samm

Hm, regarding Unity Engine and sound playback quality: On both Expeditions: Conquistador and Endless Space, I do experience clicks / stutters / pops in the game's music and sound-effect playback, possibly during harddisk activities. Just something to please keep an eye on - no matter how high quality the sound files are, if they do not play smoothly, sound can ruin much.

Now apparently anyone even entering the Taksim square "will be treated like a terrorist". Police is denying doctors access to wounded, of which by now there are hundreds. Again, socail networks are / were? only usable via proxies / VPN.

It's no replacement for the 8350 at the same price and TDP - would that be the case, it would not only be fair enough, but great No, it's an OEM-only product with about 220W TDP, at a premium price point - these things are confirmed by AMD (here in German, below "Update"). mkreku: Indeed, feels the same to me...

Ugh, that 5GHz heater is quite an embarassing product imo...

The actual way of distribution does not matter to me, as long as: That said, the Humble Store sounds good, or of course if gog ever decides to distribute Linux games as well, why not them. As for the physical copy (if there is one for Linux - I really don't recall the kickstarter packages and should be in bed now rather than being online... xD ), why not just distribute an archive accompanied by an installer shell script that also checks for dependencies and doubles for uninstall script as well? I've never played "bigger" games on Linux, so I wouldn't know if it's feasible in this context, but I've used the latter method for IBM DB2. It's sufficiently more convenient than doing it all by hand, and not as platform dependent as a deb package. Maybe rpm?

Budget? The older PS versions I've known didn't support graphics card to accelerate certain operations, and were bound to single thread performance of the CPU. Which would currently mean to get Haswell. 3Dsmax, as far as the internet tells me, profits from multiple threads so going the AMD FX-route would not be out of the question, or if Intel, to get a Haswell i7 or a Xeon ... V3. For anything less vague, as noted initially, available budget or at least a market segment would be a helpful indicator.

Oh yes, HSA has me interested as well from a programming perspective. The Foundation released a programmer's reference manual for HSAIL (the intermediate language) a few days ago at http://hsafoundation.com/standards/ , but I've yet to take the time to read through it. I hope it will be picked up and implemented soon, by multiple interested parties if possible. Truly strange to not sell the most interesting processor of the series :/ Also here, there currently is just one shop that has it listed, but not yet available

Well, they're not actually behind. At least in mobile space they've been competitive in power use, computation and, up until Haswell's highest end IGP, graphics performance as well as price from the very lowest performance point to midrange for quite some time. The OEMs just offered mostly crippled mobile units if any at all - not least because of the lack of guidelines from AMD (meaningful guidelines would have been: mandatory dual channel RAM, DDR3 1600 or faster, for everything not Brazos / Jaguar; Brazos / Jaguar only in small mobile platforms; battery capacity minimal boundaries; no dual graphics; using at least midrange chipsets with native USB3/SATA 6Gbps support and recommend usage of SSDs; higher res monitors)

Yeah :D I've been so waiting for someone to post something like that quote below, so I could reply: 24/192 can even be considered *harmful*: at best it's no quality gain, at worst, it decreases audible quality. Simple physical reasons. Read http://xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html On the issue proprietary, licence fee ridden inferior codec mp3 vs. superior open source codecs we're on the same page however.

Why use wav in a game? Transparent lossy compression is good enough. However, yes, why not offer wav as additional download, would do no harm (except to internet traffic ) I was already afraid of reading some gibberish about 24bit/96kHz or something like that, so consider me pleasantly surprised by the lack of mention of said snakeoil.

Yeah, I don't like many, many developments that are currently happening at MSFT. I'm quite surprised how many online publications rejoice about some "return of the start button", when it really isn't that - see Humanoid's post.

I wonder what will become of this... I heard about the thing from the start and it got really bad after police severely abused their power. For a moderate example see obyknven's posting. As far as I know, the governement massively censored social networks by blocked facebook and twitter in order to "calm the situation" to keep outside appearances and to make coordination between the protesters more difficult. However, reports of agent orange used against the protesters (for whatever reason) are probably false, at least. I saw a handful of protesters on their way home or to a solidarity demonstration in Zürich yesterday. Some links on the matter (some material shows violence against the demonstrating people. I'd be grateful if the links would not be censored here, they're important imo) http://occupygezipics.tumblr.com/ http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/middle-east-live/2013/jun/03/turkey-protester-killed-live http://edition.cnn.com/2013/06/01/world/europe/turkey-protests/index.html

Just got it from gog.com yesterday and stayed up until 5am playing It's very interesting so far, and challenging as well, because as usual I try to go the peaceful and diplomacy way. Found a test in german on gamersglobal. They seem to like it as well, criticising mainly graphics and camera adjustments / fiddly controls.

Well to each his own To me, SSDs are the single most significant recent addition to mainstream computing.

