I consider myself decently educated in the ways of the PC, but what I learned today told me that my current knowledge is nothing compared to what’s out there. I’ve just read that you can now do three-way SLIs if you have the cash to burn.

SLI is an acronym for Scalable Link Interface, a technology by Nvidia which lets you link three video cards together to make your games even more purdy.

Nvidia’s new nForce 780i motherboard lets you do just that. You see, the 780i board is designed specifically for 1333FSB Intel QX9650 (Yorkfield) processors (Core 2 in English). The mere prospect of having a Core 2 processor is making me drool, but combining it with a three-way SLI setup is nauseating.

Having this kind of setup means I can play Crysis with maxed-out detail, and perhaps stare at 3,000 exploding barrels without having the PC crash.

Three-way SLI is said to deliver up to a 2.8x performance boost over traditional single graphics card setups. According to a press release, linking three Nvidia cards lets you ratchet up the resolution to 1900×1200 and 2500×1600 respectively, while partaking in all of that eye candy.

Purchasing the 780i board and a Core 2 CPU is definitely doable, but can you imagine linking three $500 high-end cards? One card alone would set me back for years, so combining a trio is a pipe dream. I think I’ll stick with a PS3, thank you.

Post from: EveryJoe

Motherboard allows 3-way SLI, but affording three video cards is another matter

Beast, Illuminate’s global illumination system, will allow the Epic engine to have more realistic lighting. This system takes into account not only the light that comes directly from a light source, but also cases where light rays from the same source are reflected by other surfaces.

Under the terms of the agreement, Illuminate Labs will join Epic’s partners program, and its technology will be available to any publishers or developers that license Unreal Engine 3.

Beast is also a platform-independent baker that uses the FBX file format, which allows users to add baking functionality to 3D asset creation tools. The new Beast features include:

• Global Illumination baking;
• Skylights from HDR images;
• Baked soft shadows with transparency.

With all these new effects, how does it affect the average PC? Not very good, I’m afraid. Such lighting would take more computations to generate, making things more difficult if you have a year-old rig or video card. If you want to see this new eye candy in all its glory, focus your attention on future games that will use Unreal Engine 3.

Post from: EveryJoe

More eye candy making its way to Unreal Engine 3

So Bioshock gives me a headache when I play for long periods. I can still enjoy it for a couple of hours, right? I take in the twisted art deco, the awesome eye candy, and the superior audio for 120 minutes or so, then log out happy, right?

Taking in the atmosphere may put a grin on my face, but the visit to Rapture can get really tedious because you can fight only so much bad guys before you notice that there’s not much variety in the antagonists you encounter.

You have a few splicers, two types of big daddies (that look pretty much the same), a bunch of little sisters that you can’t tell apart from each other, and a few freakish stage bosses that are too far in between that somehow remind you of the splicers.

That’s pretty much it.

Can’t I have ninjas? Ninjas are always cool. How about bears that shoot lasers out of its eyes? Nevermind that these types of enemies have nothing to do with Rapture or Plasmids. Hardly anyone pays attention to FPS storylines anyway.

Post from: EveryJoe

Bioshock annoyances #2: Shooting splicers are fun—up to a certain point