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iPhone 4S - What It Means for Games
Apple's iPhone 4S brings a number of new features to the table, but only a few are relevant to gaming. Chiefly, the A5 processor and its GPU increase the capabilities of the phone considerably. The dual-core A5, the same one found in the iPad 2, offers twice the computing power of the iPhone 4. But the new GPU, a PowerVR SGX543MP2, is where it's really at, and it will offer a seven-fold increase in its capabilities when compared to the iPhone 4. But it's all about the developers who take advantage of more-powerful hardware. The A5 processor has only been used on the iPad 2 until now, and with the processor being deployed to the iPhone 4S, it gives developers a greater impetus to create graphically complex games for a much broader audience. The upcoming Infinity Blade II makes use of the A5's processing abilities.
Game Center
iOS 5, the mobile operating system that powers Apple's mobile devices, will also bring Game Center updates with it. Game Center was initially released on iOS 4, and it acts as a social network for games within the Apple world. It records high scores, doles out achievements, and basically lets you compare and share your accomplishments with your friends. But like Ping--Apple's social networking service for music--there was no way to import friends lists from third-party services, which turns out to be a big stumbling block for any new social network. The iOS 5 update for Game Center solves that problem. Game Center on iOS 5 will also let you add a profile picture, browse games without leaving the app, and give you an overall achievement score that is compiled from all the games you play.
iCloud Game Saves
iCloud, which is also bundled within iOS 5, brings some interesting changes for gaming to Apple's devices. Using Apple's iCloud service, developers will let gamers store gameplay data profiles in the cloud, along with saved games. Cloud-saved games should be a boon to gamers with multiple iOS devices (iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch). With any luck, it will solve the issue of having to start games anew on each device. Developers will have to individually build cloud support into their apps, so it won't be an instantaneous upgrade. Apple will give 5GB of free data to all users, and additional storage can be purchased as needed. Apple will offer an extra 10GB for $20 a year, 20GB for $40 per year, and 50GB for $100 per year. The service will also sync contacts, calendars, documents, photos, and data from various applications.
Additional iPhone 4S and iOS 5 Updates
The iPhone 4S comes with an 8MP camera that has quick shutter speeds and can record 1080p video. Two antennas improve the phone's reception and bandwidth. Apple also demonstrated Siri, a virtual assistant that you can talk to get basic answers, like stock quotes, weather updates, contact information, and more. iOS 5 also brings with it upgrades to the notification system, a new messaging service, reminders, Twitter integration, and an easier to use camera.
The iPhone 4S 16GB will cost $199 with two-year contracts. 32GB and 64GB variants will cost $299 and $399, respectively.
The iPhone 4S will be available on October 14, and iOS 5 will make its way to the public on October 12. It will be available on Sprint, AT&T, and Verizon. For more iPhone 4S coverage check out CNET. (Images courtesy of CNET.)
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Video Game Capture: Roxio GameCap and Hauppauge Colossus
The process of capturing video game footage has come a long way. Before there were reasonably priced options to play with, the solution was simply to mount a camcorder in front of the TV. It got the job done, but the grainy recordings and quiet tapping of buttons in the background weren't exactly desirable. The initiated could cobble together a good capture station, but the costs would still be quite high. More recently, quite a few products have popped onto the market at rather low prices. We've zoomed in on two products that get the job done for around $100.
Roxio's $100 GameCap is simplicity in a box the size of a deck of cards. The device plugs into your USB port and lets you connect a single console via component cables. The GameCap doesn't record at HD resolutions, but the easy-to-use controls and interface speak for themselves.
Getting a little fancier, the $130 Hauppauge Colossus gives you quite a bit more flexibility, but with an added dash of complexity. It can capture footage up to 1080i over HDMI and component video. As an add-in card for a desktop computer, it's also not very portable.
Roxio GameCap
The Roxio GameCap is about as difficult to use as a bag of microwave popcorn. You simply plug the USB end into a computer and drop in the component video cables from your console. Installing the software is as trouble-free. Our only gripe is that you have to save the CD installation sleeve. If you lose that, you can't install future downloadable updates or the files off the original driver disk. This seems rather excessive considering that you need the hardware in the first place.
