Why Diablo 3′s always-online DRM is a good thing

Diablo 3 has now been available worldwide for a week. In true, zealous, Blizzard-super-fan style, the end boss on the hardest difficulty setting has already been defeated. We don’t know the exact number of Diablo 3 sales, but with some 2 million pre-orders, we’re talking about one of the fastest-selling games of all time — and probably the fastest-selling PC game of all time (beating out the World of Warcraft expansions and Starcraft 2, which are also Blizzard titles).

By almost all accounts, Diablo 3 is a fantastic game. It has received almost perfect scores from the top game critics, hardcore gamers, and casual players alike — except for one niggling issue: Diablo 3 requires an internet connection to Battle.net to play.

It’s not like this is news — Blizzard announced that the game would require an internet connection last year — but unfortunately it was brought into sharp relief by a flurry of server issues and extended maintenance downtime over the past week. If there hadn’t been any login difficulties, the always-online thing probably would’ve faded into the background, obscured by legendary-tinted glasses — but because some 2+ million people have spent the past week battling with heinous lag, Error 33, Error 37, and Error 3003, critics and gamers have focused their ire on what they perceive to be the issue: Diablo 3′s always-online DRM.

Now, while it’s true that D3′s reliance on Battle.net does act as a form of DRM, this is just a value-added extra as far as Activision-Blizzard are concerned. Really, given the faith that Blizzard has garnered from its users over the last 20 years, I’m surprised that fans have been so quick to label this feature as crippling DRM, or worse, the hellspawn of Blactivision’s CEO, Bobby Kotick. In reality, Diablo 3′s connectivity requirement exists for a handful of compelling reasons that actually make the game better.

Gameplay

Users and critics are quick to draw comparisons to Ubisoft’s aborted use of must-remain-connected-to-the-internet DRM, but Diablo 3 is really very different. To begin with, it helps if you think of Diablo 3 as an online game. In fact, think of Diablo 3 as an MMO, like World of Warcraft or Star Wars: The Old Republic.

Unlike Diablo 2 or other offline games, all of your D3 characters reside in the cloud — in one of Blizzard’s huge database servers, just like your WoW character. Every time you loot or equip an item, that change is automatically saved to Blizzard’s database. Because of this, your characters will survive a hard disk crash, and they’re accessible from any internet-connected computer — you can log into D3 from a friend’s computer (or your office computer) and continue from where you left off.

Once you actually log in, Diablo’s gameplay is a piece of seamless mastery. Joining a friend’s game takes one click — and then porting directly to them takes one more. All your characters share a single item stash. With the BattleTag and Real ID systems, you can set up a new game with two or three clicks — and of course, like SC2 and WoW, you can chat to any of your friends, no matter which game they’re currently playing, from the chat window.

None of this would be possible without permanent Battle.net connectivity.

Security

One of the biggest problems with offline games is that all of the game logic and game saves must be stored locally. Game saves are historically very, very easy to crack — outfitting your character with a full set of end-game legendary items can be as simple as loading up a hex editor and changing a few values. With decompilation and memory interrogation hacking, a game’s inner workings — boss mechanics, loot generation, and so on — can be laid bare.

In offline-only games, these factors aren’t a big issue — but in Diablo 2, which featured offline and online play, so much data was available in the game client that hacked characters and map hacks were rife.

Diablo on the left, WoW on the right — the look similar because they are

To put it another way: Can you ever imagine an MMO like WoW storing character data locally on your hard drive? No. Just apply the same logic to Diablo 3. Blizzard wants to keep hacking and exploitation to a minimum — and hacked games and characters were one of the biggest complaints in Diablo 2 — and so it isn’t all that surprising that the company is keeping as much data and logic server-side as possible.

The real-money auction house

The jewel in Diablo’s crown — and one of the most exciting experiments in online/MMO history — is the real-money auction house (RMAH). When it launches at the end of May, players will be able to sell items for actual dollars and pounds, with Blizzard taking a flat $1 cut on unique items, and 15% on stackable commodities (health pots, gems).

The real-money auction house is Blizzard’s attempt to monetize (and legalize) the rampant, gray/black market buying of gold and items from “Chinese gold farmers” using real money. Similar approaches at stemming gray/black market trading have been tried before — most notably, Eve allows you to buy your monthly subscription with in-game currency — but Diablo 3′s RMAH is by far the highest-profile attempt yet. The intricacies of virtual world economies are beyond the scope of this story, but put it this way: It is actually more efficient for someone in China (or another developing country) to farm gold in WoW and sell it to rich Westerners, than to work in manufacture or agriculture.

Diablo 3 real-money auction house

It is likely, if Diablo 3 attracts enough players, that a huge real-money economy will develop around the game, making Blizzard (and players!) millions of dollars in the process. For a game without a monthly subscription, this is obviously a rather attractive proposition for Blactivision.

For the RMAH to work, though, Blizzard needs absolute security. Dupe bugs and hacks — where players can magically conjure up duplicates of the same item — could ruin the legitimacy of the RMAH overnight. This isn’t to say that MMOs are perfectly secure (almost every big MMO has fallen victim to a dupe bug), but they’re a lot more secure than offline games. As we mentioned previously, every action that you perform in Diablo 3 is recorded and saved in one of Blizzard’s databases. It might be possible to dupe some gold or items, but Blizzard will have built in plenty of protections that allow it to track the duped objects and remove them from the game. There is almost certainly a team at Blizzard that is tasked with hunting for exploits and exploiters 24/7.

Epilogue

In my opinion, these three factors are a large part of what make Diablo 3 so damn enjoyable. With that said, though, there is simply no avoiding the fact that requiring an internet connection to play is ultimately very lame. DSL connections are finicky beasts, after all — and what happens if Blizzard gets DDoSed, or it goes bankrupt? As internet connections improve, though, these concerns will slowly vanish.

In many ways, Diablo 3 is almost the first step towards cloud gaming. While I can’t confirm this, I suspect that the D3 artwork is the only real asset that is stored on your computer — everything else is either downloaded, or streamed while you play. You will notice that, despite the tumultuous first week, Blizzard hasn’t issued a single patch for D3. It’s entirely possible that, when you log in, item stats, monster attributes, spell effects, and even game mechanics are downloaded from the Battle.net servers. It also seems that Blizzard has the capability to change items, monsters, and spells while you play the game. In effect, you are streaming everything from the cloud — except the art.

I think this is the real reason that Diablo 3 completely forbids offline play. Blizzard could make it so that you could download a complete version of Diablo 3 for offline play, but a) that would give hackers easier access to data that Blizz would rather keep locked up; b) the ability to continually fine-tune the game after launch is very desirable; and, finally, who are we kidding: As far as the accounting bods are concerned, online-only play is the single best way of cutting down on piracy and generating more income — at least until someone reverse engineers the Diablo 3 server, of course.

Read more about Diablo 3, or the awful DRM in Batman: Arkham City

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GeForce GTX 670: Carpet bombing the video card market

That’ll teach me! If I had known exactly what Nvidia had planned for this week, I might not have written last week about why enterprising PC gamers shouldn’t bother slavering over the $999 GTX 690 and instead just be thrilled that a $499 video card as good as the GTX 680 exists. Because now, in the wake of the release of the GTX 670, it’s tough to say pretty much exactly the same thing without wearing out the Ctrl and V keys on my keyboard.

