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NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480 set up in 3-way SLI, tested against Radeon HD 5870 and 5970
Not many mortals will ever have to worry about choosing between a three-way GeForce GTX 480 SLI setup, an equally numerous Radeon HD 5870 array, or a dual-card HD 5970 monstrosity, but we know plenty of people would care about who the winner might be. Preliminary notes here include the fun facts that a 1 Kilowatt PSU provided insufficient power for NVIDIA's hardware, while the mighty Core i7-965 test bench CPU proved to be a bottleneck in some situations. Appropriately upgraded to a six-core Core i7-980X and a 1,200W power supply, the testers proceeded to carry out the sacred act of benchmarking the snot out of these superpowered rigs. We won't spoil the final results of the bar chart warfare here, but rest assured both camps score clear wins in particular games and circumstances. The source link shall reveal all.
The great gear explosion
Gear is fairly easy to get at this point in the expansion life cycle of Wrath. That's not a flaw. That's actually how things should be: there shouldn't be too many artificial limitations keeping you from jumping into the newest content and getting a chance to at least see, if not down it. With the rise of 10 and 25 man versions of every raid and heroic modes, however, we are looking at something fairly unique to this expansion, a somewhat drastic power curve to gear scaling. This isn't a new idea, and it's not one Blizzard themselves haven't commented on. It's one thing to be aware of it in a general way, however, and another to sit back and look at it. That's a comparison of itemization on select 2H weapons from the first crafted epic (equivalent to a Naxx 10 drop) up to hard mode Ulduar 25, which puts it squarely in the middle of the current expansion cycle. What you're looking at is a steady gain that leads to a nearly 60 DPS increase between the starting weapon (Titansteel Destroyer) and the last one compared (Voldrethar).
First Microsoft Windows Phone 7 Series devices to boast 480 x 800 pixel displays, HD2 owners sigh
Even though Microsoft's big MIX event is still days away, the Windows Phone 7 Series development platform is already pretty well defined. It's also clear that Microsoft wants to keep things tidy for developers by requiring all WP7 phones to meet a certain base-level spec. Now, thanks to a post from Microsoft's Shawn Hargreaves, we know the display resolution for the first batch of Microsoft's next generation phones: 480 x 800 (WVGA) pixels at launch, with a future update that will introduce a 320 x 480 (HVGA) native resolution. Dedicated hardware will ensure image scaling across all those pixels without taxing the GPU. That allows game developers, for example, to write to a lower resolution (requiring less horsepower) and then scale up as required while remaining compatible to a variety of screen resolutions. Now, for those playing along at home, the HD2 getting ready to launch on T-Mobile in the USA is also WVGA and it features a 1GHz Snapdragon processor from Qualcomm, Microsoft's WP7 silicon partner. So we can assume (but not guarantee) that it meets the image scaling hardware requirements described by Hargreaves. Man, if only the HD2 had three-buttons. [Thanks, Cytrix]
Moonkin may receive a buff soon
Balance druid performance has been noticeably lagging in raids. While moonkin have long had a problem being too easily +haste-capped with Wrath, there's another issue on the not-too-distant horizon in the form of the "lunar +crit cap." Essentially, when a lunar eclipse procs and the player turns to the Starfire portion of the rotation, the combination of raid buffs, gear, and procs make Starfire crits all but inevitable. While this may sound like a welcome DPS increase, it does have the unhappy result of the spec seeing increasingly less benefit from the +haste and +crit that exists in abundance on Icecrown raid gear. Blizzard has known about this for a while, but the issue with Nature's Grace and the soft +haste cap isn't easily fixable without impacting both Restoration and Starfire (where the NG proc is still useful), and the +crit cap is the effect of unintended stat inflation in Wrath. Enter Zarhym on Wednesday to announce news of a possible change to the Earth and Moon talent in a future mini-patch, granting 2/4/6% spell damage to the moonkin, up from 1/2/3%. While this isn't set in stone (and Balance players are already aware that an overhaul to the Nature's Grace issue probably won't happen until the Cataclysm content patch at the earliest), it's been greeted as a decent short-term fix. It's also a means of improving the scaling of what remains the moonkin's best stat (+spellpower). Zarhym did warn that the change may not go through in this form, and we're also waiting for news on when this mini-patch will hit. Stay tuned for future announcements.