Getting the whole kit working didn't take us more than a few minutes. After flicking a few power switches and firing up the Roxio GameCap software, we had stutter-free video and audio on our computer monitor. No fiddling, no settings, nothing. It's pretty hard to get lost using the included software. The software doesn't let you go full screen if you want to use your monitor to play on, but you can maximize the window to get a larger viewable area. The GameCap box also has component video-out for use on an external monitor or HDTV.
Input
1x component video/analog audio
Output
1x component video/analog audio
1xUSB output
There's a big green button in the Roxio GameCap program that says "Start Capture." You won't find any resolution settings or encoder settings to fiddle with outside of choosing whether you want a WMV, DIVX, or AVI file as the output. This makes the GameCap very easy to use but also limits you to the quality settings built into the program. Videos come out at 848x480 regardless of what resolution you set on the console, and screenshots are pulled at 720x480. Audio is captured in stereo. The GameCap software uses a high level of compression that results in small files that add a considerable amount of blocking and artifacting to the visuals. In our test video, the sky gets completely blown out using appropriate brightness settings. The screenshots are also taken with an incorrect aspect ratio, which results in a slightly stretched image.
Roxio's GameCap video editing software lets you trim videos, combine them, replace music tracks, add narration, and quite a bit more. The interface is clearly laid out, and the drag-and-drop functionality makes it intuitive. Once you're done editing, the software will render the file; how long that takes is a function of how powerful your CPU is and how complex the file is. Built-in export functions let you make stand-alone videos and post them to YouTube, Facebook, and WeGame with a few clicks. Overall video quality is nothing to write home about, and black levels are pretty bad due to compression.
The GameCap will come in handy for those folks limited to laptops. It's cheap, easy to use, highly portable, and it provides passable video quality. For better video quality, there are products like the Hauppauge HD PVR, but they also cost twice as much.
Hauppauge Colossus
Priced at around $130, the Hauppauge Colossus costs a bit more than the Roxio GameCap, but it also does a heck of a lot more if you have a desktop that you can plug it into.
The Hauppauge Colossus requires an open 1x PCI Express slot and fits only in full-height desktop cases; slimline computers need not apply. If you have any experience at installing video cards, the Colossus won't prove any more difficult.
Inputs
1x component video/analog audio
1x optical audio
1x HDMI
Optional daughter card - 1x S-Video and 1x composite video
1x RF receiver
Outputs
1x component video/analog audio
1x optical audio
Hauppauge includes connecting dongles for component video and everything to get you going using them. You're going to have to supply your own HDMI cables if you want to go down that route. Some models of the Colossus include an HDMI splitter. The Colossus supports S-Video and composite inputs, but the package does not include the functionality out of the box. You'll have to purchase a daughter card separately for $15, which isn't a terrible loss since most of us won't be capturing video from devices limited to those connections. Another benefit of the Colossus is its ability to record multichannel audio from sources over optical and HDMI inputs. The Colossus will not record over HDMI on devices that have HDCP enabled (copy protection). In practical terms, this means you won't be able to record PlayStation 3 footage over HDMI, but component video will work fine.
The Colossus comes with two software titles that you can use to record video with. WinTV v7 can be used to record games, but its primary use is to record TV shows. The ArcSoft ShowBiz software is better suited to gameplay recording because it also has a built-in video editor and automatic upload to YouTube. Both programs let you take screenshots at whatever resolution you've set the console to (1280x720, 1920x1080).
The Colossus has a slightly longer learning curve, but it also delivers high-quality recordings and screenshots, and it offers numerous input options for the effort. In addition to being able to capture over various inputs, the card works well as a personal video recording device like a Tivo, provided you have a cable box or a PC tuner card.
Video quality from the Colossus is excellent, especially considering its price. Our only gripe with the Colossus is that it's impossible to play a lag-free game using only the computer. You will need to use the video outputs to properly play and record. Component video users are covered, but certain models of the Colossus do not include an HDMI splitter, so you'll have to fork out an extra $10 depending on the model.
Even though the two products have similar prices, deciding between them isn't terribly difficult. Gamers with laptops are clearly limited to USB-style options like the Roxio GameCap. As long as you're not looking for HD capture or particularly discerning about video quality, the GameCap should serve just fine. Get the Hauppauge Colossus if you have a desktop. The capture quality is excellent, it has a low price point, and it offers great connectivity options.
