Items tagged with Xbone
Microsoft's Xbox One X hasn't needed a lot of incentives for it to sell well with gamers, but with a cost of $499.99 USD, it's a hard pill for some to swallow for some - especially if they already have an original Xbox One. Regardless, as it turns out, etailer Rakuten (formerly known as Buy.com) is currently offering a stellar deal that could net you the console for a lot less than MSRP, and with bonus store cash piled on for future use. Despite its $499.99 SRP, Rakuten sells the Xbox One X for $514.99 before discount, but as of the time of writing, a coupon found right inside of the product page itself on the site will drop $75 off the price in an instant. Further, rewards gained from this...
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A new interview with Assassin's Creed Unity senior producer Vincent Pontbriand has some gamers seeing red and others crying "Told you so!" after the developer revealed that the game's 900p framerate and 30 fps target on consoles is a result of weak CPU performance rather than GPU compute. "Technically we're CPU-bound, he [Pontbriand] said. "The GPUs are really powerful, obviously the graphics look pretty good, but it's the CPU [that] has to process the AI, the number of NPCs we have on screen, all these systems running in parallel. "We were quickly bottlenecked by that and it was a bit frustrating, because we thought that this was going to be a tenfold improvement over everything AI-wise, and...
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Normally, the question of whether a game runs better on the PC or a console is a no-brainer -- at least, for PC users. Watch Dogs, however, with its problematic PC play, challenges that concept. And since the gap between consoles and PCs is typically smallest at the beginning of the console generation, we decided to take the Xbox One out for a head-to-head comparison against the PC with this long-awaited title. What we've found may surprise you. Based on our results, and depending on just how much horsepower your PC has, the Xbox One might be the better option... Watch Dogs Graphics And Game Play: PC versus Xbox One, With Surprising Results...
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Normally, the question of whether a game runs better on the PC or a console is a no-brainer -- at least, for PC users. Watch Dogs, however, with its problematic PC play, challenges that concept. And since the gap between consoles and PCs is typically smallest at the beginning of the console generation, we decided to take the Xbox One out for a head-to-head comparison against the PC with this long-awaited title. What we've found may surprise you. Based on our results, and depending on just how much horsepower your PC has, the Xbox One (and possibly the PS4 option, though we didn't compare against it) might be the better option. Here, we'll step through the game's pre-rendered...
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Earlier this month, Microsoft acknowledged that it would debut DirectX 12 at GDC this year, with promises that it would offer many of the same features as AMD's Mantle. Fast on the heels of that announcement came news that the API would also be deployed on the Xbox One, presumably as part of a future update. Now, a report from SemiAccurate claims that "Microsoft has adopted AMD’s Mantle but are now calling it DX12. The way they did it manages to pull stupidity from the jaws of defeat by breaking compatibility in the name of lock-in." Meanwhile, other reports across the 'Net are claiming that because the Xbox One has a real-time operating system, it won't benefit from the new API and that...
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Titanfall has been one of the most anticipated and important games of the Xbox One's short life, but a head-to-head comparison between the new console and high-end gaming PCs has illustrated that once again, the PCs come out on top. The problem, in this case, isn't that the Xbox One's visuals are poor -- the differences between the PC and the console are very small in static images; apart from the resolution difference (792p vs. 1080p). As Digital Foundry writes, however, the gap between the two systems once the actions gets going is the real problem. When it built Titanfall, Respawn Entertainment settled on an adaptive V-Sync solution in which the game uses V-Sync when running at a steady 60...
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Expectations are high for the imminent launch of Titanfall. The game is a major test for Microsoft's Xbox One -- its one of the biggest exclusive projects, its beta was well-reviewed, and gamers have been looking for a game that would clarify just what the Xbox One is capable of when compared against the PlayStation 4. The game's beta ran an odd resolution -- 1408x792 -- but according to an interview with Respawn lead engineer Richard Baker, an upgrade could still be in the cards. Digital Foundry spoke to Baker, who said: " One of the big tricks is how much ESRAM we're going to use, so we're thinking of not using hardware MSAA and instead using FXAA to make it so we don't have to have this larger...
