Friday news, part two:

Kingdom Come: Deliverance DLC detailed in a lengthy launch-day trailer
https://www.pcgamer.com/kingdom-come-deliverance-dlc-detailed-in-a-lengthy-launch-day-trailer/
The Kingdom Come: Deliverance DLC From the Ashes is live today, and developer Warhorse Studios has rolled out a new video providing a closer look at what players can do when they're given the job of bailiff of a village being rebuilt on the ruins of a bandit camp.

Medieval board game The Castles of Burgundy is getting a videogame adaptation
https://www.pcgamer.com/medieval-board-game-the-castles-of-burgundy-is-getting-a-videogame-adaptation/
Digidiced has announced that it is developing a videogame version of board game The Castles of Burgundy to be released in 2019. In The Castles of Burgundy, players work to build the best medieval princedom by building up the territory they control with new settlements, resources, trade, and—of course—castles. It’s one of the modern classic “point salad” strategy board games, where everything you do gets you points, but some things get you points faster and better.

Moonlighter roadmap teases New Game Plus, Familiars, and other free updates
https://www.pcgamer.com/moonlighter-roadmap-teases-new-game-plus-familiars-and-other-free-updates/
The shopkeeping-RPG Moonlighter was released at the end of May and turned out to be pretty good: A "cute and casual" mashup of genres that trades depth and complexity for a more relaxing roguelike experience. We said in our review that it's "meant to be completed and set aside," but players will soon have reason to pick it up again, as developer Digital Sun unveiled a development roadmap teasing big plans for the rest of 2018.

Fortnite's Playground LTM ends in a week, Epic teases plans for the next one
https://www.pcgamer.com/fortnites-playground-ltm-ends-in-a-week-epic-teases-plans-for-the-next-one/
The Fortnite Playground limited time mode finally got underway for real this week and has managed to run along pretty well since. Today Epic announced that the Playground will stay open until July 12—right when Fortnite Season 5 kicks off—at which point it will be taken down and reworked for a future LTM release.

Guild Wars 2 writers fired following heated Twitter exchange with streamer
https://www.pcgamer.com/guild-wars-2-writers-fired-following-heated-twitter-exchange-with-streamer/
Guild Wars 2 developer ArenaNet recently parted ways with writers Jessica Price and Peter Fries, who were involved in a contentious Twitter discussion with Guild Wars 2 Twitch streamer and YouTuber Deroir, who is also partnered with ArenaNet through its content creator program.

Quakes Champions update adds new Molten Falls arena
https://www.pcgamer.com/quakes-champions-update-adds-new-molten-falls-arena/
A new July patch for Quake Champions has just rolled out, and among other things it adds a new map. Dubbed Molten Falls, its as bleak and lava-filled as that name implies, with a focus on verticality, wide halls and "great lines of sight". It's available in all ranked and unranked modes, except for Sacrifice.

Todd Howard on VR: 'Historically, the third generation is where it starts to become popular'
https://www.pcgamer.com/todd-howard-on-vr-historically-the-third-generation-is-where-it-starts-to-become-popular/
Speaking to Venturebeat (via Shack News) at Gamelab, Howard says he prefers virtual reality to augmented reality and is confident in the hardware's long-term appeal. "I'm a little more VR than AR," Howards tells VB. "We did Fallout and Skyrim in VR. We're just about to enter the second generation of VR. Historically, the third generation is where it starts to become popular."

Activision is giving From Software 'much-needed support' on Sekiro's tutorial system
https://www.pcgamer.com/activision-is-giving-from-software-much-needed-support-on-sekiros-tutorial-system/
Sekiro, From Software's next game, subverts nearly everything we've come to expect from Dark Souls, wrote our Steven following a lengthy hands-off demonstration at E3. In conversation with Eurogamer, company president Hidetaka Miyazaki explored these nuances further—in relation to the dev's partnership with Activision, its single character focus and class options, and its tutorials.

Slay the Spire adds Face Trader event, new Shop Relics and neat UI adjustments
https://www.pcgamer.com/slay-the-spire-adds-face-trader-event-new-shop-relics-and-neat-ui-adjustments/
Last week, Slay the Spire added a third game mode and cracked one million copies sold. This week, the roguelike deck-builder adds a new Face Trader feature, five new Shop Relics and Relic Overflow Paging—the latter of which improves how multiple Relics are displayed at once. It now packs up to 25 relics per page. Which, in the heat of a game, is a lot of Relics.

