Author: dpugh007

Right on schedule, Resident Evil 7‘s PC demo landed on Steam today, letting a new group of players get a taste of the horror game that arrives in January.

The Beginning Hour demo, as it’s called, can be downloaded right here on Steam for free. “You wake up alone on the floor of an abandoned farmhouse. Daylight is quickly fading. You must find a way out,” reads a line from the demo’s description.

The demo’s full minimum and recommended system requirements can be seen further down the page.

When Capcom announced the Resident Evil 7 PC demo earlier this month, the developer said there would be a “multitude of PC-specific settings and graphics options.” Courtesy of someone on NeoGAF, we now know that they include things like dynamic shadows, ambient occlusion, bloom, chromatic abberation, and much more. You can see the graphics options menu here.

The Resident Evil 7 Beginning Hour demo is already available on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.

Resident Evil 7 launches on January 24, 2017 for PS4, Xbox One, and PC. That’s just a few days before the new movie, Resident Evil: The Final Chapter, comes out in theaters on January 27. Check out the newest trailer for Resident Evil 7 above, while the latest Final Chapter trailer can be seen here.

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Following a report last week, we’ve now possibly learned a little more about the Nintendo Switch‘s specs. Digital Foundry has the scoop today on the system’s CPU and GPU speeds.

According to the site, the CPU power is the same when the Switch is docked and undocked, with the cores running at 1020MHz in both situations. “This ensures that running game logic won’t be compromised while gaming on the go: the game simulation itself will remain entirely consistent,” the site reported. “The machine’s embedded memory controller runs at 1600MHz while docked … but the default power mode undocked sees this drop to 1331MHz. However, developers can opt to retain full memory bandwidth in their titles should they choose to do so.”

The Switch’s GPU speed is what might be controversial, Digital Foundry says. This is because, when docked, clock speeds for the system are reportedly locked at 768MHz. As the site points out, this is much lower than the 1 GHz that Nvidia’s Shield Android TV runs at in terms of GPU seed.

“But the big surprise from our perspective was the extent to which Nintendo has down-clocked the GPU to hit its thermal and battery life targets,” Digital Foundry said. “That’s not a typo: it really is 307.2MHz–meaning that in portable mode, Switch runs at exactly 40 percent of the clockspeed of the fully docked device.”

Nintendo did not respond to the site’s request for comment. Be sure to read Digital Foundry’s full report to learn lots more about the Switch’s rumored specs and what it might mean for the way the console’s games look.

An earlier report from Digital Foundry claimed that the Switch’s portable screen has a resolution of 720p and supports multi-touch.

Last week, a report claimed the Switch would use Nvidia’s Maxwell graphics processing technology, not the chip-maker’s newer Pascal architecture. It was confirmed during the Switch announcement event in October that the console would use a variant of Nvidia’s Tegra chip.

The Switch’s reported use of the custom Maxwell Tegra apparently means the console will have more than 1 teraflop of performance. This would be well below Project Scorpio (6 teraflops), the PS4 Pro (4.2 teraflops), the standard PS4 (1.8 teraflops), and the standard Xbox One (1.3 teraflops).

Nintendo will officially announce the Switch’s specs during an event in January, though we don’t know how specific Nintendo plans to get. The event, scheduled for January 12, is also where Nintendo will reveal the console’s price and launch lineup, but not necessarily its release date.

We know it’s coming sometime in March 2017, but a specific date has not been revealed.

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As anyone who has seen the new Star Wars spinoff Rogue One will know, the movie is packed with Easter Eggs, cameos, and callbacks to the other films in the blockbuster series. Now director Gareth Edwards has spoken about one of the coolest surprise appearances.

Spoilers about Star Wars: Rogue One follow below.

In an interview with the Radio Times, Edwards discussed the appearance of Rebel pilots Red Leader and Gold Leader from the original Star Wars. The director revealed that the footage of the two characters–played by actors Drewe Henley and Angus MacInnes–were actually taken from unused scenes from the original movie.

“We went to Skywalker ranch, and there’s the archives there,” he said. “And as we’re walking around, and doing all the cool things and looking at the Millennium Falcon and trying on Han Solo’s jacket and things like that, in the back at the bottom was all these cans of film. And we said, ‘What are they?’ and they said, ‘Oh, it’s Star Wars.’ “And you go… ‘has someone gone through all this? And it’s like, ‘not really, they’re not fully digitised at all.’

“We got the neg documents and found the clips from A New Hope that hadn’t been used. And there’s pilot photography and lines that were never featured in [the film.] Through the magic of [vfx studio] ILM they cut round them and manipulated them and stuck them into our cockpits.”

Edwards went on the explain that he wasn’t initially sure the time, cost, and effort involved in placing the characters into the climactic scenes of Rogue One was worth it–until he saw the movie with an audience.

“It’s the sort of thing you think, ‘How many people will notice?’,” he admitted. “It’s like, is this a lot of effort for very little reward? At the world premiere in LA, there was this massive cheer at a particular point in the film. It was the only time during the premiere where I actually punched the air.”

Rogue One opened last weekend to massive worldwide success. In the US it made $155 million, which makes it the second biggest December opener of all time, behind last year’s Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Internationally, it earned $135.5 million, boosting the global haul to $290.5 million. Check out GameSpot’s review here, and read our roundup of the best moments from the film.

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