Table of contents for Special 1 2017 in PC Powerplay

As the primary interface between the player and the game worlds we immerse ourselves in, your gaming display is one of the most important components in your entire setup. Graphics make up a huge part of the gaming experience, and showing them off in the best possible way relies upon a high-quality display. What’s the point in blowing $750 on a beastly graphics card if you’re going to then pump its polygons through a panel that doesn’t truly represent the colours the developers intended, or causes horrible motion blur during high-speed scenes? Displays are continuing to evolve at breakneck pace, and over the last year we’ve seen lots of new technologies and terms bandied about. But which ones are truly important, and what do they actually mean? We’re going to…

As PC Gamers, we all know how exciting it is when a dramatic new technology is introduced that promises to deliver ever-richer gaming experiences. Then we’re struck by the reality that many of these technologies never reach fruition, and even when they do, they can take many years to become the norm. Take multi-cored CPUs for example. While we’ve had these for around ten years now, it’s only in the last couple of years that we’ve seen game programmers figure out how to use four cores simultaneously. It was a long wait, but it now makes 4-core CPUs the go-to for gamers. The latest two technologies to be wheeled out to gamers that promise to revolutionise graphics performance are DirectX 12 and Vulkan. With claims of performance boosts that make…

I’m a lifelong videogame nerd, as I’m sure you know by now. Don’t make me tell the Exidy Sorcerer story again. What I hope you’ve also gleaned about me, in my nine years of writing for PC Powerplay, is that music is my other enduring love. My first degree was a Bachelor of Music Education from Sydney Conservatorium and I can expertly harmonise your Bach chorale any way you want me to. This is thanks to a teacher who would put an ugly clay monk on the desk of any student who used parallel fifths, to illustrate their harmony was stuck in the medieval period. The shame of it. Amazingly, I pursued my passions for gaming and music separately, for the longest time. When I was teaching music in a…

“Simulated racing has grown as a niche in leaps and bounds over the past few years, and has done so for numerous reasons” When I was a kid, I wanted to be a race car driver. I wanted a go-kart, I wanted to race that go-kart, and I wanted to win in that go-kart. But I never got a go-kart, because as it happens, they cost a lot of money not only to buy, but also to race. You see, the costs don’t end once you have the kart, because then you have to think about the tyres, the engine, the fuel, the race suit and other protective gear, the individual track and race registration fees as well as the travel to and from the circuit. Thankfully, all these years…

As somebody who has been building and tweaking PCs for over twenty years, I’ve built up a handy little collection of must-have tools that every serious DIY PC owner should have. While it’s easy enough to get away with a set of needle-nosed pliers and a screwdriver, a decent set of goodies will make building, maintaining and running your PC that much easier. So without further ado, here’s what I recommend budding system builders should stock up on if they’re going to be fiddling around with their hardware on a regular basis, and I’ve also thrown in a few software utilities for good measure too. 1 A DECENT PC TOOL BOX WITH TOOLS You can pick one of these up for less than $50, and it’ll have all the items…

If you’ve ever seen a sweet looking PC rig, decked out in LEDs flashing away in all sorts of colours and thought, “I want a piece of that, but it looks like too much effort”, well Asus has just made your day. Asus’s new Aura Sync lighting system combines pre-installed LEDs with easy to use software to create a platform for blinging up your PC and continues Asus’s legacy of giving gamers and enthusiasts more control over their PCs. In the past if you wanted to install some cool LED lightning going on in your PC, it was a massive pain to get all the lights in sync and to control it all from your desktop. The software frustrated and you had to be pretty handy with electronics to get…

I make no claims to be an IT security expert, yet in over twenty years of PC gaming, I’ve never had a single virus or hack on my PC. To you dark-hatters out there, please don’t see this as a challenge to get into my machine, as I’m sure you can probably get through my basic security measures if you put your mind to it. However, for most of us, there are several rather basic ways of keeping your PC safe and secure, and here are the tips I’ve picked up over the years. Follow these and your PC should remain free of intruders looking for your credit card details or that cache of photos you wish you and your partner had never taken that drunken night… INSTALL AV SOFTWARE…

