Batman Arkham City is just like Mafia II a Nvidia-sponsored game with exclusive CUDA-based-PhysX support:

AMD users don’t get full particles, debris, fog and smoke effects. I bought this game but the exclusive support for Nvidia-owners-only pissed me so much off that I decided to get an additional Nvidia card that would do dedicated CUDA-PhysX calculations after watching a video on YouTube of someone who did it:

I paid 30 Euro for a GT430/PCI-E on eBay as it seemed that this card is sufficient for normal PhysX setting in the game with its 96 processor cores. I build it in next to the HD 6870 but had to switch my Asrock AOD790GX/128M main-board from PCI-E 16/1 mode to PCI-E 8/8 Crossfire-mode in order to detect the card. The GT430 barely fit in as the HD 6870 is a 2 slot card but it worked. After doing that I installed the latest Nvidia drivers 285.62 that come with PhysX 0621 and then applied the patch that makes this all possible…

http://www.ngohq.com/graphic-cards/17706-hybrid-physx-mod-v1-03-v1-05ff.html

… it made possible what Nvidia says is impossible: you can use an AMD card for the 3D acceleration and an additional one from Nvidia for PhysX rendering. Nvidia is using PhysX as a unique selling point for their GeForce cards and is pushing it into the market by paying developers to implement exclusive support. That’s not fair and the poor success of the Bullet Physics Library shows how serious Nvidia is about it. They push this proprietary “standard” by all means.

The setup with the GT430 in hybrid-mode together with the HD 6870 is maybe not the fastest and my system is mid-range (Phenom II @3,2 GHz, 6870 1GB, 4GB RAM) but it’s enough to get 30 FPS average in the in-game benchmark and play the game smoothly on DX11 normal tessellation normal PhysX settings (rest is set to very high). Before it was ~50 FPS without the PhysX effects but in this game the performance hit is worth it IMHO. To get high PhysX effects you would need to use a GTX460 BTW and to get more FPS something in general like a 6970 with 2GB.

Let`s round up:

Modern Warfare 3

Rendering API: outdated OpenGL version

Engine: IW 5.0 - http://callofduty.wikia.com/wiki/IW_engine

Singleplayer: 6 hours

Multiplayer: 16 maps

Vehicles: No

Teamplay: Limited

Server stability: Low

Battlefield 3

Rendering API: newest DirectX 11 version

Engine: Frostbite 2 - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frostbite_2

Singleplayer: 6 hours

Multiplayer: 9 maps

Vehicles: Yes

Teamplay: Yes

Server stability: High (but Client stability is low at least on my PC)

I’m comparing MW3 and BF3 for PC but some of this applies to consoles as well. Where should I start? Singleplayer part… there I liked MW3 better than BF3. Although the graphics engine is worse the single player is an awesome action packed ride where you basically don’t have any time to look at textures in detail. They are lower in resolution than in BF3 but rarely you see fails like the one below (notice the car mirror). In general the levels are very well designed and pretty beautiful in a lot places. The BF3 singleplayer campaign is nice but MW3 is just the sweetest FPS action around.

1:0 for MW3!

The MW3 multiplayer is again the same kind of place for pikey asshole like players like COD:BO and MW2 has  been. There is basically no teamplay expect that some players can drop bullet vests now but this is a very limited gameplay element. The new game mode is called ”Kill Confirmed” and is basically team deathmatch with collecting dog tags. Something I first have seen in the Crysis 2 multiplayer. The tone on the servers is pretty rude… players insult each other with “you noob” all the time and take themselves and the game too serious. Not to mention the frequent host migrations and connection problems. This kills the fun most of the time.

Battlefield 3 is maybe not the most teamplay supporting game but the elements are much stronger. You need to work together as a team to win and this is what I really appreciate about the game. It’s not only about quick reflexes but also about helping you team. The maps are really huge in size and each has a Rush and Conquest type. The best multiplayer experience currently!

1:1 as BF3 scores here

1:1

In my opinion there is no clear winner so if you can GET BOTH titles!

I wish there was an objective based stage progress game mode like in the 2010 Medal of Honor where you escort a tank called “High Value Target”. Similar to Quake Wars  Enemy Territory , Wolfenstein Enemy Territory or Brink. Well… you can’t have everything.

MoH:

First of all I want to mention that I’m a huge AMD fan! My last Intel CPU was a Pentium 120Mhz. Later I had Athlons of various generations and now a Phenom II 920 running @ 3,2 GHz. My last Nvidia graphics card was a GeForce 6800 that I killed with overclocking. Later I had ATI cards like the X850, 4850 and now an AMD 6870 with 1GB. I love my AMD system as it’s really giving a lot of bang-for-the-buck meaning that is good value for the money.

