Wolfenstein: The New Order

Wolfenstein: The New Order was released couple of days ago. I did my pre-order for one reason and one reason only, to get my hands on the Doom 4 Beta when it comes out. Just incase you are wondering, yes I do love Wolfenstein.

Have not had a chance to play through it, only fiddled with it for a couple of minutes and I can say the first impressions are pretty good. I am playing on Uber difficulty because why wouldn't you? Made it to a castle whose exact details are eliminated in an attempt to avoid spoilers. In the castle it feels like Wolfenstein 3D, the classic Wolfenstein 3D of course.

Since I cannot review this yet I will suggest that you must see the free classic Wolfenstein 3D game made available online to play inside your web browser. Click the Wolfenstein 3D link to get to it.

A link on the free Wolfenstein 3D game to a YouTube video is also worth a look (Embedded below) as it has John Carmack playing through the original DOS version while telling the story and history of the games. Of particular interest is the technical aspects of the game engine and design he touches on as well as the attempts to improve it when the game was made open source.

I am hoping to discuss Wolfenstein: A New Order at some point but there is a lot of other things going on at the moment so priorities priorities. However the most things I will talk about is the Doom 4 Beta -Beta conditions permitting of course.

Mantle Intel -Marriage or infatuation and a jealous Direct3D -the other woman?

Couple of weeks ago I wrote a blog post on AMD's Mantle where I had distilled information from a number of sources. Sometime later from then I wrote another blog post on Mantle talking about nVidia's response to it. From those and other news articles at that time one could conclude that AMD was in for a fight with nemesis Intel, nVidia, and the API competitor Microsoft's DirectX. Now it seems AMD is marrying Intel and Direct3D might be the jealous other woman, or perhaps I am getting a little ahead of myself here.

An interesting set of measured statistics has been published by techradar that compared the performance of Mantle enabled AMD GPU's running on AMD CPU's versus Intel CPU's. Techradar reports an interesting find that Intel and Mantle pairing resulted in better frame rates than AMD and Mantle pairing. We have to be careful when we say this because the pairing advantage seems to be where there is CPU intensive operations by DirectX, Mantle helps the AMD CPU's come closer to Intel CPU's running DirectX.

What does all of this mean then? If you are a gamer, you are better off with an Intel/Mantle combination as is inferred by techradar and I agree. The impression we could get and as touched by techradar is that AMD is not focusing on CPU comparison, instead take out nVidia altogether and then this would cause problems for DirectX. If Mantle and Intel combination succeeds in a hypothetical world with many game developers in support then this is dire straits for DirectX because let's not also forget TrueAudio part of the AMD package. Given that all this is in the early stages and DirectX is coming out in flavor number 12, it actually means a hard time for Mantle rather than the other way around. For me, I am continuing to develop my 3D engine in Direct3D (a component of DirectX) and there is no intention of changing that yet. It does mean that I will most likely try my hand at Mantle and will likely provide that support time permitting because I like Mantle and I like Intel.

So is Direct3D the jealous other woman? If Mantle keeps on growing strong then I guess she is, except we haven't seen her 12th incarnation yet. There is also the case of whether Mantle supports every technology of Direct3D and that I cannot answer. What I can say is that none of the reviewers of games running on Mantle have yet talked about any missing graphical functions compared to DirectX so at least those features are present that are needed to maintain the quality of the original version written for DirectX. In all of this we have forgotten about nVidia so is this a sign of things to come? I have another dilemma now, I really like nVidia too! so now what do I do? There is only one thing to do, watch the market, see how things are turning out, adjust and adapt. The beauty of it is, whatever goes, it is replaced with something even better so there is really no loss to think about.

What a week!

Hi everyone!

Wow what a week it has been! Graduation day was amazing and it did not rain despite weather report predictions for Friday May 9th. For me at least it didn't feel like I  had achieved my degree until I was present at the ceremony. Thank you University of Auckland for an excellent ceremony and the street procession.

It was also a reminder of how important hard work is and its benefit but most importantly it was an experience all of which is embodied into the certificate. Photo shoot session was amazing with Timeless Images Photography with the photographer having a great sense of humor. I am sure that alone will probably result in a lot of my portraits showing off my pearly whites.

Haven't done much catching up with news lately but it is time to get back into it.

Reminder about this blog

Hi All,

A reminder about this blog.

This is not a blog I intend to update regularly but with topics that I feel I need to discuss. These will mainly be programming which will be my major pillar post but currently it is a new blog and there are some interesting things going on in the technology world. There's the AMD's Mantle, and of course the Oculus VR technolgies Oculus Rift. I am following these technologies and will post more details as and when more information comes out about them and of course as I learn more about them.

This week is an extremely busy week with a lot of things going on. The most important of which is my Graduation on May 9th when I get capped!

If you have been following my blog I thank you and please remain tuned in!

-Michael Chand.