-bit 256-bit 256-bit
Memory Bandwidth 650GB/s 650GB/s 960GB/s 800GB/s 576GB/s 624GB/s
Memory size 16GB GDDR6 16GB GDDR6 24GB GDDR6 20GB GDDR6 16GB GDDR6 16GB GDDR6
Total board power (TBP) 304 W 220 W 355 W 315 W 260 W 263 W

AMD’s high-level performance promise for the RDNA 4 architecture revolves around big increases in performance per compute unit (CU). An RDNA 4 CU, AMD says, is nearly twice as fast in rasterized performance as RDNA 2 (that is, rendering without ray-tracing effects enabled) and nearly 2.5 times as fast as RDNA 2 in games with ray-tracing effects enabled. Performance for at least some machine learning workloads also goes way up—twice as fast as RDNA 3 and four times as fast as RDNA 2.

We’ll see this in more detail when we start comparing performance, but AMD seems to have accomplished this goal. Despite having 64 or 56 compute units (for the 9070 XT and 9070, respectively), the cards’ performance often competes with AMD’s last-generation flagships, the RX 7900 XTX and 7900 XT. Those cards came with 96 and 84 compute units, respectively. The 9070 cards are specced a lot more like last generation’s RX 7800 XT—including the 16GB of GDDR6 on a 256-bit memory bus, as AMD still isn’t using GDDR6X or GDDR7—but they’re much faster than the 7800 XT was.

AMD has dramatically increased the performance-per-compute unit for RDNA 4. AMD

The 9070 series also uses a new 4 nm manufacturing process from TSMC, an upgrade from the 7000 series’ 5 nm process (and the 6 nm process used for the separate memory controller dies in higher-end RX 7000-series models that used chiplets). AMD’s GPUs are normally a bit less efficient than Nvidia’s, but the architectural improvements and the new manufacturing process allow AMD to do some important catch-up.

Both of the 9070 models we tested were ASRock Steel Legend models, and the 9070 and 9070 XT had identical designs—we’ll probably see a lot of this from AMD’s partners since the GPU dies and the 16GB RAM allotments are the same for both models. Both use two 8-pin power connectors; AMD says partners are free to use the 12-pin power connector if they want, but given Nvidia’s ongoing issues with it, most cards will likely stick with the reliable 8-pin connectors.

AMD doesn’t appear to be making and selling reference designs for the 9070 series the way it did for some RX 7000 and 6000-series GPUs or the way Nvidia does with its Founders Edition cards. From what we’ve seen, 2 or 2.5-slot, triple-fan designs will be the norm, the way they are for most midrange GPUs these days.

Testbed notes

We used the same GPU testbed for the Radeon RX 9070 series as we have for our GeForce RTX 50-series reviews.

An AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D ensures that our graphics cards will be CPU-limited as little as possible. An ample 1050 W power supply, 32GB of DDR5-6000, and an AMD X670E motherboard with the latest BIOS installed round out the hardware. On the software side, we use an up-to-date installation of Windows 11 24H2 and recent GPU drivers for older cards, ensuring that our tests reflect whatever optimizations Microsoft, AMD, Nvidia, and game developers have made since the last generation of GPUs launched.

We have numbers for all of Nvidia’s RTX 50-series GPUs so far, plus most of the 40-series cards, most of AMD’s RX 7000-series cards, and a handful of older GPUs from the RTX 30-series and RX 6000 series. We’ll focus on comparing the 9070 XT and 9070 to other 1440p-to-4K graphics cards since those are the resolutions AMD is aiming at.

Performance

At $549 and $599, the 9070 series is priced to match Nvidia’s $549 RTX 5070 and undercut the $749 RTX 5070 Ti. So we’ll focus on comparing the 9070 series to those cards, plus the top tier of GPUs from the outgoing RX 7000-series.

Some 4K rasterized benchmarks.

Starting at the top with rasterized benchmarks with no ray-tracing effects, the 9070 XT does a good job of standing up to Nvidia’s RTX 5070 Ti, coming within a few frames per second of its performance in all the games we tested (and scoring very similarly in the 3DMark Time Spy Extreme benchmark).

Both cards are considerably faster than the RTX 5070—between 15 and 28 percent for the 9070 XT and between 5 and 13 percent for the regular 9070 (our 5070 scored weirdly low in Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered, so we’d treat those numbers as outliers for now). Both 9070 cards also stack up well next to the RX 7000 series here—the 9070 can usually just about match the performance of the 7900 XT, and the 9070 XT usually beats it by a little. Both cards thoroughly outrun the old RX 7900 GRE, which was AMD’s $549 GPU offering just a year ago.

The 7900 XT does have 20GB of RAM instead of 16GB, which might help its performance in some edge cases. But 16GB is still perfectly generous for a 1440p-to-4K graphics card—the 5070 only offers 12GB, which could end up limiting its performance in some games as RAM requirements continue to rise.

On ray-tracing improvements

Nvidia got a jump on AMD when it introduced hardware-accelerated ray-tracing in the RTX 20-series in 2018. And while these effects were only supported in a few games at the time, many modern games offer at least some kind of ray-traced lighting effects.

