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MechWarrior Online assault class training starts in this trailer
MechWarrior Online, which has been in open beta since October 29, is making sure systems are nominal for its full launch in the first quarter of next year. Here's a pair of devs showing off the game and, more specifically, the assault class mechs available now.
MechWarrior Online: The story of how one MMO got crowd-funded without Kickstarter
Kickstarter is kind of A Thing now. Oodles of companies are turning to it for all their crowd-funding needs, to varying levels of success. MechWarrior Online has distinguished itself by raising over $5 million in crowd-funding without touching Kickstarter. If not Kickstarter, where could all that money have come from? Fans, of course! MWO has the advantage of belonging to an existing franchise with fans, and those fans bought over 70,000 of the game's Founder's packages. The Founder's program allowed fans to buy in at any of three price levels ($30, $60, and $120) with varying perks at each level. Nick Foster, CEO of Infinite Game Publishing's parent company 7G Entertainment, explained some of the rationale behind this approach to funding. "The product will be a lot better for players because of the crowdfunding. It's allowed us to maintain a higher level of ongoing development in the product than if we were waiting for momentum to build immediately after going live. In the next few months, we'll be able to release a lot more features." MWO hit open beta today, which means you have the perfect opportunity to see for yourself whether they put fans' funds to good use. To read more about MWO's road to funding, check out Gamasutra's full article.
MechWarrior Online stomps into open beta October 29
Infinite Game Publishing (IGP) expects MechWarrior Online's internet-based systems to be nominal for an open beta beginning October 29. Interested pilots can head on over to mwomercs.com to reserve their pilot name now.IGP and developer Piranha Games recently announced thier multi-tier pre-order program achieved $5 million in sales before the game's launch.%Gallery-155258%
MechWarrior Online made $5 million off 'Founders Program'
Infinite Game Publishing (IGP) and Piranha Games achieved $5 million in sales off the MechWarrior Online "Founder's Program." Since July, the multi-tier pre-order program gave those interested in the game the opportunity to play early and provide feedback."The success of the Founder's Program reinforces IGP's vision to help independent developers build exceptional games with the right economic model for the global marketplace," said IGP CEO Nick Foster. "We are in a unique position to be able to deliver a pipeline of high quality, innovative content for online game players."That pipeline includes the coming MechWarrior Tactics and Sins of a Dark Age. There's still no definitive date for when MechWarrior Online will be nominal and enter open beta.
MechWarrior Online stomps through River City environment
MechWarrior Online is adding maps and polish to its launch arsenal, with the latest trailer showing off the new River City map. It's the first urban warfare map revealed for the game, replacing the pine and rivers seen before with fifty shades of gray and sepia.
Atoms rumored to ditch Intel graphics for PowerVR
When Intel wanted to take a serious stab at the tablet market it turned to PowerVR, the company already providing the graphical muscle for its embedded chips that power the Logitech Revue and other set top boxes. Now, the folks at VR-Zone claim that Intel will be adopting the company's tech across the Atom line and ditching its own integrated graphics for the upcoming Cedarview platform. Specifically, it's rumored that Chipzilla will stick the SGX545 (an upgraded version of the pixel pusher inside Samsung's Hummingbird platform and Apple's A5) in all Cedar Trail processors. The switch will bring support for DirectX 10.1 and OpenGL 3.2 to the low-power CPUs while improving HD video decoding. Sure, when the next-gen Atoms land the graphics chip it will already be almost two years old, but its low power and robust Android support make it a natural match for Honeycomb -- Intel's best bet for tablet success now that Nokia is distancing itself from Meego.
ATI overtakes NVIDIA in discrete GPU shipments
You'd think with ATI having the performance, value and power efficiency lead for so long -- at least since the Radeon HD 4000 series -- NVIDIA would be in all kinds of trouble, but it's only now that AMD's graphics division has finally taken the lead in quarterly shipments. This is according to Mercury Research, whose analysts place the split at 51 to 49 percent in favor of ATI -- still a tightly contested thing, but it compares very favorably to the Red Team's 41% share in the same quarter last year. This data is concerned with discrete GPU shipments only (laptops included), whereas on the integrated front Intel continues to reign supreme with 54 percent of the market shipping its cheap and cheerful IGP units. ATI has made forward strides there as well, however, with 24.5% ranking ahead of NVIDIA's 19.8%. If Apple shifting its iMac and Mac Pro lines away from the Green livery wasn't enough, perhaps these numbers will finally start ringing some alarm bells over at NV HQ. [Thanks, Zubayer]
Intel briefly demos next-gen Sandy Bridge laptop platform at Computex
We're obviously well aware of what's coming up from Intel, but today at Computex Chipzilla demoed its upcoming Sandy Bridge platform for the first time. The demo was quite brief, but showed off the power of the future Intel integrated graphics with a side by side comparison with a discrete graphics system. It's all in the video after the break, but don't get your hopes up about seeing these new processors anytime soon -- Intel's Dadi Perlmutter confirmed that they won't hit the market until 2011.
