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Om nom nom. Its Friday folks! But the last week has been so full of games releases, no one has been gossiping about any secretive new projects, so today we’re going to recap what’s happened over the last weeks gaming news. Coming up we look at Nvidia’s next-gen facial rendering tech, peer into Blizzards take on the collectible card game genre & say farewell to Hamonix’s legendary rock band series.
Nvidia, FaceWorks and you
First on our plate is Nvidia showcasing their impressive new facial rendering technology during the keynote speech at GTC 2013. There’s a video just below of CEO Jen-Hsun Huang showcasing a comparison of their previous efforts comparing to the latest endeavour, titled ‘FaceWorks’, but let me dish out some of the specifics for you.
FaceWorks outputs its renders at 1080p resolution, consuming 2 teraflops (FLOPS is a measurement of computing speed, in this instance its equal to one trillion floating-point operations) In comparison, the PS3 is only able to output 230 gigaflops, so that’s an impressive amount of FLOPS to be had. Eagle-eyed tech heads will be sure to notice that FaceWorks still only manages to achieve half of what Nvidia’s latest GPU – Titan – can push out, which peaks at an incredible 4.5 Teraflops.
Does this mean we will be seeing some life-like characters in our next gen titles? Not quite, as although the latest Xbox is still awaiting official spec details, the PS4 is just under the margins with a 1.8 teraflop output. Maybe in a few more years we’ll have Ira shouting orders at us through our home consoles, but for now just sit back and watch the evolution unfold.
HearthStone – Card trading galore
Next on the agenda is the recently announced F2P title coming out of longstanding MMO developer Blizzard. HearthStone: Heroes of WarcraftHerere saw its official announcement at PAX East today, being described as a collectible card game set in the World of Warcraft....well, world. The title is scheduled to release on PC, Mac and iPad, offering 1v1 matches hosted via Battlenet’s matchmaking capability and boasts the sizable sum of 300 cards to collect from launch with more cards being available for $1 micro-transactions some time after release.
The game is currently still in development, with a beta version slated for ‘summer 2013’ and for those of you interested, they are taking beta sign-ups on their official site here.
An ode to Rock Band: End of an era
Finally, today marks the end of Harmonix’s long running musical party game, Rock Band, as the last ever official DLC release for the games was announced today at PAX East. The song that will be carrying the series into the sunset is none other than Don McLean’s American Pie, with a scheduled release of April 2ND.
I for one would like to congratulate Harmonix on their achievement, on a great series that has brought immense fun to many of us across the globe, and proven that you don’t need to leave your house to look like an absolute idiot whilst trying to sing/play guitar/drums/all of these at once.
