Even though the NDA still isn't up on AMD's second volley of Ryzen-based CPUs, some lucky buyers are already running some of the upcoming Ryzen 5 processors after some sellers jumped the gun. Now, a YouTube video by user "Santiago Santiago." is making the rounds in which he compares gaming performance between the Ryzen 5 1400 (4-core, 8-thread part @ 3.2 GHz base, 3.4 GHz boost), Intel's i5 7400 (4-cores @ 3.0 GHz base, 3.5 GHz boost), and the Pentium G4560, a Kaby Lake dual-core CPU with Hyper Threading @ 3.5 GHz base clocks. The user even snapped a picture proving he has his hands on this chip.

AMD today released a new version of Radeon Software Crimson ReLive, which brings with it support for Capcom's Resident Evil 7: Biohazard, set to launch on January 23rd.

This driver also includes several fixes for previously identified issues: specific crashes on Dishonored 2 running with a R9 380 and flickering on Paragon with multi-GPU configurations. You can read the full list of fixed (and known remaining) issues after the break.

NVIDIA today released its latest GeForce Game Ready drivers. The new GeForce 375.57 WHQL drivers come game-ready for "Battlefield 1," "Civilization VI," and "Titanfall 2." The drivers are also recommended for the best VR experience with "Eagle Flight" and "Serious Sam VR." The drivers also fix flickering noticed with "Mirror's Edge Catalyst" on GeForce GTX 980M, decal corruption on "Overwatch," and display signal loss when switching between 144 Hz to 240 Hz refresh-rate, on BenQ Zowie monitors. Grab the drivers from the links below.DOWNLOAD: NVIDIA GeForce 375.57 WHQL for Windows 10 64-bit | Windows 10 32-bit | Windows 8/7/Vista 64-bit | Windows 8/7/Vista 32-bit

AMD is preparing a "Battlefield 1" promotion for its Radeon RX 480 graphics cards. Starting today, RX 480 purchases in select markets are eligible to receive Origin codes that upgrade your "Battlefield 1" Standard Edition purchase to the Early Enlister Deluxe Edition. As an Early Enlister, you get to play the game a few days ahead of the October 21 launch. The way this code works is that you add BF1 Early Enlister Deluxe Edition to card in the Origin store, and enter the code as a "promo code" during checkout. Its final price is reduced to that of the Standard Edition. If redeemed after launch, you get the Digital Deluxe Edition at the price of the Standard Edition.

AMD late Wednesday released the Radeon Software Crimson Edition 16.8.3 Beta drivers. The drivers come with optimization, including CrossFire support, for the week's biggest game releases, "Battlefield 1" Open Beta, and "Deus Ex: Mankind Divided." The drivers address a rare bug noticed on machines with AMD "Polaris" GPUs, in which a blank or colored screen is noticed intermittently when gaming. Grab the drivers from the links below.DOWNLOAD: AMD Radeon Software Crimson Edition 16.8.3 for Windows 10 64-bit | Windows 10 32-bit | Windows 8.1 64-bit | Windows 8.1 32-bit | Windows 7 64-bit | Windows 7 32-bit

NVIDIA today released the GeForce 372.70 WHQL "Game Ready" drivers. These drivers feature day-one optimization for "Battlefield 1" Open Beta, "World of Warcraft: Legion," and "Quantum Break" Steam release (Win32 variant, supports multi-GPU). The drivers also include a DPC fix for multi-GPU machines, building on the fix NVIDIA released for single-GPU machines in the previous release. The drivers also enable NVIDIA Fast Sync for GeForce 900 series "Maxwell" GPUs. Grab the drivers from the links below.DOWNLOAD: NVIDIA GeForce 372.70 WHQL for Windows 10 64-bit | Windows 10 32-bit | Windows 8/7/Vista 64-bit | Windows 8/7/Vista 32-bit

Johan Andersson, technical director for the Frostbite game engine at DICE, developers of games such as Battlefield, tweeted the first clear picture of AMD's next flagship graphics card, and it looks a lot [better] than this mockup render. We'd be tempted to call it the Radeon R9 390X, but older reports suggest that AMD could give it a fancy name, just as NVIDIA named its top-dog "Titan." That's not all, Andersson commented that "this new island is one seriously impressive and sweet GPU," referring to the card's GPU codename of "Fiji." AMD is expected to launch this card in the third week of June. Either to preempt that, or out of spook (with an effort to siphon off high-end GPU sales), NVIDIA is preparing the GeForce GTX 980 Ti, which will launch in the first week.

