Gaming

Adobe next month will release Director 11, an update to its graphics assembly, that it hopes will lure game developers with its better 3D imaging.

Adobe is expected to detail the latest features of Director at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco on Tuesday.

Director 11 is used to build games, as well as graphics-rich presentations, and learning applications. It uses the Shockwave plug-in to render 3D graphics.

The latest version includes physics, or movement between images, using the Ageia PhysX engine and support for DirectX 9, which can take advantage of recent graphics cards.

It will make it … Read more

Those of you hunting for the latest technology in Dell's 17-inch gaming laptop will be pleased to learn the M1730 has received its Penryn update. Since Intel announced its new 45-nanometer chips last month at CES, they've been ever so slowly making their way into systems. Dell is replacing the T7700 and the T7800 Merom CPUs with the T9300 and the T9500 Penryn chips, respectively. There will be no price differential between the older Merom chips and their Penryn replacements.

Dell's XPS M1730 laptop now lists two Penryn CPU options, the 2.5GHz Core 2 Duo T9300 … Read more

In the video game industry hardware sales are an extremely important factor in deciding which console a game should be developed for. Realizing this, companies like Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft have done their best to keep consoles in the hands of consumers and sell as many systems as possible each month.

And while some of the more common practices of selling consoles are already used--promotion of a software library, marketing, and pricing--a relatively new phenomenon has developed where console availability has dropped significantly and hardware sales stay at a relatively steady, yet inflated level.

In essence, hardware scarcity is running rampant and yet, demand for these devices has grown at an astounding rate. In fact, most experts in the field think 2008 could be the biggest year for gaming ever.

So what is it about a scarce product that makes us want it more? Does it somehow tell us that the device is far more valuable and worthwhile if it's not available? If so, does that line of thinking even make sense?

Sadly, I'm left wondering if we've entered a phase in the video game industry where scarcity is being used as a tool to increase demand, only to be followed by a flood of consoles to satisfy it.… Read more

I stopped by a LeapFrog event today to at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York. I was pleasantly surprised when the company representatives trotted out a new handheld learning/gaming system, the Didj ($89.99), which is due to arrive this summer. LeapFrog doesn't exactly bill the Didj as a Nintendo DS competitor, but the the new device is geared toward 6- to 10-year-olds, an age bracket where the DS currently rules.

LeapFrog also had its upcoming Leapster 2 ($69.99) at the event, which is targeted at even younger children. The idea behind the Didj … Read more

Intel let a variety of tech enthusiast sites run wild with benchmarks today showing off its forthcoming eight-core desktop platform, code-named Skulltrail. You can get eight-core computing already in the form of Apple's Mac Pro or a pair of Intel Xeon 5400 processors, but Skulltrail marks the first eight-core platform we've seen aimed at high-end workstation computing and PC gaming. The Skulltrail motherboard not only supports two CPUs, but it also supports both Nvidia's SLI and ATI's Crossfire multigraphics card standards. The problem is that for all of Skulltrail's power, PC gaming isn't quite … Read more

Parents on the lookout for carefree, unintimidating ways to urge the sprout of their young kids' creativity ought to take a look at Ten Amazing Fruits. As the product name suggests, Ten Amazing Fruits stars a sampling of botanical characters, including the frequently miscast tomato (hurrah!) These are not, however, your garden-variety fruits. Each outsize organic possesses arms, feet, and a blank face upon which children can attach, Mr. Potato Head-style, a variety of digital features and appendages. A posh voice recites object names when the cursor mouses by, but a quick trip to the options can put an end … Read more

Henry Jenkins, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor who is perhaps academia's leading fanboy, spent part of January in Shanghai and has been posting observations on his blog. I want to highlight one of his better contributions: on social responsibility in Chinese video game culture.

Video games, "freedom," and "addiction"

Jenkins was attending the International Games and Learning Forum, organized by MIT and Beijing University. There, the focus was on "serious games," those that might potentially be used to promote learning. His most frequently repeated observation was that, while U.S. experts on … Read more

A week after it was supposed to, AMD announced its Radeon HD 3870 X2 graphics card today. Roughly $450 will get you this high-end 3D card, which melds two Radeon HD 3870 chips onto a single 3D card package. The resulting performance is basically the same as two standalone Radeon HD 3870 cards in AMD's multicard ATI Crossfire mode. Various review sites show it competing more or less well against Nvidia's GeForce 8800 GTX and 8800 Ultra cards, although neither AMD nor Nvidia can claim an across-the-board victory.

Our illustrious colleagues at GameSpot are working diligently on updating their benchmarks for this card after a late-breaking driver update (the reason for the cancellation of last Monday's announcement). We weren't originally going to retest, but for reasons unrelated to the driver, we decided we would. Once we have scores, both CNET and Gamespot will post our respective reviews. In the meantime, Anandtech, ExtremeTech, and PC Perspective have well-done coverage of AMD's new card. And how do those sites find the DirectX 10 performance picture?… Read more

AMD's new Radeon HD 3400 and 3600 graphics cards represent the complete opposite end of the spectrum from the 3870 X2 whose benchmark results and technical details we're not allowed to discuss until later. Where the 3870 X2 is...something else, the 3400 and the 3600 sit firmly on the budget side of the aisle.

The 3400 will feature card variants ranging from $50 to $65 or so, and the 3600's will go from $80 to $100. Neither version will deliver top-line 3D performance, but they will each give you a step up in speed over an … Read more