But it’s true. With this release Nvidia has accomplished, if not the impossible, then the grossly implausible: reoriented the enthusiast video card market around the $400 price target rather than $500. And, in the process, the company has changed everything.

Although I’m not positive I’ll forget anytime soon the head-to-toe awestruck numbness I experienced when my Nvidia contact told me that the price of the GTX 670 would be $399, looking back now it makes perfect sense. This is a shockingly similar replay of what the company did almost two years ago when it released the GTX 460 and took up residence in the $200 stratum civilization had previously ignored. This isn’t just undercutting the competition — it’s nuking it from space.

Assuming Nvidia and its board partners are able to maintain (and deliver) products around $400, there’s simply no compelling reason to buy either of AMD’s top two cards, the Radeon HD 7950 or the 7970, anymore. The GTX 670 crushes the former in performance across the board and is available for the same price, and surpasses the latter most (no, not all) of the time despite being available for about $80 to $100 less. And it’s better as far as power draw, too: My test system used only about 292 watts (under full load) with the GTX 670 but 346 with the 7970.

This has to be a stunning blow for AMD, as price and power usage have been its main selling points over Nvidia for a while now. I have no doubt that AMD can bounce back from this, but because Nvidia pulled this coup de graphics in the middle of a generation, AMD will be hard pressed to really respond to the challenge for another six months. Sure, it could reprice its cards tomorrow, but even if that were likely to happen (which it’s not), AMD has released products straight down through to the midrange, and the cascade effect could be catastrophic. And if a reasonable supply of GTX 670s appear on retailer and e-tailer shelves, AMD might not be able to recover from this attack at all — at least on the high end.

What I think is even more interesting about this is what it means for the GTX 680. The GTX 670 delivers about 90% of the performance of that card, but costs only 80% as much. Forget, for a moment, about Nvidia cutting off AMD’s legs: Isn’t it taking a baseball bat to its own knees, too?

I’m sure Nvidia has a sound business strategy here — I can’t imagine a company this big and influential making an industry-shaking decision like this lightly — but I must admit I can’t figure out exactly what it is. Pricing like this would seem to drive away customers — maybe a lot of customers — who might have shelled out the extra dough for the GTX 680 if they thought it would be legitimately worth it. But for many people the GTX 670 is going to be more than enough, so why should they fork over another $100 just to get marginally higher frame rates? And why is all this happening less than two months after the GTX 680 was released?

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this — so please leave me a comment below — but I can see only a few possibilities. One: The Nvidia folks wanted the double headlines they could get from two terrific releases in quick succession, and didn’t think hurting the sales of the GTX 680 (or the feelings of those who ran right out to buy one) would do any lasting harm. (Let’s face it, they were probably right about this.)

Two (and, I admit, the chances of this one aren’t great): Nvidia realized after the fact that it erred in positioning and pricing the GTX 680 quite the way it did, and pushed the GTX 670 as a stabilizing release knowing it would kick off AMD’s second-in-command card at the same time. Certainly the GTX 670 is impressive enough on its own, and had Nvidia released it first, no one would have complained. This could have made slotting the GTX 680 slightly easier, and wouldn’t leave it feeling like the odd card out.

Most tantalizing is the third possibility: Nvidia has something amazing planned for the next go-around. Lowering the top threshold from $500 to $400 gives the company the freedom to insert an exponentially better flagship single-GPU product into the previous space. If it’s sufficiently good — or, more correctly, sufficiently better than AMD’s next entry in that field — then Nvidia will have owned the upper and lower ends of the “serious gamer” market for two consecutive generations. Considering that Nvidia’s previous contestants in this area, the GTX 480 and GTX 470 in 2010 and the GTX 580 and the GTX 570 last year, were hardly slouches, even if their competitors got there first, AMD might not be able to catch up for years.

That is, of course, contingent on Nvidia’s next product being truly great. By all but obliterating the $500 price point with its GTX 670–shaped grenade, Nvidia is only making it that much more difficult to reoccupy that previous territory later. Its next hurdle will be the opposite of the one it jumped this time: Can it convince people that the GTX 780 (I’m guessing at the name here, but come on) is $100 or $150 better than the GTX 670? That’s taking a pretty big risk, and given that Nvidia followed up the GTX 460 with cards showing only incremental improvements in the $200 space, leaving AMD room to at least get a foothold there… well, one has to wonder.

Whatever ends up happening, one thing is clear: Nvidia has terraformed the video card landscape in a way most of us hadn’t considered possible, or even probable, last week at this time. Shoppers can, and will, only benefit from this, as they’ll have a much wider selection of options at a much lower cost now and for the next generation or two of releases to come. But with great upheaval comes great opportunity — and more potential problems. Will Nvidia cement its current lead and revolutionize video card pricing from the top down? Or will it carve out a niche for itself from which it can’t escape, leaving AMD the opening it needs to innovate and dominate with its 8000 and 9000 series?

At this point, it’s too early to tell. But both Nvidia and AMD have their work cut out for them, and seeing how this shakes out could be one of the most nail-biting tech stories of 2012 and 2013.

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GeForce GTX 670 review: Nvidia’s flagship has a little brother

Nvidia’s GK104 GPU (codenamed Kepler)debuted last month in the form of the GTX 680. Now the company is following up with a slightly less-powerful part aimed at securing a lower price point and going head-to-head with AMD’s own Radeon HD 7950. Team Red has already cut prices once since the GTX 680 debuted — the Radeon 7970 has slipped from $549 to $479, with the 7950 currently at $399 down from $449.

The GTX 670 is targeting the $399 price point, and Nvidia claims its new GPU is significantly faster than the best AMD can offer.

Let’s take a look at what Nvidia has brought to the table this time around.

One of the first thing we noticed about the GTX 670 is its size and weight — or lack thereof. It may look like a standard high-end graphics card on top, but Nvidia put Kepler’s PCB on a diet. The card comes equipped to cover all your display needs, with two DVI outputs, one HDMI, and one DisplayPort. Flip it over, and it’s surprisingly short.

The GTX 670 PCB is approximately seven inches long, not counting the PCIe bracket. While this particular card retains a dual-slot design, Nvidia told us that several partners may have single-slot solutions in the works. It’s been a long time since top-tier GPUs shipped in such svelte packages and it says a great many good things about GK104 that Nvidia was able to pull this off.

The GTX 670 uses the same GK104 chip as the 680, but with one SM (Streaming Multiprocessor) unit turned off. Kepler’s SM groups are referred to as SMXs and were rearchitected, rather than being based on Fermi’s. The GTX 670 has just 112 texture units (down from 128) but keeps the GTX 680′s 32 ROPs.

Looking at its spec sheet, the GTX 670 has ~12% fewer cores and clocks them ~12% slower than its big brother. That’s a modest step down from the 680, and should keep the card’s performance near the top of the chart. We’ve rounded up two cards to compare against the 670 — a GTX 580, NV’s previous top-performing single-GPU solution, and a Radeon 7950 courtesy of AMD. The GTX 580 is still widely available on Newegg, with a number of models priced from $379 – $429.