Sea of Thieves could do battle royale, but Rare would want 'a unique spin' if so
https://www.pcgamer.com/sea-of-thieves-could-do-battle-royale-but-rare-would-want-a-unique-spin-if-so/
Think of a game that hasn't been linked to the battle royale genre in the last year. Difficult, isn't it? Sea of Thieves has no plans to venture into last-person-standing territory as yet—but Rare would do so on its own terms, should it ever be considered.

Let's take a look at what have prepared GOG and Steam for us this weekend:

+GOG

• The first of the five deals GOG has for us is the daily deal, Kona, 50% off: https://www.gog.com/promo/20180706_daily_deal_kona
• Next the weekly sale, Snacks to last you seven days, with discounts of up to 90%: https://www.gog.com/promo/20180702_weekly_sale
• There's a special Kingdom Come sale, with a 30% discount: https://www.gog.com/promo/20180705_kingdom_come
• The first of the two weekend sales revolves around the Medieval theme, with up to 80% discounts: https://www.gog.com/promo/20180706_medieval_sale
• The other weekend sale revolves around horror, with discounts of ut to 90%: https://www.gog.com/promo/20180706_horror_weekend

+Steam

• With the Summer Sale over, things have gone back to usual. As such, we have a new daily deal, Papers Please, 50% off: https://store.steampowered.com/app/239030/Papers_Please/
• Rocket League has a free to try weekend, and is 50% off if you want to keep playing: https://store.steampowered.com/app/252950/Rocket_League/
• Bulletstorm: Full Clip Edition is 75% off: https://store.steampowered.com/app/501590/Bulletstorm_Full_Clip_Edition/
• And many more deals from the Sale that will last until the next week.

And that's it. I hope you have a happy and gaming weekend.

I didn't post the new about the Intel CEO because it wasn't "hardware related".

As for the AMD new mobile chips, it doesn't really affects us much as few people here game on a laptop, at least as far as I know. I'm more interested in the new 4-core Ryzen desktop chips.

And regarding the GPUs, maybe AMD should reconsider the way they develop GPUs and go back to a single, scalable architecture, and forget to develop two archs for the mainstream and high-end market. It saddens me to say this, but they seem to lack the resources to do it.

A physical launch won't do much for them, specially with stores having less and less space for PC games.

Well, it wouldn't do much for them, but it'd make me want the game more

AMD is doing that. The problem was more that they couldn't afford development of both a complete lineup of chips and their masks. As a result AMD had to develop only partly releases, with the gaps getting bigger and bigger over time. They had to reduce in size between 2008-2017, so AMD couldn't develop both a new CPU and a new GPU in parallel at full steam. So after they developed Bulldozer and GCN, they had to choose which one to develop first. Considering GCN was doing well originally but Bulldozer was pretty much the definition of a development fail, it was clear the CPU would come first. Hence why the later GCN developments were mostly pretty small. Vega was the last one where they had all possible ressources bound by the CPU development

Every release after the first gen  (Radeon HD 7xxx) had just some new GPUs, and the rest were rebrands. Second Gen was first Bonaire, followed a couple months later with Hawaii. Third gen was Tonga, followed a year later with Fiji. Fourth Gen, Polaris, had 2 chips at first(RX480/470 and RX 460), followed by a very slow one (RX 550) a year later. Vega only has the high-end chip for now apart from the variants in the APUs.

Polaris had those small chips mostly to get rid of their 1./2. gen entry level chips (Oland, Cape Verde and Bonaire), which went through several generations and rebrandings, especially as mobile chips. Especially Oland (which got similarly developed to get rid of the old Terascale chips in the lineup) really had to go, as it couldn't keep up anymore with the APUs, even when bottlenecked, and even Cape verde was getting too slow for them. Btw, when you put a RX460 against Bonaire and a RX 550 against Cape Verde, you can see that AMD was improving GCN quite a lot - just not enough to keep up with NVidia.

With the resources from the CPU architecture development being freed up since Zen got feature complete in early 2016, Navi certainly did profit from the additional work and will probably either come with a full lineup or with radically different chips in PC and server segments (where they can bring the announced scalability without the problems they would have in a PC), and possibly both.

About Krzanich firing not being hardware related: Well, it marks the beginning of the end of a pretty headless era in CPU development at Intel where almost all CPU talents got fired because they went against Krzanichs idea of improving cost-effectiveness. On the other hand he broadened Intels portfolio so much that they are much less dependent on the CPU market anymore, so if AMD would start trashing Intel badly with Ryzen and Epyc they have something else to fall back upon.