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With the Xbox One and PlayStation 4 both launched, the pressing question is: Which one should you pick? Comparing stats on the two is the typical way websites tackle this issue. I'm not going to. If you've read anything about the two devices, you already know the following: The PS4 is more powerful than the Xbox One. The Xbox One has Kinect. Some people hate Kinect. Some people don't. The PS4 is smaller and has a replaceable hard drive. The Xbox One is quieter, and will eventually support external storage. As of today, the Xbox One's menus and organization are nicer. It also supports MP3 playback. PS4 doesn't. Games look almost identical between the two. Rehashing this for the umpteenth time...
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The PS4 and Xbox One aren't out yet, but that's not stopping them from facing off in Battlefield 4, the next-generation, just-launched title from EA/DICE. We highlighted some of the visual differences we might expect between the console and PC versions of the game based on the performance of the in-game scaling software option, but now that the title has launched, what do we see? Quite a bit -- some of it good, some not so much. Fair warning here: The PS4 and Xbox One screenshots are quite large. I decided to preserve the YouTube videos and the original aspect ratios below, in order to give you a better look at the differences in zoom. Eurogamer has published a full preview of the game, screenshot...
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This is one of those announcements that's so odd, I'm still trying to figure out if it works out to a positive. I'm fairly certain it does. So as you likely know, the Xbox One has both HDMI-in and HDMI-out capability. The point of HDMI-in is to allow you to hook up a cable box, with output then running from the Xbox One to your television. As it turns out, however, that's not the only thing the Xbox One can do. Since the HDMI-in port is a standard option, it can accept video input from a PS4 -- which means it can also accept a video stream from a PC. According to Xbox senior director of product management, Albert Panello, "any application can be snapped to a game... this could be the live TV...
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Crime might not pay -- but video games about crime certainly do, particularly when they're the follow-up to one of the biggest franchises in gaming. Grand Theft Auto V -- easily one of the biggest titles left for the Xbox 360 and PS3 -- went on sale today and cleared $800M in revenue in just 24 hours. That's not just a record for Grand Theft Auto, it's a record for Take Two, and possibly for the entire gaming industry. Last year, Activision touted Call of Duty Black Ops II as raking in a record $500M in revenue, but this has blown way past that. Reviews of the game are excellent, with an average Metacritic score of 98 and praise lavished on the degree of detail and visual effects squeezed out...
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AMD's next-generation Radeon is set to debut later this fall and rumors about the upcoming chip have begun to leak out into the wild. While unconfirmed, the specs are in line with our expectations and what AMD has previously said about the chip. Hawaii won't be a fundamentally new architecture, but a refined approach to the technology already baked into Graphics Core Next (GCN). Specifically, the new chip is supposedly built to GCN 2.0 standards with support for DX 11.2 (this may already be present in current Radeon hardware), four raster engines (up from two), a maximum of 2,816 shader cores, a 900MHz clock speed, temperature-based Turbo modes rather than a current-based model, and a 430mm sq....
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It's common knowledge that game console and game sales have been in a serious slump this year. According to conventional wisdom, this is part of the console refresh cycle -- sales of older hardware falls off as customers await new products, even when manufacturers are publicly committed to long life cycles for current generation hardware. Makes sense, right? Right. But a new comparison between long-term hardware sales for Sony and Nintendo products makes it clear that the recent decline in shipments isn't a new development -- it's been building for a long time. Take a look at Sony and Nintendo's combined sales for consoles and handhelds from 2008 - 2013. In mid-2008, the two companies combined...
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According to a now-pulled update pushed to Age of Empires Online, Microsoft's Games for Windows Live will shut down altogether by July 1, 2014. That unofficial announcement follows official word that the Games for Windows Live marketplace would close on August 22 without a replacement service being offered. MS has refused to comment on whether the July 1, 2014 date is legitimate, but it raises real questions of what's going to happen to the games that require GFWL to authenticate and save data. The list of titles isn't small. Batman: Arkham Asylum, Arkham City, BioShock 2, Dark Souls: Prepare to Die, DiRT 2 & 3, F1 2010 and F1 2011, Fallout 3, GTA IV, and the Lost Planet series are all games...
