Unreal Engine 4 Gets Geomerics Enlighten Global Illumination Support, Showcasing Incredible Visuals

Low end cards like that one uses cheap and slow DDR3 memory instead of GDDR5 like high end cards do. This means they can put lots of memory on the card. I doubt that the card would have the power needed to actually drive games at the settings that would require that much memory tho.

As for the 970 it seems like a fantastic card. Great price/performance ratio. And it is one of the fastest single GPUs you can buy.

There will always be new stuff on the horison, by the time AMD's next cards are out Nvidia will have new stuff about the same time away from release. If the 970 is in your budget it is probably the best card in that price bracket. Unless you can get a good deal on a AMD card.

The 970 is a wonderful card with an awesome price/performance ratio, and the only alternative right now is if you can find a cheap R9 290X for about the same price... if you don't mind the extra power consumption, of course.

As for the model to get, I'd say that any of them would be a good buy so the best answer would be this: get the cheaper one. Asus, MSI and even EVGA cards are silent when the card is idle as their fans stop, Palit is the only one that I know that has a card with a blower cooler that exhausts the hot air out of the case and Gigabyte has the best cooler, but that also makes its cards the longest and also the loudest ones. Zotac is a bit lost between them with no real pro or con in front of the others.

Enforcer: Police Crime Action is a full-blooded police simulator. Yet it’s hilarious

Comments1

Enforcer: Police Crime Action puts you behind the badge of a Mountain Valley Police Officer. It’s your duty to keep the peace, be that by setting up roadblocks to check for drunk drivers, ticketing illegally parked cars, or hunting down escaped murderers in the woods.

Too few games let you play as the police and, when they do, it’s often as an undercover cop so you end up committing crimes anyway. Enforcer’s not like that. It’s an authentic police simulator and it allows for a lot more fun than you’d expect.

I just wasn’t expecting people to fly into the air when I tased them.

Read and Comment

Expect the Inquisition: Dragon Age Keep open beta begins

Comment

Dragon Age Keep has entered open beta letting you prepare for the release of Dragon Age: Inquisition. Keep lets you import your save files and make edits to the decisions you made in previous games. These can then be exported to Inquisition where the world will be changed to account for those decisions.

Read and Comment

The Long Dark update doubles world size with new Coastal Highway

Comment

The Long Dark just added a long road which made the game twice as large (and twice as long). The new Coastal Highway area’s not the only thing to come in the v.152 update, there’s also been changes to starvation, wolves will hunt you more the closer you are to death, and there are now rabbits.

Cute little rabbits you can devour.

Read and Comment

Shadow of Mordor DLC Lord of the Hunt detailed. Lead a ghul horde

Comments2

Shadow of Mordor’s set to get its first major piece of DLC and it’s focused on the open world’s beasts. Lord of the Hunt adds mounted uruk captains to the fray as well as two new beasts to be ridden - the stealthy caragath and a new kind of graug which can vomit toxin on its enemies.

It also marks the return of Torvin the dwarf in a set of new story missions.

Read and Comment

The Swindle is Spelunky meets Deus Ex, a stealth roguelike in a steampunk top hat

Comments1

Having deannounced it a while back, Size Five Games have just reannounced The Swindle. It's a sort of side-scrolling Deus Ex in which you break into heavily guarded buildings, hack money out of computers, swipe bags of cash from vaults and then run away.

The old Swindle didn't really work, admits developer Dan Marshall, but this Swindle does. It's been overhauled, refurbished, gutted and rebuilt into something that's infinitely more compelling and fun to play: a smart, steampunk roguelike, a stealth RPG with permadeath and procedurally generated levels and scoops of Victorian charm and character.

I've been playing it and, well, it's remarkable. It's Spelunky in a top hat.

Read and Comment

Assassin’s Creed Unity trailer transports our French Revolution assassin to WW2

Comments2

Well, this came out of nowhere. Assassin’s Creed Unity isn’t just set during the French Revolution, you also fight Germans during the Nazi occupation of Paris.

The trailer has you shooting down planes, climbing the Eiffel Tower, and dodging speeding trains.

Read and Comment

Alone in the Dark: Illumination and Haunted House: Cryptic Graves appear on Steam in time for Halloween

Comment

We haven’t heard all that much about Atari’s Alone in the Dark and Haunted House reboots, both due out in Holiday 2014, as the Americans say. This doesn’t mean you can’t throw caution to the wind and pre-order both of them now, but caution is good, so maybe you shouldn’t.

Both games have appeared on Steam, and Haunted House has a new trailer that you can slap your eyes on below. 

Read and Comment

Techland's brought in a special kind of expert to help with Dying Light

Comment

Techland are probably pretty familiar with zombies by now, but for Dying Light, the studio decided that there was still a lot to learn, and did the only thing a sane video game developer could do: they hired Steve, a zombie. Or should that be a Partially Deceased Syndrome sufferer?

