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Puget Systems says PC buyers are "reluctant" to step up to Windows 8.
Depending on where you look, Windows 8 is either off to a scorching fast start or it flopped out of the gate with little interest from consumers. There doesn't appear to be much middle ground. Obviously, Microsoft is promoting the former, claiming it sold 40 million Windows 8 licenses in the first month. Yet companies like Asus are saying that the demand for Windows is "not that good," while PC OEMs in general are refusing to take the blame for soft sales. What's the real story? To help answer that question, Puget Systems posted some interesting data and thoughts about its own Windows 8 versus Windows 7 sales figures.
"Keep in mind that as a custom PC shop, our customers dictate sales trends. Unlike some of our competitors, we didn’t stop offering Windows 7 when Windows 8 arrived. We began offering Windows 8 across our product line the day it become available," Puget Systems stated in a blog post.
Puget posted a graph reflecting the sales disparity between the two OSes, and since the day Windows 8 launched, it's been bouncing back and forth between about 10 percent and 20 percent of total sales.
"The lack of substantial spike in initial Windows 8 sales shows that our customers are reluctant to wade into the waters of Microsoft’s newest operating system," Puget says.
The boutique system builder offered up some thoughts on why that's the case. One of them is that the landscape is different today than when Windows 7 launched. Back then, you had a large number of XP users who opted to skip Vista, and when Windows 7 debuted to favorable reviews, many of them made the leap. Windows 8, however, is trying to supplant an OS that most users like.
In addition, Puget believes "the removal of the Start menu is a deal breaker for many," and though there are ways around that, we can understand it being a turnoff for some users. For these and other reasons, Puget says it plans to sell Windows 7 alongside Windows 8 for as long as Microsoft commits to selling and supporting the previous generation OS.
Earlier this year at the GeForce LAN party in Shanghai, Nvidia chief Jen-Hsun Huang revealed an interesting cloud-based service that's supposed to analyze your hardware and adjust in-game settings and display resolution for an optimized experience. It's an ambitious initiative given the number of hardware combinations that exist not only today, but tomorrow and beyond, yet Nvidia is determined to see this project through after having worked on it for more than half a decade. Gamers can get their first taste of Nvidia's new tool today by downloading the GeForce Experience beta.
There's nothing complicated about what Nvidia wants to do. Put simply, the GeForce Experience tool is about simplifying the configuration process and adjusting settings to their optimal values based on your particular setup. The hard part, obviously, is figuring out what those settings are. How does Nvidia determine what they are? It's a six step process:
Expert tester plays through key areas of the game
Find a demanding test case to use as a benchmark
Determine an appropriate FPS target (40-60 fps)
Analyze how each setting affects quality and performance
Find the highest quality settings that satisfy frame rate target
For each game, test across thousands of hardware configurations
The software tool takes all your hardware into consideration, and then based on what was already figured out through the 6-step process above and uploaded to the cloud, it pulls that information down and adjusts the game's settings automatically.
Once you install the software tool, you can then look at all your supported games in one place (as shown above) and click the Optimize button for whichever ones you want Nvidia to, well, optimize. The interface also provides detailed instructions on what the different settings do, so it's also a bit of a learning tool, especially for inexperienced users and/or first time PC gamers.
"GeForce Experience also delivers the latest GeForce drivers right to your desktop," Nvidia explains. "No more going to the web to search for the right driver – GeForce Experience automatically selects the right driver based on your HW config and OS, (optionally) downloads it in the background, and notifies you when it is ready to install. Optimus, SLI and game profiles are also automatically downloaded and installed to your PC, so you are always ready for the latest games."
Not only does this tool help out gamers, but it could make things easier for game developers who are forced to ship a game without knowing what hardware is on the horizon. For example, a game bought today won't necessarily pick out the best settings for a graphics card that you purchase next year or in two years based on its own analysis. The Nvidia Experience tool will, at least in theory.
If you want in on the beta, you'll have to act fast. It's limited to 10,000 users, with the primary goal of getting user feedback before polishing this into a final product. As it stands, GeForce Experience supports over 30 games (Batman: Arkham City, Battlefield 3, Borderlands, Crysis 2, Dirt 3, Just Cause 2) and both notebook and desktop GPUs based on Fermi and Kepler.
Update
The download link is now live. Remember, this is a closed beta limited to 10,000 users, so if you're interested, you'll want to pounce on this sooner rather than later.