Totem Talk: On unique gearing and gear consolidation
Totem Talk is the column for shamans. Matthew Rossi is a vampire robot from beyond the stars who came to Earth to learn the true meaning of love and to write columns about shamans. Seriously, it was in my alien creator's first lines of code when they programmed me. "Drink human blood, write shaman column." The love thing was somewhere around the second packet of directives. Last week on Totem Talk, we jumped our cherried out Dodge Charger out of a warehouse before it exploded and then complained that we were too old for this kind of thing to our reckless younger partner. We're supposed to retire in a few days, we informed him. There may also have been some discussion about shaman itemization in there. I'll have to check the credits later to make sure. The main issues with shaman itemization are more complex than can be easily summarized: many commenters correctly pointed out, for instance, that I was giving short shrift to enhancement's constant struggle to stay both hit and expertise capped (in fact, even calling them caps instead of targets shows that I'm not going into full detail) since the changes to the spec implemented with Wrath of the Lich King. Basically, one of the issues here is the very hybridization of the class: since now enhancement has become a spec that uses both spell damage and melee strikes, it has to hew to both spell hit rating levels (which are generally higher than melee targets) and stats like expertise, which is only useful for melee. Shamans are interesting in that they are a hybrid class more in their playstyles than in terms of roles: like priests and warriors, shamans are only two of the three possible roles, being either healers or DPS. We can of course quibble about the nature of DPS, and if 'ranged DPS' and 'melee DPS' are distinct enough roles to be divided in focus. I personally believe they are, based on watching my guild struggle to recruit ranged and being thick on the ground with melee. But as a result of having two damage specs and one healing spec, shamans have a lot of cross-hybridization conflict built into their itemization.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: The Luck Of The Drop
It's been a remarkably grueling month for me, so I can't say I'll be sorry to see April finally end. As much fun as the new content is, a lot of personal issues (including a sick rabbit,vet trips and the like on the top as a kind of panic frosting to everything else) have made it hard to squeeze in the time to do anything but raid nowadays. I fell asleep trying to do the Argent Tournament dailies. I picked up the saddest ring ever last night (let the search for a sadder ring commence) and got to thinking about the peculiar way warriors have to rely on loot luck. (Yes, I'm aware all classes have to rely on luck for drops.) Since frankly I don't want to write the often threatened nerd rage post over fury (and I'm starting to be discontented by arms' performance, as improved as it is) I thought talking about gear less from a 'here are the stats of every drop you want in Ulduar' way could be interesting.We all know eventually I'll be doing that, too. But since the instance still hasn't revealed all of its goodies, Ulduar loot discussions are always an exercise in finding out you missed something. It seems worth it to me to wait for more things to be discovered before tackling that job.
Adobe demos Photoshop CS4's content-aware scaling
In a QuickTime screencast, Adobe's Russell Brown demonstrates content-aware scaling, a feature of Photoshop CS4, due to be released this month. A lower-resolution YouTube demo from Lynda.com is available here, if you don't want to download a huge QuickTime movie. The content is different, but you'll get the idea. Adobe licensed an algorithm that senses "dead" areas in photos, and resizes the image to avoid squashing or stretching every object. In the video, Brown demonstrates resizing an image of four golfers, interactively removing space between and around the golfers, but leaving the golfers' proportions correct. He also demonstrates resizing a Volkswagen bus, making it a more "economical" size, but automatically keeping the wheels round. For those looking for a compelling reason to upgrade to Photoshop CS4, this might be it. If not, what is? Let us know by leaving a comment. [Via Swissmiss and Michael Sippey.]
Pets Scaling in Wrath: Hit percentage is in, resilience and xp bonuses are out
A while back, class designer Koraa told Warlocks that their pets would be getting their master's hit percentage. Today, he confirmed the same for Hunter pets. This should definitely be a godsend for raid level DPSers of both classes. Conventional wisdom is that reaching your personal hit cap is pretty much the single best way to increase your personal DPS total, and being able to do the same for pets should only provide a noticable increase to DPS, as well as keep any special buffs or debuffs said pets apply coming in with a minimum of interruption. Unfortunately, something else Koraa said on the same post is a little less exciting -- resilience is nowhere on the table for being shared. They believe that they currently have the right amount of survivability for pets. In a group situation, you or your group should be healing the pet, and in Arena play, any time spent killing the pet provides a benefit in the form "crowd control" while the DPS is focus firing your pet. Unfortunately, as the player of a level 70 Hunter and Warlock who have both seen extensive 2v2 Arena play, I'm not sure it's that simple.
