Gaming News

Normally I do a short writeup of what we played, what went well, what we ate etc. This time I think I will hand over to the guys who gave some great comments in the Discord channel at the end of the event:

• eddier1981: "Thanks very much guys, had a good time, glad I made it for my first pup quiz, that was a good laugh. When we get back to normal bobslans I will be bringing my pimp coat (dressing gown)"
• Pup: "Well played @trebz for a great event! Apologies for leaving early and not helping with tidy up - promise I’ll help next time. Great mix of games... some classics, some new and some new mods for classics. So...DazWan in April?"
• Bynar: "Some great gaming this weekend, BF1 last night stands out to me, some really tight balanced matches with good numbers! You should have suggested it sooner @Russcky. Great bantz as always, let's get another in the diary."
• Russcky: "@Bynar really good games as much as I’m hated for it haha. @DBoy I’ll use base guns just for you next time :) I think the key to BF1 is numbers ideally we want a 6v6 or more for it to work well"
• Lynx: "the numbers for BF1 yesterday were great, and was quite well balanced really. Great to catch up with everyone after such a 'long time no see' :)"
• Trebz: "Aye great weekend as always chaps. Cheers for the quiz pup!"
• AngryDaz: "Thoroughly enjoyable. Well done everyone!"
• DBoy: "Amazing weekend as usual, great games, great bantz, great fun... thanks @Russcky appreciate that, sure it will make all the difference :)"
• Wozani: "aye, great to see you all :)"
• Fox: "Thanks for organising @trebz, top work on the quiz @Pup and nice work on the racing front from @EvilGoblin. And a big thank you to everyone for providing something positive to focus on when the world seems to be in need of a hard reboot or at least a couple of targeted Alt+F4s! :wink: As discussed in the early hours today, only @Lynx really has the infrastructure and processes in place to host these events with the level of professionalism that we expect (and deserve?!?!) and whilst @Pup and @trebz have done a tremendous job in stepping up and organising additional events to fill the calendar it would be unfair to expect them to do so again so quickly. However as things stand having something to look forward to - aside from our numbers in the vaccine queue (spoiler alert: @Lynx is the bookies favourite :)) is very important - so I'm happy to announce that the next event will be BobLAN BobWAN PupWAN DanWAN FoxWAN! Dates to be agreed/announced in due course but March/April time should allow us to all put in the hard yards and garner sufficient brownie points with wives/partners to allow for us to "slip away" for the weekend. Obviously we need to play things by ear at present but it's likely that we'll still be in "lockdown" by then, so I'm already looking forward to some more lockdown haircuts - although @NooNoo22's put down a strong marker for everyone already :). I'll keep you posted and obviously we'll have plenty of time to chat during our regular Friday night (and Monday race sessions?)."

The first remote BobLAN of the year starts today, otherwise known as DanWAN. Follow the latest developments on the DanWAN page, where you'll find the schedule and links to social and the photo gallery.

The event turned out to be an announcement of the RTX3060 for release late February, some new mobile chipsets and a raft of games that will be supporting the RTX platform (ray tracing, DLSS and the Reflex latency reduction technology). Nothing about Ti or Super models for the RTX3070 or RTX3080 to bridge the gaps, nor anything concrete about improving supply of existing cards. Meh

Nvidia have a Special Broadcast Announcement scheduled for today at 5pm GMT. Not sure what's in it - probably something else that nobody can buy.

Watch the event here.

The long-awaited dystopian RPG Cyberpunk 2077 went on general release overnight. The story-based FPS by the studio behind the Witcher series has been delayed a few times, and with a few launch day bugs, expect some hefty patches to follow. There are reports of some performance issues and glitches, but these should be sorted out fairly quickly.

You will need a powerful PC to get the best out of it - a 3070 or better is a must as DLSS is required to max out the settings at 60fps or more.

There are plenty of trailers and gameplay clips on the game's Youtube channel

The first virtual LAN party of 2021 will start on Thursday 21st January, and run through to the early house of Sunday morning. Expect more updates nearer the time via @boblan on Twitter, and on our DanWAN 2021.1 page.

It's been a while since we covered a PUBG update, but patch 9.2 seems quite an interesting one. The main features are a new vehicle - the Dirt Bike, but the one that will change how players use vehicles is the ability to fire a sidearm as a driver. Only pistols plus the sawed-off can be fired by the driver, and there are limitations on the arc of fire if there are any passengers in the vehicle, but it's a welcome feature.

In addition to the above, there are a bunch of gameplay changes, bug fixes and map updates.

There is a full writeup on Shacknews

The next virtual BobLAN will start around lunchtime on Thursday 22nd October, and end late Saturday night/Sunday morning. Follow the schedule and social via the BobWAN 2020.3 page.

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