AMD caught up a little when it began shipping its own ray-tracing support in the RDNA2 architecture in late 2020, but the issue since then has always been that AMD cards have taken a larger performance hit than GeForce GPUs when these effects are turned on. RDNA3 promised improvements, but our tests still generally showed the same deficit as before.

So we’re looking for two things with RDNA4’s ray-tracing performance. First, we want the numbers to be higher than they were for comparably priced RX 7000-series GPUs, the same thing we look for in non-ray-traced (or rasterized) rendering performance. Second, we want the size of the performance hit to go down. To pick an example: the RX 7900 GRE could compete with Nvidia’s RTX 4070 Ti Super in games without ray tracing, but it was closer to a non-Super RTX 4070 in ray-traced games. It has helped keep AMD’s cards from being across-the-board competitive with Nvidia’s—is that any different now?

Benchmarks for games with ray-tracing effects enabled. Both AMD cards generally keep pace with the 5070 in these tests thanks to RDNA 4’s improvements.

The picture our tests paint is mixed but tentatively positive. The 9070 series and RDNA4 post solid improvements in the Cyberpunk 2077 benchmarks, substantially closing the performance gap with Nvidia. In games where AMD’s cards performed well enough before—here represented by Returnal—performance goes up, but roughly proportionately with rasterized performance. And both 9070 cards still punch below their weight in Black Myth: Wukong, falling substantially behind the 5070 under the punishing Cinematic graphics preset.

So the benefits you see, as with any GPU update, will depend a bit on the game you’re playing. There’s also a possibility that game optimizations and driver updates made with RDNA4 in mind could boost performance further. We can’t say that AMD has caught all the way up to Nvidia here—the 9070 and 9070 XT are both closer to the GeForce RTX 5070 than the 5070 Ti, despite keeping it closer to the 5070 Ti in rasterized tests—but there is real, measurable improvement here, which is what we were looking for.

Power usage

The 9070 series’ performance increases are particularly impressive when you look at the power-consumption numbers. The 9070 comes close to the 7900 XT’s performance but uses 90 W less power under load. It beats the RTX 5070 most of the time but uses around 30 W less power.

The 9070 XT is a little less impressive on this front—AMD has set clock speeds pretty high, and this can increase power use disproportionately. The 9070 XT is usually 10 or 15 percent faster than the 9070 but uses 38 percent more power. The XT’s power consumption is similar to the RTX 5070 Ti’s (a GPU it often matches) and the 7900 XT’s (a GPU it always beats), so it’s not too egregious, but it’s not as standout as the 9070’s.

AMD gives 9070 owners a couple of new toggles for power limits, though, which we’ll talk about in the next section.

Experimenting with “Total Board Power”

We don’t normally dabble much with overclocking when we review CPUs or GPUs—we’re happy to leave that to folks at other outlets. But when we review CPUs, we do usually test them with multiple power limits in place. Playing with power limits is easier (and occasionally safer) than actually overclocking, and it often comes with large gains to either performance (a chip that performs much better when given more power to work with) or efficiency (a chip that can run at nearly full speed without using as much power).

Initially, I experimented with the RX 9070’s power limits by accident. AMD sent me one version of the 9070 but exchanged it because of a minor problem the OEM identified with some units early in the production run. I had, of course, already run most of our tests on it, but that’s the way these things go sometimes.

By bumping the regular RX 9070’s TBP up just a bit, you can nudge it closer to 9070 XT-level performance.

The replacement RX 9070 card, an ASRock Steel Legend model, was performing significantly better in our tests, sometimes nearly closing the gap between the 9070 and the XT. It wasn’t until I tested power consumption that I discovered the explanation—by default, it was using a 245 W power limit rather than the AMD-defined 220 W limit. Usually, these kinds of factory tweaks don’t make much of a difference, but for the 9070, this power bump gave it a nice performance boost while still keeping it close to the 250 W power limit of the GeForce RTX 5070.

The 90-series cards we tested both add some power presets to AMD’s Adrenalin app in the Performance tab under Tuning. These replace and/or complement some of the automated overclocking and undervolting buttons that exist here for older Radeon cards. Clicking Favor Efficiency or Favor Performance can ratchet the card’s Total Board Power (TBP) up or down, limiting performance so that the card runs cooler and quieter or allowing the card to consume more power so it can run a bit faster.

The 9070 cards get slightly different performance tuning options in the Adrenalin software. These buttons mostly change the card’s Total Board Power (TBP), making it simple to either improve efficiency or boost performance a bit. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

For this particular ASRock 9070 card, the default TBP is set to 245 W. Selecting “Favor Efficiency” sets it to the default 220 W. You can double-check these values using an app like HWInfo, which displays both the current TBP and the maximum TBP in its Sensors Status window. Clicking the Custom button in the Adrenalin software gives you access to a Power Tuning slider, which for our card allowed us to ratchet the TBP up by up to 10 percent or down by as much as 30 percent.