The video above shows Rage with the latest AMD 11.10 Catalyst WHQL drivers. This is now the 4th driver AMD released that is supposed to fix problems with id Software’s Rage. The last version 11.9 had problems with texture streaming that have been fixed later by AMD in the 11.10 preview 2 & 3 drivers. The first preview driver made Rage run faster but it had the texture popping shown in the video below. The 11.10 final version totally broke it and we have Smurf-like blue textures!

Nvidia had this problem too (just to be fair) but they managed to fix it in a driver update. AMD totally failed to do that and even made it worse with the blue texture bug! It even looks to me this might be some kind of revenge by AMD because id Software and Bethesda blamed AMD for the initial texture popping problem. Maybe it’s even because id Software cooperated with Intel on making Rage run on their Sandy Bridge CPU-integrated HD 3000 GPU. AMD looks bad here… and they should change that! It should be like in this commercial: left and right should be the same image. Currently with AMD and Intel/Nvidia on Rage it’s not the same picture even if the price is lower on the AMD side :/

AMD, you don’t want me to like the “AMD SUCKS” site on Facebook don’t you? It’s only one click away at http://www.facebook.com/pages/AMD-SUCKS/301628902631

***

If you want to solve this problem manually there is a community-driven solution for the blue texture problem: http://forums.bethsoft.com/index.php?/topic/1249144-ati-1110-final-drivers-fix/

***

Edit:  The Catalyst 11.11 performance driver finally fixes all the problems!

DL: http://support.amd.com/us/kbarticles/Pages/catalyst-1111b-performance.aspx

When Crysis 2 came out I ignored it more or less as it was a typical cross platform-developed console title ported 1:1 to the PC. Now I bought a Crysis 2 key on eBay for Origin (former EA Download Manager) after they released DX11 support and the high resolution texture pack. It was really worth waiting for this upgrade that makes the graphics superior to the console versions. In my opinion it’s one of the best looking PC first person shooter games  right now. Meanwhile it runs also pretty well on AMD graphic cards. It’s super smooth on my Phenom II 920 @3GHz / AMD Radeon HD 6870 system. It really looks like Crysis Warhead has now finally a true successor in terms of being a benchmark for excellent graphics.

It’s a pity that upcoming titles like Rage won’t get any “PC advantage” with better graphics. It seems that id Software these days is so limited on resources that they can’t invest time in that. Let’s see how far Battlefield 3 will allow to improve graphics on the PC compared to the PS3/Xbox 360… at least it comes with DX 11 out of the box. Chances are good. On the other hand Modern Warfare 3 probably won´t support DX11 so it will look the same on all platforms most likely. Bravo to Crytek for going the extra mile with the DX 11 upgrade.

http://www.ea.com/crysis-2

This is my new graphics card. An AMD Radeon HD 6870 based Asus with custom heat-pipe air cooling. More info: http://www.asus.com/Graphics_Cards/AMD_Series/EAH6870_DC2DI2S1GD5/.

Before buying it I read tons of reviews on the AMD 6000 series and compared it to Nvidia GTX 460 and 550 Ti cards in the same price range… but first let’s start with the motivation why I upgraded: When I put together the configuration of my AMD Phenom II machine I had to be careful with costs. I even considered using the on-board HD 3300 graphics unit of the 790GX chip set motherboard (an Asrock AOD790GX/128M) but in the end went for an low-end 4800 series card, the ATI 4830. The performance of it is somewhere in the range of a Nvidia 8800 GTX. Basically sufficient for the majority of games that are currently on the market. Not sure if you noticed but games these days rarely go over the hardware limits of a Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3. Crysis 2 is a good example of that. Game developers develop cross platform so you don’t need a high end graphics card in your PC as the GPUs of the Xbox and PS3 are a bit outdated by now.

Moreover cloud gaming is upcoming! With OnLive your games will run on remote servers and also remote graphics cards. More Info: http://www.onlive.com/#1 Another argument for not spending much on a graphics card.

So why the new graphics card?

1. There are actually some game titles on the PC that go beyond console limitations and one of them even came included with the 6870: Shogun 2 Total War! A game that would make an Xbox CPU + GPU smoke. A console simply could’t handle it.
2. DirectX 11games are picking up. More and more titles make use of it and there are even value games like Stalker Call of Pripyat or Metro 2033 for 10 Euro that have DirectX 11 support. Of course the DirectX 11 launch-title Dirt 2 looks even better on it.
3. OnLive is not available in Europe yet and the quality of the streaming video isn’t that good.
4. I consider getting a 24″monitor for stereoscopic 3D and the 6870 supports AMD HD3D. Moreover you need 1GB video memory to run games with full HD resolution.