The launch of Windows 8 was accompanied by a massive ad campaign.The TV ads sweeping the globe as part of this campaign, the cost of which one report pegged at somewhere between $1.5 billion and 1.8 billion, have one thing in common, in that they all have music from up-and-coming bands at their heart. But Microsoft’s “You and Me Together” Indian TV spot is not merely an amalgam of peppy music, Live Tiles, and, well, people. It stands out for being surprisingly honest about the biggest problem facing Windows 8: consumer skepticism.
The ad in question shows a man and woman using dance moves to interact with Windows 8. But it’s the Bollywood film song in the background that steals the show with its lyrics, which don’t urge, but actually dare, the viewer to take a chance on Windows 8: “Why are you scared friend? If you have the courage, take a chance on me.”
Perhaps much of the creative input for this ad came directly from CEO Steve Ballmer, who once called Windows 8 the company’s “riskiest product bet yet” The message is loud and clear: Microsoft now desperately needs you to take a chance in order for its bet to pay off.
The wait is over, Far Cry 3 is here and available on the PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, and of course our favorite gaming platform, the PC. To kick things off on a high note, both AMD and Nvidia have released new GPU drivers -- AMD Catalyst 12.11 Beta and Nvidia GeForce 310.70 -- that promise to deliver big performance gains in Far Cry 3 (by as much as 38 percent in some cases), as well as a few other titles.
Let's start with AMD. The chip designer's latest beta drivers improve performance by up 25 percent with 8xMSAA and SSAO enabled at 1600p, and up to 15 percent with 8xMSAA and HDAO enabled. A few other games receive a performance boost as a result of the 12.11 beta series, but AMD also focused on resolving a bunch of issues, including system hangs and a missing font issue in XBMC, to name just two.
Nvidia's driver offers an even higher performance boost in Far Cry 3, at least for GeForce GTX 680 graphics card owners, who can expect up to a 38 percent boost. Double digit percentage gains are also found in Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 (up to 26 percent), Battlefield 3 (up to 16 percent), and Assassin's Creed III (up to 18 percent).
The third installment in the Crysis series is about to revive a long-running joke in PC gaming, the one that always ends in, "but can it run Crysis?" Going foward, the question is whether or not yours or any other system can run Crysis 3, and to help you answer that, Crytek today posted the minimum, recommended, and high performance requirements for PC gamers. Brace yourself, this might hurt.
The minimum system requirements aren't too obscene, though they're going to leave some entry-level and older rigs on the sidelines. Here's how it shakes out:
Windows Vista, Windows 7, or Windows 8
DirectX 11 graphics card with 1GB video RAM
Dual-core CPU
2GB memory (3GB on Vista, because apparently it's a pig of an OS)
Example 1 (Nvidia/Intel) - Nvidia GTS 450 - Intel Core 2 Duo 2.4GHz (E6600)
Example 2 (AMD) - AMD Radeon HD 5770 - AMD Athlon 64 X2 2.7GHz (5200+)
Is your system still in the running? Yes? Good, now let's jump up to the Recommended system requirements:
Example 2 (AMD) - AMD Radeon HD 5870 - AMD Athlon64 II X4 805
Congratulations if you're still able to play Crysis 3, you have a very good system. But is it a great setup? You'll need a fairly burly PC to pull off the High Performance specifications, which look like this:
Windows Vista, Windows 7, or Windows 8
DirectX 11 graphics card with 1GB video RAM
Latest quad-core CPU
SLI / CrossFire configuration will run even better
Example 2 (AMD) - AMD Radeon HD 7970 - AMD Bulldozer FX 4150
If you want to turn on all the eye candy, you're going to need a fast system that's particularly well equipped in the GPU department. Do you have a system that can manage it, and if not, do you plan on upgrading?
Valve today announced the public release of Big Picture, the 10-foot user interface (UI) that makes it easier for PC gamers to plop on the couch and play their catalog of titles on their big screen HDTV. To celebrate the public launch, more than thirty "controller-friendly" games will be on sale from now until December 10, some of which will be marked down by as much a 75 percent.
"Access to the complete Steam store is included, as is the Steam Community. Big Picture is available worldwide in over twenty languages, including German, French, Russian, Korean, and Portuguese," Valve stated in a blog post.
Prior to today, Big Picture mode was available in beta form. You may remember we posted a guide on how to enable it. Now that the Big Picture UI is available to the public, all you need to do is fire up Steam as you normally would and click on "Big Picture" in the upper-right corner (you can't miss it). If you don't like it, just revert back to the normal interface.