This is all the firsthand testing we did with the power limits of the 9070 series, though I would assume that adding a bit more power also adds more overclocking headroom (bumping up the power limits is common for GPU overclockers no matter who makes your card). AMD says that some of its partners will ship 9070 XT models set to a roughly 340 W power limit out of the box but acknowledges that “you start seeing diminishing returns as you approach the top of that [power efficiency] curve.”

But it’s worth noting that the driver has another automated set-it-and-forget-it power setting you can easily use to find your preferred balance of performance and power efficiency.

A quick look at FSR4 performance

There’s a toggle in the driver for enabling FSR 4 in FSR 3.1-supporting games. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

One of AMD’s headlining improvements to the RX 90-series is the introduction of FSR 4, a new version of its FidelityFX Super Resolution upscaling algorithm. Like Nvidia’s DLSS and Intel’s XeSS, FSR 4 can take advantage of RDNA 4’s machine learning processing power to do hardware-backed upscaling instead of taking a hardware-agnostic approach as the older FSR versions did. AMD says this will improve upscaling quality, but it also means FSR4 will only work on RDNA 4 GPUs.

The good news is that FSR 3.1 and FSR 4 are forward- and backward-compatible. Games that have already added FSR 3.1 support can automatically take advantage of FSR 4, and games that support FSR 4 on the 90-series can just run FSR 3.1 on older and non-AMD GPUs.

FSR 4 comes with a small performance hit compared to FSR 3.1 at the same settings, but better overall quality can let you drop to a faster preset like Balanced or Performance and end up with more frames-per-second overall. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

The only game in our current test suite to be compatible with FSR 4 is Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered, and we tested its performance using both FSR 3.1 and FSR 4. In general, we found that FSR 4 improved visual quality at the cost of just a few frames per second when run at the same settings—not unlike using Nvidia’s recently released “transformer model” for DLSS upscaling.

Many games will let you choose which version of FSR you want to use. But for FSR 3.1 games that don’t have a built-in FSR 4 option, there’s a toggle in AMD’s Adrenalin driver you can hit to switch to the better upscaling algorithm.

Even if they come with a performance hit, new upscaling algorithms can still improve performance by making the lower-resolution presets look better. We run all of our testing in “Quality” mode, which generally renders at two-thirds of native resolution and scales up. But if FSR 4 running in Balanced or Performance mode looks the same to your eyes as FSR 3.1 running in Quality mode, you can still end up with a net performance improvement in the end.

RX 9070 or 9070 XT?

Just $50 separates the advertised price of the 9070 from that of the 9070 XT, something both Nvidia and AMD have done in the past that I find a bit annoying. If you have $549 to spend on a graphics card, you can almost certainly scrape together $599 for a graphics card. All else being equal, I’d tell most people trying to choose one of these to just spring for the 9070 XT.

That said, availability and retail pricing for these might be all over the place. If your choices are a regular RX 9070 or nothing, or an RX 9070 at $549 and an RX 9070 XT at any price higher than $599, I would just grab a 9070 and not sweat it too much. The two cards aren’t that far apart in performance, especially if you bump the 9070’s TBP up a little bit, and games that are playable on one will be playable at similar settings on the other.

Pretty close to great

If you’re building a 1440p or 4K gaming box, the 9070 series might be the ones to beat right now. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

We’ve got plenty of objective data in here, so I don’t mind saying that I came into this review kind of wanting to like the 9070 and 9070 XT. Nvidia’s 50-series cards have mostly upheld the status quo, and for the last couple of years, the status quo has been sustained high prices and very modest generational upgrades. And who doesn’t like an underdog story?

I think our test results mostly justify my priors. The RX 9070 and 9070 XT are very competitive graphics cards, helped along by a particularly mediocre RTX 5070 refresh from Nvidia. In non-ray-traced games, both cards wipe the floor with the 5070 and come close to competing with the $749 RTX 5070 Ti. In games and synthetic benchmarks with ray-tracing effects on, both cards can usually match or slightly beat the similarly priced 5070, partially (if not entirely) addressing AMD’s longstanding performance deficit here. Neither card comes close to the 5070 Ti in these games, but they’re also not priced like a 5070 Ti.

Just as impressively, the Radeon cards compete with the GeForce cards while consuming similar amounts of power. At stock settings, the RX 9070 uses roughly the same amount of power under load as a 4070 Super but with better performance. The 9070 XT uses about as much power as a 5070 Ti, with similar performance before you turn ray-tracing on. Power efficiency was a small but consistent drawback for the RX 7000 series compared to GeForce cards, and the 9070 cards mostly erase that disadvantage. AMD is also less stingy with the RAM, giving you 16GB for the price Nvidia charges for 12GB.

Some of the old caveats still apply. Radeons take a bigger performance hit, proportionally, than GeForce cards. DLSS already looks pretty good and is widely supported, while FSR 3.1/FSR 4 adoption is still relatively low. Nvidia has a nearly monopolistic grip on the dedicated GPU market, which means many apps, AI workloads, and games support its GPUs best/first/exclusively. AMD is always playing catch-up to Nvidia in some respect, and Nvidia keeps progressing quickly enough that it feels like AMD never quite has the opportunity to close the gap.