There are a lot of things that make the PC the superior gaming platform for serious gamers. The ability to upgrade; the exponentially more powerful hardware within; mods and indie games. The list goes on. Surprisingly though, one of the biggest advantages is one of its simplest – the humble mouse and keyboard. This archaic combination of 30- year old design gives PC gamers a huge advantage when it comes to basically every genre, which is why there is now a deluge of different “gaming” mice and keyboards on the market. But what makes a mechanical keyboard so special? And why are pro-gamers now flocking back to optical mice after years of laser dominated pointing? We’re here to decode these two key debates, and hopefully demystify some of the marketing…

“In a review in PC & Tech Authority, Editor Ben Mansill said both drives deliver “…a new paradigm in consumer PC storage performance”. Samsung is in a unique position when it comes to building today’s high-speed Solid-State Drives, also known as SSDs. It’s one of the only companies who builds every component within its SSDs, from the drive controller, to the flash memory, to the PCB these pieces are mounted on. This helps to give Samsung the ability to extract every ounce of performance out of its products, and has helped establish Samsung SSDs as a premiere drive. The new release of the Samsung 960 PRO and EVO helps extend that lead, delivering outstanding performance designed to give gamers and performance users a superb experience.. Both of these new products…

What follows are some excerpts from the panel. DANIEL WILKS: The idea of this panel today is that -- I’m very guilty of this, being in print - I’m Daniel Wilks, editor of PowerPlay - is that whenever a new technology comes out there’s a lot of hyperbole around it, where people call it the future of PC gaming. The new Pascal cards come out, they’re the future, VR comes out, it’s the future. 4k screens, it’s the future. DEAN: Cloud gaming. DANIEL: Cloud gaming is the future. Everything is the future. And the reason we use hyperbole is it grabs eyes. But the idea of this series of talking heads is to cut through that hyperbole and actually have a conversation about the direction in which PC gaming is…

Often the talk of accessibility in games turns to gender and ethnic representation, but sometimes that (very valid) argument often overshadows another kind of accessibility that is vitally important to a small but vibrant demographic; gamers with disabilities that prevent them from interacting with games in a standard manner. Many developers have been steadily building more and more accessibility options into their games for years. Standard options include epilepsy friendly modes, colour blind modes, descriptive captioning for the deaf and simplified controls for one hand. While many of the games that champion full accessibility are on the indie end of the development spectrum, a number of AAA titles have been released with, or updated to cater for a wide range of disabilities. GTA: San Andreas, for example, has a colour…

Not all PC’s are equal. Sure, anyone can tell you that your Granny’s old beige PC is going to be slower than the shiny new one you just bought from Harvey Norman, but it takes an enthusiast to tell which PC in Harvey Norman is the fastest or the best suited to your actual needs. These people realise that computers are more than just a box you shove your USB sticks into, and that with some planning and possibly some tinkering they can make their PC even faster, or build it from scratch to their exact bespoke specification to meet performance and budgetary goals. Intel has been aware of these users for a long time, but it wasn’t until almost a decade ago (2007) that they decided to start addressing…

It’s 2005 and 19 year old Scott Bednarski is working his regular shift at Bunnings when he gets a phone call. It’s his manager. “Can you get time off next week?” “Probably.” “Good, ‘cos you’re going to Singapore.” Scott recalls running through the store telling his bewildered workmates he was flying overseas to play video games. Two years later and Scott is just one month into a new job when his Counter-Strike: Source team gets the call to head to Malaysia for the Asian region qualifiers of the inaugural Championship Gaming Series. Once again Scott needs to get some time off work. “My boss said no,” he says. “I called in sick on the Friday. We prepped on Saturday and played on Sunday. Come Monday I was still in Malaysia.…