Read and Comment

The best of the Steam Halloween Sale

Comments5

If you’ve nearly emptied your bank account to pay for the materials required to make your completely authentic xenomorph costume for Halloween, but still fancy grabbing some appropriately themed games, then not to worry - Valve has you covered. 

And by has you covered, I mean that Valve wants to bleed that bank account dry with the Steam Halloween Sale. Lock up that wallet.

With 21 pages of discounted sales, I’m not going to be listing them all, but I've found a few choice spooky games to keep you feeling uneasy this Halloween. And they’re dead cheap. 

Read and Comment

Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare's live action trailer is leaking testosterone all over the carpet

Comment

Call of Duty live trailers sure are big, loud and expensive. Advanced Warfare isn’t bucking the trend, with its brotacular, first-person perspective advert. Live action is a bit of a misnomer, though as it’s so filled with CGI that it’s about as live action as the game itself. 

It’s a race through Advanced Warfare’s vision of 20159 Lagos, with your best bro, that dude who was, I think, in that awful Battleship movie. The lassie from the fairly creepy Blurred Lines music video is also in it because... no, I honestly don’t know. Watch it for yourself, below.

Read and Comment

Hone your testicle shooting skills in Sniper Elite 3's free Shooting Range update

Comment

If you’ve not picked up your sniper rifle and caused a few heads to explode in Sniper Elite 3 in a while, you might want to take it for another spin. Rebellion’s chucked in nine free content updates since launch, adding a new multiplayer mode, new missions and a bunch of multiplayer maps. 

The ninth one arrived today: the Shooting Range. As the name suggests, you’ll find yourself facing a bunch of shooting range challenges across three ranges, with over 30 weapons, including ones from DLC. 

Read and Comment

Survival management game This War of Mine gets a November release date and a gloomy trailer

Comments1

I don’t expect to have much fun in This War of Mine. War’s not really a great source of fun, especially not for civilians caught in the middle of one, and these are the protagonists and, sometimes, antagonists of 11 Bit Studios’ grim survival management game. Not fun, then, but potentially very compelling. 

It’s due out in only two weeks, on November 14th. 

Read and Comment

Far Cry 4's PvP will let you duke it out using armoured vehicles, magic animals and teleportation

Comment

Along with single-player and co-op shenanigans, Far Cry 4 also bring PvP back to the series after a good long while. Fancy villain Pagan Min’s magical Rakshasha face off against the rebellious Golden Path faction in fights that rage across three modes and 10 maps. And it doesn’t look half bad. 

Read and Comment

Shadows: Heretic Kingdoms – Final Early Access Update Rolls Out, Full Game Releases On November 13th

Prey 2 cancelled by Bethesda

Comments2

Prey 2’s been in on/off development since 2011 but now Bethesda’s vice president, Pete Hines, confirms the game is firmly in the off position. They cancelled it.

That’s a damn shame because Prey 2 was looking fantastic from the trailer footage released a couple of years ago and the premise of the thing was compelling, too. You played a US Marshall who’d been abducted from Earth and was now working as a bounty hunter on an alien world.

Read and Comment

Watch Dogs sold 9m copies. Ubisoft expect to make €1.4bn by end of financial year

Comments3

Ubisoft are sitting pretty on a big pile of money and it’s thanks, in large part, to Watch Dogs. The company’s published it’s earning report of the first half of their financial year, stating they’ve made €484 million in sales and that Watch Dogs has sold 9 million copies since launch.

More than that, they predict they’ll make a further €1 billion by the end of the financial year.

Read and Comment

Hearthstone win trading results in permanent bans and tournament disqualification

Comments1

It starts off innocently enough, you trade a win or two in Hearthstone just to get by. You want your MMR to be a little higher so your friends will still look at you with respect. Soon it spirals. You’re botting game after game, using your newfound rank to reach for glory in a tournament.

It’s not till you wake up in a bathroom, vomiting on the cracked tile floor that you realise you have a problem. By then it’s too late. You can’t stop.

Blizzard are here to save you from that future, win trading will now result in a permanent ban on your account and disqualification from tournaments.

Read and Comment

One Minute to Midnight lets you start a revolution for free

Comment

One Minute to Midnight puts you in charge of your own revolution and has you watch as your movement turns sour.

It’s a free Unity game and it’s a great way to while away an hour.

Read and Comment

Ubisoft reveals what you'll need to drive around in The Crew

Comments2

With The Crew, Ubisoft continues to be best buds with Nvidia and - just like in Assassin’s Creed Unity (and most Ubisoft games for the last year or so), Nvidia GPU owners will be able to get a few more bells and whistles. 

When fiddling around with the ambient occlusion, you’ll be able to select HBAO+ for all your sexy shadow needs, while you’ll also get an extra anti-aliasing option in the form of TXAA. 

Ubisoft’s also revealed the system requirements for the game, which are a lot more reasonable than Unity’s. You’ll only need a GTX 670 or its equivalent to get the optimal experience, but the recommended requirements are actually lower. 