When I said that AMD can't work on two architectures at the same time, I was tlaking about the GPU side, not the whole company. Simply put, working on Fiji and now Vega is part of the reasons why AMD has to rebrand their cards so much nowadays. Without those extra chips to worry about, and while still being limited by the current node, AMD could refine and optimize their main architecture more, launching products that aren't just the old one with a new sticky, but actual revisions that justify the new name.

And if they have to completely leave the high-end market to do it, then so be it. After all, it's been quite a while since they had something that could actually compete with Nvidia.

But well, you're agreeing with me that they're not big enough anymore, so they should start realizing that and act accordingly.

Regarding Krzanich, had he been able to keep it in his pants he wouldn't have been fired. As for who will take over, they only need someone that doesn't screw things up. Intel got Raja to try again to make a proper GPU, and got Keller to develop the next CPUs, so unless the new CEO is stupid and tries to reinvent the wheel, they should be "fine".

Keller only came in April and thus probably is working on the next architecture after Tiger Lake. While with him it's probably going to end up great, it's still many years away. Don't forget he joined AMD in 2012 to design Zen, a full 5 years before it's release. Until then, AMD can wreak some havok among Intel's plans

I'm glad to see AMD doing well enough to actually start hiring again. Hopefully they hire the right people for the right jobs.

And of course Intel will have to face AMD with whatever they had in their roadmap for the time being, but they had to do that no matter the CEO, right? So it doesn't matter who's at the helm as long as he/she doesn't start messing around.

For now, Intel has the 9xxx series, which by the looks of it is just the same processors with a 100/200 MHz increase and the launch of the 8 core part.

"A Hat in Time" as early unlock of the Humble Monthly Bundle. Awesome!

I almost bought it in the Steam sale.

^Not a bad game.

Talking about the Steam sale, what do you (all) think about it? Did you get something?

Personally, I found them to be quite average. Good but not great. Of course, that hasn't stopped me from getting 5 games, and for less than 10 €.

I am of two minds about Quad-Cores these days.
In a laptop they can get away with higher clocks... Which is important for single threaded performance... But on the other hand... It's a Quad-Core. In 2018. Yuck.
Give me a Hex and I will think about it, give me an Octo and call me keen, maybe next year when Intel start pushing 10nm.

It will still have an effect on Navi, GPU's have extremely long development cycles, so something that happened a few years ago can have an effect today.
Navi is still a derivative of GCN, it's another iterative refinement just like Fury, Vega, Polaris was and so on.
Graphics Core Next is getting old and tired at this point.

Where all bets are off is with AMD's next-gen GPU architecture, which is hopefully what comes after Navi.

Graphics Core Next is actually an extremely modular design, so what AMD could/did do is make an update to one part of the chip like the geometry engines whilst leaving the rest of the chip alone... And dropping that as a new high-end offering.
So it made sense they would take things in that direction while the company was hemorrhaging cash.

AMD also tried to replicate what they did with RV770 and that was to adopt the latest DRAM technology to get a leg up over the competition... Unfortunately for AMD's sake, nVidia was making their GPU's more efficient by implementing Delta Colour Compression and Tiled Rasterization which allowed for better culling which saves on bandwidth anyway.

AMD "Tried" to catch up with Vega by implemented it's Primitive Shaders and Draw Stream Binning Rasterization, except they either made it so Developers had to opt-in to use the feature or never bothered to implement it in drivers, meaning it was a waste of time from a gamers perspective, maybe with Navi they might fix that shit.

They were reserved for OEM's. OEM's need "higher numbers" every year in order to advertise their new products every cycle, even if it's the exact same chip, sometimes they might have a significant inventory of stored chips as well.

RX 550 is the lowest us mere-mortals can get our hands on through regular channels, meaning the entire 500 series is all GCN 4.0 based in public channels.

No one doubts that GCN hasn't seen great strides in efficiency and performance over the years, but compared to nVidia they are just slower at making those incremental improvements.

Ultimately though... I would like AMD to return to it's small-die strategy that they employed with Terascale, it worked and it was great.

It's not just a freeing up of resources (AMD is hard at work building the next several Zen lineups.) but they can afford to bring in additional resources as they have drastically increased profits.

Intel actually has a strong Micro-architecture, certainly has an edge over AMD, albeit slight. It's just they aren't offering the core counts to match AMD.
They stagnated and tried to profit as much as they can for as long as they can while AMD fumbled.