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Microsoft has made an art out of reversing course on everything people thought the Xbox One was going to do (largely for smart reasons), but up till today, the company has been firm on two points. You will be buying a Kinect at launch, though you could turn off its voice-activation feature, and it would be required for any gaming or console use. One of those points has just collapsed. Specifically, the "You must use Kinect for gaming" point. Now, you'll be able to deactivate Kinect and stuff it in your closet. Supplemental game functions won't work without it, obviously, but there's no reason to leave it hooked up if you don't care about those functions and don't buy the games that require its...
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Microsoft has announced yet another difference between the original version of the Xbox One console and the version you'll be able to buy on store shelves come late November. When it announced the console, the company stated that the Xbox One would not ship with a headset. The reason for this, supposedly, was that Kinect's speaker and microphone would be more than good enough to pick up on the player's speech. Now, the company has reversed that decision. The Xbox One now comes with an included, minimalist 44 gram headset. The blog post from Major Nelson also includes a full console unboxing and highlights another feature -- controllers will plug in via standard micro-USB cables and will run off...
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The Xbox One and PlayStation 4 are more similar than any two consoles from competing vendors have been in decades, but as far as hardware specs are concerned, Sony has a decided edge. While both systems use AMD CPUs and Radeon 7000-derived, GCN-based graphics cards, the Sony system has 1,152 shader cores compared to just 768 cores on the Xbox One. Both chips are (or were) reportedly clocked at 800MHz, leaving Sony with a 50% shader core advantage over its Xbox rival. It's far too late in the cycle for Microsoft to do much about its GPU design, so the company has decided to tackle the problem by increasing GPU clock speed. In a recent podcast, Major Nelson confirmed that the GPU is currently running...
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John Carmack's annual Quakecon keynote is one of the most interesting events of the entire year. The man is incredibly intelligent and understands programming and development to a degree that very few people can match. id may have struggled to replicate the gameplay successes of its early years, but Carmack's understanding and perspective on the technical issues surrounding gaming is second to none. This year, he kicked off by discussing the upcoming consoles, their hardware capabilities (very similar) and the long-term impact on AMD. Carmack believes that having everyone standardized on the same architecture with very few differences will make it much easier for developers to build better products...
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According to Steve Ballmer, Microsoft is now one of just a handful of companies with a seven-digit server deployment. Speaking at the company's Worldwide Partner Conference, Ballmer claimed that Microsoft had entered rare territory and used the number as an example of how few companies really understood how to run a cloud business. According to the CEO: We have something over a million servers in our datacenter infrastructure. Google is bigger than we are. Amazon is a little bit smaller. You get Yahoo! and Facebook, and then everybody else is 100,000 units probably or less. So the number of companies that really understand the network topology, the datacenter construction, the server requirements...
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When Microsoft announced that it was canceling the much-hated always-on Xbox One requirements, a collective cheer went up from the Internet -- and also, a collective grumble. A number of players were ready to get rid of physical discs altogether, looked forward to the Family Share features that Microsoft had promised, and generally wanted a console that would move forward into digital distribution, even if it came at the cost of giving up privileges today. Those fans have put together a Change.org petition calling for Microsoft to add back the features that it removed from the console. The petition is short and to the point, reading: This was to be the future of entertainment. A new wave of gaming...
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GameStop executives and spokespeople never said much about Microsoft's original plan for the Xbox One, but the company must surely have breathed a sigh of relief when Microsoft unexpectedly canceled its original plans a few weeks later. Had the company pushed ahead with the goal of leaving game sharing in the hands of publishers, it could have had a serious impact on the used game retailer's business model. The question is, is GameStop out of the woods yet? Long-term, that's not clear. Digital revenues continue to grow; EA and Activision Blizzard are reporting that an increasing amount of their revenues are coming directly from digital sales. With the PS4 and Xbone both offering digital as a...
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When Microsoft reversed its Xbox One policies a few weeks back, there was momentary hope that the company has listened to its customers and understood the features they were asking for. Granted, this was brief -- the company promptly dashed such ideas by throwing out all the Xbox One's good ideas alongside the 24 hour Internet connection and publisher-controlled used-game policies. Still with Mattrick gone, there was some hope that maybe the company would reintroduce plans like Family Sharing and put the console back on track. Apparently not. Microsoft's big new feature with Kinect? Advertising. That, in and of itself, isn't really very surprising. Xbox 360 had ads from the beginning. Then they...
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