We only had a few days to spend with the card, so our coverage will be a bit confined this time around. Nvidia launched a number of new technologies alongside the GTX 680 last month, including what it calls adaptive Vsync, the option to force FXAA (a type of antialiasing) on in the control panel, and a new hardware video encode engine, dubbed NVENC. We’ll revisit some of these new features and overall image quality in the near future. All of the following benchmarks were run at 1920×1080 resolution.

We start off with 3DMark 7 as a quick way to examine our three cards at two different presets and in different workloads. The Radeon 7950 maintains a lead over the older GTX 580 in both the preset options, but the GTX 670 soars ahead of both. The gap between the Radeon and the GTX 670 actually increases at the higher performance level, from 17% to 30%.

According to the synthetic tests, the 670 should pull well ahead of the other two cards in real-world games. Let’s see if that occurs.

Batman: Arkham City

Arkham City is the sequel to the smash hit Arkham Asylum from 2009 and easily one of the best games of 2011. Its DX11 mode was broken when the game launched, but a subsequent patch added an admittedly minimal amount of support for the API. It’s a great game in either mode, however, and makes an appearance here as a real-world title with broad appeal.

We tested in two modes: Very High, and Ultra High. In Very High, DX11 and HBAO are both enabled, with tessellation set to “Normal” and no AA. Anisotropic filtering is set to x16 in-driver. Ultra High mode turns tessellation up to “High” and adds 8x MSAA. PhysX is off in both cases — while it adds some nice features and effects, it significantly slows down any system without an Nvidia GPU.

The GTX 680 and Radeon 7950 tie at Very High detail levels, with the GTX 580 significantly behind them. At Ultra High detail, however, this changes. Here, the GTX 670 perches well out in front of its competitors, while the Radeon slumps to last place behind the GTX 580.

Shogun: Total War 2

Shogun: Total War 2 is a strategy game that blends elements of real-time and turn-based gameplay. In the former mode, large armies gather to bash each other’s heads in, all in glorious DX11. We tested two modes — first, the game’s “Very High” preset, followed by our own custom Ultra High mode, in which we added 8x MSAA and tuned all of the various variables to their maximum settings.

In Very High mode, the GTX 670 is the overall winner, coming in ~12% faster than the Radeon and 36.5% faster than the GTX 580. This trend collapsed when we increased to Ultra High settings — none of the video cards tested here were capable of maintaining a smooth frame rate under the load. The GTX 580 wins overall, but doesn’t really offer a playable frame rate.

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim

99% of the time, when we test a game, that means testing an official version of the product without any mods or add-ons. With Skyrim, we made an exception: Instead of relying on Bethesda’s own texture packs, we benchmarked the game with the full Skyrim HD textures installed instead. This substantially increases texture resolution and puts a greater load on modern GPUs. It also drastically improves the overall visual quality of the game, from something a PC might’ve run five years ago, to something you’d want to play today.

Power Consumption

One of the major positive changes to GK104 that Nvidia has hyped is the improvement in the chip’s performance per watt. Without time to do a comprehensive writeup, we had to resort to some quick-and-dirty testing — but what we found was striking. Check the chip’s power consumption in 3DMark’s first game test.

We chose this test for expediency, not because NV recommended it — and the GTX 580′s 340W draw is in line with what we’d expect from real-world games. That’s what makes the GTX 670′s 230W consumption startling — it’s an enormous improvement. Granted, it’s not going to have a huge impact on your power bill — even if you gamed 24/7, the difference between the two would come out to about $8.42 a month. It confirms, however, that Nvidia rearchitected Kepler with an eye towards what it might do with the chip in the future. A Fermi-style GPU was never going to make it into a mobile part, while a Kepler-derived chip just might.

In this case, we’re going to insert a note of caution. With very limited time, we chose a test that was expedient and simple. Other websites have demonstrated that the GTX 600 family is capable of offering superior performance/watt when compared to the Radeon 7000 series — while our own results demonstrate that this isn’t always the case, we want to note the general trend.

Conclusion

Kepler is an awesome chip and the GTX 670 reflects that heritage nicely. There’s no doubt that Nvidia has the upper hand at the top of the market, at least on paper. The latter distinction is necessary given that GTX 680s are darn hard to find right now. As of this writing, Newegg has none in stock, while Amazon only has a handful. High-end Radeons, in contrast, are easy to find.

We’ll have to watch GTX 670 availability over the next few weeks and see what develops.

As far as direct competition with AMD is concerned, Kepler puts Nvidia back in the driver’s seat when it comes to defining performance at a given price point. The good news, for both consumers and AMD, is that the comparison isn’t nearly as one-sided as we’ve sometimes seen in previous generations. When the GeForce FX or Radeon HD 2000 families launched, there was real reason to question if a person who bought one of these cards would get the level of performance and quality they thought they were paying for. That’s not an issue here. The HD Radeon 7000 series is a strong lineup — just not as strong as what Nvidia is serving up.

Thus far, AMD has countered GK104 with price cuts and an emphasis on board partners offering overclocked versions of the card. We expect to see both trends continue, with AMD ultimately positioning the HD 7000 family as a contender in the price/performance ring. The overall crown has passed to Nvidia for now, but that doesn’t mean AMD is out of the fight.

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Nvidia GeForce GTX 690: Just how much video card do you need?

Nvidia’s newest dual-GPU video card, the GeForce GTX 690, came out yesterday. And it’s amazing.

I’m not just throwing that word around. It’s based on the same GK104 GPU at the heart of Nvidia’s current-generation single-GPU leader, the GTX 680, and its performance stops just shy of what you’d get with two of those hooked up in SLI; Nvidia’s claims of this being the fastest video card in the world weren’t exaggerations. But compared with an SLI setup, the GTX 690 requires only one expansion slot and uses a lot less power (my test system drew 56 watts less under full graphics load with the GTX 690 than it did with two GTX 680s — 414 watts versus 470 watts). Plus, it’s received such a thorough physical redesign it almost doesn’t look like a video card anymore: It’s more like a jet engine crossed with an aluminum sculpture. Everything else aside, it looks… sexy. (Did I really just say that about a video card? Heaven help me.)

In other words, Nvidia has gone out of its way to make sure that the GTX 690 is a completely satisfying product. Sure, there’s the little problem of price: It costs $1,000, or the same as two GTX 680s. As for availability, there are a few out floating around out there now and there will be a few more on May 7, but whether we’ll see many more is not clear at this point — nor is it particularly relevant, as works of art (which is obviously how Nvidia has styled the GTX 690) are praised as much for their rarity as their features.

Only one question remains: Do you need one?

If you’re reading this, chances are you don’t need to be convinced of the worth of discrete video, even high-level discrete video. But, in the past, how much have you been willing to pay for one? How much have you had to pay for one? It’s an unfortunate fact of life with computer building that, in most cases, you get exactly what you pay for, and previous releases of even ultra–high end models seemed to keep this in mind.

Previous dual-GPU cards, like Nvidia’s last one, the GTX 590, or the Radeon HD 6990 or Radeon HD 5990 from AMD’s last two generations, capped their prices around the $700-$800 mark. True, you weren’t getting exactly double the performance of the highest-level cards with them — the 6990, for example, was closer to what you’d see with two of the next-best cards of that series, the 6950 — but you were still getting a lot. And maybe it’s just me, but $800 seems fair for what you get. Not sensible, mind you — that’s not a word I tend to apply very often to computer components with four-digit prices — but fair: something that could legitimately be part of a full, jealousy-inciting gaming PC.