Complete review @Legit I recommend to read if you consider getting the Asus 6870 DirctCU: http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1605/

The A N D R O I D… has landed

It landed on my WeTab as an easy-to-install Android Starter application from the WeTab market. It’s a virtual-machine-like-emulation so the speed of apps like games is pretty poor in general. You can play only puzzle games that don’t need any high framerate. Most other static apps run fine with this speed. The Android installation comes with the AndroidPIT app store but about the half of the software there is not optimized for tablets in any way or doesn’t run on a virtual machine.

Nevertheless it’s great to have it and there are rumors that one day Android apps will run on the Intel x86 Atom CPU of the WeTab in native mode with better performance. More Info: http://www.android-x86.org/

This is my WeTab 3G 32GB, a Linux powered tablet computer designed in Germany. I have it now since about two weeks and I’m absolutely happy with it. The device is extremely versatile. It brings many features like Adobe Flash support or an integrated Webcam that have been announced or experts suspect for the second generation tablets like the Apple iPad 2 or the Motorola Xoom. The user interface of the WeTab OS (that is based on MeeGo Linux) is clearly structured and very user friendly in my opinion. The device has two USB ports, a mini HDMI port and a SD card reader. Currently no other tablet computer can provide such great connectivity options and they have actually been the reason why I bought the WeTab although the device had many negative reviews in the press and by users on Amazon. Most of the reviews refered to version 1.x of WeTab OS and are simply outdated by now. The OS is at 2.1 and updates with improvements keep coming. Reviews of the WeTab with OS 2.x often didn’t acknowledge that the device is truly open or even consider it. You don’t have to jailbreak it in order to install an alternative OS like Windows 7 or Ubuntu (just put in a slightly modified bootable USB stick into the port and there you go). On WeTab OS you can run many great open source apps known from Linux like OpenOffice, Gimp or XBMC media center and of course use free apps like Skype or Firefox (including all Add-Ons). The device installs all Adobe Air programs as apps and since one of the latest release it supports Java as well. The CPU is pretty powerful for a tablet computer. It’s a 1,66 GHz Intel® Atom™ N450 processor supported by a Crystal HD chip for hardware accelerated video decoding. In short: this is the right tablet computer for me. It’s not limited like the Apple iPad not not as expensive as a Samsung Galaxy Tab. It’s has a larger screen, it’s cheaper and much more flexible. It’s not perfect but the more time you spend with it the more you enjoy using a WeTab.

Let’s recap the Pros and list some Cons:

Pros

- USB, HDMI, SD card ports

- Adobe Flash, Air & Java support

- Full HD 1080p hardware video decoding via Crystal HD

- 1,3 Megapixel front facing Webcam

- Built in GPS and 3G with mobile ISP presets

- Large and bright 11,6“ screen

- Weight of 1020g not really a problem

- Battery time of about 5 hours is sufficient

- Customizable & easy WeTab OS pin-wall user interface

- Tons of free Linux software from various sources like portablelinuxapps.org

- Extremely engaged and vivid used community on wetab-community.com

- Price of the WeTab 3G 32GB is lower than the cheapest 16GB Apple iPad with 460€

Cons:

- Screen gets dark when changing the view angle too much  (meanwhile I got used to it but sometimes I wish it had a better screen)

- Active CPU fan can get loud (1.6 GHz need some cooling – in my opinion it’s an acceptable noise level though)

- Speakers are weak (I guess that’s the case for all tablet computers)

- OS hangs sometimes (I hope they fix this in one of the next software updates or at least implement some visual indication that the OS is busy)

- Integrated browser has difficulties with complex Ajax driven sites (the good thing about the integrated browser is that it’s fast and very well optimized for touch)

- Linux software not optimized for touch is difficult to use (I think about getting a wireless Speedlink FUTURA  keyboard that has a small trackpad)

- The market (kind of App Store) doesn’t have many apps currently (it will be opened for 3rd party developers soon and gain some apps I hope)

- Not available or known outside of Germany

So what is my experience so far as someone who used Microsoft Windows since 1989? BTW: My first Windows ran with monochrome graphics on a 286 machine (I blogged about this some time ago when I decided to upgrade to Windows 7: http://warczyk.wordpress.com/2009/03/01/windows-7/).

