Soooooo it's exactly as we thought? Vega 64 slightly below 1080 and 56 slightly above 1070. And that with very similar pricing.

Is that AMD's new strategy? Give the market to Nvidia for a year and then release the same product? Considering Navi is slated for 2019 and Volta comes out in early 2018 it seems that way.

My point was is that you don't sell promises about your product no matter how far away they are in the future even if it's just a day away from launch! (It is unnacceptable If you hypothetically have to wait for a day if you want to see current games and benchmarks patched to use rapid packed math or wait for a game to release to use this feature.) 

Gamers want to see a finished product on LAUNCH DAY, not an unfinished product ... (Your customers don't want to deal with your crap about your bets in the future.)

Depending on how you define 'very long time', I give it about a year before the feature takes off since the biggest AAA western developers already have DX12 backends ... (AMD's outlook for their graphics chip should vastly improve once devs get on board with transitioning to the new shader model 6 bytecode and half precision support.) 

BTW rapid packed math is more than just double rate FP16, it's also about double rate INT16 data types too which is useful for rendering with deep learning ...

So you work with a smartass. I'm sorry for you, they can be quite irritating.

I posted an article about games that will use that feature last week: Wolfenstein 2 & Far Cry 5 will support AMD’s RX Vega exclusive feature, Rapid Packed Math. Far Cry 5 is remarkable because it's an Ubisoft title and the french publisher usually favors Nvidia and Gameworks. DICE will probably also use it as they tend to go with AMD (much like Epic is the go to studio for Nvidia, so is DICE for AMD).

But yeah, we'll have to wait until they launch to see if that makes any difference compared to their Nvidia counterparts.

Sort of depends on the engine design ... (Far Cry which uses the Dunia engine has NEVER played badly with AMD hardware. The same goes with the Snowdrop engine which is also Ubisoft in-house technology. UE4 on the other hand runs like hot garbage on AMD and so does Unity since consoles aren't saving those junk of an engine.) 

I bet AMD really wishes UE4 never took off since Epic Games was only relevant in console gaming with their Gears franchise ... (Epic is like leukemia for AMD. Everytime a UE4 game releases, AMD dies a little on the inside and it's especially sad how japanese developers are going to make this their main engine.) 

Pretty much.

And double packed math doesn't double performance.

Unreal Engine has always had a presence on console since the Playstation 2/Dreamcast era, games like Unreal Tournament, Brothers in Arms, Deus Ex, various Tom Clancy games, Unreal Championship were pretty decent pushers of the engine.

But you are right, Unreal Engine has always preferred nVidia hardware as nVidia was a pretty big sponser of the Unreal technology back in the day. (Not sure what it is like today though.)
Although... Unreal Engine 2 and 2.5 did actually support some of ATI's propriety technology.

Thankfully... As a game engine, it's use isn't as significant as last generation... Thank goodness... As EA has opted to use Frostbite for pretty much everything and even Ubisoft is preferring to use it's own engines.

Maybe it's only my own impression, but I think UE4 isn't repeating the success of UE3.

Last gen of consoles, the UE3 engine was seemingly all over the place, with only japanese studios and a few western ones not using it. Meanwhile, with UE4, things seem to have changed, and while japanese studios are finally using it, it seems that the western ones are abandoning it for other alternatives (Unity for indies) or for their internal engines (EA with Frostbite).

Never said it did, was just revealing another tid bit about rapid packed math ... 

Another fun fact with rapid packed math is that you can get lower register pressure too! 

There's lot's of options in ways you can use this feature, either higher performing shaders or for using smaller register space ... (maybe something I haven't even thought up of yet!)

Yeah but I don't ever remember Unreal Engine being mainstream as it is now than back then ... (UE1&2 didn't get much traction with 6th gen consoles and UE3 went big with 7th gen consoles and UE4 is almost as big with 8th gen consoles.) 

I'm also glad EA went with Frostbite and hopefully the rest of Bethesda uses id Tech 6 even for their Elder Scrolls and Fallout games! (Although console engines suffer a lot with their content production pipeline efficiency since their more restrictive for the fact that they have higher performance.)

Sadly however UE isn't going away on consoles since indies and japanese developers (ironic since they used to be the technical leaders up until the 7th gen but it's no surprise since Square Enix and Nintendo left the scene of developing their own high end graphics while Sony transitioned to depending on the west for technical expertise to create their masterpieces) are the most technically challenged of the bunch ... 

Tons of japanese developers did not use UE3! Creating their own engine was still within the complexity of what they could handle before going into the 8th gen. Most japanese developers couldn't bother using UE3 cause the documentation lacked a lot in japanese ... 

UE4 fit the needs of japanese developers more than UE3 because of documentation, high quality graphics and easy content production pipeline ... (the vast majority of them didn't want to bother making specialized console game engines like AAA western developers) 

UE4 didn't fit the needs of AAA western developers since they wanted more performance and high quality graphics at the same time so off they went with their own engines centered around consoles ... 

