Gaming News

As we all know by now, the RTX 3080 launch was a complete disaster. Websites crashing, hardly any stock - that's well documented around t'interweb. What's come to light since then is tales of crashes under load. Tech experts have narrowed this down to the choice of capacitors which form the power regulation on the back of the board, behind the main chip. Given that most cards have a hole in the backplate around the cooler bracket, you can easily see these capacitors.

Jay explains it very well in his video (linked below) but the main issue seems to be on cards that only use POSCAP capacitors. Those that use MLCC, or a mix of POSCAP and MLCC are less affected.

EVGA and ASUS both delayed launch of their top end cards to rectify this, and BIOS/driver updates could mitigate the issue to a degree (eg by lowering the boost clock). Note that the 3090 series are also affected by this.

• Explanation of the issue: JayzTwoCents
• List of cards and their capacitor layout: Reddit
• Further details about the capacitor options: videocardz.com

Earlier this week, Left4Dead 2 received its first major update in years. The Last Stand is a huge community-made update which includes a new full campaign based on the Lighthouse Survival map, twenty survival arenas and four new scavenge arenas. A host of new achievements, weapons, NPC dialog and bug fixes complete the update, along with a new shovel and pitchfork battle!

You can read the complete release notes and write-ups on the L4D Community and Steam L4D Page

As expected, the launch day was a complete clusterfeck. Nvidia went out of stock of their Founders Edition immediately, and most other sites went down under the load. Only a lucky few managed to bag a card from this first batch, and those that missed out saw prices rocket for pre-orders of the next batch. For example at Overclockers.co.uk, the Zotac Trinity went up from £649 to £720, which they are blaming on Brexit. Really?! Brexit caused a £71 increase in one day?!

The wait for more stock may end up being a good thing, as it will enable gamers to study the reviews of all the different designs and pick the one that's right for their build. Hopefully within the next couple of months, most cards will be freely available to buy.

Here's a handy comparison chart at overclock.net

The review/teardown embargo on the new range of RTX graphics cards was lifted yesterday, and here are a pick from the main tech channels:

• JayzTwoCents Benchmarks
• Linus TL;DR
• Gamers Nexus Benchmarks incl power usage
• Gamers Nexus 3080 Teardown

The general conclusion is that the 3080 Founders Edition is a great card - awesome performance compared to the 2080, and a very well thought out cooling system that in the end has no impact on overall system temperatures (in fact it may help it). All this at a price point that is within reach of many compared to the 20xx series.

Here are a couple more videos regarding the new Nvidia cards, the first of which is due to be released later this week:

• Jayz unboxes a 3080 but NDA limits what he can say
• Gamers Nexus talks about binning and various other topics, incl Xbox Series X/S

In this video, Jay answers a bunch of questions he's received regarding the upcoming 3000 series. Topics covered include PCIe Gen 4, Founders Edition, the 12 pin power connector, plus discussing the likelihood of a 3080Ti to bridge the huge price gap to the 3090.

Watch the vid here at JayzTwoCents

Following Nvidia's big announcement on 1st September, details of partner manufacturer cards are starting to emerge. In the linked video, Nexus covers cards by EVGA, MSI, Zotac, Gigabyte and Asus. Watch in full on Gamers Nexus

Last night, Nvidia introduced the world to their new Ampere range of graphics cards, aka the 3000 series. This new architecture suggests almost double the performance over the previous Turing series, all at a refreshingly low price point (well, except for the 3090 which is listed at £1400)

There's loads of info online, plus summaries from the usual suspects: JaysTwoCents, Gamer Nexus, Linus Tech Tips and an early look at the actual hardware from Digital Foundry

The various regional grand finals took place yesterday, with Herioc coming out on top of the European group. Here are all the grand final results:

• Herioc 3 - 0 Team Vitality (Europe)
• Tyloo 3 - 1 ViCi Gaming (Asia)
• Renegades 3 - 0 Avant Gaming (Australia and Oceania)
• Team Liquid 2 - 3 Evil Geniuses (North America)

This is a great result for Herioc, the draw being wide open after NIP beat Astralis in the quarters, and then NIP going out 2-0 to Vitality in the semis.