Even so, $1000 for a video card is… a lot. I’d even go as far as saying that, with this pricing, Nvidia has smashed a psychological barrier that maybe should have been left intact. For the first time, the video card could reasonably be more expensive than the rest of an otherwise very good computer — you’ve long been able to put together something acceptable for $800, but $1,000 is where (for me, at least) the magic has traditionally started. Worse, the chances are now excellent we’ll start seeing cards that cost even more. And once you’ve established that a $1,000 video card is acceptable, how can you legitimately argue against an $1,100 card? Or a $1,200 card? Or a $1,500 card? It’s a slippery slope, and the mud-slicked grass on that slope is tessellated.

As we’ve already established, the card works as intended. (If it didn’t, I would have written something very different!) But whether it needs to — or rather, if you need it to — is another matter altogether. From my perspective, for most gaming, even of the seriously serious kind, the GTX 690 is overkill. Glorious, thrilling, eye-caressing overkill. But overkill nonetheless.

Testing

In my testing, I found that at 1920×1200, a single GTX 680 can run the Aliens vs. Predator benchmark at a solid 52 frames per second (fps) — and that’s with all of the detail options maxed out. With just the tiniest bit of tweaking here and there, you should be able to easily reach the magic number of 60 fps. Batman: Arkham City (I’m running really low on activation codes here, Warner Bros. — for a game I already own) doesn’t even need that much help: With all the graphics options (except advanced PhysX) turned on, it hits a solid 68 fps at the same resolution.

Under the same conditions, DiRT 3 ends up around 93 fps, Tom Clancy’s HAWX 2 at 143 fps (yeah, yeah, I know, I really need to retire that one),Just Cause 2 at 67 fps and Lost Planet 2 at 70 fps. By no stretch of the imagination are these not outstanding frame rates — and this is at a resolution very close to 1920×1080, which is what the highest number (24.84%) of Steam gamers use according to the April 2012 Steam Hardware Survey.

These numbers show that a GTX 690 (or, for that matter, a second GTX 680) simply aren’t necessary if that’s as far as you take your gaming. Sure, the GTX 690 gets 98 fps in Aliens vs. Predator, 114 fps in Batman: Arkham City, 151 fps in DiRT 3, 232 fps in HAWX 2 (sigh), 81 fps in Just Cause 2, and 98 fps in Lost Planet 2 (again, all at 1920×1200, with every setting cranked) — but so what? At a certain point it becomes more about prestige than performance, and I had a mighty tough time discerning differences in video quality and smoothness at this level of achievement; most people are going to.

Where the GTX 690 truly and usefully shines is if you want to press things still further. It is, for example, a remarkable 2560×1600 card. With all the graphics options remaining at their highest levels (I really wanted to see what the GTX 690 could do), it earned 60 fps on Aliens vs. Predator, 74 fps on Batman: Arkham City, 112.71 fps on DiRT 3, 171 fps on HAWX 2, 72 ps on Just Cause 2, and 84 on Lost Planet 2. Even Unigine’s Heaven Benchmark, a punishing DirectX 11 feature fest, all but melts before it, with the GTX 690 attaining a relatively incredible 55 fps. (I haven’t had a chance to try multimonitor gaming yet, but I’m predicting things will turn out much the same.) We’re finally at the point where high-quality gaming at that resolution isn’t becoming a reality — it is a reality.

The only catch is that 2560×1600 isn’t exactly a popular resolution. Granted, this may change as newer technologies like DisplayPort gain broader adoption, and the death of DVI opens up additional possibilities as far as still higher resolutions are concerned. But for now, Newegg sells only three monitors that use it (at least the least expensive is nearly $1200, and Steam’s statistics show that only 0.17% of its users play on monitors that size.

So if you’re one of the 99.83%, do everything within your power to not be swayed by the ubiquitous (and, admittedly, well-deserved) hype about this shiny new video card. There’s a lot to be said for having the best something, but there’s even more to be said about having the best something for you. If the two don’t naturally overlap, don’t try to force them. You’ll never be able to fully appreciate what you’ve bought, and you’ll almost certainly be a lot poorer (in this case, $1,000 poorer) as a result. If all you want is a really good video card and you have $500 to spend, the GTX 680 is not going to disappoint you.

If, however, you want the ne plus ultra of discrete graphics, then yeah, the GTX 690 is the right thing to lust after. Just get in line behind me, okay?

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Valve confirms Steam and Source for Linux, signals low confidence for Windows 8

At long last, Valve has confirmed that Linux ports of both Steam and the Source engine are in active development, and should be released later this year. These are native solutions that run directly on Linux, without any kind of Wine-like emulation. Left 4 Dead 2 will be the first Source-based title on Linux, but once the engine has been successfully ported other AAA games will surely follow.

Now, the usual port of call is to wax lyrical about how Steam on Linux could finally kick start desktop adoption. Linux might have plenty of productivity apps and utilities, but Windows’ dominion when it comes to games is often cited as one of the key reasons for the failure of desktop Linux. With the Source engine coming to Linux, and assuming developers actually take the time to build Linux versions of their games, rebooting into Windows to play games — or incessant fiddling with Wine or Cedega — could become a thing of the past. This could be it for desktop Linux!

Let’s be serious, though — Linux won’t flourish on the desktop unless Microsoft monumentally messes up. It would seem, though — at least according to Valve co-founder Gabe Newell — that Windows 8 might actually be bad enough for Linux to step in and take the desktop PC reins.

Speaking to Michael Larabel of Phoronix, Gabe Newell expressed “stunning negativity” for Windows 8 and the future of Microsoft. On the flip side, after speaking positively about Linux for hours, Larabel quips that Newell could be “the director of the Linux Foundation.”

While Newell doesn’t say it outright, his comments to Larabel and the timing of Steam and Source for Linux could hint that Valve isn’t confident about the future of gaming on Windows. Linux ports have been in the works for years — and yet now, just a couple of months after the release of Windows 8 Consumer Preview, a working version of L4D2 for Linux appears.

We’re no strangers when it comes to critically analyzing Windows 8. There’s no getting around the fact that desktop PCs — and thus gaming PCs — are an afterthought in Windows 8. Matthew Murray, perhaps portentously, even went as far as saying that Windows 8 might drive him to Linux. It’s a little bit extreme to suggest that Windows 8 will be so awful that gamers will flee en masse to Linux, but Valve obviously wants to be first off the boat if such a sea change occurs.

The Oatmeal’s take on the Steam Box video game console

 

Another possibility is that Linux will power Valve’s “open hardware platform” Steam Box video game console, which it recently confirmed is in development. Valve isn’t a hardware or an operating system developer, so starting with a known quantity such as Linux would make a lot of sense.

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Parents: Read the damn box

Okay, I guess I am still capable of being surprised. I didn’t really expect that there would be any major blowback to my last piece, about the controversy-filled several days Electronic Arts experienced last week, when Consumerist named it the Worst Company in America and it was revealed that it’s been under attack for its depiction of homosexual relationships in Star Wars: The Old Republic and Mass Effect 3. And yet, so soon after it posted, it seemed as if at least one commenter was already trying to ensure that this week turned out to be a bad one for me!

