The wait is finally over. Battlefield 3 is here and ready to accept your countless hours of first-person gaming. This is what your gaming rig was meant to do.
EA estimates that there were close to 3 million pre-sales, making Battlefield 3 the biggest first-person shooter launch in EA history. 9.5 million gamers downloaded the September beta and collectively set new social online play records for EA with 42 billion shots fired and 1.6 billion kills registered, 21 million exploded M-Com stations and 19 million dog tags lost at the end of a knife.
Before you jump into the game any further, however, you should make sure that you have all the most current drivers for your game. Such is the joy of being a PC gamer.
Nvidia yesterday released a new driver set that’s optimized for Battlefield 3, Rage and Arkham City. Battlefield 3 players will enjoy a performance boost of up to 11 percent GeForce 285.38 beta drivers.
AMD doesn’t have an official new driver set yet, but those looking for best performance (along with Eyefinity 5×1 support) should get the latest Catalyst preview driver that’s been tuned for Battlefield 3 and Rage.
Speaking of which, here’s a bonus video of Battlefield 3 running in Eyefinity:
Nokia Maps is still getting development love, despite the Finnish manufacturer pinning its smartphone hopes and dreams on Windows Phone. The HTML5-powered maps are now willing to play ball with iOS and Android devices. Previously one of Nokia’s strongest built-in functions on its own phones, the maps perform well on rival hardware — although pinch-to-zoom isn’t working on our Google devices. With Microsoft’s Windows Phones touting some impressive HTML5 credentials, it wouldn’t shock us to see something very similar running on Nokia’s incoming WinPho. There’s a smattering of online settings, including transport directions, but the best part is a new offline mode that will download neighborhood maps from your WiFi connection. Navigate your phone browser to the source link below to see how it works.
USB gamepads are already supported in Honeycomb, so we had plenty of hope that Android 4.0 — also lovingly referred to as Ice Cream Sandwich — would offer the same functionality. We finally have the answer, and it’s a resounding yes, courtesy of Google framework engineer Romain Guy’s Twitter account. The cool part, though, is that HDMI’s playing nice as well. In short, you could hook up an external gamepad to a USB-to-microUSB adapter on the Samsung Galaxy Nexus, connect it to your TV and transform your handset into a fancy portable gaming console. It’s definitely something we can see developers flock towards, and we’ll expect some cool stuff to come out of it. Just in case you thought the Nexus wouldn’t let you get anything else done around the house already, this pretty much seals the deal. Move below the break to see a screenshot from the SDK.
Nokia may be moving on to other things, but it’s not leaving its existing smartphone lineup completely behind just, yet. The company confirmed today that Nokia C6-01, E7 and N8 owners in the US are now finally able to download the Symbian Anna OS update, more than two months after it first rolled out elsewhere around the world. That brings with it a whole raft of changes, including a spiffed up UI, a new on-screen QWERTY keypad, a new browser, new Maps, new versions of the Ovi Store and QuickOffice, and a number of other “performance and usability improvements.” Look for it in the software update client on your phone if you haven’t downloaded it already.
The Nokia N9, the abandoned child of Nokia that got ditched even before it was born. But oddly, it was loved all over the world, and people yearn of why the perfect MeeGo smartphone is not reaching to their shores. It’s humble yet awesome OS, its liquid-looking display and gorgeous machined polycarbonate shell. Now, we can see how that glorious bit of Finnish hardware gets put together in the newly released video seen above. So sit back, relax and let the precision manufacturing wash over you.
Remember The Gadget Show’s FPS simulator that we showed you last week? Armed with naught but a pre-release level of Battlefield 3 and £500,000 ($650,000), it transformed a Birmingham studio into the sort of game room only multi-billionaires can dream of (as long as the dreams involved getting shot back, the sim comes packing paintball markers). The episode, which shows how this slice of gaming greatness came to be, has just finished airing here in the UK, where streaming and catch-up services aren’t available to those outside the country. Fortunately for you lot, our friends at the show have uploaded the feature for you to watch in all its glory after the break.
CEO Steve Luczo said that mass production has been delayed and “lagged” behind Seagate’s initial plans, but is now on track to be shipped in a volume of “millions” of units by the end of the current quarter. The transition to the mass market will enable the company to take the technology into the mainstream while preserving more profit margin.
While Luczo said that Seagate has not been directly affected by the flooding in Thailand, it conceded that some of its suppliers were affected and that the company will be able to ship between “40 million and 50 million drives” during the December quarter. In the most recent quarter, Seagate shipped a total of 50.8 million hard drives – 6.9 million into the enterprise market, 33.4 million client consumer drives and 10.5 million non-compute hard drives. 67 percent of Seagate drives were distributed via OEMs, 10 percent via retail and 23 percent via distributors.
Seagate’s total revenue was slightly up year-over-year to $2.8 billion, but the recorded net profit was down to $140 million.
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