The Oculus Rift’s Recommended PC Specs released

oculus rift

Today in a blog post, Atman Binstock; chief architect and technical director for the Rift, dropped the skinny on what kind of hardware you are going to need in order to get what he called “the full Rift experience”. And fair warning, it is not for the faint of heart, there are going to be a LOT of people looking to upgrade in order to play games properly on the Rift. So without further ado, here are the recommended specs to get “the full Rift experience”

  • NVIDIA GTX 970 / AMD 290 equivalent or greater
  • Intel i5-4590 equivalent or greater
  • 8GB+ RAM
  • Compatible HDMI 1.3 video output (required)
  • 2x USB 3.0 ports (required)
  • Windows 7 SP1 or newer (required)

Like I said, not for the fair not heart as those are some fairly steep requirements, and we imagine that a lot of people will be looking to upgrade some hardware over the next 6-10 months before the Rift is released.

They also went on to say that they are going to be using those specs over the “lifetime of the Rift”, and as time goes on, naturally that hardware or the equivalent will come down in price. They are using this as a standard so that “Developers, in turn, can rely on Rift users having these modern machines, allowing them to optimize their game for a known target, simplifying development.”
He also went on to explain some of the resolution and latency details of the consumer model;

A traditional 1080p game at 60Hz requires 124 million shaded pixels per second. In contrast, the Rift runs at 2160×1200 at 90Hz split over dual displays, consuming 233 million pixels per second. At the default eye-target scale, the Rift’s rendering requirements go much higher: around 400 million shaded pixels per second. This means that by raw rendering costs alone, a VR game will require approximately 3x the GPU power of 1080p rendering.

You can read the whole, very detailed blog post over here.

Still no word on the pricing for the Rift when it is released sometime in Q1 of next year, but it is great to start seeing more details trickle out.

By Dayne “Anjel” Cody
Twitter- @DayneCody

Halloween Steam Sale on Now!

Steam Logo

Ladies and gentlemen, get your wallets ready for another Steam sale! Steam is having it’s annual Halloween sale. Starting today and going until Nov 3, at 10 am, all your favorite spooky games are on sale.

Head over to Steampowered.com to get in on this great sale!

By Dayne “Anjel” Cody
@DayneCody 

Twitch To Be Acquired By Amazon, Is Now Official

Twitch-Logo-720-1030x579

Twitch CEO, Emmett Shear has confirmed that Twitch will in fact be bought by Amazon. Rumors earlier this year had Google, or Youtube actually, buying the huge video-game streaming service. But today we have confirmation that Amazon will be purchasing them.

In a an open letter, the CEO states that Twitch will remain seperate, but that now with Amazon’s resources, they aim to give us a better Twitch experience. A Copy of the letter is below

Dear Twitch Community,

It’s almost unbelievable that slightly more than 3 years ago, Twitch didn’t exist. The moment we launched, we knew we had stumbled across something special. But what followed surprised us as much as anyone else, and the impact it’s had on both the community and us has been truly profound.

Your talent, your passion, your dedication to gaming, your memes, your brilliance – these have made Twitch what it is today. Every day, we strive to live up to the standard set by you, the community. We want to create the very best place to share your gaming and life online, and that mission continues to guide us.

Together with you, we’ve found new ways of connecting developers and publishers with their fans. We’ve created a whole new kind of career that lets people make a living sharing their love of games. We’ve brought billions of hours of entertainment, laughter, joy and the occasional ragequit. I think we can all call that a pretty good start.

Today, I’m pleased to announce we’ve been acquired by Amazon. We chose Amazon because they believe in our community, they share our values and long-term vision, and they want to help us get there faster. We’re keeping most everything the same: our office, our employees, our brand, and most importantly our independence. But with Amazon’s support we’ll have the resources to bring you an even better Twitch.

I personally want to thank you, each and every member of the Twitch community, for what you’ve created. Thank you for putting your faith in us. Thank you for sticking with us through growing pains and stumbles. Thank you for bringing your very best to us and sharing it with the world. Thank you, from a group of gamers who never dreamed they’d get to help shape the face of the industry that we love so much.

It’s dangerous to go alone. On behalf of myself and everyone else at Twitch, thank you for coming with us.

Emmett Shear, CEO

I haven’t really had a chance to process this newest development, but as of right now I suppose if they leave Twitch to be twitch still and only help the service become better, then that is a great thing. Of course whenever there is a deal like this, the concern is that they will in fact mess it all up. So here is hoping that in this case, things only get better.

By Dayne “Anjel” Cody
@DayneCody

 

New CoD Game Announced, Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare

call-of-duty-advanced-warfare-trailer

 

Activision dropped the news on the new upcoming Call of Duty game today, called Advanced Warfare. Being developed by Sledgehammer Games for the PS4, Xbox One and PC, an unnamed studio is said to be working on the PS3, and Xbox 360 version, no Wii U version was mentioned. Activision is calling this the first game in its new 3 year development cycle for the Call of Duty franchise.