Here’s what that commenter, Happeh, said(I’ve left this completely unedited, by the way):

“Don’t let your children play them. Take responsibility for your own decisions about what is or is not appropriate for your family.”

I really hate smug people with this smug argument.

Did Bioware advertise Mass Effect 3 by saying “Buy Mass Effect 3 where your child can have fun shooting aliens and learning all about homosexuality?”

NO. THEY. DID. NOT!

The parent who bought that game for their child was not given the opportunity to put that filth back on the shelf where it belongs, because Bioware knows that they will not be able to sell a game that teaches children about homosexuality.

Those parents should sue Bioware for not placing a warning on the Mass Effect 3 box that says in large capital letters “CONTAINS HOMOSEXUAL CONTENT. DO NOT BUY THIS GAME IF HOMOSEXUAL CONTENT OFFENDS YOU”.

I must admit a bit of confusion about one thing. The relevant part of my post concerned my standing up for individual rights, and advocating making your own decisions, rather than thinking that I (or anyone else) knows what’s right for you and the people who are close to you. How does that make me “smug”? I assumed — or maybe “hoped” is the better word — that my showing respect for others’ abilities to make for themselves the choices that work best for them and their families would be seen as the fairest and least restrictive option. Certainly not smug, which was in neither my heart nor my words.

And, for the record, I would not say that Mass Effect 3 “teaches children about homosexuality.” (I haven’t played Star Wars: The Old Republic, so maybe it does, though I’d wager it’s more concerned with instructing in the proper care and feeding of lightsabers.) The gay relationships — like the straight ones — are fairly well buried; you actually have to be looking for them to find them. One male character makes a passing comment about having a husband, one female character remarks that she finds the computer’s female voice attractive. Those aren’t lessons, those are references, and oblique ones at best. Perhaps Mass Effect 3 acknowledges that homosexuality exists, but that’s where it stops — it doesn’t “teach” anyone anything about it any more than it teaches anyone anything about straight relationships. This is a game about fighting violent aliens, not interstellar sexual politics. (And, if I may interject an editorial comment about that: Thank goodness.)

I guess I do owe you all a mea culpa about something Happeh brought up, however. No, neither developer BioWare nor publisher EA advertised the game with references to its sexual content (or much more than the barest suggestion of the rest of what it contained). And, for that matter, theMass Effect 3 package does not indicate anywhere that it contains “homosexual content.” So if advertising and packaging are all you’re going by, then Happeh is technically correct.

But implicit in my original argument — and, it seems to me, pretty much the entire home video game industry — is that the information about potentially objectionable material is out there if you want to find it. And, in fact, it can be found even on the Mass Effect 3 box.

Look at the bottom-left corner of the front cover (pictured above) and you’ll see a label stating that it has been rated M by theEntertainment Software Ratings Board, which means that organization has determined it’s most appropriate for ages 17 and up (this is printed there, too). Turn the box over and you can learn even more (pictured right). Listed right next to the “M” is a description of what comprises that rating: “Blood, Partial Nudity, Sexual Content, Strong Language, Violence.”

Nope, there’s no “homosexuality” there, but as I suggested last time — in about the only sentence I would say could potentially maybe almost be considered bordering on being smug — one would think the presence of any sexual content at all (to say nothing of “partial nudity”) would convince most parents that Mass Effect 3 isn’t right for their children, regardless of whether it’s between humans and other species or between the same or opposite genders.

But I stand by everything else I wrote. Just as I don’t believe it’s the government’s role to censor games or other entertainment products of any sort, I don’t believe it’s other adults’ role to dictate what your child should or should not watch or play (or, for that matter, eat). What works for one family doesn’t always work for another, and kids — like their parents — have different levels of tolerance, maturity, and morality that need to be respected, tolerated, and addressed. I guess I have strong feelings about whether homosexual and heterosexual sex should be treated as equivalent within video games. But I’m not going to get into them here, because they don’t matter. They affect only the choices I make for myself and my children (or, er, would if I had children); there’s no earthly reason why they should affect yours. For me to assume otherwise would be… smug.

Happeh was wrong about something else, too. Parents were given the opportunity to pass up “that filth” — but some initiative was required on their part. If they didn’t want to read either the front or the back of the box (or if they purchasing the game via digital download), the information, in even more thorough a form, was and is waiting for those who know where to look and are willing to take the time to uncover it. Though I wouldn’t be surprised if there are dozens of websites on which similar content rundowns can be found, off the top of my head I am aware of two.

The first is the official ESRB website, which is potentially more convenient (and goes into greater depth) than the labels on game boxes. All you have to do is go to the site, type the game’s title in the “Search Game Ratings” field, and hit the Search button. You’ll be presented with a brief summary of the game’s contents, but click the “[More]” link to get the full story. These ratings are voluntary, so not every game will have them, but huge numbers of them do. Such as, for example, Mass Effect 3.Its entry goes into even deeper detail about exactly what players can expect in terms of the violence and sexual content (though it avoids any mention of homosexuality).

You may have heard about Focus on the Family, an evangelical Christian organization; among other things, it made headlines two years ago when NFL quarterback Tim Tebow and his mother made a commercial for it that ran during the Super Bowl. It describes its mission as providing “help and resources for couples to build healthy marriages that reflect God’s design, and for parents to raise their children according to morals and values grounded in biblical principles.” But you might not know that it also publishes a website called Plugged In, which is devoted exclusively to reviewing movies, TV shows, videos, music, and video games through that same kind of lens. (You can probably guess how seriously its reviewers take what they do.) Yes, Mass Effect 3 is covered there, too — and, unlike the ESRB site, the Plugged In reviewer does mention the gay angle.

Resources like these exist to help you take control over the entertainment options you and your family are exposed to. Take advantage of them! And by all means do additional research to discover if you’re being well served by the movies, TV shows, and video games you’re planning on partaking of. Everything you need to know is out there. But the ball is in your court and no one else’s. If you don’t make the most of the wealth of information available, and end up disappointed or even enraged by what you discover — sorry, but you have no one to blame but yourself. The up side is that, when your children grow up and demonstrate — and, just maybe, pass on to their own children — the values and beliefs that you hold most dear, you yourself might have something legitimately worth feeling smug about.

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Does Ivy Bridge replace discrete video cards for gaming?

With Intel’s release of its new third-generation Core (aka “Ivy Bridge”) processing platform, the general consensus among tech reviewers seems to be that the processor company has finally made something of a breakthrough in how it handles its integrated graphics. AnandTech,Hot Hardware, Legit Reviews, Tom’s Hardware, and more — all are basically impressed. Heck, former ETer Loyd Case even pronounced that “Entry-level GPUs are dead.” Clearly Intel did something right this time, and people who buy Ivy Bridge CPUs will undoubtedly have more and better capabilities than were available on Sandy Bridge or its predecessors.

Which isn’t the same thing as saying they will be particularly good for gaming.

In the interests of full disclosure, I’m very anti–integrated graphics and have been for decades. Ever since I witnessed the wonder that EGA and VGA cards wrought on late-1980s/early-1990s computer games, I’ve insisted on having a discrete card in every system I buy or build for myself. (I felt, and feel, the same way about sound cards, but that’s a separate discussion.) But even if you believe that on-board video is somehow acceptable under specific circumstances, you should have your head examined if the idea crosses your mind — even for only a moment — that it’s somehow able to play games in a satisfying way.