Anyone watching on Twitch would have noticed the setups of each team - very impressive, and definitely not cheap. It goes to show just how much money there is in elite e-sports right now!

This year's ESL One event in Cologne started yesterday and continues today with more first round matches. You can watch the event on the ESL Twitch stream, or just follow the results via Twitter

The Nvidia site is showing a countdown to a "Special Event" on 1st September - what could it be? The page suggests a look back at their products since 1999, but could there also be an announcement of RTX30xx perhaps?

There is speculation over on Shacknews and elsewhere in the Twitterverse

Microsoft have confirmed that Xbox Live Gold will continue for the foreseeable future, despite the growing popularity of their new Game Pass scheme.

There are good articles on it over at Shacknews and The Verge

It looks like the Trusted Mode issues that plagued CS:GO last week have been fixed in the latest version. The previously suggested beta version is no longer compatible with up-to-date servers, so you have no choice but to take the non-beta version. However, there don't appear to be any problems starting the game, even with things like Corsair iCue and MSI Afterburner running. Whether they have fixed the application detection, whitelisted more applications or just rolled the whole thing back remains to be seen.

counter-strike.net has the change list from this week's release.

Day two of PupWAN draws to a close, and what a good couple of days they have been! We've played quite a range of games, including CS:GO, Wreckfest, GRID Autosport, Ticket to Ride, plus Age of Empires II Definitive Edition. New to our LAN parties was a BobLAN/DFC themed quiz, compiled and hosted by Pup using Kahoot. It was a great quiz with something for everyone - hopefully the first of many. More to follow as day three unfolds...

The second virtual LAN Party starts this evening, run by Pup using his new found AWS skills to host the servers. The schedule will be updated on the PupWAN page, and also in our Discord group.

At the weekend, Valve released changes to CS:GO's anticheat technology. They have started the process of replacing Prime status with a new Trusted Mode, and it's not been without problems.

In order to get a high trust score, you really need to be running the game in Trusted Mode. It automatically defaults to this, although you can turn it off via a command line switch. Trusted Mode works by checking for ANY background processes which MAY interact with the game - this includes thing like Windows Defender, Corsair iCue, Razer Synapse, MSI Afterburner/RivaTuner Stats Server, Asus audio drivers - the list goes on. If any of these are running, the game refuses to start in Trusted Mode and will automatically restart in untrusted mode.

If you find yourself in this situation, there is a simple workaround but it may not last too long:

• Go to the Properties page for CS:GO in the Steam client
• Go to the Betas tab
• Select Beta version 1.37.5.9

If you want to find out which applications prevented Trusted Mode from working, look here whilst you are trying to start it:

Steam\userdata\[username]\730\local\cfg\trustedlaunch.cfg

This has caused uproar in the CS:GO community, as it punishes legitimate gamers who just happen to have some hardware drivers or security software running in the background. Valve's advice - disable all these applications - ffs! Here are some discussion threads on the topic:

• Reddit
• Rock Paper Shotgun
• VG247

The first cinematic trailer for FarCry 6 has been published by Ubisoft - watch it over on Youtube

Have you ever been playing CS:GO late at night, maybe been a bit loud after a couple of beers, only to get a bang on the door or a "too loud!" text message from t'other 'alf? Well, here's a basic soundproofing solution to avoid being nagged mid-game...

How to Soundproof your Gaming Room

Steam's annual summer sale is now on - find out more at the Steam Store

Titanfall 2, Apex Legends, Dead Space 3 and Sims 4 are among some of the EA titles that will be soon available on the Steam platform. It is well documented that gamers much prefer Steam to EA's Origin platform. Indeed, EA have been trying to play catchup for years but have never quite had the smooth user experience and flexibility that Steam offers.

Another point in Steam's favour is caching - whilst it is possible to build a cache server for EA games, it's nowhere near as simple as building a Steam cache.

How the mechanics will work remains to be seen - presumably it will match the Ubisoft integration, where the games are listed and installed under Steam, but take you to the Uplay login when you try to start the games.