Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor system requirements are even higher than Watch Dogs

Do you remember Shadow of Mordor? You're forgiven if not, because, as generic fantasy names go, it's almost memorably unmemorable. If you need a refresher, the announcement trailer is an adequate primer for Warner Brothers' upcoming Assassin's Creed-meets-Lord of the Rings fantasy action-'em-up.

In preparation for its October release, a Steam listing has appeared. With it, are the game's PC system requirements. For those recently stung by Watch Dogs' high demands, these specifications may provide a familiar feeling of computational inadequacy.

Minimum: 
OS: 64-bit: Vista, Win 7, Win 8
Processor: Intel Core i5-750, 2.67 GHz | AMD Phenom II X4 965, 3.4 GHz
Memory: 4 GB RAM
Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560 | AMD Radeon HD 6950
DirectX: Version 11
Network: Broadband Internet connection
Hard Drive: 25 GB available space

Recommended: 
OS: 64-bit: Win 7, Win 8
Processor: Intel Core i7-3770, 3.4 GHz | AMD FX-8350, 4.0 GHz
Memory: 8 GB RAM
Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 670 | AMD Radeon HD 7970
DirectX: Version 11
Network: Broadband Internet connection
Hard Drive: 40 GB available space

To compare, we're seeing a similar 64-bit OS restriction. And while the minimum RAM requirement is lower, the recommended GPU is higher; recommending the newer GTX 670, over Watch Dogs' suggestion of a GTX 560. source by pcgames

As with Watch Dogs, Shadow of Mordor is releasing on Xbox 360 and PS3 as well as PC and current-gen consoles. So while this is a good suggestion of where system requirements are heading, it's possible that the size of these games are still being set by the older hardware. As we move away from the last-gen, we should get an even better idea of the components needed to stay competitive.

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Digital Storm's first Steam Machine will be a $1,469 gaming PC

Digital Storm has a Steam Machine too. The boutique gaming PC manufacturer has just announced its own take on Valve's formula for a Linux-based game console, and it just goes to show how diverse these computers will be when they hit the market next year. Instead of trying to compete with the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 like iBuyPower's $499 rig, the new Digital Storm computer will start at a comparatively pricy $1,469.

"Rather than try to compete with console pricing, our system takes aim at the high end of the market and capitalizes on PC gaming's biggest advantage, raw performance," the company's statement reads.

While details are scarce, it will come with liquid cooling for the CPU, an advanced thermal-management system of some sort, and can optionally dual-boot both Windows and SteamOS so gamers can play http://technoworld007.blogspot.in/search/label/Games%20%20detailsgames for both operating systems. Options include a GeForce GTX Titan graphics card and a 700W power supply. At 4.4 inches wide, 14.1 inches deep, and 16.4 inches tall, it's a good bit bigger than an Xbox One, but it should hopefully still be able to fit into a home entertainment system lying down. We should get more when Valve announces the full lineup of Steam Machines at CES 2014 next month.

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Angry Birds Go! features in-app purchases as expensive as $100

It looks like Rovio's upcoming kart racing game, Angry Birds Go!, will be full of in-app purchases with some priced as high as $100.

While the game will be widely launched on December 11, the Finnish developer has now launched it in New Zealand via Apple's iTunes App Store as part of a soft launch. Mobile gaming focused website Pocket Gamer, has already previewed the game, and discovered that it's a free download but features a number of in-app purchases including cars, energy systems, pay-for power-ups, multiple currencies and advertising priced as high as $100.

The Angry Birds Go! preview also describes the gameplay, mentioning that the action can be controlled with tilt or touch but one can't jump and drift. Races can be started by catapulting birds from the start line.

The report points out that Angry Birds Go! power-ups can be used free of charge once or twice following which one needs to use premium currency, in the form of gems to buy power-ups. To purchase gems after you run out of the initially allocated quantity, you need to pay in real cash.

Karts can also be upgraded through in-app purchases, and most notably, there is even a Big Bang Special Edition car, that costs a whopping $99.99.  It even uses a waiting system wherein you'll need to "reenergise" your player by paying in gems, or have to wait for it to be ready on its own.

While there's still time for the game's full launch, and there might be some changes, as the initial reaction has been of outrage, similar to how mobile gaming enthusiasts reacted to games, like Real Racing 3, which were full of irritating in-app purchases.

Rovio released the gameplay trailer of Angry Birds Go!, in October. It is a kart-racing game that brings the Angry Birds characters to a brand new downhill kart racing set-up. 

The game would be available worldwide on December 11 on all major mobile platforms including Android, iOS, Windows Phone 8 and even BlackBerry 10, via respective app stores. 

