Gaming News

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.

Another good turnout for our Friday Night gaming session. First up was CS:GO with an hour on Casual, and then a few rounds of Arms Race. Wreckfest was next, where the team games were great fun. Sadly no win for AngryDaz this time though!

Bean wins at CS:GO and AngryDaz wins at Wreckfest - what's going on?! The world has gone mad.

Is it possible to kill an entire five-man team with one shot in CS:GO? You'd have thought not, but here's proof:

• Victim's point of view: Reddit


• Shooter's point of view: Youtube

What's even more amazing is that the shooter was blinded by a flashbang a split second before he fired - incredible!

One from last week - the developers of Wreckfest had promised to fix the really slow loading times, and they certainly have. The previous version took around 1 minute 20 seconds to load the game to the initial menu, whereas the new version takes 15-20 seconds, a huge and welcome reduction.

The first ever virtual BobLAN event took place this weekend, and I think everyone will agree it was a complete success. Of course, one of the major aspects of the real BobLANs is just being there in person to catch up with everyone and enjoy the food and drink that's on offer. That said, Discord came to the rescue and we had 19 people on the video chat at one point - not only an amazing turnout but remarkable that the technology held up, even whilst gaming.

On the gaming front, some games worked better than others. Here's a rundown of what we played and how it went:

• CS:GO - Pup did a great job of setting up the servers on his AWS account, and this was the go-to game throughout the weekend. Even the scripted game mode changing process worked smoothly, as did the new map selection we tried
• Wreckfest - the other favourite throughout the weekend performed flawlessly. No dedicated server, but we were able to spin it up on a client PC and with the appropriate firewall ports mapped it worked a treat
• GRID Autosport - we only had one go on this, but it was quite good fun
• Rocket League - the tournament was fun, but a little one-sided. Well done Foxy and DBoy!!
• Battlefield 1 - didn't feature much but we enjoyed playing it. The maps are just too big for the numbers we usually have available
• Battlefield V - for some reason, we really didn't enjoy this and it's unlikely we'll play it again. Shame, seeing as it wasn't cheap
• Snow Runner - watching Foxy drive the truck round was actually quite addictive!

So there you have it - BobWAN in a nutshell. To view the full schedule of what we played, who attended and links to the photos head over to the BobWAN 2020.1 page. Hopefully the next one will be a physical event, but we now know that we can do it remotely if required.

The first gathering of 2020, albeit a virtual one, starts later today. Meet up in Discord to vote on games, join the voice chats etc. Also keep an eye on the BobWAN 2020.1 page for the schedule and links to join servers where possible.