Valve today announced the public release of Big Picture, the 10-foot user interface (UI) that makes it easier for PC gamers to plop on the couch and play their catalog of titles on their big screen HDTV. To celebrate the public launch, more than thirty "controller-friendly" games will be on sale from now until December 10, some of which will be marked down by as much a 75 percent.
"Access to the complete Steam store is included, as is the Steam Community. Big Picture is available worldwide in over twenty languages, including German, French, Russian, Korean, and Portuguese," Valve stated in a blog post.
Prior to today, Big Picture mode was available in beta form. You may remember we posted a guide on how to enable it. Now that the Big Picture UI is available to the public, all you need to do is fire up Steam as you normally would and click on "Big Picture" in the upper-right corner (you can't miss it). If you don't like it, just revert back to the normal interface.
Some long time fans of Star Wars are afraid of what will become of their favorite franchise now that Disney has acquired Lucasfilm for $4.05 billion (to be fair, Disney's done a good job with Marvel assets, like The Avengers movie), but as an old school adventure gamer, I'm even more concerned with what fate awaits old friends like Guybrush Threepwood (The Secret of Monkey Island) and Bernard (Maniac Mansion). So is Ron Gilbert, the guy who created both games (along with Gary Winnick, who co-conceived Maniac Mansion).
While discussing his current project, The Cave, with our sister magazine PC Gamer, Gilbert also shared his thoughts on the acquisition and his own fears regarding the franchises he birthed.
"I would find it hard to believe that Disney would do anything with them, just because I think they just have a lot more important things that will make them a lot more money," Gilbert said. "Star Wars, for example, just to throw out one thing."
He described the situation as "kind of sad," adding that he wished he owned Monkey Island and Maniac Mansion.
"The fact that Lucasfilm owned them, I guess I was kind of OK with that, right? Because I made them there," Gilbert explained. "But now that they’re owned by someone else–that kind of sits weird with me. It’s like, ‘Well, if someone else is going to own Monkey Island, it should be me that owns Monkey Island.’”
But it's not him that owns the rights, it's Disney, and Gilbert doesn't believe he could offer them enough money to "make it worth their while" to sell. He said if it was anyone else, he'd try to raise some funds and make an offer, but since it's Disney, he probably won't."
"But we'll see, you never know," Gilbert added, leaving the door open.
Some long time fans of Star Wars are afraid of what will become of their favorite franchise now that Disney has acquired Lucasfilm for $4.05 billion (to be fair, Disney's done a good job with Marvel assets, like The Avengers movie), but as an old school adventure gamer, I'm even more concerned with what fate awaits old friends like Guybrush Threepwood (The Secret of Monkey Island) and Bernard (Maniac Mansion). So is Ron Gilbert, the guy who created both games (along with Gary Winnick, who co-conceived Maniac Mansion).
While discussing his current project, The Cave, with our sister magazine PC Gamer, Gilbert also shared his thoughts on the acquisition and his own fears regarding the franchises he birthed.
"I would find it hard to believe that Disney would do anything with them, just because I think they just have a lot more important things that will make them a lot more money," Gilbert said. "Star Wars, for example, just to throw out one thing."
He described the situation as "kind of sad," adding that he wished he owned Monkey Island and Maniac Mansion.
"The fact that Lucasfilm owned them, I guess I was kind of OK with that, right? Because I made them there," Gilbert explained. "But now that they’re owned by someone else–that kind of sits weird with me. It’s like, ‘Well, if someone else is going to own Monkey Island, it should be me that owns Monkey Island.’”
But it's not him that owns the rights, it's Disney, and Gilbert doesn't believe he could offer them enough money to "make it worth their while" to sell. He said if it was anyone else, he'd try to raise some funds and make an offer, but since it's Disney, he probably won't."
"But we'll see, you never know," Gilbert added, leaving the door open.
Earlier this year at the GeForce LAN party in Shanghai, Nvidia chief Jen-Hsun Huang revealed an interesting cloud-based service that's supposed to analyze your hardware and adjust in-game settings and display resolution for an optimized experience. It's an ambitious initiative given the number of hardware combinations that exist not only today, but tomorrow and beyond, yet Nvidia is determined to see this project through after having worked on it for more than half a decade. Gamers can get their first taste of Nvidia's new tool today by downloading the 
The wait is over, 
The third installment in the Crysis series is about to revive a long-running joke in PC gaming, the one that always ends in, "but can it run Crysis?" Going foward, the question is whether or not yours or any other system can run 
Valve today announced the public release of 
Some long time fans of Star Wars are afraid of what will become of their favorite franchise now that 