Angry Birds Go! will be the eighth game in the popular series, following the original Angry Birds, Angry Birds Seasons, Angry Birds Rio, Angry Birds Space, Angry Birds Star Wars, Angry Birds Star Wars II and Angry Birds Friends, and excluding the Bad Piggies spinoff.  

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NVIDIA QUADRO K6000 becomes new world’s most powerful graphics card for professionals

This week at the annual computer graphics conference known as Siggraph, NVIDIA has let loose  information on their next-generation NVIDIA QUADRO K6000. This is NVIDIA QUADRO release is the new most powerful graphics card on the market– so says NVIDIA, bringing the world’s largest graphics memory with12GB onboard. This isn’t the sort of processing power you’ll be using for anything less than the most power-hungry tasks on the planet.

Faced with managing extremely large data sets and time constraints, NVIDIA is aiming to satisfy the mostcurrent demands of product creators everywhere from graphics-intensive big-screen films to car manufacturing.Showing examples in both Layout and Animation & Simulation, NVIDIA has made it clear: the memory capacity involved in the K6000 allows previews of scenes with a much more final vision than has ever been offeredbefore.

“It’s going to allow artists to preview their scenes much earlier in the pipeline. In this case,  with the K6000, it’s all interactive.” – NVIDIA

“The added memory and other features allow our artists to see much more of the final scene in a real-time, interactive form, and allow many more artistic iterations.” – Guido Quaroni, Supervising Technical Director at Pixar Animation Studios

In car manufacturing, NVIDIA aims to push reality-based design processes to a new generation as well – time restraints and massive amounts of data are needed here as well. Especially when full-on reality-based previews of vehicle renders are needed to avoid costly mistakes once the manufacturing process begins.

“I am now able to load nearly complete vehicle models into RTT Deltagen and have stunning photorealism almost instantly. Instead of spending significant time simplifying the models to fit into previous hardware, we can now spend more time reviewing and iterating designs up front which helps avoid costly changes to tooling.” – Dennis Malone, associate engineer, Nissan North America

The third of three places where NVIDIA aims to take command is with massive geological datasets. In the ecology survey universe, like the automotive world, users need to know what’s under the ground before they get there – the rendering of these possibilities is one of the most intense at this point in our collective history.

“Compared to the Quadro K5000, the Quadro K6000 tripled the performance when running jobs on Terraspark’s InsightEarth application. With jobs running in mere minutes, we can run more simulations and get better insight into where to drill. In this business, drilling in the wrong place is a multi-million dollar mistake, and the Quadro K6000 gives us the edge to make better decisions.” – Klaas Koster, manager, seismic interpretation, Apache Corporation

Sizemic exploration is what we’re looking at here. Faster simulation means faster imaging and faster analysis in the end.

The NVIDIA QUADRO K6000 will be available this Fall worldwide from both leading OEMs and resellers. If you’re aiming to bring on a massive display wall for broadcast-type applications or digital signage, you’ll be glad to see 2 DisplayPort 2.1 ports and 2 DVI ports on its back that can be run simultaneously.

• 12GB ultra-fast GDDR5 graphics memory lets designers and animators model and render characters and scenes at unprecedented scale, complexity and richness
• 2,880 streaming multiprocessor (SMX) cores deliver faster visualization and compute horsepower than previous-generation products
• Supports four simultaneous displays and up to 4k resolution with DisplayPort 1.2
• Ultra-low latency video I/O and support for large-scale visualizations

When pressed on how this product would continue to roll beside the gaming-aimed card family GeForce – specifically with cards such as the GTX TITAN, NVIDIA made it clear: these are two separate families, but they can co-exist as a friendly bunch.

“The Quadro family is targeted at professionals – while you can certainly play games, the real value is for professionals on a variety of verticals. For that Geophysicist that like to play Assassin’s Creed, could he have a good time doing that? Absolutely.” – NVIDIA

This unit will be available in, as NVIDIA says, an “October timeframe” from groups like Dell, HP, and Lenovo and with systems integrators like BOXX Technologies and Supermicro.

