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Meanwhile not to be left behind, NVIDIA released their own new wave of video cards powered by the Maxwell 2 architecture.
#Best video games 2014 pc update
Tahiti and R9 280 were in need of an update and R9 285 is a fine replacement, but if it has any weakness it’s that it hasn’t done much to push the overall performance envelope. Compared to R9 280, R9 285 is an unusual sidegrade that packs the GCN 1.2 features, a narrower 256-bit memory bus, and virtually identical performance to R9 280. Like Tonga to Tahiti, R9 285 is designed to replace the R9 280 and similar second-tier Tahiti designs. At the same time we suspect there are some compute/HSA improvements in the design that AMD has not disclosed and are being saved for the rumored Carrizo APU, Kaveri’s successor.Īs for AMD’s desktop product stack, Tonga has been used so far in a single product, the Radeon R9 285.
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From a high level GCN 1.2 is a further refinement on the GCN architecture, bringing with it greatly improved Delta Color Compression for graphics buffers, a faster video decode block (H.264 L5.2 support), and a further optimized geometry frontend that better handles extreme tessellation factors. Tonga is an interesting – if still slightly mysterious – GPU, as we suspect we have not seen everything it and GCN 1.2 can offer. Tonga serves as AMD’s replacement for the nearly 3 year old Tahiti GPU, the very first of AMD’s GPUs first launched in 2011. While October has been a relatively quiet month, both companies kept September busy by pushing new products out the door and took others off the shelves.ĪMD for their part released the first of their GCN 1.2 architecture GPUs: Tonga. The big news this fall has of course been the new video card launches from AMD and NVIDIA. Since our last guide it has been a busy couple of months, so there’s quite a bit to cover. I want to go out and play some video games now.After a couple of months off due to a very busy fall product season, we’re finally back again with our monthly guide to video cards and video card industry recap. Going into this knowing little about the video game world, I feel like I know much more about them now. Snead's "Video Games: The Movie" has its speed bumps and may not capture all the gritty details about the video game world, but it's a good overview of video game history and culture that captures the love people have for video games. You may not always get the small details of who built what and why, but you get the essence of video games and why they have been so successful and ingrained in our culture. Snead does a great job of capturing the love of video games and what they mean to our society. Sean Astin has fun being a narrator and the people being interviewed have a deep passion for video games. It could have been stronger in storytelling, but it still works. Why not give a complete telling of the history of video games from start to finish? "Video Games: The Movie" feels kind of broken up when it could have been more of a holistic documentary. The rest of the film jumps around and fills in the blanks throughout the other sections. Although it feels rushed, has missing parts, and can be a little hard to keep up with, it keeps you engaged. The opening credit sequence is fun and is a tribute to video games. The first half an hour or so bursts with energy and gives us an overview of the history of video games. Throughout these 4 sections, Sean Astin narrates and a collection of video gamers and creators tell us about video games, what they mean, how we use them, where they were, where they're going, and why so many people love them. Jeremy Snead's "Video Games: The Movie" is a documentary about video games that is broken up into 4 clear sections: history, culture, creation, and future. I was interested in watching this film though, because I knew little about the video game industry and was curious. I don't have the knowledge that some of my friends do about video games. I still play video games with my friends, but not consistently. Growing up, my siblings and I would play on our Nintendo 64, Play Station 2, and Game Boy Advance.
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