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The Himalayan country of Kyrat is a place of myth, faith, secrets, lies, and beauty, and it's one of the best-realized locations I've ever explored in a video game. Kyrat is a colossal, dense, visually diverse place that feels lived in, torn up, and ancient. Far Cry 4 capitalizes on every available strength to make it an amazing open world for first-person action and adventure, while failing repeatedly in creating enjoyable characters within it. Versatility is the greatest strength in Far Cry 4’s first-person exploration and combat. I scaled cliffs with climbing gear in search of treasure, religious monuments, and hostages in need of rescue. In venturing into the Himalayan mountains, I stole oxygen masks and snowmobiles to survive, and used the unstable environment to crush enemies with snow. Long-lost letters told a tragic story I wanted to learn more about. Collectible calling cards had me on the trail of a serial killer, and gorgeous vistas had me in awe of Kyrat’s lakes, mountains, and other spectacular scenery. This is sometimes compromised by lower-resolution textures and an inferior draw distance on Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, but Far Cry 4 is comparable to Far Cry 3 in terms of visual fidelity, and up to expectations for old-generation hardware. 2
REVIEW
Far Cry 4 NOVEMBER 18, 2014 Step into a vast, unknowable land once again in this fourth game in the Far Cry franchise. The vertical landscape of the Himalayas isn’t just a pretty backdrop, but a playground that encourages the player to fight, hunt and explore.
The future of cinema is here. It's been around for years but, as studios now struggle to find a way to offer audiences a spectacle that can't be replicated by downloads or illegal streams, it's currently enjoying a quiet renaissance. It has revolutionised the way we consume movies, and an increasing number of well-respected film-makers are seeking it out as a creative outlet. 3D? Don't be daft – 3D is the medium of cut-price dance films; the medium of Piranha and Yogi Bear and that terrible Clash of the Titans remake. No, I'm talking about IMAX. A surprisingly large part of the IMAX experience is the sound. That’s what makes an IMAX movie visceral. You don’t just see an IMAX film, you feel it in your bones. One reason is the sheer power of the custom, patented speaker system in an IMAX theatre. Another is the wider frequency response – which means higher highs and lows so low they’re as much vibrations as sounds.
More than anything – more than 3D, more than digital projection, more than crazy schemes where you have to pay 30 quid to see a secret film you’ve already seen – IMAX has spent the last few years quietly asserting itself as the superior way to experience movies. The vastness of the screen. The infinite clarity of the picture. The way that securing a last-minute seat is almost impossible. It’s event viewing. Imax can make bad films bearable and good films incredible.
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IMAX
HI-FI Audio High fidelity—or hi-fi or hifi—reproduction is a term used by home stereo listeners and home audio enthusiasts (audiophiles) to refer to high-quality reproduction of sound to distinguish it from the poorer quality sound produced by inexpensive audio equipment, or the inferior quality of sound reproduction characteristic of recordings made until the late 1940s. Ideally, high-fidelity equipment has minimal amounts of
noise and distortion and an accurate frequency response.
Stereophonic sound provided a partial solution to the problem of creating some semblance of the illusion of live orchestral performers by creating a phantom middle channel when the listener sits exactly in the middle of the two front loudspeakers. When the listener moves slightly to the side, however, this phantom channel disappears or is greatly reduced. An attempt to provide for the reproduction of the reverberation was tried in the 1970s through quadraphonic sound but, again, the technology at that time was insufficient for the task. Consumers did not want to pay the additional costs and space required for the marginal improvements in realism. With the rise in popularity of home theater, however, multi-channel playback systems became affordable, and many consumers were willing to tolerate the six to eight channels required in a home theater. The advances made in signal processors to synthesize an approximation of a good concert hall can now provide a somewhat more realistic illusion of listening in a concert hall. In addition to spatial realism, the playback of music must be subjectively free from noise to achieve realism. The compact disc (CD) provides about 90 decibels of dynamic range,[9] which exceeds the 80 dB dynamic range of music as normally perceived in a concert hall. 4
HI•FI Audio
THE
FUTURE
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OCULUS RIFT Is a new virtual reality (VR) headset designed specifically for video games that will change the way you think about gaming forever. With an incredibly wide field of view, high resolution display, and ultra-low latency head tracking, the Rift provides a truly immersive experience that allows you to step inside your favorite game and explore new worlds like never before. 5
Oculus VR
Electronic sports (also known as esports or competitive gaming) is a term for organized video game competitions, especially between professionals. The most common video game genres associated with electronic sports are real-time strategy, fighting, first-person shooter, and multiplayer online battle arena. Tournaments such as the The International, the Evolution Championship Series, and the Intel Extreme Masters provide both live broadcasts of the competition, and cash prizes to competitors. Although esports have long been a part of video game culture, competitions have seen a large surge in popularity in recent years. While competitions before around the year 2000 were largely between amateurs, the proliferation of professional competitions and growing viewership now supports a significant number of professional players and teams, and many video game developers now build features into their games designed to facilitate such competition. The increasing availability of online video streaming platforms, particularly Twitch, has become central to current esports competitions. In 2014, sports broadcaster ESPN broadcast the The International finals, marking the first time an esports event had been simultaneously broadcast on a mainstream channel.
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E-Sports
Broadwell is Intel’s codename for the 14 nanometer die shrink of its Haswell microarchitecture. It is a “tick” in Intel’s tick-tock principle as the next step in semiconductor fabrication. Unlike the previous tick-tock iterations, Broadwell will not completely replace the full range of CPUs from the previous microarchitecture (Haswell), as there Starting with a brief look of the specifications, much of the Radeon R9 295X2’s de- will be no low-end sign, goals, and performance can be observed in the specifications alone. Whereas desktop CPUs based the 7990 was almost a 7970GE Crossfire setup on a single card, AMD is not making on Broadwell. any compromises for the R9 295X2, equipping the card with a pair of fully enabled Hawaii GPUs and then clocking them even higher than their single-GPU flagship, Broadwell will be the R9 290X. As a result unlike AMD’s past dual-GPU cards, which made some per- used in conjunction formance tradeoffs in the name of power consumption and heat, AMD’s singular with Intel 9 Series goal with the R9 295X2 is to offer the complete performance of a R9 290X “Uber” chipsets (Z97 and H97). Crossfire setup on a single card. Compared to the retired 7990, the R9 295X2 should be a far more capable card, offering 40% more shading/texturing performance and 2x the ROP throughput of AMD’s previous flagship. Like the R9 290X compared to the 7970GHz we’re still looking at what are fundamentally parts from the same generation and made on the same 28nm process, so AMD doesn’t get the benefits of a generational improvement in architectures and manufacturing, but even within the confines of 28nm AMD has been able to do quite a bit with Hawaii to improve their performance over Tahiti based products.
As of July 2014, Broadwell CPUs are available to Intel’s hardware partners in sample quantities;[6] as of October 2014, Broadwell-based laptops are available
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Hardware