THE BLOWING OF MINDS - E3

Well that has been a mind blowing series of revelations ...

What do you mean it is not over yet? Cap'n ... I simply cannae take no more! Lol!

Stunning ...

Hmm now let me see ... wanted to type this out before I leave my house. Now ... notes.

I did not watch the PC Gaming show and I will at some stage, probably tonight or tomorrow, but I did read about it. Someone reported it was a bit slow but to be honest how much more could have actually been revealed that was not already?!

That is exactly what I am thinking about the remainder of the E3 spectacle.

Games

Fallout 4 ... obviously

Dishonoured 2 ... pleasingly surprisingly

Dishonoured Definitive Edition ... eyebrow raisingly

Need For Speed ... promisingly

Mass Effect Andromeda ... looking better than Dragon Age Inquisition surprisingly

Ghost Recon Wildlands ... shockingly double time as it did not really look like Ghost Recon, lol

Star Wars Battlefront ... gorgeously but with a few unsure bits (Tie Fighters and X-Wings)

Rise Of The Tomb Raider ... beautifully and assuming it has to come to PC at some stage

Deus Ex Mankind Divided ... What? Where? Who am I? What am I doing on the floor?!

Call Of Duty Black Ops 3 ... surprisingly

Uncharted 4 ... the most interesting of the console games you hope hits the PC but probably never will!

Assassins Creed Syndicate ... because they finally make a game based in a city that is not America ... err or Paris, Rome ... umm was it Rome? Probably Florence. OK, OK they finally make a games set in London!

Rainbow Six Seige ... looks great but I am turned off currently by on-line only games of battle arenas and co-ops

Hmm now I am sure I am forgetting some ... ahh but then I have a perfect excuse for that.

Now for the ones, the notable ones, that were missing, some of which I strongly suspect will appear at next years E3 ...

Elder Scrolls 6

Splinter Cell

Half Life 3 (I am only going on this repeatedly being mentioned by the gaming community I never expected a third after Steam got going!)

And the rest ...

AMD and their Radeon Fury graphics cards along with that shocking double Radeon Fury gaming system toted as being 'the thing' for 4K gaming?!

OK, this was a shock on a number of levels ...

Just the other day I had the only brother I have that is heavily into gaming. I do have another into gaming but he is more the casual shooter and last I checked was on the PS3, though admittedly that was a while ago and I never even thought about the last Christmas.

One of the topics that we covered was graphics cards and he has a nVidia 970 Strix currently and I explained everything I knew about the Radeon Fury and 300 series cards. I stated that yes the 300's were being panned as rebrands but at least the silcone, or I read this wrong, is improved.

I am assuming, and betting, that there is enough difference of a number to number card to make them quicker while more energy efficient at least.

Then we spoke about 4K gaming and I stated how bad things are reported. I basically said ...

"Look how the magazines and reviewers have raved about the R9-290's and now the nVidia 970 and 980 but then all of a sudden you mention 4K and 4K monitors and it all goes tits-up?! Suddenly these amazingly wonderful cards are not that powerful. Funny as I remember graphics cards generations jumping up a resolution each or every other release"

Back in the days when it was all letters referring to any given resolution. I can remember when gaming at 1600x1200 seemed like a distant or impossible dream.

Now we have had a series of generations all gaming at 1920x1080 and then 4K monitors arrive and it all falls apart.

To read that you need two Radeon Fury GPUs to game at 4K was a shock even for me. Surely not? GPUs that are as fast as most nVidia Titan cards and considerably more powerful that the R9-290s and R9-280s, I have the later as a stop gap, and one on its own cannot cut it?!

That was the biggest shock of the machine they announced, good God I cannot remember if they gave it a name?! Lol!

Still there are some plus points to take from all this ...

Firstly it might not seem to be there but it is almost there and you can bet that some refining of the latest GPUs will take place over the next 6 months to a year?

Secondly and as much as they like to harp on about 4K gaming ... and what it looks like ... sorry but nothing out there or likely to come out in the next 6 months is coded with 4K in mind.

The next step up in resolution allows for much finer detail to be displayed on-screen. The fact that all PC games are 1080p and that the PS4 has only been out a bit over a year, I think it is, and this is 1080p and the Xbox One arguably is then no, they wont be for awhile yet.

In fact it is highly likely that other than PC only titles ... err are there any ... other than Star Citizen that is not out, you would have to wait until the PS5 and XBox TWO before they were mainstream.

As  I think the previous generation consoles were on the market for 7 years before the next generation appeared ... well, that could be a hell of a wait?

Which leads me onto what I said to my brother...these days, quite why anyone would shell out a £1,000 for a graphics card that is way over the top, consumes an incredible amount of energy to give you little or no difference from a card half the price is beyond me.

I wonder if reviewers will continue to rave about each card up until one comes out capable of 4K gaming? LMAO!

Oh yes and I nearly forgot ... there was that remark about the double Fury machine handling the Virtual Reality Headsets?! I am assuming they were speaking about 4K VR Headsets?! LMAO!

Maybe I will wait for the next generation Google Cardboard ... hopefully it will be Google ... Carbon?! LMAO!

Still it is an exciting time and I still am of the belief that now that all three platforms are so similar to code for when it comes to gaming that this means that the PC versions will come out far better looking than there console counterparts? All the extra time coding ... umm porting from old machines can be cut by half and the other half adding graphical extras?

Well the excuses are gone, if nothing else.