Despite WHQL-signed driver releases almost every other week, NVIDIA still seems to find time or reason for stopgap releases such as the new GeForce 350.05 Hotfix drivers, which quickly address a pressing issue with the latest WHQL-signed drivers (349.88 in this case). The driver fixes a crash with DirectX error message on Battlefield: Hardline. It also fixes a crash with Dragon Age: Inquisition. Expreview reports that NVIDIA also quietly slipped in OpenCL 1.2 support with the new driver, which could be one of the highlights of NVIDIA's upcoming R350 drivers.DOWNLOAD: NVIDIA GeForce 350.05 Hotfix

Hot on the heels of its flagship GeForce GTX TITAN X graphics card, NVIDIA released its latest "Game Ready" GeForce driver. Version 347.88 WHQL comes with support for the GTX TITAN X, and comes with optimizations for "Battlefield: Hardline," the season's hot new online FPS, these include single-GPU optimizations for the game, an SLI profile that lets the game take advantage of SLI multi-GPU setups, and an update on how the game plays with 3D Vision Surround. The driver also adds SLI profiles for "Life is Strange," "Trine 3," "Medieval Engineers," and "Zombie Army Trilogy."DOWNLOAD: NVIDIA GeForce 347.88 WHQL for Windows 8/7/Vista 64-bit | Windows 8/7/Vista 32-bit | Windows XP 32-bit | Windows XP 64-bit

In one of the first interviews post GeForce GTX 900 series, AMD maintained that its Radeon R9 290 series products are still competitive. Speaking in an interview with TweakTown, Corporate Vice President of Global Channel Sales, Roy Taylor, said that gamers should choose the Radeon R9 290X "with its 512-bit memory bus" at its current price of US $370. He stated that the current low pricing with R9 290 series is due to "ongoing promotions within the channel," and that AMD didn't make an official price adjustment on its end. Taylor dodged questions on when AMD plans to launch its next high-end graphics products, whether they'll level up to the GTX 900 series, and on whether AMD is working with DICE on "Battlefield 5." You can find the full interview in the source link, below.

AMD is pleased to announce that Electronic Arts (EA) will support Mantle, AMD's groundbreaking graphics API, in three new games: Battlefield Hardline, Dragon Age: Inquisition, and Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare. These join an extensive catalogue of more than 40 games that now support AMD's revolutionary graphics API. All three of these games are powered by DICE's cutting-edge engine, Frostbite 3.

The latest title from the Battlefield series, Battlefield Hardline follows Nick Mendoza's journey on a cross-country vendetta against once-trusted colleagues of the force.

AMD has today rolled out a Release Candidate (RC) build of its Catalyst 14.6 graphics driver. This version features support for the Radeon HD 5000, HD 6000, HD 7000, HD 8000, R5 200, R7 200 and R9 200 Series cards (and the Mobility Radeon HD 5000/6000/6000M/7000M/8000M mobile GPUs) and brings performance improvements for Plants vs. Zombies and 3DMark Sky Diver, CrossFire profiles for the Battlefield Hardline Beta and Grid Auto Sport, and more.

The Catalyst 14.6 RC is available for Windows 7 and 8.1.

EA has confirmed reports that a beta invite to Battlefield 4 will be included with pre-orders of the Medal of Honor: Warfighter Limited Edition. The announcement claims the Battlefield 4 beta will be available sometime in fall 2013, so you have a while to wait. EA points out that the two games are very different, but touts the shared heritage of the Frostbite engine. Yesterday, the rumors started churning from a leaked ad that promised the beta. Today you can actually order the Limited Edition from Origin, which costs $10 more than the standard edition.

To give the Battlefield 3 competitive scene a helping hand, DICE is working on a new 'Matches' feature that lets players set up and schedule closed servers for their bouts. It'll all run through the Battlelog, but you'll need to be renting a dedicated server. "Players will be able to coordinate Matches for PC, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360 through the Battlelog," community manager Ian Tornay explains on the Battlefield blog. "To coordinate a Match a player must be actively renting a dedicated server. Once a dedicated server has been selected the Match host can set the Match name, start time, game mode, team size, and map rotations." You can also set rosters, so only certain players are allowed in. Then there are options to tweak and fiddle with settings from friendly fire and available unlocks to health regeneration and squad leader spawning.

There's no word yet on when the Matches feature will launch.