In putting its Ivy Bridge chips out there (particularly the new flagship desktop model, the Core i7-3770K), Intel primarily touted their facility at handling games at a resolution most gamers wouldn’t be likely to consider: 1366×768. The most recent Steam Hardware Surveyshows that 15.54% most of that service’s users play at that resolution, compared to 25.36% for 1920×1080. So I couldn’t help but wonder: How well would the Core i7-3770K handle playing games at that higher and more popular resolution?

To find out, I pulled out six of the gaming benchmark tests I use on a regular basis — Aliens vs. Predator,Batman: Arkham City (that’s right, I sacrificed one of my precious installs for this project), Tom Clancy’s HAWX 2, Heaven Benchmark 3.0, Lost Planet 2, and Metro 2033 — and loaded them all onto a computer I’d thrown together specifically for Ivy Bridge testing (an Asus P8Z77-V Deluxe motherboard, 8GB of RAM, my go-to Western Digital VelociRaptor hard drive). I ran the benchmarks, with as many details as possible turned off (to give the Core i7-3770K CPU the best possible shot), at my 24-inch monitor’s native resolution (1920×1200, pretty close to my target).

Assuming a minimum threshold of 30 frames per second (fps) for basic playability, only one game made the cut: HAWX 2. This isn’t exactly surprising; it’s definitely one of the lighter tests I run, but I include it for purposes of balance between Nvidia and AMD GPUs (cards from the former company invariably get slightly better frame rates, as it’s a “The Way it’s Meant to Be Played” title). And its 54 fps result wasn’t too bad at all.

Wondering how much lowering the resolution further would help the other tests, I dialed them all down to 1680×1050 and reran the tests at the same settings. HAWX 2 was still the only one to get above 30 fps (61 fps), though Batman: Arkham City and Lost Planet 2 came extremely close (29 fps and 29.1 fps respectively). Things clicked considerably more at 1440×900, with only Heaven andMetro 2033 still holding out — which they also did at even the lowest resolution I tested, 1280×800.

But I wasn’t satisfied with the video quality at any of these resolutions; lots of things looked just a little too blobby for my tastes. So on every game that passed my first test, I upped the details just a tad to see whether it could hack a slightly more demanding challenge. HAWX 2 again flew at all four resolutions, Lost Planet 2 was fine up through 1440×900, and that was all. Nudging the settings up still further, HAWX 2 hit 33 fps and Lost Planet 2 made it to 35.2 fps at 1280×800, but neither could surpass 30 fps even at 1440×900, so that’s where I stopped.

Even with the minor detail improvements I implemented toward the end of the testing, you still have to forsake a fair amount in terms of video quality just to get these games to play — and then generally at frame rates most legitimate gamers would barely consider good. Don’t get me wrong: As far as I’m concerned, Ivy Bridge marks a significant leap forward for Intel, and definitely suggests some good things to come on the graphics side. But I can’t quite get myself to the point where I feel comfortable pretending that this is a major victory.

The main thing Intel has proven — or, if you prefer, proven again — with Ivy Bridge is that, if you want to play 3D games that both perform well and look good, even at lower (I would argue too low) resolutions, you absolutely need a discrete video card. There’s no way around this. It may not be news to most (okay, any) system builders, but the average consumer who buys an Ivy Bridge system and is attracted by the possibility of not having to shell out another three to five wallet-size portraits of Andrew Jackson just to get the newest titles to play is going to be disappointed.

Ultimately, the conclusion to draw here is exactly the one Loyd did: Intel has functionally obliterated any compelling reason to buy a $60 video card. I’ve been a bit skeptical of the need for them for years, to be honest, as I’ve generally questioned whether the gains you might see in tasks like video transcoding were worth the money if robust gaming remained elusive. But if Intel and AMD chips can handle all the basic stuff themselves and do it well — which they now do — the GPU guys will either need to devise a much better argument for the entry-level models, drop the prices across the board to edge the $100 cards (which I’ve found in most cases to be worth the money) closer to or even onto the lowest pricing tier, or give up on trying to court that segment at all. And once Ivy Bridge gets around, AMD and Nvidia will need to make that decision sooner rather than later.

So Intel definitely deserves to be congratulated on a solid release that will change our outlooks about processing and integrated video for at least the next year or so. Just don’t assume that Ivy Bridge’s strides translate into a revolutionary rethink of the graphics market for everyone. Those for whom gaming is, at most, a sometime thing will unquestionably notice some benefits. But everyone else should stick with at least a $100 standalone card (and preferably at least a $200 one if they can afford it) to ensure the games’ performance and appearance make them worth playing.

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Sony fires 10,000, loses $6.4 billion, and cuts down on TVs: What could possibly go wrong?

As any executive of a large Fortune 500 company will tell you, the process of turning a struggling entity like Sony into profitability is a lot like trying to change a large cruise ship’s course; it happens slowly and deliberately. It takes both planning and savvy to accomplish, and the majority of the time there are difficult decisions to make. Sony’s new CEO Kazuo Hirai seems to understand this, indicated by his announcement of his “One Sony” plan at a press conference yesterday. Responding to a four-year run of his company losing money, the One Sony plan will lay off 10,000 employees as well as narrow the company’s focus onto three key areas: digital imaging, mobile devices, and video games. Conspicuously absent from that list are televisions, which used to be Sony’s bread and butter. With this announcement Hirai has shown that he’s willing to step out into difficult territory, but will it be enough to return Sony to the consumer pedestal that it was once perched on?

The answer to that question is in no way an easy one. Last December we took a look at the ailing company, and made note of five different things it would have to do to return to relevancy with consumers. The first of which was the sacking of Sir Howard Stringer, a CEO who didn’t have the aptitude when it came to understanding current and future market trends. Hirai was the logical choice to replace Stringer since he had been serving as the head of Sony Computer Entertainment, a job that required him to understand popular consumer trends. His ascension to the CEO chair was to have taken place sometime in 2013, but was accelerated due to the revision of Sony’s 2011 fiscal report. Instead of losing $2.7 billion as was originally expected, the electronics manufacturer actually lost a whopping $6.4 billion. That rather large shift was enough for the board to take action to replace Stringer sooner than later, indicating that it had finally realized the urgency in which change needed to be made to try to save the company from obscurity.

A fact that Hirai himself seems to understand with his One Sony announcement. The drastic changes he is putting into effect come just thirteen days after officially taking the reigns of the company, making it clear that he intends to do everything in his power to turn things around — and quickly. During the press conference yesterday, he also communicated that he understands the fundamental problem that Sony is facing: the fact that consumers no longer lust after Sony-made devices like they did back in the ’80s and ’90s. In the passionate speech, he told the world that Sony must begin making compelling technology again, while at the same time whittling away the excess expenditures that are miring the company down.

So can Hirai save Sony? If he can make his One Sony plan work in the next five years, then it’s a strong possibility. He’s shown that no sacred cow is safe by axing 60% of Sony’s television division, as well as his understanding of consumer desire by narrowing the focus to video games and mobile devices. If he can bring a linear convergence among the many entertainment devices his company makes and create useful interoperability between them, he will have a home run on his hands. Consumers are going to flock to the first brand that can bring a multimedia tablet or handheld device into a meaningful relationship with a game console, a fact that I think Hirai understands.