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The Battle for Budget Graphics: AMD Lynx vs. Intel Sandy Bridge
Mentioning the term "onboard graphics" to a gamer is like yelling four-letter words in holy places. You're free to do both, but the results are less than optimal. Until recently, onboard graphics were useful for games like Scrabble or perhaps Solitaire, if you really wanted to push the envelope. Intel's Sandy Bridge processor changed that a bit by pairing the beefy Core i3/i5/i7 processors with Intel HD 3000 and HD 2000 graphics. The result allowed you to turn on quite a few newer games and actually play older titles. Crysis was still a stretch, but Counter-Strike is rather doable. AMD is also hopping onto the let's-make-our-onboard-graphics-worth-looking-at bandwagon, albeit half a year later. The company recently released Brazos, meant for laptops, and is now following up with Lynx, AMD's newest desktop offering.
Lynx-based chips are essentially quad-core Phenom II X4 processors that have had a few changes made to them and have been paired with more than a few Radeon cores. The changes are enough to warrant an entirely new socket. Lynx chips will use motherboards with FM1 sockets and A55/A75 chipsets. The company will release four Lynx-based desktop parts: A8-3850, A8-3800, A6-3650, A6-3600. The A8-3850 will cost $135, while the A6-3650 will be $115. AMD doesn't have pricing for the other two, but we're going to guess it's up and down by a handful of bucks. The two with pricing will be available on July 3.
A8-3850
2.9GHz Quad-Core
Radeon HD 6550D GPU
100W TDP
4MB L2 Cache
A8-3800
2.4GHz Quad-Core (2.7GHz Turbo)
Radeon HD 6550D GPU
100W TDP
4MB L2 Cache
A6-3650
2.6GHz Quad-Core
Radeon HD 6530D GPU
65W TDP
4MB L2 Cache
A6-3600
2.1GHz Quad-Core (2.4GHz Turbo)
Radeon HD 6530D GPU
65W TDP
4MB L2 Cache
With such a low price point, the fastest Lynx quad-core A8-3850 lines up against Intel's dual-core Core i3-based processors. It might seem like an unfair fight, but AMD hasn't exactly been getting hearts racing with its processors during the past few years. As gamers, our primary preoccupation is with the GPU, though, and AMD's rather modestly priced CPUs get the job done in that respect.
Radeon HD 6550D
400 Cores
600MHz GPU Clock
480GFLOPS Peak Compute
Radeon HD 6530D
320 Cores
443MHz
284GLOPS Peak Compute
Lynx's DirectX11 built-in GPUs aren't anything that's normally worth gushing over, but they are impressive for onboard replacements. The Radeon HD 6550D features 400 Radeon cores running at 600MHz, and the Radeon HD 6530D has 320 of them at 443MHz. The A6's Radeon HD 6530D strikes us as rather neutered, especially considering the minuscule price differences.
Lynx features hybrid CrossFire, but the catch is that you have to purchase another Radeon GPU within a similar performance bracket. Hybrid CrossFire will let you run both the onboard and outboard Radeon GPUs together to get a bit of a boost. The big problem is that at the bottom, you have to spend $50 for a Radeon HD 6450 or about $100 for a Radeon HD 6670 at the top. Additionally, the gains will only be evident in DirectX10 and DirectX11 titles. We really don't recommend spending $50 on a GPU, the results simply aren't worth the effort. If you opt to spend $100, you might as well drop an extra $20 to get a Radeon HD 6770 to get better performance and none of the issues that generally come with dual-GPU setups.
We had to pit the A8-3850 against a substantially more expensive and powerful Core i5 2500K because we didn't have a Core i3 with HD 3000 graphics on hand for testing. The A8-3850's onboard GPU does a phenomenal job of trouncing the Core i5's HD 3000, to the tune of fifty percent on some games. If we upgrade to a Radeon HD 6850, the A8-3850 still does well compared to a vastly more expensive Core i5 2500K, which also has a 600MHz Turbo Boost advantage over the Core i3-2105.
The A8-3850 measures up well if all you're looking for is a simple box to serve as a home theater PC that will perform light gaming duties. However, if you're prepping the system for upgrades and heavy gaming from the start, you're better off taking a different path. We'd opt for the cheaper Phenom II X4 840 (or a Core i3) and pour the savings into a faster GPU for better performance out the door.
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