While many scoffed at Battlefield 3's late-arriving competitor to Call of Duty Elite, it seems to have worked quite splendidly for the publisher. More than 800,000 players have signed up for Premium in its first two weeks of availability, EA Games' Patrick Soderlund revealed. Although Premium less a "service" like Elite and more of a DLC Season Pass, the $50 asking price does include a lot of content. Namely, Premium includes access to over $75 worth of content, making it a "value" for hardcore fans of the series. Speaking to USA Today, Soderlund said that "we are very pleased with the performance so far." When asked if this strategy is something EA will pursue with future games, he said: "We're actually only two weeks into it, so it's a little early to tell how this is going to pay off. It certainly it looks very promising right now."

Call of Duty Elite currently has over two million paying subscribers, a number which took about six months to reach.

The games market went to Hell in May. Diablo III topping retail software sales for the month, according to the latest sales figures from NPD, and helped fuel a resurgence in the PC games space. Other top performers included Max Payne 3, which launched the same day as Diablo III, as well as Sniper Elite V2 and Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon: Future Soldier.
While action titles continued their dominance of the top 10, 2K Sports' NBA 2K12 held the fifth spot for the second straight week. Blizzard continued to show its impact in the PC market with Diablo III at number 1, the first time since July 2010 that a PC-only title has accomplished that feat. The game that did it in 2010? StarCraft 2, another Blizzard mainstay.

Total video game sales continued to shrink, down 28 percent from last year. However, the PC market jumped 230 percent from the same time last year to $80 million, fueled by Diablo III sales. The overall spend in May, including digital sales and microtransactions was estimated to be $1.17 billion.

According to MCV a major UK High Street retailer has mentioned two new titles for the first time. Firstly, it suggests that Warner Bros' upcoming summer movie hit The Dark Knight Rises will be accompanied by a video game tie-in. Furthermore, owing to the nature of the in formation MCV obtained, it suggests a physical release rather than a smaller-scale digital title. Also on the list is a game called Battlefield Evolved. No further details are known. With EA planning a big push for Medal of Honor: Warfighter this Q4, a fully-fledged Battlefield release seems unlikely. It may be that the SKU includes Battlefield 3 and all of its DLC. Both games are supposedly scheduled for the autumn.

This may not be a surprise to the PC enthusiast community but, the PC gaming market has never been healthier, according to a report from the not-for-profit consortium PC Gaming Alliance (PCGA). The report claims that in 2011, the industry reached a global record $18.6 billion, a growth of 15 percent over the prior year. The report cites burgeoning foreign markets and social games as large factors in the findings. The results of the PCGA's third annual "Horizons" research report found that China is growing at almost twice the rate of the global market, bringing in $6 billion for a total growth of 27 percent. The US, UK, Korea, Japan, and Germany saw increased revenue of 11%, by comparison. Asian companies, in general, are noted for spurring on sales in their markets.

The report also cites Zynga and Nexon (of MapleStory fame) as frontrunners in the PC space. Zynga in particular doubled its revenue to roughly $1.1 billion, putting it on-par with Nexon. Zynga and the German company Bigpoint were noted for pushing the free-to-play model, already popular in Asian territories, into North America and Europe. The report also notes the movers and shakers of big-budget PC games from the western market, like Star Wars: The Old Republic and Rift, along with multiplatform titles like Battlefield 3 and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3. Looking forward, the report speculates that the industry will grow to $25.5 billion (37 percent increase) by 2015, thanks to increased broadband penetration and digital delivery. The report is from a PC gaming coalition with a vested interest in trumpeting the industry's health, but even so, the rumors of PC's death have greatly exaggerated.

DICE has announced three new content packs to be released for Battlefield 3. According to Shacknews, Close Quarters will be the second expansion pack for DICE's shooter, with one week exclusivity on PS3. But what can you expect from it? The infantry-focused add-on will expand the online mode with four new maps and ten more weapons. A first-look at the new content showed an indoor apartment environment and a penthouse suite. The close quarters gameplay did a great job of showing off Frostbite 2's destructive capabilities, as walls were quickly being torn apart by gunfire. But that's not the only piece of DLC EA announced last night. There are two more expansion packs coming. ""Back to Karkand set the bar for what an expansion pack should be," DICE general manager Karl Magnus Troedsson said. "It's so much more than just a new map. We're trying to theme all our expansion packs." Wheres Close Quarters will focus on tight infantry battles, the next add-on will focus on vehicular combat. "Armored Kill" will add new vehicles and boast the "biggest maps DICE has ever created... for a very Battlefield experience." Finally, DICE announced "End Game." Unfortunately, that's all they're saying about the (seemingly) final piece of the Battlefield 3 post-release puzzle. "It's a secret right now," Troedsson teased.