Time will tell if the One Sony plan is nothing but marketing fodder. While losing 10,000 jobs from the global workforce isn’t something that anyone wants to see happen, it’s the right move. I for one am excited about the new announced focus, and will be looking forward to what the next few years bring in terms of fresh Sony equipment.

Read more at Wall Street Journal

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Electronic Arts’ bad week

For Electronic Arts, one of America’s biggest and best-known game publishers, there’s just no telling what any given seven-day period holds. One week you might release Mass Effect 3 to soaring sales and critical acclaim. Then, scarcely a month later, you might find yourself embroiled in dual controversies that would drive any multi-billion-dollar corporation to drink. (If corporations could drink. Which they can’t. You know what I mean.) And this week, one would think EA constantly kept one hand on the bottle.

On Wednesday, the blog Consumeristbestowed upon EA the title of “Worst Company in America 2012.” Consumerist chided EA, which beat out Bank of America to attain the dubious honor, for buying up small, innovative game makers; and its tendency to “nickel and dime consumers to death,” in reference to “numerous accusations that EA and its ilk deliberately hold back game content with the sole intent of charging a fee for it at a later date.”

Then it came to light that EA has been slammed in recent weeks with what GamesIndustry International calls “‘several thousand’ letters and emails protesting the inclusion of same sex or LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) content in its video games, most notably Mass Effect 3 and Star Wars: The Old Republic.” The letters apparently allege that EA was “pressured by LGBT groups” to include the content, and could face major boycotts if it’s not removed.

In case you ever forget that entertainment can be deadly serious, remember these events. But where to begin with addressing them? Especially since (gasp) I sympathize with EA on both. Sort of.

Starting with the latter, I think it’s pretty clear that there’s not much — if anything — to be done here. Groups that want to make their feelings known, about this or any other subject at any point along the political spectrum, will, and should be allowed to. If indeed America is still a free country, this inspires a powerful interchange of ideas that will make us all better people and yet still foster an environment in which the right things happen (if not always in the quickest or happiest ways).

But, as with so many cases like this, the, ahem, devil is in the details. I haven’t played enough of Star Wars: The Old Republic to judge it, but I’ve blazed through Mass Effect 3 a few times, and can verify that almost all the “objectionable” content is fairly well buried. Finding a partner of either gender is about as tricky in the game’s world as it is in real life, and it requires a similar investment of time, interest, and effort. A few characters may make passing references to same-gender spouses or attractions, but most of it is incredibly innocent, little more than flavor text. (And it’s worth noting that your character, Commander Shepard, can easily have sex without first getting married if he or she so chooses. I seem to have missed the brouhaha about that.)

If developers like BioWare want to make their games more representative of the world as it currently exists (and, like it or not, that’s what they’re doing), that’s certainly their right — and I’m as glad that they have that as I am the protestors have a right to speak against the results. I would like to point out, however, that there is one spectacularly easy way for parents to address the question of this content in games such as this: Don’t let your children play them. Take responsibility for your own decisions about what is or is not appropriate for your family, but please leave everyone else the freedom to do the same. The market will ultimately decide the outcome, and that’s the way it should be. Now can we please get back to talking about things that actually matter: Like how confusing Mass Effect 3’s ending is, and whether BioWare should be releasing DLC to correct it?

As for EA’s “winning” this year’s Worst Company in America match-up, I’m even more incredulous. I understand why the company rubs so many people the wrong way, but I’m not sure making this kind of a statement is useful — at least given the stated description. EA has been under fire for ages about its working conditions, support of SOPA (though it eventually backed off, user agreements, and more, all of which are more immediately appropriate qualifiers than those Consumerist chose. After all, buying up smaller companies to dilute a competitive marketplace and finding new ways to charge for products have been standard procedure, well, pretty much forever. Whether you like the publisher’s games or not, and regardless of whether you think Origin is superior to Steam (I don’t personally, but I know people who do), EA isn’t executing especially revolutionary strategies. It’s just doing so on a large scale — albeit within a discipline that arouses strong emotions in many people.

Compare this with the way Consumerist described the competition’s other finalist: “Bank of America expanded throughout the entire decade leading up to the collapse of the housing market and had the hubris to believe it could continue to do so even when things started to head south… False foreclosures, improper property seizures, misleading mortgage adjustment programs, robosigned documents and the subsequent lawsuits and settlements, have done significant damage to BofA’s public image and its coffers.” Voters found microtransactions more outrageous than all this? Really?

I don’t particularly want to offer an opinion on either side of this issue, except to state that I hope everyone remembers how important all this ultimately isn’t. I’m as much into computers and video games as anyone, and no one should understate their impact on both entertainment and culture, but there are legitimate complaints and then there is just griping for griping’s sake. And from my vantage point, this looks a lot more like the latter.

About this EA agrees. I was particularly impressed by EA’s own response to the Worst Company matter, as delivered by Senior Director of Corporate Communications John Reseburg to Kotaku: “We’re sure that British Petroleum, AIG, Philip Morris, and Halliburton are all relieved they weren’t nominated this year. We’re going to continue making award-winning games and services played by more than 300 million people worldwide.”

If EA can maintain its sense of perspective — and humor — in the midst of all this, maybe it didn’t have such a terrible week after all.

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Intel’s Z77 Ivy Bridge chipset debuts, but is unready for prime time

Ivy Bridge’s debut is still a few weeks away, but Intel has decided to launch its new 7 Series (codename Panther Point) ahead of the CPU’s ship date. The new Panther Point chipset family is the follow-up to the 6 Series that debuted 14 months ago, and it’s very much an evolution of that initial design. As some of you may recall, the 6 Series was plagued with a major product recall and significant positioning problems; enthusiasts were asked to choose between using Intel’s integrated GPU and impressive QuickSync video transcoding technology (available on the H67) and being able to overclock the CPU (only an option with P67-based boards). The later Z68 combined these features and added a few new options of its own, but lacked integrated USB 3.0 or Thunderbolt technology.

Z77, aka Panther Point, adds a number of features that the 6 Series lacked and includes the PCIe 3.0 support that was previously confined to the high-end X79 chipset. Intel’s DZ77GA-70K board that we’ve reviewed today also offers a gorgeous UEFI interface, and improved fan controls that are far more accessible than the company’s previous products. Is the Z77 a drop-in successor and easy upgrade choice? Let’s find out.

The Z77 chipset offers 16 lanes of PCIe 3.0, which can be split into two x8 lanes for a dual-GPU configuration. This is the first Intel desktop chipset to support Thunderbolt (if an appropriate controller is on-board) and the first to offer USB 3.0 support integrated into the chipset. DDR3 speeds move up to 1600MHz (Z68 only officially supported DDR3-1333) and the chipset is capable of driving up to three simultaneous displays.

The PCIe 3.0 support, however, may come with a caveat. According to Intel’s DZ77GA-70K documentation, PCIe 3.0 is only supported if an Ivy Bridge CPU is installed. Presumably, that’s a limit of the platform rather than this specific motherboard, which means one of the motherboard’s most attractive bullet points isn’t applicable if you want to re-use a Sandy Bridge processor. Intel buried this point in the engineering documentation for the board and in a single footnote on the actual motherboard box — it’s not mentioned anywhere in the other tech documents or press briefings the company distributed, which is why it missed our notice until the last moment.

