Thurrott Daily: October 23

What else is happening today?

10/23/2015 10:49:39 AM

Call of Duty: Black Ops III launch gameplay trailer

I’m trying to get excited about the next Call of Duty game but the previous title, Advanced Warfare, was the first one I didn’t like, and what I see here looks disconcertingly similar. Maybe this holiday season will be a good time for me to branch out.

Ashes of the Singularity will push DirectX 12 to its limits

When I met with the Xbox team last week, they mentioned to me that an upcoming game from Stardock, called Ashes of the Singularity, would be among the first to take advantage of DirectX 12, one of the key selling points of Windows 10. Well, Ashes of the Singularity is now available, so if you’re looking for something that will really push the limits of your graphics card, this is your chance.

But here’s something cool you may not know: This game is the first to take advantage of a unique DirectX feature that lets you use different graphics cards in tandem, sort of like NVIDIA SLI or ATI Crossfire … but the two graphics cards don’t have to be identical. This means that the game can take full advantage of a device like Surface Book, which uses both Intel HD Graphics and a dedicated NVIDIA GPU. It uses asynchronous scheduling to balance the workload across the GPUs, and can handle thousands of onscren objects, vs. just hundreds with older DX versions.

How about Halo 5 on the PC, Microsoft?

Speaking of which, as I noted this morning on Twitter, no one can take Microsoft’s claim of taking PC gaming seriously until they ship their marquee new title, Halo 5, on Windows. Until/unless they do, you know the truth about Microsoft’s real PC gaming ambitions.

Microsoft Stores will celebrate Surface Pro 4/Surface Book launch

If you live near a Microsoft retail store, head on over on Monday, October 26 to celebrate the launch of Surface Pro 4 and Surface Book. There are special events at many of the stores—for example, New England Patriots Cornerback Malcolm Butler will appear at the Boston store—and all of them will offer food, drinks and music.

Check the Microsoft Store Facebook page for details.

Chrome picks up support for iOS multitasking

If you use Chrome on iOS devices, you may be interested to learn that the latest update supports new iOS 9 multitasking features like Split View. Unfortunately, it only works on certain (new) devices, like the iPad 2 and iPad mini 4. (Which is Apple’s limitation, not Google’s.)