Recent content by Trawler

That's one big heatsink. Would be interesting to compare the size of it with a Series S.

I can see the possibility of spinning up an Xbone VM in Azure (and potentially locally in Hyper-V, though MS may not like the business case for this) so perhaps emulation will be a moot point.

My bet is that AMD is keeping a 'just good enough' cooler on these cards to keep their hardware vendors happy. The hvs can differentiate and add value with custom coolers. Looking forward to picking up a 290 with a decent cooler and I doubt I'll be the only one.

They can try, perhaps even release their own low level API to achieve similar performance gains. But they'll never be able to match the huge key benefit that (supposedly) Mantle allows developers to reuse most of their optimized console code.

If Mantle truly is similar to the new consoles' low level API, I'm surprised MS didn't stipulate that it only be released for Windows. Perhaps that's something they missed or overlooked in the X1's GPU contract. Lots of people talking Linux but this is great news for Mac owners as well. And...

Interestingly I would've said Azure winds hands down in the ease of user category, but I suppose it depends on the complexity of the task.

Off topic but the bloated kernel for Windows 7 32-bit weighs in at a hefty 11 Mb. I expect both machines dashboards will take a chunk of RAM from the OS partition, the remainder will be available to applications that can be swapped/snapped to in game.

A more fitting name would've been Xbox Azure. Lots of smart moves in here in relation to the VMs and cloud integration that will pay off big time in the years ahead. Any word on if it'll run standard Windows 8 Apps? Not sure if I'll get one at launch, would rather see how the TV integration...

Won't that mean the entire download will need to complete before the user can play? This is in contract to what we've heard about games starting straight away when played off optical media (or was that PS4? getting my rumors confused).

I'd like to see better destruction in BF4. The ability to take out buildings felt degraded in BF3, though I suppose BFBC2 only had simple structures by comparison.

Apparently it's the 8960:

I wonder if the new haptic controller is still on the cards for this year.

A new instalment of Unreal Tournament would be nice.

I expect the 360 will get WinRT app compatibility too, so one app will run on PC/Tablet/Phone/Xbox. MS are on the right track with this one IMO.

A nice little gimmick would be an SLI/Crossfire expansion module to enable stereoscopic mode and/or enhanced visuals. That way you could still cater for the hardcore crowd while the base model has a modest (for the time) GPU.