Intel kills Larrabee discrete GPU, will focus on integrated graphics
Intel's been promising to blow up the graphics market with its Larrabee GPU for over three years now with virtually nothing to show for it, and it looks like the company has finally decided to can the entire project after downsizing it to a "software platform" last year. A new Intel blog post on the matter says the company won't bring a discrete graphics chip to market, and will instead focus on integrated graphics for everyday computing and highly-parallel multicore processors for high-performance computing. Now, Intel's obviously still in the graphics game, and it's already made a strong move towards integrated graphics by building GPUs right into the Atom N470 and much of the Core 2010 line, but on a much broader level the decision to drop Larrabee means that Intel is now essentially pursuing the same strategies as its competitors: AMD is famously behind schedule with its Fusion project but plans to ship ATI-powered hybrid CPU / GPUs next year, and NVIDIA has been pushing its multicore GPU-based Tesla high-performance computing platform for a while now. We're also curious about how Intel intends to address the gaming market in the future -- its own integrated graphics obviously aren't up to the task, and it's still fighting with NVIDIA over a Core 2010 chipset license, so that's a big question mark going forward as more and more focus is placed on low-power and integrated solutions. We'll see what happens -- it's not too often the death of a vaporware product has the potential to shake up the entire industry.
New MacBook Pro running Hybrid SLI? UPDATE: Nope.
Alright, something's fishy here. When Apple announced that the new MacBook Pro has two NVIDIA GeForce chips -- the 9400M and the 9600M GT -- the focus was on what that means for battery life. Absent any mention of Hybrid SLI, we assumed that was all, but PC Mag has posted some eyebrow-raising benchmarks comparing the new MacBook Pro to HP's Pavilion HDX16t, which also features a 9600M GT. While the MacBook Pro test model fell behind the Pavilion in most benchmarks due to its slower processor, its Crysis framerate beat that of the Pavilion by 24.1 frames per second -- 41.9 over 17.3. That doesn't make a lot of sense, unless you look at benchmarks of a desktop with NVIDIA's similar GeForce 9300 chipset and a GeForce 8500 GT -- turns out Crysis runs 12.63 frames per second faster (29.19 over 16.56) in Hybrid SLI than it does on the 8500 GT alone. Is the MacBook Pro running in SLI mode when set for performance? We don't have confirmation of that, but we'll put it to the test in our forthcoming review -- until then, feel free to grab a grain of salt while freaking out anyway.Update: Sorry, folks -- NVIDIA's just posted a support doc that says the MBP doesn't support Hybrid SLI in either OS X or Windows -- and when running Windows, it's locked into using the 9600M GT. We're not sure where that Crysis boost is coming from -- GDDR3 vs GDDR2, perhaps -- but we'll dig deeper in our review. Stay tuned.Read - PC Mag (MacBook Pro benchmarks)Read - Hot Hardware (NVIDIA GeForce 9300 desktop motherboards benchmarks)
Intel targeting home media users with Bearlake G+ chipset
It's a little short on exact details, but Intel has released some details of the roadmap of their chipsets and motherboard designs. The line of interest to us at HD Beat is the Bearlake G+, which contains some built-in capabilities for HDTV decoding and display. It contains designs for an integrated video chipset on the motherboard, and should support hardware encryption and decoding of VC-1 and MPEG-4 AVC, as well as Intel's High Definition Audio. So if you get a computer with this chipset on the motherboard, rather than having to buy an nVidia, ATI, or other third-party card to get hardware video playback decoding for your HDTV, you can pick up one of the Media Series from Intel, plug in your DVI or HDMI cable -- with HDCP, of course -- and play back your HD DVD or Blu-ray media. The G+ series should be out in 2007.
