Welcome back PCWorld fans, to another roundup of some of the biggest news items of the week.
Within this past week, there has been no shortage of important happenings to cover.
There is a bad situation for a handful of New World gamers who are dealing with dying graphics
cards. Microsoft sheds some much-needed light on who will get to take advantage of DirectStorage.
And to round out the week we have news of graphics cards running on unexpected platforms. We also
have a revival of a classic gaming franchise that has Adam and me quite excited to see what comes of
it. Lots to go through this in this video and not a lot of time to do it, so let’s power through!
Amazon Games’ New World is the eCommerce giant’s latest MMO title that has made plenty
of headlines this past week. Not because of its world-building or gameplay mechanics that are
trying to bring something new to the table in the genre. Instead, it’s because of what has happened
to some of the PC gamers who have taken part in the open beta. What happened you ask? Well,
turns out a few people had their high-end graphics cards get bricked after attempting to take part in
the open beta. What makes that news is that it wasn’t average folks with RX 580s or GTX 1060s,
it was plaguing those with high-end RTX 3090s! That makes this one sting a bit more.
The good news is that those who had their EVGA RTX 3090 FTW’s bricked from this have supposedly
had their replacements already shipped out. So that alone tells us that it wasn’t a massively
widespread issue. BUT, EVGA didn’t disclose exactly how many dead cards were reported outside
of saying it was ‘a small handful’. What the exact cause of the dying GPUs isn’t 100% confirmed,
but most speculation points to the fact that the game originally had an uncapped framerate in the
menu. This supposedly allowed the graphics cards to go full tilt and possibly overdraw in the menu
scenes. Amazon Games has since implemented a patch that adds a framerate cap for the menus,
just in case you want to load this game up.
Speaking of loading, Windows DirectStorage is one of the big updates coming to PCs
and is quite exciting for gamers out there running high-speed NVMe storage. This is
something used by the current Xbox Series X and S consoles for their Velocity Storage system.
It allows the system to send data directly to the dedicated VRAM on the graphics card
rather than to the system memory. If you remember, this is also how NVIDIA’s RTXIO
works. But one of the concerns with Windows DirectStorage was that Microsoft was going to
lock it to Windows 11 only and force Windows 10 users to upgrade. Thankfully,
this isn’t the case. Now Microsoft says that if people want to take advantage of minimal to
no load times and heavily reduced texture pop-in, DirectStorage is coming to Windows 10. Either way,
it’s clear that some PC gamers aren’t too keen on Windows 11 at this point, so there is always
Linux as an alternative in the future. And NVIDIA seems to be embracing it heavily!
Okay so if you wanted to ditch Windows, what about X86? That could very well be possible in
the future. I’m not sure how far out that could be, but NVIDIA has given us a taste of what is
possible with their latest showcase. Along with Bethesda and MachineGames studios, NVIDIA has
shown off Wolfenstein Youngblood running RTX features on a system powered by a MediaTek
Kompanio 1200 ARM-based CPU and Linux. I’m talking Real-Time Ray Tracing and DLSS without the need of
an Intel or AMD CPU. But of course, it was running on an RTX 3060 graphics card as you do need a GPU
for this to happen. It makes sense to see NVIDIA push in this direction knowing their involvement
in ARM-based CPU technology over the recent years, and likely even more as things progress
in the PC space. But NVIDIA isn’t the only ones with their GPUs running off the x86 beaten path.
Don’t forget about RISC-V! More specifically SiFive and their Unmatched RISC-V Motherboard
for developers that they released last year. This board is capable of accepting PCIe add-in cards,
so why not make that a high-end graphics card? In a story picked up by Toms Hardware, the Computer
scientist Rene Rebe decided that needed to be done. He managed to patch a Linux kernel to
add support for the AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT and loaded drivers so that the board would accept
and run with full hardware support. He was able to get it up and running to output to a display,
and was even able to get it to render 3D graphics with hardware acceleration - not a small feat
for sure! But I’m not sure either of the last two topics is quite ready to run what EA has in store.
Normally I’m not too keen on the remake scene. Quite often it seems like quick and easy cash
grabs, but occasionally a Final Fantasy 7 Remake or Resident Evil 2 Remake comes along
and proves that it can not only be done right but with excellence. EA seems to be ready to give
remakes a go, and has announced they are remaking one of their greatest survival horror titles,
Dead Space. While I won’t pretend to be the biggest Dead Space fan out there (since I
felt the third game stumbled) I do look forward to seeing what the studio can do with modern hardware
and the recent version of the Frostbite engine.
And with that, I bring this week’s chart-topping news to a close.
Amazon Games New World woes are an ongoing affair, so make sure you check back to Gordon’s article
often for updates. DirectStorage is NOT going to be limited to Windows 11 so rejoice if
you game from an NVMe drive (which you should). X86 Has some real competition
coming from ARM if they don’t watch it. RISC-V is proving quite the potent platform,
so keep an eye on that one as I certainly will be. And a Dead Space Remake is coming - what
more could I say about that! If you enjoyed this roundup hit that thumbs up button and make sure
you’re subscribed here at PCWorld for even more PC hardware and software goodness in the future.