This new game is being set in the year 2054, and they have brought in Kevin Spacey as one of the main characters in the story. The player will be playing as one of the new soldiers utilizing cutting edge exo-skeleton technology. They sent along a new trailer below showing off some of this new game.


They are hoping for a November 4th release for Call of Duty: Advance Warfare.

By Dayne “Anjel” Cody
@DayneCody

Steam Holiday Sale Encore, Last Chance for Huge Savings

It’s the last day of the sale and Steam has brought back the most popular deals. Don’t miss out! Check out these tops picks of mine and head to Steam to save now on these great games and many more before its too late.

The Steam Autumn Sale 2013 starts right MEOW!

steamautumn sale

Time to hide your wallets children, its another steam sale and just in time for Black Friday. As usual Steam will help lighten lucky PC gamers wallets with amazing deals starting today Nov. 27 til next Tuesday Dec. 3. Expect killer deals on some of this years biggest titles, indies and classics. Do yourself a favor and donate to Gabe Newell’s retirement fund while also picking up some sweet deals.

Find all the deals here: The Steam Autumn Sale 2013

By Ricardo “Rico” Ferreira
@RicF

Valve Shows of the Steam Controller in Action

Steam controller_bindings

Today Valve has released a video of the Steam Controller in action. In the following video you can see the controller being used for Portal 2, Civilization 5, Counterstrike Global Offensive, and Finally in Papers Please; an Indie title. They are showing off how versatile the controller is across a wide range of games, some of which you wouldn’t normally think to use a controller for. Take a look below.


The Steam Controllers will be heading out to 300 lucky beta testers later this year, take a look at what they get to play with.

By Dayne “Anjel” Cody
@DayneCody

Valve Announces the Steam Controller

SteamController

So today Valve finished off their Trilogy of announcements with the Steam Controller, a new Input device they have spent the last year working on.

They have designed it to be used with all current and future steam games, and in place of thumb stick they have added two, high resolution haptic trackpads, which are also click-able. This is definitely an interesting way of designing a controller, one in which Valve believes every game can be played on, even games like RTS games. They have essentially “tricked” the games into thinking you are playing with a mouse and keyboard and thus allows you to play any game on steam with this controller. They added a Diagram showing how this should work in Portal 2.

Steam controller_bindings

As you can see from the Diagram above, the middle area of the controller is also a touchscreen, which is also click-able, not unlike the PS4 controller.

Steam controller_schematic

Valve is also claiming that they have designed the controller to be “hackable” and are interested in how the community will utilize this controller. They plan to release tools out to the public to allow this to happen at an unspecified later date.  This controller will be part of the same Beta as the Steam Machine, in allowing the public to voice opinions and help mold where it goes, from software, all the way to design.

Steam controller_parts

No word on when these will ship out to beta testers. For more information on the Steam Controller, and to see about getting into the beta, you can go here; Steam.

By Dayne “Anjel” Cody
@DayneCody

From the creators of Mark of the Ninja comes a new game, Incognita, and man it looks cool

incognita_logo

From the guys that brought us last years Incredible, Mark of the Ninja, Klei are at it again, throwing the stealth genre on it’s head with their new one, Incognita.  I think the video does the best job for showing this game off, so I will just say, take a watch below.

So Incognita is Available for early alpha access on Windows PC’s here. It is also on the way to steam in the coming future. Also if you have yet to pick up their other simply amazing game Mark of the Ninja it too is available on Steam here.

By Dayne “Anjel” Cody
@DayneCody

Valve Announces Steam Machines

Valve Steam Box concept

Valve, today, in the second announcement of three planned for this week, announced The Steam Box Machines. In an announcement where they really told us…. well not really anything. Other then to saying that they are working with partners to create various machines, and there will be a beta test, in which they are inviting 300 people from the public to test these machines, which if you are interested in doing so, you can go see the requirements for the “hardware beta test” Here.

We don’t have specs, we don’t have a drawing, we don’t get to see a prototype, really all they have told is “Entertainment is not a one-size-fits-all world. We want you to be able to choose the hardware that makes sense for you, so we are working with multiple partners to bring a variety of Steam gaming machines to market during 2014, all of them running SteamOS.” They have said that they would be shipping hardware in 2014, and that said hardware will be running SteamOS.

Oh and at the very bottom we get this little, possibly foreshadowing, morsel “Am I going to be using a mouse and a keyboard in the living-room? If you want. But Steam and SteamOS work well with gamepads, too. Stay tuned, though – we have some more to say very soon on the topic of input.”  Possibly tipping their hand at what Friday’s announcement will be? I guess we will have to wait till then and see.

They have stated that we will begin to see Steam Machines in early 2014.

You can check out the Steam Machines page Here.

By Dayne “Anjel” Cody
@DayneCody