If online gaming wasn't hard enough a game-hacking site called Artificial Aiming has some members that are now targeting innocent players for Punkbuster bans in Battlefield 3. They were able to do this by corrupting a streaming Punkbuster ban list shared by certain server admins. A junior member from the Artificial Aiming forums that took the lead on this attack is focusing on servers that use GGC-Stream. He is are quoted as saying,

"We have selected ggc-stream as the target since they have the most streaming bf3 servers and makes it very easy to add fake bans. In 2011 we hit them with a mass ban wave and now were are banning real players from battlelog while ggc-stream is totally unaware. We have framed 150+ bf3 players alone"

Origin is the fledgling online download account-based DRM service from Electronic Arts launched last June, that is home to Battlefield 3. To compete effectively against other similar services, the industry-leading Steam in particular, it must offer more content. To this end, Origin has added 11 publishers to its portfolio, reports CVG. These are Trion Worlds, Robot Entertainment, Freebird Games, Recoil Games, Autumn Games, 1C Company, inXile entertainment, Paradox Interactive, Core Learning Ltd, N3V Games and CD Projekt RED. That last one is interesting, because CD Projekt RED owns and runs www.gog.com, the website dedicated to selling DRM-free games.

Microsoft has revealed the top 20 most popular games played on the Xbox 360 in 2011 based on numbers of unique users logged into Xbox LIVE (Silver and Gold members). Note that this gives a different result to the total playtime for a particular game, which has not been disclosed here. Unsurprisingly, the Call of Duty series dominates the chart, but what is sure to irk CoD detractors, but make fans very happy, is that a massive five of those positions are taken up by CoD - that's 25% of the rankings. Even CoD4: Modern Warfare which was released way back in 2007 sits at a very respectable number 14. However, top games Battlefield 3 and Skyrim did very well nonetheless, sitting at five and six respectively, with only Halo beating them at number 4. Can you guess which CoD game hit the top spot before looking at the chart?

Today Kotaku is reporting the top 5 games pirated for major platforms this year according to TorrentFreak. As usual the PC platform is the most guilty almost doubling in pirated copies then its competitors.

Some of the titles listed are not surprising but the lack of a certain title filled with dragon slaying is. Why Skyrim didn't make the top five is anyone's guess. Either Steam is in fact the most user friendly DRM or people just love Skyrim. Either way this is just a small glimpse into the world of pirated software.

Top Five Pirated PC Games

1. Crysis 2 (3,920,000) (March 2011)
2. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 (3,650,000) (November 2011)
3. Battlefield 3 (3,510,000) (October 2011)
4. FIFA 12 (3,390,000) (September 2011)
5. Portal 2 (3,240,000) (April 2011)

NVIDIA today announced that system builders worldwide are now shipping the fastest PC gaming platforms ever built, thanks in part to NVIDIA SLI technology and the just-released Intel Core i7 Extreme Edition processors and X79 chipset-based motherboards.

The combination of NVIDIA SLI technology -- which allows for multiple GPUs to run on a single PC -- and new X79-based motherboards allow gamers to customize their PC experience with up to four NVIDIA GeForce GTX GPUs, including the GeForce GTX 580 and GTX 570, the world's fastest DX11 GPUs. Licensed by the world's leading motherboard manufacturers -- including Intel, ASUS, ASRock, EVGA, Foxconn, Gigabyte and MSI, SLI technology is crucial for playing this year's hottest graphics-intensive games, such as the recently released Battlefield 3 and upcoming Batman: Arkham City with detail, resolution and immersion settings cranked up.

While PC gamers are getting understandably excited about one of the year's biggest releases, which is guaranteed to have standards-setting graphics at least, there's a kick in the teeth waiting just around the corner. EA and Virgin Gaming have teamed up to launch a massive BF3 contest with $1.6m in cash and prizes - for consoles only. Yes, you read that right. And the reason? Consoles are the "gold standard". That's the aging console platforms reported on TechPowerUp a few days ago. GameStop's president Tony Bartel said in an interview with IndustryGamers:

We continue to believe that the console is a strong platform and will continue to be the gold standard.