Rebellion Games announced that "Sniper Elite V2 Remastered" is up for pre-order on Steam. The game will release on May 14. Originally priced at USD $38.49, the pre-order comes with a 10 percent discount, at $34.99. Those who own the original "Sniper Elite V2" from 2012 can buy the game as an "upgrade," for just $9.99. Sniper Elite V2 Remastered is built on Rebellion's latest Asura engine, supports the latest hardware and technologies, and in the words of the developer, features updated environments, characters, weapons and vehicles, modernized rendering and post-processing effects, enhanced texturing and level geometry, a revamped lighting system, and dozens upon dozens of improvements and refinements. Rebellion has also carried the gameplay mechanics of "Sniper Elite 4" over, so the rifles and projectiles behave more physically-accurate.

AMD at E3 2018 announced its commitment to powering the ultimate gaming experiences via partnerships with game publishers and developers, to bring fantastic 3D realms to life. In line with AMD's cooperation with Ubisoft in Far Cry 5, which saw the usage of AMD Vega-centric technologies (such as FP16 Compute on some water and lighting scenarios, Rapid Packed Math, and Shader Intrinsics) across the title, the company has announced it will help Ubisoft deliver a DX12-driven experience with The Division 2. It remains to be seen if more technologies than were used in Far Cry 5 will be in play here.

Alongside its Ubisoft/The Division 2 announcement, AMD also established partnerships with Capcom, for the upcoming Resident Evil 2 remake, and with Rebellion for their Strange Brigade title. The partnership with Capcom is a novel one, but AMD had already worked with Rebellion on Sniper Elite 4, for some stellar CrossFire performance. These partnerships join AMD's long-standing, long-reaching partnership with Bethesda Softworks, in order to fight NVIDIA's entrenchment with the videogame industry via its GameWorks program.

On the first stop in AMD's two-continent spanning RX Vega tour (which really only counts with three locations), the company pitted their upcoming RX Vega graphics card (we expect this to be their flagship offering) against NVIDIA's GTX 1080 graphics card. The event itself was pretty subdued, and there was not much to see when it comes to the RX Vega graphics card - literally. Both it and the GTX 1080 were enclosed inside PC towers, with the event-goers not being allowed to even catch a glimpse of the piece of AMD hardware that has most approximated a unicorn in recent times.

The Vega-powered system also made use of a Ryzen 7 processor, and the cards were running Battlefield 1 (or Sniper Elite 4; there's lots of discussion going on about that, but the first image below does show a first-person view) with non-descript monitors, one supporting FreeSync, the other G-Sync. The monitor's models were covered by cloth so that users weren't able to tell which system was running which graphics card, though due to ASUS' partnership in the event, both were (probably) of ASUS make. The resolution used was 3440 x 1440, which should mean over 60 FPS on the GTX 1080 on Ultra. It has been reported by users that attended the event that one of the systems lagged slightly in one portion of the demo, though we can't confirm which one (and I'd say that was AMD's intention.)

PC World posted a preview of an AMD Radeon Pro Vega Frontier Edition graphics card, and reported some interesting observations about the card ahead of its review NDA. The tech publication compared the air-cooled Pro Vega Frontier Edition against NVIDIA's fastest consumer graphics card, the TITAN Xp. It did reveal performance numbers of the two cards in two compute-heavy tests, SPECViewPerf 12.1 and Cinebench R15 (OpenGL test), where the Vega FE significantly outperforms the TITAN Xp. This shouldn't come as a shocker because AMD GPUs tend to have a strong footing with GPU compute performance, particularly with open standards.

It's PC World's comments on the Vega card's gaming performance that might pique your interest. In its report, the publication comments that the Radeon Pro Vega Frontier Edition offers gaming performance that is faster than NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 1080, but slightly slower than its GTX 1080 Ti graphics card. To back its statement, PC World claims to have run the Vega Frontier Edition and TITAN Xp in "Doom" with Vulkan API, "Prey" with DirectX 11, and "Sniper Elite 4" with DirectX 12. You must also take into account that the Radeon Pro Vega Frontier Edition could command a four-figure price, in the league of the TITAN Xp; and that gamers should look forward to the Radeon RX Vega series, bound for a late-July/early-August launch, at price-points more appropriate to their competitive positioning. The RX Vega is also expected to have 8 GB of memory compared to 16 GB on the Frontier Edition. Watch PC World's video presentation in the source link below.