Read and Comment

Watch four levels of Sneaky Sneaky, a stealthy dungeon adventure

Comment

Stealth and puzzle games sit pretty close to each other on the family tree of genres, which the best of the former transforming stealth into complex conundrums. Even a quick glance at Sneaky Sneaky hints at its puzzle roots, which isn’t surprising given that developer Naiad Entertainment includes ex-PopCap folk.

But it’s also a turn-based dungeon crawler, with loot to be grabbed and enemies to be avoided, or snuck up upon and stabbed in the back. 

Read and Comment

Tome: Immortal Arena is another MOBA, but it's doing away with a lot of genre mainstays

Comment

Every time I invite company over, it’s embarrassing. Someone sits on the sofa, starts squirming, and digs out a MOBA from under the cushions. A friend opens the fridge to grab a beer, and three MOBA fall out, smashing on the floor. Somebody else wants to use the loo, but when they open the door to the bathroom, a tide of MOBAs floods the entire place. 

This is really why I thought MOBAs should take a break, but they are continuing their relentless march to engulf the world. And another one has joined their ranks: Tome: Immortal Arena. It’s due out on Steam on November 21st. 

Read and Comment

Buzz Aldrin's Space Program Manager launches by aiming for the Moon

Comment

Buzz Aldrin’s Space Program Manager launched today, giving players command over NASA, the Soviet Space Agency or the fictional Global Space Agency. Starting in the ‘50s, there’s one big goal: get to the Moon. 

The name alone invites comparison with Kerbal Space Program, but developer Polar Motion emphasises that they are two rather different games, with SPM focusing on management, which Kerbal focuses on engineering. 

Read and Comment

Star Citizen unveils demo video of FPS combat at PAX Australia

Comments4

I’m not sure what I expected from Star Citizen’s first-person mode, but I know it wasn’t something this impressive. The new footage of the FPS module, revealed at PAX Australia, shows some cool (if conventional) squad-on-squad combat and some less-conventional zero-G firefighting... in a warehouse full of crates.

Yep, it's a shooter.

Read and Comment

Valkyria Chronicles releases in 10 days, discounted for preorder

Comments2

Better late — very late — than never. I was thrilled to hear that PC gamers would finally be getting a chance to enjoy Valkyria Chronicles, which was a much-needed breath of fresh air for the squad-based tactical wargame at a time when the genre seemed all but abandoned.

Now, we only have ten days to wait until this gorgeous combination of JRPG, third-person shooter, and turn-based wargame finally comes to the PC.

Read and Comment

There are so many sales going on at so many places these days.

PSA: XCOM owners are already enrolled in the Evolve "Big Alpha", check your Steam Library

Comments4

You might have seen a lot of people talking about the Evolve alpha this weekend (and perhaps complaining about some of the matchmaking issues that come with being an early version of the game). 2K initially reserved the alpha for players who had keys for it, but now it’s open to any veterans of XCOM.

Read and Comment

Failbetter Games bridges the timeline to Dragon Age: Inquisition with The Last Court

Comment

One of my few (okay, several) addictions is to Failbetter Games’ Fallen London, a browser-based adventure games set in an underworld London where Victorian society mingles with the occult, the demonic, and the mythic. It’s one of the most brilliantly-written games around, a masterclass in world-building and evocative writing.

Which is why it’s great news that they’ve just created Dragon Age: The Last Court in partnership with Bioware. It helps establish the world of Inquisition, and showcases the changes since Dragon Age 2.

Read and Comment

Release the Gracken: IdrA returns to Evil Geniuses for Heroes of the Storm

Comment

Well here’s a surprise. It’s been awhile since we heard from Greg “IdrA” Fields, at one point one of the foremost American StarCraft pros. He was released from the Evil Geniuses eSports team in the wake of some extremely negative comments about the StarCraft community, and appeared to have dropped out of the competitive gaming entirely.

Now, however, he has returned home to EG... as a part of their newly-signed Heroes of the Storm squad.

Read and Comment

Arcen announce Stars Beyond Reach, a bonkers-sounding sci-fi 4X

Comments1

What a great time to be a 4X fan. Arcen Games, the indie studio behind the beloved AI War, has just announced a new planet-colonization game called Stars Beyond Reach.

In keeping with Arcen Games’ history, it sounds daring, ambitious, charming... and incredibly hard to pull off. But looking at some of the frankly batshit-sounding features that designer Chris Park lists in the announcement post, it should be something unlike anything else out there.

Read and Comment

Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare unlocking tonight, Techno-Spacey is pleased

Comment

Everyone knows new games come out on Tuesday... except that’s the old way of doing things, for old, decadent societies. Something as advanced as Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare has moved beyond those ossified traditions, which is why the game comes out tonight.

Seriously, it unlocks in a few hours. Or now, if you're in the UK. So get your gun, strap on your jetpack, and go serve your new master: Kevin Spacey.

Read and Comment

Have you seen "Alone in The Dark: Illumination" trailer?

It's like another action game now.