Month: April 2017

The tech specs for the Microsoft's upcoming Xbox Project Scorpio are here, courtesy of Digital Foundry, and—on paper on least—Microsoft has hit its six teraflops performance goal for the console and then some. If early performance in Forza and testing by the company is anything to go by, Scorpio will play a good chunk of games at a native 4K resolution and at 60FPS.

At the heart of Project Scorpio is an all-new AMD GPU, which features 40 "customised" Radeon compute units (compared to just 12 on the Xbox One and Xbox One S) clocked at an impressive 1172MHz. That's a substantial increase over Xbox One GPU's 853MHz clock speeds, and even the PS4 Pro's 911MHz. Microsoft has doubled the amount of shader engines and render back-ends, and quadrupled the GPU L2 cache size, which it claims has boosted the GPU fill-rate by 2.7x. That's more than enough, it says, for native 4K gaming.

In 2015, a team of American engineers created the MegaBots Mk. II, a 15ft tall, 5,400kg, paintball cannon-armed mech of nightmarish proportions. Which is impressive and all, but the question was: why? The answer came in the form of a fight-to-the-death challenge issued to Japanese company Suidobashi Heavy Industries, which had built its own 13-foot tall mech called Kuratas, complete with touchscreen UI, Kinect-based interface, and twin BB gatling guns (customers could even order one for a cool $1.35 million).

One successful $500,000 Kickstarter campaign later—launched to get the Mk. II combat-ready—the battle to end all robot battles is finally happening, albeit a year later than originally planned. This August, the revamped MegaBots Mk. III will battle Kuratas at an as yet undisclosed location. The delay to the original duel was due to problems with the venue, according to MegaBots, so the location is being kept a secret for now.

MegaBots has been documenting the construction of the Mk. III over on its YouTube channel, and while the finished bot won't be be shown until May (somewhere in San Francisco), what's been teased is terrifying indeed. The Mk. III stands 16ft tall, weighs 10,000kg, and will sport an arsenal that includes a over-sized chainsaw and ripsaw. A recent video shows the skeleton of Mk. III picking up a car and waving it around in what appears to be a horrifying first-look at our apocalyptic future.

Enlarge / "I'm sure you can think of something to write about," Ryder said, patting Vetra's forearm.

The writing contest has one day left! We're re-surfacing this post to make sure that everyone who might want to enter gets a chance to see it. Entries will be accepted until 23:59 US Central Daylight Time on Thursday, 13 April.

The five-year wait for a new Mass Effect title has ended, and Andromeda is here. We've put our thoughts about the game into a preliminary review, and we'll have more to say in a week or two after we're done fully exploring the game and mentally digesting the stories it has to tell. But as part of the review process, Electronic Arts and BioWare not only provided Ars with an expiring review copy of the game, but also an Origin code good for one standard edition of Mass Effect: Andromeda—and a remote-controlled Nomad vehicle, too! Since we already bought our own retail copies of Andromeda, and since we don't keep expensive promotional items, we figured the best thing to do with these goodies would be to set up a simple contest to give them away to you fine folks!

The limited edition remote-controlled Nomad you could win if you enter this contest! (credit: BioWare)

The game’s the thing

Here's the dealy-o, faithful readers: if you'd like this copy of Mass Effect: Andromeda and this RC Nomad to be yours, we're going to make you work for it. Specifically, you need to write a short story (500 words max) set somewhere and sometime in the Mass Effect universe. Where and when is up to you—it could be during the original trilogy, or during Andromeda, or anywhere else along the timeline. It could be about the time you were an itinerant dance instructor and you met up with Commander Shepard to try to finally teach him or her the right moves; it could be a noir-themed Sam Spade-esque look at the Citadel from the perspective of a burned-out C-Sec cop; it could be a Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead-style comic existentialist peek behind the scenes of life on the Normandy as Shepard and crew flit around the galaxy.

It could be anything, as long as it's at least mostly work-safe. No 500-word descriptions of asari tentacle porn, please (but speaking of asari, a 500-word flash fic called "Asari, Not Sorry" about an asari debt collector in the Citadel Wards would be pretty awesome).

Enlarge (credit: Jonathan Gitlin)

We usually cover our own travel costs, but in this case, that was not an option; flights and two nights' accommodation on this trip to Palm Springs were paid for by Audi.

A little over a year ago, we traveled to California to sample the new Audi A4. The car's combination of excellent semi-autonomous driving tech and that Virtual Cockpit really appealed to our inner nerd. But the A4 is meant to sell in volume, a bread-and-butter model never meant to set the heart a-flutter. That job belongs to the S4, a hotter version with an extra hundred horsepower on tap. Together with the closely related S5 coupe, it's starting to arrive on these shores, which is how we found ourselves among the mountain roads of southern California once again.

Jonathan Gitlin