When the going gets tough
A few friends and I have begun leveling alts in the interests of having a few more 70's around for Wrath, and I got a comment on my Warrior after she dinged 29. "We'll need to get you some good blues," said a buddy, a 70-Paladin-turned-10-Shaman (in hindsight, probably cringing over said toon's Armory profile). "Warrior 30-40 is kinda tough."It didn't mean much to me at the time, but I started thinking about it while contemplating the possibility of starting a Hordeside Hunter. A 1-10 Hunter without a pet is a fairly unpleasant (if mercifully quick) experience, but that one is pretty obvious while others seem less so. There's a strange alchemy of level, quest drops, scaling, gear, dungeons, and skills that seem to combine to make life tougher in certain level ranges.A 2005 guide to classes' relative leveling speed insisted that classes alternately sped and slowed as they aged and that the difference could be tracked statistically, and while I'm not sure I trust all of their math (and the information's outdated anyway), you can't fault the amount of work that went into it. Moreover, as the commenters point out, someone who picks a Rogue as a main is not necessarily playing the game with the same goals in mind as someone who picked, say, a Priest. A less scientific, but more detailed, look at leveling speed and class difficulties was written by Breanni of WarcraftPets.com, and her experiences seem to gel a bit more with conventional wisdom, particularly with respect to the speed of Hunter and Warlock leveling. That being said, Druid 1-20 was pretty ugly, Shaman late-30's is a parade of mana inefficiency, and I'm not looking forward to getting another Hunter to 10.
2.4.2 Hunter Changes: Aspect of the Viper, Growl, and the boar's last stand
So Growl has been having some problems since 2.4 went live. Pets refuse to cast it in the right order, which is wreaking havoc with Hunter aggro, especially on boar pets, who depend on a Charge/Growl combination to gain their fabled massive aggro. I myself have noticed that I have a lot harder time keeping aggro from my beloved boar Bonnie when I solo on my Hunter. So now on the PTR, we have some new lines in the latest update of the patch notes: • Boar Charge: This ability will no longer make Growl cast immediately after it generates excessive threat. • The pet ability Growl will no longer scale with pet Attack Power. It should also be noted that Nethaera has said that Growl will now scale with Hunter AP instead of Pet AP, so there's no fear that it's become a non-scaling flat skill. Now, this all sounds somewhat ominous, but what does it actually mean?
Dungeon Runners Build 95 patch notes
The free, ad-supported title Dungeon Runners has updated to Build 95, and extensive patch notes have been posted on the official site. The meat of the new build centers around a revamping of the current PvP system, which the developers admit hadn't been the game's strong suit previously. The upgraded system involves scaling everyone's level in a PvP battle to 101, to make matchmaking quicker and fairer. However, players will still have an incentive to better their characters, as the game will differentiate toons that are well-equipped and skilled for their level, and make their level 101 incarnation stronger. Similarly, a poorly equipped character will end up with a weak level 101 in PvP. The "magical rebalancing" (to borrow their phrase) will also account for outnumbering, and will boost the strength of players on the overwhelmed side.Along with the PvP updates, there were a few other tweaks to skills, items, the UI, and a bunch of new quests. The full list of changes is linked below at the Dungeon Runners website, and you can also download the game there.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Protection
The Care and Feeding of Warriors narrowly avoided a prophylactic joke in the title this week. Seriously, Matthew Rossi actually went to sleep chuckling about how funny it was going to be. Thankfully, when he woke up he realized he had been tired the night before and the joke was stupid, so he decided not to make it. Of course, by telling you this, he gets you to imagine all sorts of jokes that he may or may not have actually made.We all know that changes are coming to just about every class in 2.3, and one of those changes is one that is intended to increase the solo play ability of dedicated healers. This is great news, of course, because it shows that the folks at Blizzard are interested in making sure that all specs have at least some viability for the aspects of the game that are necessary to prepare for instancing and raiding, namely farming for mats and questing for the repair money we all need without having to level another toon to 70 just to do our farming for us. That's why we checked the upcoming changes to warriors to see how they addressed solo prot warrior scaling.Sound of a lot of crickets chirping.Well, they nerfed mace spec. That'll help prot warriors solo and quest because... it will upset PvP warriors? No, that doesn't seem like it would help. Devastate combines the effects of sunder armor? Well, I mean... good for tanking, but not really a tremendous boost to soloing unless the DPS of the attack is going up considerably. As it stands, devastate does half weapon damage, basically. It was briefly doing enough damage to be viable when it was changed to let it hit with both weapons if you were dual wielding (many prot warriors dual wield when trying to do damage because of the spec's increase to one handed weapon damage) but then that was changed back and they were left up soloing creek without a boat, as it were.The tactical mastery change? Does nothing at all for or against prot warriors.Disarm immunity gone? Well, Weapon Mastery is an arms talent. I fail to see how nerfing the top tier of an arms talent in any way helps protection warriors solo content or do daily quests. I guess I'm just blind.Seriously, I am always for a class getting buffed as long as the buffs don't make them too powerful, and the changes to healing on gear don't strike me as overpowered. I'm not angered by the changes to healing spec soloability. I just want to know why warriors are the only class expected to so thoroughly eviscerate their own soloing capacity in order to tank.