AMD also doesn’t have an answer for DLSS Multi-Frame Generation. The benefits of that technology are fairly narrow, and you already get most of those benefits with single-frame generation. But it’s still a thing that Nvidia does that AMDon’t.

Overall, the RX 9070 cards are both awfully tempting competitors to the GeForce RTX 5070—and occasionally even the 5070 Ti. They’re great at 1440p and decent at 4K. Sure, I’d like to see them priced another $50 or $100 cheaper to well and truly undercut the 5070 and bring 1440p-to-4K performance t0 a sub-$500 graphics card. It would be nice to see AMD undercut Nvidia’s GPUs as ruthlessly as it undercut Intel’s CPUs nearly a decade ago. But these RDNA4 GPUs have way fewer downsides than previous-generation cards, and they come at a moment of relative weakness for Nvidia. We’ll see if the sales follow.

The good

  • Great 1440p performance and solid 4K performance
  • 16GB of RAM
  • Decisively beats Nvidia’s RTX 5070, including in most ray-traced games
  • RX 9070 XT is competitive with RTX 5070 Ti in non-ray-traced games for less money
  • Both cards match or beat the RX 7900 XT, AMD’s second-fastest card from the last generation
  • Decent power efficiency for the 9070 XT and great power efficiency for the 9070
  • Automated options for tuning overall power use to prioritize either efficiency or performance
  • Reliable 8-pin power connectors available in many cards

The bad

  • Nvidia’s ray-tracing performance is still usually better
  • At $549 and $599, pricing matches but doesn’t undercut the RTX 5070
  • FSR 4 isn’t as widely supported as DLSS and may not be for a while

The ugly

  • Playing the “can you actually buy these for AMD’s advertised prices” game

Photo of Andrew Cunningham

Andrew is a Senior Technology Reporter at Ars Technica, with a focus on consumer tech including computer hardware and in-depth reviews of operating systems like Windows and macOS. Andrew lives in Philadelphia and co-hosts a weekly book podcast called Overdue.

AMD Radeon RX 9070 and 9070 XT review: RDNA 4 fixes a lot of AMD’s problems Read More »

george-orwell’s-1984-as-a-’90s-pc-game-has-to-be-seen-to-be-believed

George Orwell’s 1984 as a ’90s PC game has to be seen to be believed

Quick, to the training sphere!

The Big Brother announcement promised the ability to “interact with everything” and “disable and destroy intrusive tele-screens and spy cameras watching the player’s every move” across “10 square blocks of Orwell’s retro-futuristic world.” But footage from the demo falls well short of that promise, instead covering some extremely basic Riven-style puzzle gameplay (flips switches to turn on the power; use a screwdriver to open the grate, etc.) played from a first-person view.

Sample gameplay from the newly unearthed Big Brother demo.

It all builds up to a sequence where (according to a walk-through included on the demo disc) you have to put on a “zero-g suit” before planting a bomb inside a “zero gravity training sphere” guarded by robots. Sounds like inhabiting the world of the novel to us!

Aside from the brief mentions of the Thought Police and MiniPac, the short demo does include a few other incidental nods to its licensed source material, including a “WAR IS PEACE” propaganda banner and an animated screen with the titular Big Brother seemingly looking down on you. Still, the entire gameplay scenario is so far removed from anything in the actual 1984 novel to make you wonder why they bothered with the license in the first place. Of course, MediaX answers that question in the game’s announcement, predicting that “while the game stands on its own as an entirely new creation in itself and will attract the typical game audience, the ‘Big Brother’ game will undoubtedly also attract a large literary audience.”

We sadly never got the chance to see how that “large literary audience” would have reacted to a game that seemed poised to pervert both the name and themes of 1984 so radically. In any case, this demo can now sit alongside the release of 1984’s Fahrenheit 451 and 1992’s The Godfather: The Action Game on any list of the most questionable game adaptations of respected works of art.

George Orwell’s 1984 as a ’90s PC game has to be seen to be believed Read More »

kaizen:-a-factory-story-makes-a-game-of-perfecting-1980s-japanese-manufacturing

Kaizen: A Factory Story makes a game of perfecting 1980s Japanese manufacturing

Zach Barth, the namesake of game studio Zachtronics, tends to make a certain kind of game.

Besides crafting the free browser game Infiniminer, which inspired the entire global Minecraft industry, Barth and his collaborators made SpaceChem, Infinifactory, TIS-100, Shenzen I/O, Opus Magnum, and Exapunks. Each one of them is some combination of puzzle game, light capitalism horror, and the most memorable introductory-level computer science, chemistry, or logistics class into which you unwittingly enrolled. Each game is its own thing, but they have a certain similar brain feel between them. It is summed up perhaps best by the Zachtronics team itself in a book: Zach-Like.

