After some teasing, Valve took the wraps off Half-Life: Alyx, and its minimum/recommended PC specs, on this day in 2019. The big news was that at last a new Half-Life game was being released, after a 20-year void – however it was destined to be VR only… Half-Life: Alyx was released in March 2020 and between the announcement and availability had sparked the biggest take-up in high-end VR equipment ever seen.
Valve’s own Index HMD saw sales double, and the company found it difficult to keep up with orders. Some analysts still see VR/AV/XR as the future of computing, but it looks like we will still be staring at our screens on desktops/laptops for a few more years until “VR Ready” GPUs or SoCs become trivial to purchase, or are even built into AiO HMD solutions.
PC hardware
- Intel’s Tiger Lake CPU pounces on a desktop motherboard
- EK launches a standalone Momentum Monoblock for MPG Z590 Gaming Carbon
- Intel Xe Graphics 512CU graphics card spotted in Geekbench @ 2.1GHz
- Samsung talks about DDR6, DDR6+, and GDDR7
- Gigabyte launches an Intel 12th Gen processor DRM fix tool
Gaming
- The League of Legends 2022 world championship will be a multi-city affair
- 343 Industries postpones Halo Infinite co-op and level editor release
- Star Citizen has now raised over $400M
- Leaked Resident Evil 4 VR video suggests free Mercenaries DLC will arrive in 2022
- Battlefield 2042 is one of the worst-reviewed games on Steam
Technology
- Any use of hand-held mobile phone while driving to become illegal in the UK
- Micron Announces World’s Fastest Mobile Memory has been validated (LPDDR5X)
- Adele convinces Spotify to remove shuffle from albums
- Survey: 82% of people’s work output was up or stayed the same working from home
- UK’s Ultraleap mid-air haptics (could be a key feature of the metaverse) gets £60 million backing from Tencent
- Google Pixel 6a: Leaked specs of Google’s upcoming mid-ranger
- El Salvador Bitcoin city planned at base of Conchagua volcano