It is a shame they did not add a port to the consoles where you could plug in a small graphics card to up the graphics power after a couple of years. After all Sony had a flagship laptop, ohh carbon again, that you plugged in a box to containing a more powerful graphics card into to play games. I seriously wanted that laptop! This feature would have certainly helped the XBox One and the resolution wars.

Still it will be very interesting to see what the next 18 months brings!

I was interested in the building aspect of Fallout 4. The game looks absolutely fine to me and I simply cannot wait! I was in my local game store yesterday when a member of staff asked if I needed help and I said only with the impatience to Fallout 4 coming out. He laughed and said he had ordered the special edition that comes with the Pip-Boy. Lucky bleeder! Lol!

I might look into doing that though it is something I do not normally do, I have to admit.

Nice to know the dog in Fallout 4 will not die every five minutes and I have to go back to a previous saved game to save his arse. Nice to know they are using the same game engine too! Not sure if using a different engine would change it too much so that it did not feel like Fallout any more?

If there are any naysayers left as regards Fallout 4 after E3 ... well ... I simply will not know what to say!

The thing is that what I think is if they are showing you actual gaming footage for something appearing on three separate platforms then your going to see the average look anyway. Now I would imagine that with most games, Fallout and Elder Scrolls especially, will look better than that which they showed when it comes to the PC version.

That is the drawback with being honest, you will have to show the look of the game to be expected across all three platforms...while we as PC gamers will likely get to knock the graphics up a notch or two. Hopefully but then I was OK with the graphics anyway but I would welcome more in the way of settings, sure enough.

So, yeah. I do not understand the naysayers.

Lol.

An interesting 12 months ahead, this is for sure and maybe now I wont have to skip copies of PC Gamer because there simply is not enough in their I want to read about?

Here's hoping.

LENOVO 4K GAMING LAPTOP

Well what do you know?!

Now sooner am I wondering many things and when things will be launched and a company I like, Lenovo, have created a rather interesting laptop.

Yes I think 2014 will be a great year, well for technology anyway, I would not like to be a politician, journalist, doctor or Policeman this year. There were some things linked to these I wanted to be....once upon a time and some time ago.

Well technology are tools to m and the more I can manage to acquire the better I will get at what I do and have been doing.

So yes 2014 is certainly starting off with the right sounding notes and these are promising.

Say Hello To Lenovo's 4K Gaming And Entertainment Laptop http://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonevangelho/2014/01/05/say-hello-to-lenovos-4k-gaming-and-entertainment-laptop/

4K MONITOR PRICE FROM DELL SHOCK

Well this is somewhat astounding to read.

A 4K monitor, so instead of 1,080 pixels down the screen you actually have double across and down so 2,160 and 3840 across, which is less than $1,000?!

It gets better still as you may be thinking "oh so $999.99 then but no! How about $699?! Now translated into British Pounds this is, oh crap where is the 'pound key on this keyboard, so should be about GBP450?! Though it never quite works out like that as companies just love ripping off us Brits. Even so at the GBP700 its likely to cost it is still incredible.

When I built my last rig I paid around that price for my 1600x1200 Viewsonic monitor. The size of it was 20 inches in diameter and I should really tell you that this Dell 4K monitor is 28 Inches across! So your talking about something with perfect visuals like that of Apple's retina display but in 28 inches?!

Now of course this has a bit of a quandary for the use in TV. Now maybe the Blu-Ray upscale players are good enough and I simply do not know. But you will likely be in for a bloody long wait to see TV in 4K. Luckily in some cases TV's would double as computer monitors for gaming and this will be true for my system if I ever build it.

There is however one other thing and that is the new CPUs, or more correctly APUs made by AMD who are about to release their new kaveri APU in a mere few days.

I have been waiting for this particular chip fr quite some time now with its Steamroller Cores and its GCN graphics bolted onto the same chip. There is one thing I had been hoping for and that is at least a six CPU core with a GPU core bolted on. Better an 8 but then there was this talk about hUMA and Mantle. The very idea that the GPU cores could be used as CPU cores has the potential to be one hell of a game changer.  Hmm now let me think...I think there are 13 cores on the GPU side?! So added to the four steamroller cores that would be a CPU, when NOT playing games, with 17 cores thereabouts?!

EDIT: AMD KAVERI HAS FOUR CPU CORES AND EIGHT GPU CORES SO CAN BE CLAIMED TO BE A 12 CORE CHIP!

Now of course I do not know whether this will perform as well as a steamroller core, core to core? But even if they are half the speed what you have is something of the equivalent speed of a CPU with no less than ten and a half steamroller cores?! If it is about 50% the speed that is. Similar speed and your talking 17 cores!!

EDIT: AMD KAVERI HAS FOUR CPU CORES AND EIGHT GPU CORES SO CAN BE CLAIMED TO BE A 12 CORE CHIP!

These are the types of things I think about when there is talk of new tech.

The trouble is all this sounds great but can you run a 4K monitor with one? As for Crossfire does all the new toys work when it is on crossfire? Can you now add any other card in crossfire and not just an equally powered card.

Hopefully this will be answered in the next few days. It will also be very interesting to see what else will come out of the AMD APU stable throughout the rest of 2014?!

[Updated] Dell Wasn't Joking About That 28-Inch Sub-$1000 4K Monitor; It's Only $699 http://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonevangelho/2014/01/07/dell-wasnt-joking-about-that-28-inch-sub-1000-4k-monitor-its-only-699/