The Battlefield 3 Beta
It was an exciting day at PC Perspective yesterday with much our time dedicated to finding, installing and playing the new Battlefield 3 public beta. Released on the morning of the 26th to those of you who had pre-ordered BF3 on Origin or those of you who had purchased Medal of Honor prior to July 26th, getting the beta a couple of days early should give those of you with more FPS talent than me a leg up once the open beta starts on Thursday the 29th.
My purpose in playing Battlefield 3 yesterday was purely scientific, of course. We wanted to test a handful of cards from both AMD and NVIDIA to see how the beta performed. With all of the talk about needing to upgrade your system and the relatively high recommended system requirements, there is a lot of worry that just about anyone without a current generation GPU is going to need to shell out some cash.
AMD has mentioned that the next-gen Xbox is on track for release in 2027, which means we might be in the final year of the Series X|S.
They might think taking a crack at the PC/console hybrid approach might work out for them... but with PS6 delayed until 2029 at least, there went the power advantage that paying all that extra money was supposed to afford them once PS6 does launch. Also, releasing a console right now is stupid with RAM prices as high as they are. Either we're gonna be forking out $1200-1500 for this thing, or it's going to get downgraded. It costs over $700 to put 64GB of RAM into a PC right now because all the AI datacenters are buying up ALL the RAM.
Maybe a select few gamers will be willing to fork out that much $ for a system that is more powerful than PS5 Pro, but most gamers are only just now feeling like PS5 is hitting its stride and still has a few years of life left in it before we need to move on to a new generation. Plus, by the time PS6 does launch, RAM prices will be stablizing, so PS6 will be able to put much more of its overall budget towards a more powerful GPU and CPU vs. having to spend such a large chunk of the budget just on RAM like the new Xbox will, assuming it does drop next year while still in the midst of this RAM crisis.
People said the same thing about xbox 360 launching early but it turned out pretty good. Microsoft's R&D is much larger and more cash rich than Sony's. They have the money to do it. One of the reason Sony is waiting because they arent ready to spend billions more on hardware and the PS5 is still selling and that would definitely hurt their sales. Plus they just released Ps5 pro.
The series x isn't selling well so for Microsoft its a good time to get ready for next gen. The next console from xbox is gonna be for core gamers and no matter when sony launches it probably wont have many advances over Magnus if any at all. Im confident it will be on par or better than the next Playstation. Even the series x does features that ps5 or the pro still cant do. Sony shouldn't of released the PS5 pro. Imo its not needed and underwhelming. They could of used what they spent on that for the PS6
First, no one actually said that PS6 is delayed.
The rumor started with Tom Henderson saying he thought PlayStation might consider delaying the PS6 due to RAM prices. He specifically did not say that he heard that they were going to delay it or anything like that, it was 100% speculation, and he never implied otherwise.
That said, let them delay it, the PS5 Pro especially with FSR 4 coming in the next month or so, will be more than sufficient. There isn't going to be any publishers, including Microsoft, willing to skip PlayStation's user base, especially when publishers seem eager to put games on Switch 2 which is a significant step down even from the base PS5. So, the idea that having more power is really going to shift things in their favor is extremely hard to believe.
Microsoft can make as many consoles as they want, the issue is convincing people to buy them.
Both the PS5 and the Switch 2 sold double the amount of consoles in December that the SX sold in the entire year of 2025. And I doubt that a super expensive co-pilot box is going to help them, especially if you look at the lackluster sales AI equipped PC's have seen.
The next Xbox issaid to have 36 GB of memory so the price short from ram should not be as apocalyptic as a 64 GB kit. With the PS6 coming in with 30 GB, the RAM should not be what makes the Xbox cost so much more. Of course without Microsoft subsidizing the console the actual MSRPs may diverge wildly.