Barth and his crew have made other kinds of games, including a forward-looking visual novel about AI, Eliza, and multiplayer card battler Nerts!. And Barth himself told PC Gamer that he hates “saying Zach-like.” But fans of refining inputs, ordering operations, and working their way past constraints will thrill to learn that Zach is, in fact, back.

Announcement trailer for Kaizen: A Factory Story.

Kaizen: A Factory Story, from developer Coincidence and comprising “the original Zachtronics team,” puts you, an American neophyte business type, in charge of a factory making toys, tiny electronics, and other goods during the Japanese economic boom of the 1980s. You arrange the spacing and order of operations of the mechanical arms that snap the head onto a robot toy, or the battery onto a Walkman, for as little time, power, and financial cost as possible.

Kaizen: A Factory Story makes a game of perfecting 1980s Japanese manufacturing Read More »

half-life-3-is-just-the-hot-exclusive-valve-needs-to-propel-steamos-past-windows

Half-Life 3 is just the hot exclusive Valve needs to propel SteamOS past Windows


The ultimate system seller

Opinion: Just as Half-Life 2 helped launch Steam, a sequel could help establish non-Windows PC gaming.

We found this logo hidden deep in an abandoned steel forge, Credit: Aurich Lawson | Steam

A little over 20 years ago, Valve was getting ready to release a new Half-Life game. At the same time, the company was trying to push Steam as a new option for players to download and update games over the Internet.

Requiring Steam in order to play Half-Life 2 led to plenty of grumbling from players in 2004. But the high-profile Steam exclusive helped build an instant user base for Valve’s fresh distribution system, setting it on a path to eventually become the unquestioned leader in the space. The link between the new game and the new platform helped promote a bold alternative to the retail game sales and distribution systems that had dominated PC gaming for decades.

Remember DVD-ROMs?

Remember DVD-ROMs? Credit: Reddit

Today, all indications suggest that Valve is getting ready to release a new Half-Life game. At the same time, the company is getting ready to push SteamOS as a new option for third-party hardware makers and individual users to “download and test themselves.”

Requiring SteamOS to play Half-Life 3 would definitely lead to a lot of grumbling from players. But the high-profile exclusive could help build an instant user base for Valve’s fresh operating system, perhaps setting it on the path to become the unquestioned leader in the space. A link between the new game and the new platform could help promote a bold alternative to the Windows-based systems that have dominated PC gaming for decades.

Not another Steam Machine

Getting players to change the established platform they use to buy and play games (either in terms of hardware or software) usually requires some sort of instantly apparent benefit for the player. Those benefits can range from the tangible (e.g., an improved controller, better graphics performance) to the ancillary (e.g., social features, achievements) to the downright weird (e.g., a second screen on a portable). Often, though, a core reason why players switch platforms is for access to exclusive “system seller” games that aren’t available any other way.

Half-Life 2‘s role in popularizing early Steam shows just how much a highly anticipated exclusive can convince otherwise reluctant players to invest time and effort in a new platform. To see what can happen without such an exclusive, we only need to look to Valve’s 2015 launch of the Steam Machine hardware line, powered by the first version of the Linux-based SteamOS.

Valve offered players very little in the way of affirmative reasons to switch to a SteamOS-powered Steam Machine in 2015.

Credit: Alienware

Valve offered players very little in the way of affirmative reasons to switch to a SteamOS-powered Steam Machine in 2015. Credit: Alienware

At the time, Valve was selling SteamOS mainly as an alternative to a new Windows 8 environment that Valve co-founder Gabe Newell saw as a “catastrophe” in the making for the PC gaming world. Newell described SteamOS as a “hedging strategy” against Microsoft’s potential ability to force all Windows 8 app distribution through the Windows Store, a la Apple’s total control of iPhone app distribution.

When Microsoft failed to impose that kind of hegemonic control over Windows apps and games, Valve was left with little else to convince players that it was worth buying a Windows-free Steam Machine (or going through the onerous process of installing the original SteamOS on their gaming rigs). Sure, using SteamOS meant saving a few bucks on a Windows license. But it also meant being stuck with an extremely limited library of Linux ports (especially when it came to releases from major publishers) and poor technical performance compared to Windows even when those ports were available.

Given those obvious downsides—and the lack of any obvious upsides—it’s no wonder that users overwhelmingly ignored SteamOS and Steam Machines at the time. But as we argued way back in 2013, a major exclusive on the scale of Half-Life 3 could have convinced a lot of gamers to overlook at least some of those downsides and give the new platform a chance.

A little push

Fast forward to today, and the modern version of SteamOS is in a much better place than the Steam Machine-era version ever was. That’s thanks in large part to Valve’s consistent work on the Proton compatibility layer, which lets the Linux-based SteamOS run almost any game that’s designed for Windows (with only a few major exceptions). That wide compatibility has been a huge boon for the Steam Deck, which offered many players easy handheld access to vast swathes of PC gaming for the first time. The Steam Deck also showed off SteamOS’s major user interface and user experience benefits over clunkier Windows-based gaming portables.

The Steam Deck served as an excellent proof of concept for the viability of SteamOS hardware with the gaming masses.