Unity fits the needs of indies cause they don't have a lot of programmers around, they don't really care about peformance or high quality graphics, they wanted an easy content production pipeline like UE4 and arguably most of all they valued portability so they could bring as much games to different platforms ... (UE4 isn't as portable) 

There's lot's of pros and cons with each option ...

That's what I just did. Haha

In all honesty though. The performance gains can be as little as 20%.
Which might not be worth the trouble for developers if 70% of PC's don't use packed math anyway yet.

It was popular... More-so on the Original Xbox for obvious reasons.
But I doubt any game engine will end up as popular as Unreal Engine 3 ever again.
It was the right engine at the right time while everyone was scrambling to make the big tech jump.

Indeed. And Frostbite was actually very forward thinking as well. Although parts of the engine are starting to show it's age now.

I doubt Bethesda will use iD Tech 6 for Elder Scrolls or Fallout, those games tend to rely on a ton of scripts, something that iD Tech isn't the most proficient at.
Rather they will probably just keep rehashing NetImmerse like they have for the past decade and a half.

Although, I think the end goal for most publishers is to eventually have "one engine to rule them all".

More Japanese developers did adopt Unreal Engine than ever before last generation though.
MagnaCarter 2, The Last Remnant, Lost Odyssey, Asuras Wrath, Darkengard 3, Alliance of Valiant Arms, Crimson Dragon for example.

Two bad news, one from AMD and one from Nvidia:

AMD's RX 64 Launch pricing was only for "early sales"
https://www.overclock3d.net/news/gpu_displays/amd_s_rx_64_launch_pricing_was_only_for_early_sales/1
When AMD first revealed their RX Vega 64 reference design, many were pleased with AMD's listed MSRP of $499 (£449 in the UK), placing AMD's GPU in line with some of the cheapest Nvidia GTX 1080 offerings today.

Yesterday when AMD's RX Vega 64 GPU launched, this pricing didn't hold for any reasonable length of time, with prices increasing within an hour of Vega's retail release. Many, including ourselves, assumed that this was due to demand but now it has been revealed that this was an intentional price increase, not from retailers but from AMD themselves.

Below is a quote from Overclockers UK's Gibbo, who reported that AMD's £449.99 price tag for their RX Vega 64 was "launch only" pricing. This price only applied to the retailer's initial allotment of RX Vega 64 Black standalone GPUs, with AMD giving gamers a £100 discount as some form of an "early adopter" discount.

"Now the good and bad news, the good news is AMD are rebating early launch sales to allow us to hit £449.99 on the stand alone black card which has no games. This is a launch only price which AMD at present are saying will be withdrawn in the near future, when if it happens is unknown, but remember do not be shocked if the price jumps nearly £100 in a few days."

Full Gibbo's post is here: https://forums.overclockers.co.uk/threads/vega-is-finally-here-its-in-stock-along-with-some-epic-bundles-freesync-deals.18789696/

That's terrible if true.

Nvidia's next-gen Volta gaming GPUs aren't arriving anytime soon
http://www.pcgamer.com/nvidias-next-gen-volta-gaming-gpus-arent-arriving-anytime-soon/
At some time in the future, Nvidia will cook up new graphics cards based on its next-generation Volta GPU architecture. The question is, when? Nvidia has not announced a release date, though company boss Jensen Huang did put to rest any rumors that Volta might arrive in the gaming scene before the end of the year. That's not going to happen.

"Volta for gaming, we haven't announced anything. And all I can say is that our pipeline is filled with some exciting new toys for the gamers, and we have some really exciting new technology to offer them in the pipeline. But for the holiday season for the foreseeable future, I think Pascal is just unbeatable," Huang stated during a recent earnings call.

Well, he's right when he says that Pascal is more than enough, specially now that Vega has launched and we can see how they compare.

Today is non labour day here in Spain, and I've been this close to not making the news. But that would be more work for tomorrow, so...

SALES & "SALES"/DEALS

Let's see what we have:

The Humble Store is having an Idea Factory Sale, with games of that publisher (lot's of games with "Neptunia" in the title, Fairy Fencer, etc) on sale up to 90% off: https://www.humblebundle.com/store/promo/idea-factory-sale/

And there's also Steam with the new weeklong deals:

• Portal Knights is 25% off: http://store.steampowered.com/app/374040/Portal_Knights/
• Mini Metro is 50% off: http://store.steampowered.com/app/287980/Mini_Metro/
• SimCity 4 Deluxe is 75% off: http://store.steampowered.com/app/24780/SimCity_4_Deluxe_Edition/
• Brothers - A Tale of Two Sons has an 80% discount: http://store.steampowered.com/app/225080/Brothers__A_Tale_of_Two_Sons/
• The New THQ Classics bundle is 80% off (the individual games are not on sale): http://store.steampowered.com/sub/123985/
• And 489 more deals.