32GB of DDR5 still costs in the neighborhood of $250-300 for the super cheap stuff, $450 for the name brand. That's what entire consoles used to cost. That eats up a huge chunk of the budget that was supposed to be paying for the CPU and GPU, which means that the cost of this system will be driven farther north than previously anticipated, and it was already expected to be above $1k. Releasing a console in the middle of an industry-wide RAM shortage is stupid. Even GPU makers are scaling back production because of it, and focusing their remaining stock and production towards selling to datacenters. Some memory manufacturers have dropped consumer products entirely and now only make chips for datacenters. Nvidia is scaling back its consumer GPUs, no longer offering the super series of some GPUs, for instance.
For MS to pull the trigger now means releasing at a very risky price point against a PS5 that is simply on fire, even outselling the Switch 2 in many cases. It's coming at a time where the Xbox brand is at its weakest ever, and consumer confidence in the brand is at absolute rock bottom. Nobody wants to drop $1500 on an Xbox when they can play the same games on their PS5 Pro for half the price already, or even cheaper if using a base PS5. Only a select few enthusiasts will bother to fork out that kind of money... by the time this product reaches a price point where it can have mass-market appeal, the PS6 will be dropping... but by that time, RAM prices will be dropping, so PS6 will now be able to, assuming it does delay until 2029, invest more into upgrading its architecture over the previously released spec, invest in more RAM than the new Xbox will have, a better CPU & GPU, etc.
As for nobody saying PS6 will launch in 2029, nobody said it would come sooner either, not officially, at least. As of now all we have to go by are rumors based on internal information that could easily change at a moment's notice. Even the design of the chip itself could change as it has not yet entered into production. They could easily opt to include a few more CUs, more RAM, more CPU cores, etc. between now and when it does officially enter production. So, MS could drop a new Xbox now, but it wouldn't be wise, at all, for them to do so if they plan on even holding a candle agains the juggernaut that will be PS6. PS5 will most likely mop the floor with it due to its price point alone.
And that's assuming MS even gives the green light to start manufacturing the console to begin with. We'll see in the coming months if production even happens. Microsoft's shareholders damn sure aren't going to be willing to subsidize anything at all after they just dumped $100b into buying game publishers, expecting to see a ROI, and not seeing it anywhere near as fast as they'd hoped, which is why we're now playing Xbox games on PS5.
As for MS sitting on RAM, they are sitting on some, but Xbox is sitting on none. Microsoft knows good and well they will make far more money putting that RAM into datacenters than they ever would putting it into a console that is already at a huge disadvantage before it even launches, and has little hope of generating a lot of sales.
It'll end up being a Windows based machine that utilizes an Xbox ecosystem as well to play their game library on. But you'll end up being able to buy games from places like Steam as well more than likely.
Would make the most sense honestly. Best of both worlds.
Microsoft should just ditch Xbox and cash in on PC and PlayStation games, maybe even Switch 2. Apparently, they make a loss on hardware, so what's the point?
Some people never learn, and others are destined to learn the hard way, that's how.
What's meant to be will always find a way. The next xbox is gonna happen no matter how much fanboys are still wishing for its death. The core fans will always be there.
What Xbox was is dead. Long live Xbox. I mean Halo and fable are coming to PlayStation this year. Gears and forza are already there. I'm here for it. I will absolutely give MS publishing my money if they make good games.
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NVIDIA rolled out the DLSS 4.5 update at CES last week, adding 2nd Gen Transformer-based Super Resolution technology for all RTX GPUs. The performance scaling varies wildly across the older (RTX 20/RTX 30) and newer (RTX 40/RTX 50) GeForce RTX lineups. We tested NVIDIA’s next-gen upscaling solution across Cyberpunk 2077, Black Myth: Wukong, Oblivion Remastered, and KCD 2.
I've been surprised by this, the difference between 4 and 4.5 is very noticeable. It's almost completely or has removed that weird dark ghosting that you'd get in foggy games like Silent Hill 2... and Cyberpunk mixed with a high res texture pack is jaw dropping in ultra 4k.