Credit: Kyle Orland

The Steam Deck served as an excellent proof of concept for the viability of SteamOS hardware with the gaming masses. Credit: Kyle Orland

Still, the benefits of switching from Windows to SteamOS might seem a bit amorphous to many players today. If Valve is really interested in pushing its OS as an alternative to Windows gaming, a big exclusive game is just the thing to convince a critical mass of players to make the leap. And when it comes to massive PC gaming exclusives, it doesn’t get much bigger than the long, long-awaited Half-Life 3.

We know it might sound ludicrous to suggest that Valve’s biggest game in years should ignore the Windows platform that’s been used by practically every PC gamer for decades. Keep in mind, though, that there would be nothing stopping existing Windows gamers from downloading and installing a free copy of the Linux-based SteamOS (likely on a separate drive or partition) to get access to Half-Life 3.

Yes, installing a new operating system (especially one based on Linux) is not exactly a plug-and-play process. But Valve has a long history of streamlining game downloads, updates, and driver installations through Steam itself. If anyone can make the process of setting up a new OS relatively seamless, it’s Valve.

And let’s not forget that millions of gamers already have easy access to SteamOS through Steam Deck hardware. Those aging Steam Decks might not be powerful enough to run a game like Half-Life 3 at maximum graphics settings, but Valve games have a history of scaling down well on low-end systems.

Valve’s leaked “Powered by SteamOS” initiative also seems poised to let third-party hardware makers jump in with more powerful (and more Half-Life 3-capable) desktops, laptops, and handhelds with SteamOS pre-installed. And that’s before we even consider the potential impact of a more powerful “Steam Deck 2,” which Valve’s Pierre-Loup  Griffais said in 2023 could potentially come in “the next couple of years.”

Time for a bold move

Tying a major game like Half-Life 3 to a completely new and largely untested operating system would surely lead to some deafening pushback from gamers happy with the Windows-based status quo. An exclusive release could also be risky if SteamOS ends up showing some technical problems as it tries to grow past its Steam Deck roots (Linux doesn’t exactly have the best track record when it comes to things like game driver compatibility across different hardware).

The Lenovo Legion Go S will be the first non-Valve hardware to be officially “Powered by SteamOS.” A Windows-sporting version will be more expensive

The Lenovo Legion Go S will be the first non-Valve hardware to be officially “Powered by SteamOS.” A Windows-sporting version will be more expensive Credit: Lenovo

Despite all that, we’re pretty confident that the vast majority of players interested in Half-Life 3 would jump through a few OS-related hoops to get access to the game. And many of those players would likely stick with Valve’s gaming-optimized OS going forward rather than spending money on another Windows license.

Even a timed exclusivity window for Half-Life 3 on SteamOS could push a lot of early adopters to see what all the fuss is about without excluding those who refuse to switch away from Windows. Failing even that, maybe a non-exclusive Half-Life 3 could be included as a pre-installed freebie with future versions of SteamOS, as an incentive for the curious to try out a new operating system.

With the coming wide release of SteamOS, Valve has a rare opportunity to upend the PC gaming OS dominance that Microsoft more or less stumbled into decades ago. A game like Half-Life 3 could be just the carrot needed to get PC gaming as a whole over its longstanding Windows dependence.

Photo of Kyle Orland

Kyle Orland has been the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica since 2012, writing primarily about the business, tech, and culture behind video games. He has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland. He once wrote a whole book about Minesweeper.

Half-Life 3 is just the hot exclusive Valve needs to propel SteamOS past Windows Read More »

details-on-amd’s-$549-and-$599-radeon-rx-9070-gpus,-which-aim-at-nvidia-and-4k

Details on AMD’s $549 and $599 Radeon RX 9070 GPUs, which aim at Nvidia and 4K

AMD is releasing the first detailed specifications of its next-generation Radeon RX 9070 series GPUs and the RDNA4 graphics architecture today, almost two months after teasing them at CES.

The short version is that these are both upper-midrange graphics cards targeting resolutions of 1440p and 4K and meant to compete mainly with Nvidia’s incoming and outgoing 4070- and 5070-series GeForce GPUs, including the RTX 4070, RTX 5070, RTX 4070 Ti and Ti Super, and the RTX 5070 Ti.

AMD says the RX 9070 will start at $549, the same price as Nvidia’s RTX 5070. The slightly faster 9070 XT starts at $599, $150 less than the RTX 5070 Ti. The cards go on sale March 6, a day after Nvidia’s RTX 5070.

Neither Nvidia nor Intel has managed to keep its GPUs in stores at their announced starting prices so far, though, so how well AMD’s pricing stacks up to Nvidia in the real world may take a few weeks or months to settle out. For its part, AMD says it’s confident that it has enough supply to meet demand, but that’s as specific as the company’s reassurances got.