Where is Vega? When is it launching? On AMD's Financial Analyst Day 2017, Raja Koduri spoke about the speculation in the past few weeks, and brought us an answer: Radeon Vega Frontier Edition is the first iteration of Vega, aimed at data scientists, immersion engineers and product designers. It will be released in the second half of June for AMD's "pioneers". The wording, that Vega Frontier Edition will be released in the second half of June, makes it so that AMD still technically releases Vega in the 2H 2017... It's just not the consumer, gaming Vega version of the chip. This could unfortunately signify an after-June release time-frame for consumer GPUs based on the Vega micro-architecture.

This news comes as a disappointment to all gamers who have been hoping for Vega for gaming, because it reminds of what happened with dual Fiji. A promising design which ended up unsuitable for gaming and was thus marketed for content creators as Radeon Pro Duo, with little success. But there is still hope: it just looks like we really will have to wait for Computex 2017 to see some measure of details on Vega's gaming prowess.

At GDC's AMD Capsaicin Event, AMD's Raja Koduri reaffirmed Radeon's commitment to Multi-GPU setups by remembering his RX 480 launch event claim on a RX 480 dual setup beating their competition's high-end solutions. Then, Rebellion's Chris Kingsley took stage, who attributed the fact that his team was able to get Sniper Elite 4 to run with 100% scaling on a RX 480 dual GPU setup to Rebellion's previous work with Mantle. Next to it, for perspective, AMD showed a dual-GPU RX 480 system running the same game and settings at virtually double the frame rate - a perfect, 100% scaling. Rebellion's Chris Kingsley also elaborated on the importance of DX 12 and Vulkan on making such a thing even possible in the first place, reiterating the software and coding investment necessary to make that happen.

NVIDIA today released a hotfix version of its GeForce driver suite. Numbered the 378.77, these fix some issues with the previous driver release, numbered 378.66. Solved issues include driver installation errors for laptops with GeForce GTX 1050 and 1050 Ti GPUs, crashes in Minecraft and some other Java-based titles, and resolving 'Debug Mode' as default option on Pascal based GPUs.

This driver release contains all previous improvements, including an optimized experience for Sniper Elite 4, For Honor and Halo Wars 2, whilst also introducing support for NVIDIA's Video SDK 8.0, which provides support for high-bit-depth (10/12-bit) hardware accelerated video decoding of VP9 and HEVC. You can, as always, grab these hot-from-the-coding-gods drivers from the link below, right here on TPU.DOWNLOAD: NVIDIA GeForce 378.77 Hotfix Drivers

With its latest Radeon Software Crimson ReLive 17.2.1 drivers, AMD decided to stop releasing regular WHQL-signed drivers for the 32-bit version of the Windows 8.1 operating system. At first we thought AMD's web-admins accidentally missed publishing the driver (so we could post it on our Downloads section). When we got in touch with AMD, we were told that the company doesn't have new drivers for 32-bit Windows 8.1. We were even told that it's because nobody cares about 32-bit Windows 8.1 anymore, citing extremely low download numbers.

Apparently, AMD is cutting down costs and time for its driver development team by discarding operating systems and architectures that only a few people use. It was first to dump Windows XP support, and support for Windows 8 (in favor of Windows 8.1). While the company does provide 64-bit Windows 8.1 WHQL drivers as regularly as its popular Windows 7 and Windows 10 ones; it is skipping support for 32-bit Windows 8.1 going forward. The company will not release any new Windows 8.1 32-bit drivers anymore. One way out of this is to upgrade to Windows 10 while you still can. Updating to Windows 10 from Windows 8.1 is pretty smooth, and maybe you can consider an upgrade to 64-bit, since most new AAA games are limited to 64-bit only.

AMD today released the 17.2.1 WHQL version of its Radeon Software Crimson ReLive. This release features Multi GPU profiles and support for For Honor (with an up to 4% performance improvement on Radeon RX 480) and Sniper Elite 4 (with a 5% performance improvement being registered here). Look after the break for a list of known, fixed issues. Compared to the previous 17.2.1 Beta release of the ReLive driver suite, this one is virtually the same, the only difference being the WHQL signing.

As always, you can grab the drivers right here at TPU, through our revamped downloads section. Just follow the link below.DOWNLOAD: AMD Radeon Software Crimson ReLive Edition 17.2.1 WHQL

NVIDIA has released the latest version of its "Game Ready" drivers, providing an optimized experience for Sniper Elite 4, For Honor, and Halo Wars 2. In addition to these features, these drivers add support for NVIDIA's Video SDK 8.0, which provides support for high-bit-depth (10/12-bit) hardware accelerated video decoding of VP9 and HEVC, as well as some miscellaneous other media-related features. Grab them from the link below:

DOWNLOAD: NVIDIA GeForce 378.66 WHQL