Also if anyone doesn't know I recommend DLSS swapper, it allows you to inject the latest DLSS version into older games.
Quite amazing. But, this does probably mean devs will depend on ai even more for their supposed optimizations lol.
no offense to AMD, but this sort of stuff shows that they are always going to be playing catchup. I guess Nintendo can take advantage of some of these features.
With the Switch 2? NVidia can easily lock their proprietary tech to their latest GPUs and the Switch 2 will be stuck on 3.5 for 5 more years at least
4 and 4.5 are available on 2 and 3 series cards right now. The Switch GPU is based on 3 series architecture, meaning it has access to some of those features. Obviously not as much as the higher end cards, but still some.
"Better than native."
Native 4K in nearly all games nowadays is actually native resolution with forced temporal anti-aliasing.
TAA smears and blurs frames together to soften jagged edges.
Of course DLSS makes games look "better than native" because native alone without any competent AA methods makes games look horrible.
FSR 4 was a substantial improvement to AMD’s upscaling solution. It reduces ghosting, improves finer mesh retention, and particle effects. In most cases, it delivers similar visual quality to DLSS 4’s CNN model, but slightly worse than the newer transformer model.
Since FSR is open-source and nvidia's DLSS isn't, I'd personally always prefer FSR.
Frankly, I think all these differences are nice to know (and notice) about if you're playing at DF level. And I totally respect that very small need to max out performance.
But given the prices, I don't think any nvidia GPU advantage justifies paying 1000+ bucks. I don't see any game(s) exclusively (or not) available on PC that offer a fundamentally different and innovative gameplay experience.
There's never a good reason to own any products from Nvidia. They are one of the most destructive and anti-consumer companies that's ever existed.
Anyone buying and using Nvidia is only contributing to the downfall and end of gaming as we know it now.
With the rise of Nvidia all we've seen is price gouging while their products that continue to become less power efficient and their performance gains are so miniscule you'd need a 100x microscope to notice the AI upscaling. Pathetic really.
Why do you need to pay 1000 bucks for an Nvidia GPU? You can find one that is faster than the PS5 Pro at 400 bucks, RTX 5060 ti 16GB, and it has better upscaling, more VRAM, multiframe generation and RT.
Exactly. Headline says FSR looks like last gen. Implying it's years behind the competition. Article says it's slightly behind.
Examples shown, the difference are barely discernible.
I dont know about anyone else, but I've never had 2 screens playing at the same time to know the difference in performance of a given game. It's like those TV screen comparisons, virtually nobody in the real world engages does this, lol. Performance seems comparable to me. Besides Nvidia is no longer interested in the gaming products, its full steam ahead with "AI".
Yeah, but the gaving division is still 8.5% of their global revenue, and they just made 30% YoY topline growth per quarter. A 11.35 billion business is absolutely massive, and this will continue to increase. That means there's 11.35bn reasons why they won't stop the gaming business, nor lose their focus on it. It's also their pivot if things do not go as well in the AI race. By end of 2026, they have DOUBLED the gaming division business in 5 years.
FY 2025 $11.35 billion 8.6%
FY 2024 $10.45 billion 15.2% (approx)
FY 2023 $9.07 billion -7.5% (approx)
FY 2022 $9.82 billion (approx) 49.6% (approx)
FY 2021 $6.5 billion (approx) 61.1% (approx)
I've been lucky enough to get a new 5090 build in March, glad I went with Nvidia. Cyberpunk looks amazing.
Just tested the PS3 version and PC version, was it worth investing in a GTX590.....no.
The gfx aint that mind blowing as some want it to be.
Looks like I should be allright with my Sapphire 6870 then, especially when its overclocked to 950/1150 and runs BF3 at 1080p not 1200p. Still waiting for the beta.
im playing the game with a HD 6970 at 2560x1440 and i get outside 20-35FPS and inside 40-50FPS.