Month: November 2021

A few days in, Champion Hill is one of a handful of stand-out features.

By Seth Macy @ IGN

Call of Duty: Vanguard’s multiplayer is fast, fun, and more than anything, familiar. There are some great new additions by way of expanded game modes, including the excellent new Champion Hill, but if you’d told me I was playing a patched version of Call of Duty: World War II or a reskinned Black Ops: Cold War (which itself felt like a reskinned Modern Warfare) I would probably have believed you, you devious trickster.

Read on…

A fun, truly cinematic campaign that lacks variety over its brief runtime.

By Simon Cardy @ IGN

Call of Duty: Vanguard’s campaign starts off on the right track – literally. An explosive train sequence through a burning Hamburg, Germany thrills as you jump between carriages, fending off dozens of angry Nazis on your way to a submarine base. It’s a cinematic opening to a game that wears its film influences proudly; whether that be the tense behind-enemy-lines aspects of D-Day in The Longest Day or the vivid depictions of the Pacific in Terence Malick’s The Thin Red Line. No shadow hangs heavier over this latest Call of Duty World War II story, however, than Inglourious Basterds. Its tale of a small group of expert soldiers on a secret mission to stop the Third Reich may sound familiar to anyone who has seen the 2009 movie, but Vanguard plays it with a much straighter face than Tarantino ever could. Even so, Vanguard’s campaign is over quickly, and its small series of battles are all too rarely memorable high points.

Read on…

Source: Blue’s News

Call of Duty: Vanguard is now available for PC, Xbox, and PlayStation, putting out the call for players to reenlist in the military shooter series in a return to a World War II setting. The Windows edition is for sale on the Battle.net Shop as either a Standard Edition or an Ultimate Edition with additional skins and blueprints, a battle pass bundle, and an XP booster. The game kicks off with a solo campaign, a new zombies experience, and 20 multiplayer maps with crossplay support between PC and consoles. A new season of Warzone will kick off on December 2nd, bringing the free-to-play battle royale to the war in the Pacific. Here’s the previously released Launch Trailer featuring Jack White along with more details:

In Vanguard, players will experience the origins of Special Forces fighting across four major theaters of World War II like never seen before.

With development led by Sledgehammer Games, Vanguard enlists players in an engaging blockbuster campaign as ordinary soldiers from diverse backgrounds rise on all fronts to do the extraordinary and turn the tides of war. Multiplayer features 20 maps, 12 Operators and over three dozen Weapons in the revamped Gunsmith all starting day one. Vanguard multiplayer delivers new ways to play with the Combat Pacing system and the fast and frenetic multi-arena survival Champion Hill mode. Vanguard also brings a franchise-first Zombies crossover developed by Treyarch, expanding upon the Dark Aether storyline that players were introduced to in Call of Duty®: Black Ops Cold War.

Matrix Games has released the second tactical video from Decisive Campaigns: Ardennes Offensive. 

We’re back with a new technical video, this time regarding the new rules designed to fit the game’s lower scale. Discover what’s changed with LOS, height levels, Kampfgruppen, and much more with this new technical video, and get ready for November 18th.

For more game information please visit the Decisive Campaigns: Ardennes Offensive webpage.

By Hilbert Hagedoorn @ GURU3D

To be precise, ASUS is back in the game, this time with another HERO, in the form of a Z690 motherboard. This Alder Lake motherboard is loaded with features and gadgets, and it’s dressed to impress with its dark design. The Z690 motherboards from ASUS will be plentiful, with some of the models offering a choice between DDR5 and DDR4 memory configurations. It all starts with the flagship ASUS ROG Maximus Z690 Extreme motherboard, which is followed by the FORMULA, HERO, and APEX motherboards, all of which will include DDR5 memory and only DDR5 memory — and that’s all there is to it. In total, there will be three ROG STRIX Z690 motherboards, one TUF GAMING Z690 motherboard, and a slew of PRIME Z690 motherboards, all of which will have differing degrees of technological sophistication, features, and sizes. ProART Z690-Creation 10G motherboard, which sounds like it’ll be a “content creator” motherboard with 10GbE LAN connectivity and, I’m sure, a ton of I/O connectivity, will be sandwiched between the rest of the ASUS Z690 lineup. The ASUS Maximus Z690 Hero, as tested today, rocks a 20-phase power design with 90A PowerStages.

Read the Review Here

The embargo on independent reviews of the Alder Lake-S desktop series has officially lifted.  Now available from retailers, the six unlocked desktop processors are the first based on Intel’s performance hybrid architecture featuring a combination of Performance-cores (P-cores), the highest performing CPU core Intel has built, and Efficient-cores (E-cores), designed for scalable multi-threaded workload performance. We have gathered a number of reviews on the new 12th Gen processors, and they are featured via the links below.