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See what present inside the Sony's PS4 with many screenshots

• 

  
  

  Sony engineering director Yasuhiro Ootori looks over a PlayStation 4 -- after taking it apart, piece by piece.
• The PlayStation 4 -- in one piece -- and its controller, the DualShock 4.
• The underside of the PlayStation 4, whose look and feel was overseen by Sony design guru Tetsu Sumii.
• 
  
  
  The rear of the PS4, where you'll find an AUX port (for a PS Camera), an HDMI out port (for TVs and other audio-visual devices), an optical digital audio out port (for audio devices), and a LAN port (for connecting to a network).
• 
  
  
  The eject and power buttons on the front of the system.
• 
  
  
  The two USB ports on the front of the system.
• 
  
  
  Another view of the back of the console, where you can also connect power.
• 
  
  
  A closeup of the rear ports.
• 
  
  
  The DualShock 4 controller, designed in the image of the DualShock 3 (with a few new additions, including a touch pad and a button for sharing your game play with others).
• 
  
  
  A rear view of the DualShock 4.
• 
  
  
  A front view of the DualShock 4, where you can see the iconic Sony light bar.
• 
  
  
  Ootori holds the console's optical drive, which plays DVDs and Blu-ray disks.

  

  
  
• The PS4's internal parts, after the teardown. The motherboard is the large green piece on the right.

  

  
  
• The PS4's central frame.
• 
  
  
  Sony's specially designed centrifugal fan (top).
• 
  
  
  The PS4 heatsink, used to draw heat from the central processor.
• 
  
  
  A closeup of the green motherboard. The central processor is that big thing on the right, surrounded by eight memory chips. The other eight memory chips are on the other side of the board.
• 
  
  
  The PlayStation 4 in repose.

  Yasuhiro Ootori dismantling completely the PS4 in video:
  
  Next-generation consoles have yet still to the market, but both Sony and Microsoft began long ago to promote, each in their own way, to his "shoot".
  
  The Redmond giant has backed strong exclusive games and computing in the cloud, leaving a Xbox One that is willing to prove that brute force is not everything.
  
  Meanwhile the Japanese firm has shown its conviction by a powerful hardware, without further complications, configuring a PS4 able to offer, at least in theory, a better performance than the Xbox One.
  
  The case is that in keeping with their particular way of promoting your console the Japanese company has released a video where the own Yasuhiro Ootori dismantling completely the PS4.
  
  Ootori is director of engineering firm, so undoubtedly nobody better than him to show us the ins and outs of the new Sony Desktop console.
  
  As we can see in the video it is very complete and allows us to see in detail all the components of PS4, since SoC of AMD, which integrates CPU and GPU, up to the dissipation system.

  so I chosen to upload the screen shots of that video upto here

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Battlefield 4 Beta Performance: 16 Graphics Cards, Benchmarked and it's experiment of beta version details

We spent our weekend playing the Battlefield 4 multiplayer beta, and made sure to capture a ton of performance data with lots of PC hardware. Does your system have what it takes to handle this title? It comes out this month; you'd better look and see!

PC gamers who love great-looking first-person shooters have more than a few big-name franchises to choose from. But if you're particularly enchanted with large-scale multiplayer battles that include a wide array of player-piloted vehicles, one series stands above the rest. The Battlefield games weren't the first to focus on that style, but they certainly had a hand defining the genre.

The imminent release of Battlefield 4 is, therefore, a big deal to PC gamers. We spent some time with the public multiplayer beta to see what's new and check out pre-release performance on a wide array of graphics cards and processors

Gone in 60 seconds

Of course, this means our analysis is limited to online play for now (though that tends to be what makes the series so long-lasting). The basics haven't changed: the four player roles are still assault, support, engineer, and recon. The beta offers the staple conquest-style game with large vehicle-populated maps, along with an infantry-focused domination option on a smaller map and void of mechanical transportation. The new obliteration and defuse games are not available yet. Neither are competition favorites like team deathmatch, rush, or squad deathmatch. There's only one map in the beta test: Seige of Shanghai. Like Battlefield 3, the game servers are selected via a Web browser.

Server browser

The sense of scale is much larger than any Battlefield game I've played before, thanks to the sprawling city and large buildings. The new Frostbite 3 game engine facilitates gorgeous visuals that remind me a lot of Crysis 3. There are other changes, like improved water dynamics, the commander mode (also available from Battlefield: 2142), and the new "levolution" feature that gives you the ability to destroy large-scale map features, such as buildings, to move the location of objectives. While levolution sounds cool, it appears to be hard-coded into specific structures. My understanding was that only one building in the Seige of Shanghai could be destroyed. It was already down in every server I joined, though, so I never saw this feature in action.

Chopper up...

I would have liked to see fully-destructible terrain, though of course that introduces logistical issues. We're hoping, then, that the final version of Battlefield 4 includes at least one map with more "levolvable" structures.

Otherwise, the beta's environment is fairly standard, perhaps a bit more interactive than prior titles in the franchise. There's a lot of glass and architectural detail that demonstrates abuse from gunfire and explosions, and much of the concrete cover is destructible. Most of the buildings are static above the first floor, though.

