Table of contents for Special 1 2016 in PC Powerplay

“under DX11 the PC could only churn out around 10,000 draw calls per frame, and even then only by talented coders” We often refer to the holy trinity of gaming performance here at PC PowerPlay, which pertains to the three major components within your system that will impact on frame rates. Your graphics card is obviously of paramount importance, as it’s tasked with the final steps of the rendering process, and the better your GPU the higher the resolution, anti-aliasing and other graphical effects you can run. System memory is also key, as if the game runs out of memory it’ll have to fetch data from the sluggish hard drive, causing stuttering and slow downs. The final piece of the performance pie is one that is often overlooked – the…

Once upon a time cooling was one of the most essential parts of any PC build. Even at stock, enthusiast and gaming hardware tended to push a lot of heat, and if you overclocked your CPU, then you were really asking for it. I have fond memories of a friend’s high-end gaming system with its side panel off, a desk fan perpetually blowing air into the oven-like interior. These days a lot of PC components are much more heat tolerant, able to handle heat better as well as put out less of it. Nonetheless, good cooling is still important, and overclocking or running an SLI setup can still create a good amount of waste heat. It’s also important to take into account not only the PC hardware’s own heat output,…

Interested in making a PC game? That’s cool. So am I! In fact, I started doing so a little over a year ago, with absolutely no experience whatsoever. If you’re in the same position and have no idea where to start, this is the guide for you. But don’t raise your expectations just yet: reading this won’t give you the power to make an entire game right away. It is a long, arduous and often tedious process. But you can do it. I believe in you. What can you expect to do after reading this, then? You’ll have a starting point. You’ll be set up and ready to go with all the tools you need to begin. You’ll understand on a conceptual level all the elements that make up a…

UHD/4K Film and Television use different standards for 4K resolution. Television utilises 3840 x 2160 which gives a 16:9 aspect ratio, called Ultra High Definition (UHD). Film standards for 4k uses the slightly higher resolution 4K 4096 x 2160 with 1.9:1 ratio which is much closer to a true rectangle. 5K A resolution of 5120×2880 giving a 16:9 ratio, the standard ration for TVs and computer monitors. 8K A resolution of 7680x4320 or higher. At 16x the resolution of 1080p, 8k is seen as the next step on ultra-large televisions, like the 98” 8K LG TV shown off at CES 2015, due to the fact that the resolution is high enough that individual pixels are indistinguishable to the human eye even at large scale. 8K Fulldome (8192x8192) is the most…

For the first time in as long as we can remember, gaming displays have actually experienced a shent-load of innovation over the last year. Whether it’s high-speed IPS displays, wide-angled TN panels, G-sync vs Freesync, and the confusing mess around Adaptive-Sync, gaming displays now come in more shapes and flavours than we ever thought possible. Here’s our glossary of what all the different panels mean to gamers, and which features you should look out for. “If you’ve got some cash to burn, and a PC packing several GPUs, you might like to consider one of the high-refresh rate gaming displays” TN PANEL Twisted Nematic panels used to be the go-to guys for gamers. They were the cheapest to produce, and most importantly to gamers, had the fastest pixel response times.…

It’s not too much of a stretch to say that anyone who loves playing games has at some stage fantasised about the idea of making money playing game, of turning their hobby and passion into a career. Rather than trying to dish out some advice on how to make that dream a reality ourselves, we instead reached out to a number of professional gamers from Australia and around the world to find out how they made the move from amateur to professional, how they found their teams, why they chose their particular games and more. Here is what they had to say. Q: WHAT DREW YOU TO YOUR CHOSEN GAME IN THE FIRST PLACE? Simon “Swiffer” Papamarkos – Team Captain of The Chiefs (LoL): What drew me…

ANTI-POOPSOCKING Mechanics built into some modern games that seek to discourage day long gaming sessions for health reasons. The Nintendo will often have a “time to take a break” message after an hour of playing for example. AOE Area of Effect, an attack that deals damage in a wide area, whether around the character or at a specific location. Term used in MOBAs, MMOs, turn based RPGs BUFFER ‘Storing’ inputs when attacking isn’t possible, like the quarter circle for a Hadouken, and then hitting the attack button when attacking is possible to immediately fire the projectile/ use the attack. Used also in speedrunning to execute commands on the first possible frame. CROSS UP A way of cancelling out an opponent’s defence in fighting games by mixing low, high and overhead…

“Now, you’ve got two dominant tracking mechanisms – optical, which is admittedly going out of style, and laser.” It’s actually kind of odd that possibly the cheapest piece of kit in your build is the one you rely upon the most, but that’s the nature of the machine interface that has evolved around the PC. CPUs and video cards are still the big drivers of what your PC can do, but they’re out of the way. Your mouse, though, is front and centre, and if you’ve ever used a friend’s PC, or sat down to a strange system at a convention, the time it takes to get used to a new mouse can be catastrophic – using one that is actively bad, or at the least not designed for how…

Overclocking your PC simply refers to taking a certain component and running it at a speed faster than it ships at. There are three major areas of the PC that can be overclocked; the CPU, GPU and system memory. In the best case scenario, it’s possible to squeeze up to 40% better performance out of a given component. In the worst case scenario, you can actually damage the components you’re trying to overclock, but we’re going to show you how to minimise that risk. Having said that, before you embark on any of the following guides, you accept all responsibility for any damage to your system. We highly recommend backing up any and all important files on your PC before CPU overclocking, as it’s possible to hose your hard drive…

As our lives become more and more reliant on the internet and access to data – so does our expectations to have that data immediately. Streaming media from providers such as iTunes and Netflix has only increased our demand for fast connections. Recent years has seen internet speeds increasing rapidly and we’ve almost hit (some countries have) the point at which your internet connection is just as fast as your home network. This is all good news for the multiplayer gamer as well as the experiences have become larger, more intense and more immersive. Just about every home now has its own network (in one form or another) and most people are looking into how to make it better. Setting up a home network these days is a rather simple…

George Lucas is said to have said that ‘Sound is 50 percent of the moviegoing experience. Which is actually a very silly statement. You can’t divide an experience between two of its contributing factors. Absent sound or absent vision, you’re probably getting just five per cent of the combined experience. Nonetheless, it captures some essence of not only movie-going, but game playing. Shooting the enemy is enormously more satisfying when there’s a visceral thunk from the sound of your 5.56mm rifle than a mere sketch of what’s happening from some plastic computer speakers. Your game score can even be higher if you can accurately and instantly detect the direction of hostiles from their sound Likewise for ambience. Where mood is part of the gaming experience, much is delivered almost unconsciously…