PlayStation 3 can scale after all
The PlayStation 3's hardware scaling capabilities (or lack thereof) have been a serious point of contention since word first got out of the console's potential shortcoming, which left owners of HDTVs of a certain resolution unable to use their sets to their fullest potential with the console in its current state and unsure they'd ever be able to do so. Well, it looks like Sony may have a few tricks up its sleeve, with Beyond3D reporting that the company's latest software development kit includes measures that game makers can take in order to implement "hardware accelerated horizontal scaling" in their titles, ensuring that they'll always look their best, even on 1080i sets. What's not so clear is what this means for all the current games that pump out less-than-desirable results when hooked up to the aforementioned HDTVs, with patches seemingly one option but no official word given on that possibility. Although you can bet that this won't be the last word we hear on the subject.[Via Joystiq]
De-interlacing and scaling the most important buying factors?
While the whole "1080i vs. 1080p" debate could likely go on for a good decade or so, having that oh-so-coveted "Full HD" logo slapped on your set evidently isn't the answer to all your HD problems, at least if you watch a good percentage of cable / satellite-provided content. A rather informative writeup / rant over at HD1080i lends a bit more insight into the ongoing discussion of when 1080p differs from 1080i, and goes on to explain that many incorrectly processed images cause quite a bit of dissatisfaction when it comes to quality, and oftentimes, it's not even your fault. Sure, folks outputting 1080p from an HD DVD or Blu-ray player get the benefit of seeing a progressive, pre-cleaned-up image, which basically removes all the hard work from your TV's internal scaler; however, for those watching a processed episode of TNT HD's Charmed, for instance, could witness a bit of "interlacing crop errors when de-interlacing is not done properly," rather than just a correctly rendered motion blur. Essentially, this fellow attempts to convince us that 1080p is an important matter, and it's great to have it there "when you need it," even though it's not likely that we see 1080p content coming through our cable STB anytime soon. So be sure and hit the read link to take a gander at yet another perspective, because a bit more research never hurt anyone, eh?
Microsoft shows off Ana, says no HD DVD in Xbox 360... ever
Microsoft recently had the guys from Ars Technica over to show how the Xbox 360 compares to the PlayStation 3 on one of Sony's own 1080p Bravias, and of course didn't find much difference except in cases where scaling came into play. They looked at the 360's hardware scaler, Ana, which means while it may lack the advanced digital A/V output of the PS3, it will allow every HDTV owner to play games in HD resolutions over component or VGA. Also of note was their response to questions about possibly putting an HD DVD drive in the console, the answer was a firm no, and even referred to the company's own format of choice as a potential "next Betamax". The lack of HDMI may be resolved soon, but with the high def war still very much in flux don't look for Microsoft to put all of its eggs in the HD DVD basket just yet.
Toshiba updates Regza LCD lineup for native 1080p
Toshiba added 1080p output to their HD DVD line yesterday and since you'll need a TV to watch that on, they also updated their US line with new 1080p Regza LCDs. Unlike the Japanese editions of these HDTVs, they include just one Ethernet jack for Toshiba's THINC network capability to stream photos and MP3s (but no video like the Pioneer Elite plasmas) from a connected PC. The 47-inch 47LZ196 and 42-inch 42LZ196 are part of the Cinema Series Pro line, include 12-bit digital video processing for enhanced colors, 8ms response time but most importantly for HD-XA2 buyers (or Blu-ray users, we won't ask where your 1920x1080 source comes from) feature Native Mode, to display pixel-for-pixel 1080p with no scaling or overscanning. They are both CableCard ready, with dual HDMI inputs and "high-gloss black cabinetry". According to the original press release, the 47- and 42-inch models are due this month with MSRPs of $4,599 and $3,399 respectively, however Big Picture Big Sound says they have been updated to expect them in October, with MSRPs of $3,999 and $2,999 respectively. Combining the sooner date and lower prices sounds like a fair compromise to us.[Via Big Picture Big Sound]
Patch 1.12: Scaling Rogue Skills
One major rogue complaint has long been the fact that several core rogue abilities did not scale as the rogues' gear and stats improved. Thus, the eviscerate damage you did right after hitting level 60 was the same eviscerate damage you would do when decked out in full epic gear. Come patch 1.12, this will be changing - albeit slightly. Drysc has posted some specific numbers explaining how the abilities rupture, garrote, and eviscerate will scale with attack power. The increase in power looks fairly minor to me, but some increase is better than none. For druids, Drysc has confirmed that the cat form abilities that mirror these rogue skills will also scale based on attack power, but there are no specific numbers on them.