Chopper down.

Thus far, Battlefield 4 looks like it's shaping up to be a polished, better-looking version of its predecessor with even more interesting environments to play in.

We all know we're going to be busy playing Battlefield 4 when it comes out, so let's take a moment during the beta period to discuss DICE's Frostbite 3 engine.

Again, Battlefield 4 employs an updated Frostbite 3 engine, the newest version of Digital Illusions CE's game technology for the next-gen console and PC platforms. While it makes its commercial debut with Battlefield 4, Frostbite 3 will also power Need or Speed: Rivals later this year, in addition to the next iterations of the Dragon Age, Mass Effect, and Star Wars: Battlefront franchises. 

Compared to it's predecessor, Frostbite 3 features higher-resolution textures, particle effects, and changes to tessellation, according to the company's feature video. A new networked water feature ensures that all players see the same waves in the water at the same time, allowing small naval craft to hide behind waves in rough seas.

Leavin' On A Jetski

First we tested the Low, Medium, High, and Ultra detail presets, finding that the texture detail on Low appeared dependent on the game type. We noticed higher-resolution textures on the Low setting in domination mode compared to conquest, even on the same Seige of Shanghai map. It's not clear whether this is a beta glitch, or a result of the game dynamically allocating resources based on the number and size of models in the map.

We chose to benchmark the domination map because of its higher texture resolution on the Low setting. We didn't notice a significant performance hit shifting between the Medium and High presets, so we tested Low (MSAA off, AA Deferred off, Ambient Occlusion off), High (MSAA off, AA Deferred high, HBAO enabled), and Ultra (4x MSAA, AA Deferred high, HBAO enabled) detail presets.  

                               The challenge of benchmarking a multiplayer game is that every run is potentially different, altering the load from one test to the next. For this reason, we performed our measurements on serve

We all know that graphics cards like the Radeon HD 7990 require a substantial amount of power, so XFX sent along its PRO850W 80 PLUS Bronze-certified power supply. This modular PSU employs a single +12 V rail rated for 70 A. XFX claims that this unit provides 850 W of continuous power (not peak) at 50 degrees Celsius (notably higher than the inside of most enclosures).

we've almost exclusively eliminated mechanical disks in the lab, preferring solid-state storage for eliminating I/O-related bottlenecks. Samsung sent all of our labs 256 GB 840 Pros, so we standardize on these exceptional SSDs.

As far as testing goes, we have to use Fraps in conjunction with a predefined 

path for 60 seconds of recording. We planned to use our FCAT tools to report frame rates for dual-GPU solutions like the Radeon HD 7990 and GeForce GTX 690, factoring out dropped and runt frames, but this turned out to be impossible. The frame overlay only works in 32-bit applications, and the Battlefield 4 multiplayer beta is 64-bit-only.

				Test System
CPU				Intel Core i5-2550K (Sandy Bridge), Overclocked to 4.2 GHz @ 1.3 V
Motherboard				Asus P8Z77-V LX, LGA 1155, Chipset: Intel Z77M
Networking			On-Board Gigabit LAN controller
Memory			AMD Gamer Series Memory, 2 x 4 GB, 1866 MT/s, CL 9-9-9-24-1T
Graphics			GeForce 210 1 GB DDR3 GeForce GT 630 512 MB GDDR5 GeForce GTX 650 Ti 1 GB GDDR5 GeForce GTX 660 2 GB GDDR5 GeForce GTX 670 2 GB GDDR5 GeForce GTX 770 2 GB GDDR5 GeForce GTX Titan 6 GB GDDR5 GeForce GTX 690 4 GB GDDR5 Radeon HD 6450 512 MB GDDR5 Radeon HD 6670 512 MB DDR3 Radeon HD 7770 1 GB GDDR5 Radeon HD 7790 1 GB GDDR5 Radeon HD 7870 2 GB GDDR5 Radeon HD 7950 Boost 3 GB GDDR5 Radeon HD 7970 3 GB GDDR5 Radeon HD 7990 6 GB GDDR5
Hard Drive			Samsung 840 Pro, 256 GB SSD, SATA 6Gb/s
Power			XFX PRO850W, ATX12V, EPS12V
Software and Drivers
Operating System			Microsoft Windows 8 Pro x64
DirectX			DirectX 11
Graphics Drivers			AMD Catalyst 13.10 Beta 2, Nvidia GeForce 331.40 Beta

Benchmarks
Battlefield 4 Multiplayer beta			Custom THG Benchmark, 60-second Fraps run Map: Siege of Shanghai, Game Type: Domination

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