Pros:

#1 It’s fast. REALLY fast. I’m using Gimp and Blender in Windows as well and the program start feels much faster in Ubuntu Linux.

#2 It secure. Basically you don’t need any real time protection virus scanner that’s slowing down your PC because it’s not possible to infect your Ubuntu Linux unless you install malicious software from untrusted sources.

#3 The disturbing hard drive noise is gone. I don’t know what Windows is doing on the HD all the time but it makes really much noise. I always thought it’s paging memory to the hard drive but with 4GB RAM (that I have) it shouldn’t page anything or only when absolutely necessary. In Ubuntu Linux the noise is gone! I hear only the CPU fan…this is why I initially thought there is something wrong with it (Ubuntu didn’t recognize the CPU fan thermal sensor of my ASRock AOD790GX/128M mainboard – but apparently this can be ignored).

#4 Driver installation is easy. The first Linux I ever had was the Suse distro (on my Pentium 120 – OV 133)… gosh, I had to invite a friend to come to my house to install the 3dfx graphics drivers! Remember 3dfx add-on graphic cards? Ha… you couldn’t get anything better at that time (around 1998/99). In Ubuntu Linux divers are no problem. Even better: the OS suggested community tested ATI/AMD drivers! Excellent.

#5 It’s community-driven. This operating system is what I call “from the community for the community”. If you have a question just go to a forum and you will find engaged and competent Linux fans who will for sure be able to help you. In my case I went to the official Ubuntu Ultimate Edition forum. I met there really great people!

Cons:

#1 The Firefox browser on Ubuntu Linux didn’t work with my DSL modem/router. I knew this cheap piece of shit from China (Shanghai DareGlobal Technologies re-banded as Alice Modem 1121 WLAN) always had problems with DNS servers but on Ubuntu Linux this became a really a big problem. The router just forgets about DNS servers for whatever reason after some time. On my Mac PowerBook running OS X 1.4 this resulted in about 60 seconds waiting time when accessing the time synchronization service and on Windows 7 in pages not being found from time to time. On Ubuntu Linux this resulted in very long loading times. Yahoo.com loaded for 60-70 seconds compared to the normal 5  seconds (cache cleared). I installed Chromium (the Chrome without all the Google-Spyware) and it worked without any problems. It turned out it’s accessing some own speed-optimized DNS service. After installing OpenDNS (http://www.opendns.com/) the problem has been gone! Firefox worked as expected.

#2 Flash in Firefox on Ubuntu Linux crashed on right-clicking. It turned out I had to update my Flash to 10.3 to fix this problem manually. Firefox didn’t show this Flash version when installing the plug-in. I think this 10.3 is some development version. It boosted the FPS of flash apps too!

Ubuntu Ultimate Edition for Gamers download: http://ultimateedition.info/Ultimate%20Edition/gamers/

Edit: If you are looking for some awesome non-FPS-games on Ubuntu check these-> http://houcemhachicha.blogspot.com/2011/01/6-ubuntu-free-addicting-games-youve.html

A few weeks ago I posted very positively about the WeTab, an Apple iPad competitor that runs on Linux. I called it the Mercedes of Tablet computers. Since then I talked about it with colleagues, read tons of reviews and even posted questions in the WeTab Community Forum. Most people & reviews dislike the WeTab. Should I call it now the the bicycle of Tablet computers? For sure NOT!

One thing I can tell: Most negative reviews and opinions are simply outdated. I don’t have the WeTab yet but went to my local MediaMarkt electronics store to check if the allegations are true. Most of the allegations are wrong. Ok, there are  a few things that still need to be improved  but the company that designed the WeTab (meanwhile called WeTab GmbH) is still working on it and I’m sure they will do EVEYTHING they can to get things right in the long term!

The thing that I’m most worried about is the Android emulation. It’s at a very early stage right now:

Do I still want to get it? Heck, yes. Why? Because per specs the WeTab is the BEST tablet computer right now and the software will for sure improve with time. The people who designed the WeTab live the idea of open-source! For the most part of the software that comes with the WeTab I would need to pay 10$ each at the Apple App Store!

The video below shows the history of the PR-disaster around the WeTab (WePad how it was first called – video in German BTW)

Here a recent review of the WeTab at Computer Bild (in German) – they still don’t recommend it but I think they just don’t understand the idea of the WeTab: http://www.bild.de/BILD/digital/computer/2010/12/27/wetab-neue-version/tablet-pc-ipad-touchscreen-apps.html

Happy new year!

… and now go out and wave at the ISS to wish them a happy new year

There is really a campaign to do exactly that http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-hampshire-12018849