SOFTWARE

Blizzard sees the light, brings back the Battle.net name
http://www.pcgamer.com/blizzard-sees-the-light-brings-back-the-battlenet-name/
Earlier this year, Blizzard renamed its venerable Battle.net client to the Blizzard App, or maybe the Blizzard Launcher—I was never entirely clear on which it was supposed to be—in order to reflect its growth into a more well-rounded, Steam-like piece of software. The trouble is that Battle.net is a really good name with a lot of history behind it, and so the change never really took. Even Blizzard opted to call it Battle.net when Destiny 2 was revealed. Given all that, it's not really surprising that Blizzard has thrown in the towel on the whole thing.

MODS/EMULATORS

This nightmarish Doom mod turns every enemy into Crash Bandicoot memes
http://www.pcgamer.com/this-nightmarish-doom-mod-turns-every-enemy-into-crash-bandicoot-memes/
If you're active on 4Chan or Reddit, chances are you've encountered the horror that is the Crash Bandicoot 'whoa' meme—and you're probably sick of it. Well, finally there's a way to fight back against the internet's terrible obsession with running memes into the ground with this Doom mod that transforms every enemy into a whoa-ing Crash Bandicoot for you to murder.

>>This mod is for the original Doom, not the new one.

GAMING NEWS

Tom Clancy’s The Division – Update 1.7 releases tomorrow, will add new Global Events
http://www.dsogaming.com/news/tom-clancys-the-division-update-1-7-release-tomorrow-will-add-new-global-events/
Ubisoft announced today that Update 1.7 for Tom Clancy’s The Division will be available tomorrow, August 15th. The update will be free for all players and release simultaneously on consoles and PC.

BATTLETECH has been delayed to 2018
http://www.dsogaming.com/news/battletech-has-been-delayed-to-2018/
Paradox Interactive and Harebrained Schemes today announced that the release of BATTLETECH has been moved to early 2018. Initially planned for release later this year, the move will give the Harebrained Schemes team the time they need to deliver the type of quality experience the company is known for.

Starcraft Remastered Has Been Released
http://www.dsogaming.com/news/starcraft-remastered-has-been-released/
Blizzard has finally released their much loved revamp of the classic sci-fi real-time stratergy game Starcraft.
Blizzard have revamped their classic real-time strategy game Starcraft from 20 years ago. They have gone out of their way and spiced things up a bit with providing better support for modern day PC’s as well as updating graphics into awesome 4K UHD.

Tree of Life: Beyond of Journey Final Beta Before Release
http://www.dsogaming.com/news/tree-of-life-beyond-of-journey-final-beta-before-release/
NeoBricks has announced their final beta for their upcoming MMORPG sandbox survival game, the beta has hit the live servers and will be the last one before the official release.

New trailer released for third-person adventure title, Unknown Fate
http://www.dsogaming.com/videotrailer-news/new-trailer-released-for-third-person-adventure-title-unknown-fate/
1C has revealed a new trailer for Unknown Fate, the first-person story-driven adventure developed by Marslit Games. The game will be released this autumn on PC and will support VR devices.

Middle-earth: Shadow of War – New trailer focuses on the Terror tribe
http://www.dsogaming.com/videotrailer-news/middle-earth-shadow-of-war-new-trailer-focuses-on-the-terror-tribe/
Warner Bros today released a new video for Middle-earth: Shadow of War, showcasing the Terror tribe, a faction of Orcs who specialise in spreading fear throughout Mordor. In Shadow of War, Orcs now belong to tribes, which extend their influence stemming from the Overlords ruling the mighty fortresses throughout the open world, providing a rich ecosystem of missions, exploration and a dynamic Orc society with diverse Orc cultures, all brought to life through the expanded Nemesis System. As master tormentors, the Terror tribe rely on their infamous reputations to inspire fear among their enemies.

Pure Farming 2018 to be released on March 13th 2018
http://www.dsogaming.com/news/pure-farming-2018-to-be-released-on-march-13th-2018/
Techland Publishing announced today that their original farm simulator – Pure Farming 2018 – will be released globally on PC on March 13th, 2018. In order to celebrate this announcement, Techland released a new trailer featuring all the diverse locations that will be included in Pure Farming 2018 that can be viewed below.

Football Manager 2018 to be released on November 10th
http://www.dsogaming.com/news/football-manager-2018-to-be-released-on-november-10th/
SEGA has announced that Football Manager 2018 will be released on November 10th. According to the publisher, anyone who pre-purchases Football Manager 2018 (for PC, Mac or Linux) through a SEGA approved retailer will be able to start pre-season at least two weeks prior to the official street date through a fully-playable Beta version.