Haven't updated my system in here since my 2009 rig it seems. I'd upgraded the processor there to a Phenom II X6 1090T, but some time last year I upgraded some more: Asus Crosshair V Formula Z AMD FX 8350 16 GB 1866 "MHz" G.Skill XFX Radeon HD7970 BE Samsung 840 Pro 256 GB Samsung 830 128 GB The only HDDs I have in use currently are an external WD Green 1 TB, my old data drive, now used for backup purposes only, and 2x1TB Seagate Hybrids in Raid 1 in our file/media server (my former HTPC). The server's system drive is a Crucial C300 64GB, and a Micron C300 relative with 128GB in my laptop at work. Wouldn't want to miss the SSDs anymore. Yeah, one of the few AMD users left (including Laptop, with an A6 3410 MX, and said server with an Athlon II X4 630). I hope team green stays alive, wouldn't want to miss customer choice in x86 / AMD64 processors. Especially seeing how it slowly convinced Intel to keep up in terms of APU / OpenCL development. Haswell will be the first time Chipzilla will deliver a usable GPU part (potentially - let's see how the drivers turn out).

Yes, Ivy Bridge is Intel's current, Haswell is the upcoming generation: http://forums.obsidian.net/topic/63710-haswell-countdown/ Power efficiency is likely to increase further, CPU performance not so much if at all (not counting the integrated graphics, which is in some models taking a big step towards AMD).

*sing* never, ever, never trust a Klingon... :D

Perfectly acted in this pitch video If I wouldn't already have Psychonauts and Brütal Legend (and the Cave, which isn't in the bundle, and Broken Age via Kickstarter) and more than enough to play, I'd go for this. But as things are now, I'll pass... and watch the vid again :D

IWD1 :D We'll have Torment for Planescape: Torment feeling.

Thanks for the corrections regarding ultrabooks and the clarifications regarding the 'R' series

Your ideas seem quite elaborate and I've read them on the Torment uservoice thing. Some cross-posting to further seed your intentions, eh? For PE, I think this kind of dialogue flavour is over the top. For Torment, it would be possibly ok, if the time to implement it would allow it. As a person able to read, I recognize the difference between a polite and a rude answer by reading them, and don't need a descriptor explicitly telling me what the tone of the answer is. This is quite in the vein of what you propose, but I really don't think one should have a rudeness stat (or interest or politeness etc.) Instead of tonal descriptors, using fully formed answers in the sense of "[Truth] <rude affirmative answer>", "[Truth] <polite affirmative answer>", "[Lie] <polite affirmative answer>" etc. that are aimed at the dialogue partner exclusively and not influence some stat future dialogue partners will be magically aware of. In PE, this kind of stat again would be over the top, and in Torment, this is already captured with the Tides regarding the consequences of actions including results from dialogues. The above is only true of course if the answers can be read before chosing them (i.e. unlike in MassEffect for example). In a MassEffect-like system, intention descriptors add more to the game than the tonal descriptors that would only multiply the effort of dialog creation without too much gain in roleplaying possibility.

All the violence of the world hidden in a fluffy beat

Intel claims that its fastest version of the "GT3" graphics, aka "Iris Pro 5200", available in Ultrabook processors and some select other ones, will reach a Geforce GT 640. Realistically, we can expect maybe GT 630 level of performace of the fastest solution. Keep in mind that there will be 3 other versions of the IGP, plus probably different clock rates, so all in all: It will be okay-ish to play entry level games at low settings. Its faster versions will quite possibly get up to the performance level of AMD's integrated GPUs, but unlike those, you won't be able to supplement a discrete GPU*. If it can replace one depends on your expectations in terms of performance and drivers. *: not that I'd advise to use this asymetrical Crossfire, it's bound to be microstuttering from hell. I'd keep away from using multi-GPU setups for the time being anyway, until there is a way to properly use them like one GPU. Let's see if further levels of HSA technology will enable such a thing.

Oh, and if anyone is planning to buy a Haswell: Please do so with a retail motherboard and do not get any OEM manufacured PCs, unless you don't care for USB problems. Reason: http://techreport.com/news/24494/report-new-chipset-revision-to-fix-haswell-usb-3-0-bug Also, you'll probably need a new PSU, and with new, I don't mean recent, but rather still-to-be-built for Haswell compatibility: http://techreport.com/news/24738/few-psus-support-haswell-c6-c7-low-power-states Oh Intel, what a capable company you are... Remeber the SATA-port-issues at Sandy Bridge release? They don't seem to have learnt from their past mistakes. Not that they have to, the consumers still happily buy their products and their image stays unblemished.

I'd prefer a high-end motherboard (and PSU, but that's beside the point) with a mid-range CPU, if I wouldn't have enough money at my hands for an overall high-end-system. I'd also prefer to have a cheap CPU as a backup should the original fry. Overall, I like to be able to select and combine my computer's components freely, and using BGA in desktop computers would take such freedom away. There is however one big reason, besides Intel's cynicism, why we'll end up with this sooner or later: With stacked RAM and more and more SOC qualities that the component formerly known as CPU acquires, comes an ever increasing difficulty to maintain signal quality and bandwidth over the comparatively large area of a motherboard. There won't be too much choice in the future, I'm afraid. Yep, Richland certainly will be a nice choice for that. With a good motherboard you'll even have plenty of SATA 6Gbps and USB 3 ports to build a very well performing file/media server, should the HTPC ever prove to be rarely used as a home theatre Unfortunately, at the moment I can only find one FM2 Mini ITX mainboard with A85X chipset, I don't know about the market where you're from, but in Europe, there's not much choice...