Specs and speeds: Radeon RX 9070 and 9070 XT

RX 9070 XT RX 9070 RX 7900 XTX RX 7900 XT RX 7900 GRE RX 7800 XT
Compute units (Stream processors) 64 RDNA4 (4,096) 56 RDNA4 (3,584) 96 RDNA3 (6,144) 84 RDNA3 (5,376) 80 RDNA3 (5,120) 60 RDNA3 (3,840)
Boost Clock 2,970 MHz 2,520 MHz 2,498 MHz 2,400 MHz 2,245 MHz 2,430 MHz
Memory Bus Width 256-bit 256-bit 384-bit 320-bit 256-bit 256-bit
Memory Bandwidth 650 GB/s 650 GB/s 960 GB/s 800 GB/s 576 GB/s 624 GB/s
Memory size 16GB GDDR6 16GB GDDR6 24GB GDDR6 20GB GDDR6 16GB GDDR6 16GB GDDR6
Total board power (TBP) 304 W 220 W 355 W 315 W 260 W 263 W

As is implied by their similar price tags, the 9070 and 9070 XT have more in common than not. Both are based on the same GPU die—the 9070 has 56 of the chip’s compute units enabled, while the 9070 XT has 64. Both cards come with 16GB of RAM (4GB more than the 5070, the same amount as the 5070 Ti) on a 256-bit memory bus, and both use two 8-pin power connectors by default, though the 9070 XT can use significantly more power than the 9070 (304 W, compared to 220 W).

AMD says that its partners are free to make Radeon cards with the 12VHPWR or 12V-2×6 power connectors on them, though given the apparently ongoing issues with the connector, we’d expect most Radeon GPUs to stick with the known quantity that is the 8-pin connector.

AMD says that the 9070 series is made using a 4 nm TSMC manufacturing process and that the chips are monolithic rather than being split up into chiplets as some RX 7000-series cards were. AMD’s commitment to its memory controller chiplets was always hit or miss with the 7000-series—the high-end cards tended to use them, while the lower-end GPUs were usually monolithic—so it’s not clear one way or the other whether this means AMD is giving up on chiplet-based GPUs altogether or if it’s just not using them this time around.

Details on AMD’s $549 and $599 Radeon RX 9070 GPUs, which aim at Nvidia and 4K Read More »

amd’s-fsr-4-upscaling-is-exclusive-to-90-series-radeon-gpus,-won’t-work-on-other-cards

AMD’s FSR 4 upscaling is exclusive to 90-series Radeon GPUs, won’t work on other cards

AMD’s new Radeon RX 90-series cards and the RDNA4 architecture make their official debut on March 5, and a new version of AMD’s FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) upscaling technology is coming along with them.

FSR and Nvidia’s Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) upscalers have the same goal: to take a lower-resolution image rendered by your graphics card, bump up the resolution, and fill in the gaps between the natively rendered pixels to make an image that looks close to natively rendered without making the GPU do all that rendering work. These upscalers can make errors, and they won’t always look quite as good as a native-resolution image. But they’re both nice alternatives to living with a blurry, non-native-resolution picture on an LCD or OLED display.

FSR and DLSS are especially useful for older or cheaper 1080p or 1440p-capable GPUs that are connected to a 4K monitor, where you’d otherwise have to decide between a sharp 4K image and a playable frame rate; it’s also useful for hitting higher frame rates at lower resolutions, which can be handy for high-refresh-rate gaming monitors.

But unlike past versions of FSR, FSR 4 is upscaling images using hardware-backed machine-learning algorithms, hardware newly added to RDNA4 and the RX 90-series graphics cards. This mirrors Nvidia’s strategy with DLSS, which has always leveraged the tensor cores found in RTX GPUs to run machine-learning models to achieve superior image quality for upscaled and AI-generated frames. If you don’t have an RDNA4 GPU, you can’t use FSR 4.

AMD’s FSR 4 upscaling is exclusive to 90-series Radeon GPUs, won’t work on other cards Read More »

salty-game-dev-comments,-easier-mods-are-inside-command-&-conquer’s-source-code

Salty game dev comments, easier mods are inside Command & Conquer’s source code

Inside the source code are some wonderful reminders of what Windows game development from 1995 to 2003 was really like. One experienced modder posted some gems on Bluesky, like a “HACK ALERT!” text string added just to prevent the Watcom IDE from crashing because of a “magic text heap length” crash: “Who knows why, but it works,” wrote that poor soul.

This writer’s personal favorite is this little bit in the RampOptions.cpp file in Generals, credited to John K. McDonald Jr., which expresses concerns about “TheRampOptions” existing with a set value:

if (TheRampOptions)

// oh shit.

return;

In addition to helping out modders and entertaining experienced coders, the GPL-licensed source code releases do a lot to help preserve these games, such that they can be reworked to run on future platforms. Projects like OpenRA and OpenSAGE already offer open source reimplementations of those games’ code, but having the original source can only help. C&C community stalwart Luke “CCHyper” Feenan worked with EA leaders to get the code back into a build-ready state and said in a press release that the updated code should make the classic games easier to patch in the future.

As part of the source code release, the Command & Conquer team dropped off 35 minutes of footage, newly found in the archives, of alpha and archive footage from the later Sage-engine based Generals and Renegade games.

Archival footage from alpha versions of Command & Conquer: Generals and Renegade, released by EA as part of their source code release.