This brings us to another problem. The Intel board we were sent, the aforementioned DZ77GA-70K, is, in our estimation, half-baked and not ready for launch. The only available BIOS listed on Intel’s website is the same BIOS the company shipped us. To be bluntly honest, this product shouldn’t be on the market yet. This is a remarkable departure from form for Intel; the company’s motherboards have a long-earned reputation for stability and solidity, even when they’ve skimped on the features and options that most appeal to enthusiasts.

Intel’s list of known issues for the board include limitations on BIOS flashing, limited keyboard functionality in BIOS, and specific information on how to install an operating system to a particular SSD/HDD. Even following the company’s recommendations, we were unable to configure an HDD and optical drive in a configuration that would allow the optical drive to boot and install an operating system. Neither hardware swaps nor SATA port reconfigurations were able to fix the problem.

We got around that issue by loading an OS on an Intel Series 6 board, then moving it to the DZ77GA, but the existence of said errata make testing problematic. We’ve included some preliminary results but will revisit the question in more detail when IB launches in a few weeks.

Let’s look at the board itself.

Intel’s board layouts are typically clean and well thought out; the DZ77GA is no exception. The two blue slots are PCI Express 3.0 ports; there’s a brace of PCIe x1 ports and a legacy PCI slot in between them. Below the second GPU slot is another legacy PCI and an x4 PCIe 2.0 slot. This last is handy for PCI Express Flash drives, given that such devices can overheat if stuffed between a pair of GPUs in a high-end rig. The LEDs across the top of the board indicate how many process VR phases are active (fewer active phases means better power efficiency at idle). Other features, like the on-board power/reset switches, will appeal to anyone who spends a lot of time testing equipment.

One welcome addition to the DZ77GA is the number of USB 3.0 ports the board offers. Up until now, 2-4 USB 3.0 ports has been the rule; the DZ77GA ups that to a total of eight and includes a front-panel USB 3.0 header just in case you’re missing one. One thing we don’t much care for is the way SATA ports are arranged. Intel stacks its own SATA 6Gbps ports at the top right, which makes them difficult to access if you’ve got a GPU installed inside a case. We’re not disputing that it makes sense to stack them this way as far as customer expectations and port assignments, but we wish there was a way to shift them to somewhere other than directly to the right of the graphics card.

The board’s backplate is also well-designed. There’s a single legacy PS/2 header, a pair of high-powered USB 2.0 ports for charging tablets or driving certain modern peripherals, one Firewire 1394a, two standard USB 2.0 ports, an eSATA port, four USB 3.0 ports, dual LAN controllers (both based on Intel hardware) and an HDMI 1.4a-compatible output with a maximum resolution of 1900×1200. The audio block uses Realtek’s ALC898 and can output up to 8 channels simultaneously.

Using UEFI instead of BIOS is something we’ve seen from Asus and other motherboard manufacturers, but this is the first Intel board we’ve tested that offered the feature. It makes a difference; the board is much easier to configure and offers a wealth of information in a much more accessible way. The shift to UEFI is emblematic of the Z77 family as a whole: It improves and streamlines what has come before, but doesn’t really push the envelope.

Board performance: P67 vs. Z77

We compared the DZ77GA-70K against the Series 6 Intel DP67BG motherboard. Both boards used a Core i7-2600K, 240GB OCZ Vertex 3, Radeon 7950, and 16GB of DDR3-1333. USB 3.0 testing was done using a Seagate BlackArmor 500GB HDD, Windows 7 SP1 64-bit was installed on both systems with all patches and downloads applied. ATI’s Catalyst 12-3 series was used, with texture quality set to “High Quality” and anisotropic filtering forced on at x16 in the driver.

PCMark 7

PCMark 7 is designed to test general system performance, which makes it an effective first stop in measuring the benefit of one platform against another. Performance-wise, there’s not much to see here — the two systems are in a dead heat against each other.

The individual test results break down just like the aggregate. There’s no area where the Z77 shows a marked gain over its predecessor.

3DMark 7

For a check of GPU performance, we opted for 3DMark 7 and again didn’t find much. PCIe 3.0 isn’t expected to offer much of a benefit to modern cards in any case, but keeping a Sandy Bridge chip installed means the DZ77GA is limited to PCIe 2.0.

USB 3.0

USB 3.0 is one area where we thought we might see a marked performance difference. Early USB 2.0 controllers were notoriously finicky, prone to high CPU utilization and lackluster performance. The DP67 motherboard’s USB 3.0 support comes courtesy of a Renesas D720200 chip, but the board has a number of problems with USB 3.0 connectivity, as documented and confirmed at Intel’s own forums. This is one area where the DZ77 could distinguish itself.

The good (or bad) news, depending on your perspective, is that Renesas’ D720200 chip appears to offer very strong performance compared to Intel’s chip. Power consumption and CPU usage were both equal, though there’s some evidence at other sites that the Intel solution is better when connected to an external SSD. For conventional users, either chip appears to do the trick.

The preliminary bad news is that the DZ77 may have exactly the same sort of BIOS problems that plagued the DP67 last year. We’re not willing to conclude that yet — not with the board’s BIOS clearly unfinished and with just a single device to test with. In both cases, we had to plug the HDD back in following every reboot in order for the device to be recognized and initialized in Windows. Even this didn’t always work — occasionally the system would report an error initializing USB 3.0 and required a further reset.

We’ll reserve final judgment until we’ve gotten our hands on a more finished BIOS and are able to test an SSD in addition to a conventional hard drive, but we’re not thrilled with the current state of things. Even if the Intel USB 3.0 controller distinguishes itself when combined with a solid-state device, the majority of external drives are going to continue to be built around conventional hard drives. That’s good news for folks who’ve already invested in a board with an NEC solution, less great for anyone hoping Intel’s controller would deliver a benefit when combined with a mechanical drive.

Power consumption

Given that both chipsets are built on a 65nm process, we didn’t expect to see much benefit from moving to Z77 as opposed to P67 — and we didn’t.

Audio quality

Finally, there was audio quality. We put the two Intel boards head-to-head using Rightmark’s Audio Analyzer. The P67 board’s overall audio performance isn’t as good as some of the integrated solutions from the likes of Asus and MSI; we’d hoped the Z77 would offer more on this front.

Again, there’s not much difference between the two. Some of the individual subtests that go into Rightmark’s final score tilted towards the Z77, but others favored the P67.

DZ77 final verdict must wait for Ivy Bridge

Between the DZ77GA’s unfinished state and the fact that certain features aren’t accessible without an Ivy Bridge processor installed, it’s impossible to give a final opinion on the board or the chipset. What we can say is that the Z77′s features are solid, but not necessarily all that compelling if you already own a Sandy Bridge CPU and motherboard. We’re still glad to see Intel implementing full backwards and forwards compatibility for both boards and CPUs, but it’ll be system builders (both individuals and businesses) who primarily benefit from the increased flexibility such options allow.

We’ll be back to take a second look at the DZ77GA in two weeks, but for now, we’d say don’t buy it. It’s got the makings of a great product, but right now, it’s a great product that needs more time in the oven.

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