Intel Core i9-12900K and Core i5-12600K

• TOM’S HARDWARE
• EUROGAMER
• HOTHARDWARE
• OC3D
• OVERCLOCKERS
• GURU3D (Core i9 12900K)
• GURU3D (Core i5 12600K)
• TECHPOWERUP! (Core i9 12900K)
• TECHPOWERUP! (Core i5 12600K)

Intel Core i7-12700K

• TECHPOWERUP!

Source: TechPowerUp!

AMD has put out the first Radeon Software release for the month of November 2021, with the Radeon Software Adrenalin 21.11.1 beta. These drivers add optimization for “Call of Duty: Vanguard,” and “Forza Horizon 5.” For the latter, the drivers provide a massive 23% performance gain at 4K with “extreme” settings over the previous driver, as tested on a machine with an RX 6800 XT graphics card. A couple of issues have been fixed. Samsung Odyssey G9 C49G95T monitors were showing up display corruption with their resolution set at 5120 x 1440 @ 240 Hz, which has been fixed. Certain visual artifacts in the menu screen of “Call of Duty: Warzone,” have been fixed.

The Radeon Software Adrenalin 21.11.1 drivers are available online at the AMD driver download page.

Check out these latest hardware announcements for today from around the web. Also included are some hardware news bits, and on some days, a few rumors tossed in for good measure. Click on the links below to read the official press release, visit the products web page, or to an independent news source.

• MSI Unveils 12th Gen Intel Core Gaming Desktop and Definition the New Standard of Gaming Monitor
• Sharkoon Introduces the SKILLER SGK50 S4 60% Keyboard
• G.SKILL Trident Z5 Breaks DDR5-8704 World Record with ASUS ROG Z690 Apex
• PNY Announces Specifications and Availability of XLR8 Gaming and Performance DDR5 Desktop Memory
• GIGABYTE Prepares AORUS Z690 First Look Event to Showcase the Launch of the new Intel Alder Lake Platform
• Scythe Announces Mounting Upgrade Kit for Intel LGA1700 Socket
• Noblechairs Releases White Edition EPIC Gaming Chair
• Turtle Beach Velocityone Flight Controller Pre-orders Close Within Hours!
• EK Launches Precision Torque Screwdriver
• ASUS AIO Coolers Support Intel Core Processors of the 12th Generation
• SilentiumPC Cooling System Compatibility with the LGA1700 Platform
• GIGABYTE Releases GeForce RTX 3070 with a Silver colored Triple-fan Cooler
• Alphacool’s CPU Coolers & AIOs are ready for Intel’s LGA 1700 Socket
• Cooler Master Announces Free Mounting Upgrades for LGA1700 Release
• Arctic Launch Freezer i35 ARGB & Freezer A35 ARGB CPU Coolers
• SteelSeries Unveil Aerox 3 & Aerox 3 Wireless 2022 Editions

Source: Blue’s News

Friday is D-Day for Call of Duty: Vanguard, as that’s when the World War II first-person shooter is set to invade PCs and consoles worldwide. The World Premiere Video Link says the video premiere will go live at 9:00 pm EDT on Wednesday. Those who’ve preordered the Windows edition can begin preloading tomorrow at 1:00 pm EDT to be ready to play when the switch gets flipped. Publisher Activision and developer Sledgehammer offer a new trailer showing off PC specific enhancements. There’s also a new article on the Call of Duty Blog on the subject. This includes presumably final PC specs formatted, well, oddly:

Video Card

• Minimum: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960 or AMD Radeon RX 470
• Recommended: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060 or AMD Radeon RX 580
• Competitive: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2070/RTX 3060 Ti or AMD Radeon RX 5700XT
• Ultra 4K: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 or AMD Radeon RX 6800 XT

Video Memory

• Minimum: 2 GB
• Recommended: 4 GB
• Competitive: 8 GB
• Ultra 4K: 10 GB

Source: Blue’s News

A new trailer from NVIDIA shows off some of the enhancements owners of GeForce RTX video cards will see in Battlefield 2042 when the military shooter is released later this month. The clip shows off support for RTX ray tracing, DLSS, and Reflex. Here’s an explanation:

PC gamers will get a Battlefield 2042 experience like no other, because a PC allows you to enjoy higher detail levels, uncapped frame rates, and gameplay enhanced by variable refresh rate G-SYNC monitors, TVs and displays.

Graphics on a PC are next-level with ray-traced ambient occlusion (available only on PC), and GeForce RTX-based PCs have dedicated RT cores to deliver excellent ray tracing performance. With NVIDIA DLSS, performance is boosted without sacrificing image quality. NVIDIA Reflex optimizes system latency to assure shot accuracy for maximum competitiveness.