It’s heartening to see that with the right combination of people and purpose, classic games can find renewed interest and longevity inside a big publisher.

Salty game dev comments, easier mods are inside Command & Conquer’s source code Read More »

the-playstation-vr2-will-get-a-drastic-price-cut,-but-that-might-not-be-enough

The PlayStation VR2 will get a drastic price cut, but that might not be enough

Sony’s first PlayStation VR for the PlayStation 4 hit stores at the right price at the right time and ended up being one of VR’s biggest hits. The PlayStation 5’s PlayStation VR2? Not so much, unfortunately. In either an effort to clear unsold inventory, an attempt to revitalize the platform, or both, Sony has announced it’s dropping the price of the headset significantly.

Starting in March, the main SKU of the headset will drop from $550 to $400 in the US. Europe, the UK, and Japan will also see price cuts to 550 euros, 400 pounds, and 66,980 yen, respectively, as detailed on the PlayStation Blog. Strangely, the bundle that includes the game Horizon: Call of the Mountain (originally $600) will also drop to the same exact price. That’s welcome, but it’s also a little bit difficult not to interpret that as a sign that this is an attempt to empty inventory more than anything else.

The headset launched in early 2023 but has suffered from weak software support ever since—a far cry from the first PSVR, which had one of the strongest libraries of its time. It didn’t help that unlike the regular PlayStation 5, the PSVR2 was not backward-compatible with games released for its predecessor.

About a year ago, there were reports that Sony was temporarily pausing production because it wasn’t able to move the inventory it already had. Later, the company released an adapter and some software for getting it running on PCs. That made it one of the most attractive PC VR headsets, at least on paper. However, setup was clunky, and some features that were supported on the PS5 weren’t supported on PC.

PSVR2 games are still getting announced and released, but the VR market in general has slowed down quite a bit in recent years, and most of the remaining action (such as it is) is on Meta’s Quest platform.

The PlayStation VR2 will get a drastic price cut, but that might not be enough Read More »

now-the-overclock-curious-can-buy-a-delidded-amd-9800x3d,-with-a-warranty

Now the overclock-curious can buy a delidded AMD 9800X3D, with a warranty

The integrated heat spreaders put on CPUs at the factory are not the most thermally efficient material you could have on there, but what are you going to do—rip it off at the risk of killing your $500 chip with your clumsy hands?

Yes, that is precisely what enthusiastic overclockers have been doing for years, delidding, or decapping (though the latter term is used less often in overclocking circles), chips through various DIY techniques, allowing them to replace AMD and Intel’s common denominator shells with liquid metal or other advanced thermal interface materials.

As you might imagine, it can be nerve-wracking, and things can go wrong in just one second or one degree Celsius. In one overclocking forum thread, a seasoned expert noted that Intel’s Core Ultra 200S spreader (IHS) needs to be heated above 165° C for the indium (transfer material) to loosen. But then the glue holding the IHS is also loose at this temperature, and there is only 1.5–2 millimeters of space between IHS and surface-mounted components, so it’s easy for that metal IHS to slide off and take out a vital component with it. It’s quite the Saturday afternoon hobby.

That is the typical overclocking bargain: You assume the risk, you void your warranty, but you remove one more barrier to peak performance. Now, though, Thermal Grizzly, led by that same previously mentioned expert, Roman “der8auer” Hartung, has a new bargain to present. His firm is delidding AMD’s Ryzen 9800X3D CPUs with its own ovens and specialty tools, then selling them with two-year warranties that cover manufacturer’s defects and “normal overclocking damage,” but not mechanical damage.

Now the overclock-curious can buy a delidded AMD 9800X3D, with a warranty Read More »

portal-randomized-feels-like-playing-portal-again-for-the-first-time

Portal Randomized feels like playing Portal again for the first time

For most modern players, the worst thing about a video game classic like Portal is that you can never play it again for the first time. No matter how much time has passed since your last playthrough, those same old test chambers will feel a bit too familiar if you revisit them today.

Over the years, community mods like Portal Stories: Mel and Portal: Revolution have tried to fix this problem with extensive work on completely new levels and puzzles. Now, though, a much simpler mod is looking to recapture that “first time” feeling simply by adding random gameplay modifiers to Portal‘s familiar puzzle rooms.

The Portal Randomized demo recently posted on ModDB activates one of eight gameplay modifiers when you enter one of the game’s first two test chambers. The results, while still a little rough around the edges, show how much extra longevity can be wrung from simple tweaks to existing gameplay.

Make special note of that “gravity changed” note in the corner.

Make special note of that “gravity changed” note in the corner. Credit: Valve / gamingdominari

Not all of the Portal Randomized modifiers are instant winners. One that adds intermittent darkness, for instance, practically forces you to stand still for a few seconds until the lights flip back on (too slowly for my comfort). And modifiers like variable gravity or variable movement speed have a pretty trivial effect on how the game plays out, at least in the simplistic early test chambers in the demo.

Portal Randomized feels like playing Portal again for the first time Read More »