Check out these latest hardware announcements for today from around the web. Also included are some hardware news bits, and on some days, a few rumors tossed in for good measure. Click on the links below to read the official press release, visit the products web page, or to an independent news source.

• Cooltek Announces the GT-04 Green Edition Mid-tower Chassis
• ASUS Republic of Gamers Announces ROG Maximus VIII Formula Mobo with EK-waterblock and RGB Lighting
• Biostar Introduces Racing Series Motherboards
• Enermax Announces ETS-N30II Air CPU Cooler
• iBuyPower Announces the Revolt 2 eSports Gaming Desktop
• SilverStone Finally Releases the Argon Series AR07 and AR08 CPU Coolers
• ASRock Announces its Intel C232 Chipset Motherboards
• Dell Introduces U2417H InfinityEdge 23.8” 1080p IPS Monitor
• AOC Releases 4K LCD Monitor U2879VF With FreeSync
• Plextor Launches M8Pe NVMe PCI-e 4x SSD Next Week
• Dell SE2417HG 60 HZ Gaming Monitor Announced

The Christmas Truce has been called in the WW1 FPS Verdun. Join the snowball fights and football matches, sing along with Christmas Carols and make sure to send your friends a Christmas card from the trenches. Watch the trailer here.

Verdun is available now with a 40% Holiday Sale discount. Live and let live

The Christmas Truce has begun in Verdun! From December the 22nd to January the 4th 2016 players will have the opportunity to come together with their friends and enemies on a dedicated winter map. Throw some snowballs, play football for some extra points, write Christmas cards to your beloved ones or sing along with Christmas carols while enjoying this extraordinary scene.

Lorraine, the Christmas Truce map, wraps it all together and gives players the opportunity to win an extra Steam key. When players send their friends and enemies Christmas Cards from out of the trenches, they will automatically participate in a daily give away. Each day three random winners will be picked from the many Christmas Cards sent.

Verdun is also offered at a 40% discount during the whole Christmas Truce event on Steam, Humble Bundle, Greenman Gaming, GamersGate, Games Rocket and Bundle Stars.

A Christmas Truce live stream – www.Twitch.TV/VerdunGame – will be hosted with BaronVonGamez, Squire, PhlyDaily and the Verdun team on the 23th of December at 4PM EST /9PM GMT.

Enjoy the Holidays!

Find out more about Verdun at the games official website.

Source: Blue’s News

The Jack the Ripper DLC for Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate is now available, as is a new patch for the latest installment in Ubisoft’s assassination series. The patch notes have all the details on the new version, and the UbiBlog has the rest of what you need to know:

If you’re playing Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate on PC, you can now dive into the macabre, fear-fueled Jack the Ripper DLC and solve the mystery of the Whitechapel murders on your platform of choice. Unfolding (mainly) from Evie Frye’s point of view, the new adventure is set 20 years after the events of Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate, and tasks you with tracking down history’s most notorious serial killer.

Jack the Ripper is available through Steam and Uplay for $14.99, and is also included in the $29.99 Season Pass along with a slew of other content. Before you grab the DLC, however, make sure you download the 1.31 patch (detailed in full here), which adds Jack the Ripper support, better performance and stability and a number of other fixes, including the following:

• Added additional parameter to AC.ini for disabling cloth motion 30FPS limits
• Fixed crash in multi-monitor mode in London
• Fixed FXAA with enabled MSAA
• Fixed changing of display in fullscreen mode issues
• Fixed flickering panel in World Map
• Fixed various render issues
• Fixed several online issues
• Minor UI improvements

Final update for the ‘castle sim’ sequel adds new maps, optimizations and single player DLC

Firefly Studios has just released their final content update for Stronghold Crusader 2. The update was announced in a post on the developer’s official website, where Firefly clarifies that no additional single-player content or DLC is planned for the future:

“As a team we’re very happy with the reaction and feedback from Stronghold players over the past year. Stronghold Crusader 2 was an important step forward for the series and we intend to build on that progress in future games. Work has now concluded on post-release DLC and single-player content, but there’s plenty to look forward to in 2016! Starting with the release of Stronghold Kingdoms on iOS and Android, which has been completely redesigned for touch, you’ll hear more about our plans for Stronghold and Firefly. We have lots in the pipeline for 2016 including multiple announcements and new releases, so watch this space!”

Watch the new Mini-Campaigns trailer here.

Free Map Pack

Stronghold Crusader 2 has also been updated with four new skirmish maps:

• Ruins – Just like in the very best 80s boxing movies it’s East vs West in ‘Ruins’. The map’s unique setup provides up to four players with a reliable source of Stone, but leave the elevated centre uncontested and even the mightiest walls will crumble.
• Mirage – All eight players must cross the great desert to reach fertile grasslands and enemy castles. Be quick! Unlike your typical mirage the aforementioned castles and armies within can definitely kill you, if left undisturbed.
• Three Rivers – The turtling player’s dream! Up to three castles stand high atop its very own hill, providing strong natural defences. Resources on the other hand lay scattered about the map in strategically vulnerable locations, so be prepared to fight over those village estates.
• The Fork – Your keep is on a mountain at the conflux of two great rivers. This provides plenty of opportunities to make the rivers run red with blood, just like in Revelation 16:4. Venture outwards to discover plentiful resources before testing your castle design with a few AI sieges.

Optimizations

Fixes and optimizations for pathfinding have now been added to the Steam version, with a GOG Galaxy update soon to follow. These changes should reduce the impact of these systems on frame rates and prevent variations in worker productivity during large games of up to eight Lords. Woodcutters were given special attention, given their importance to almost any player economy. Peasants assigned to Woodcutter Huts will now spend less time seeking resources, finding paths to them and generally act with greater autonomy.

A full list of changes can be found in the Stronghold Crusader 2 forum.

Stronghold Crusader 2: Delivering Justice and Stronghold Crusader 2: Freedom Fighters DLCs are now available on Steam.

Author: Grady McKinney @ HardOCP

In this evaluation we have a custom built Radeon R9 390 video card, the ASUS R9 390 STRIX DirectCU III 8GB. It features a factory overclock and the DirectCU III cooling system, alongside STRIX technology for silent gaming. We will compare it to a custom NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 video card, both using the highest overclock we achieved.

Read The Review Here

Check out these latest hardware announcements for today from around the web. Also included are some hardware news bits, and on some days, a few rumors tossed in for good measure. Click on the links below to read the official press release, visit the products web page, or to an independent news source.

• ASUS Announces E3 Pro Gaming V5 Intel Xeon Gaming Motherboard
• BIOSTAR Partners with Thermaltake for the Ultimate Gaming Experience at DreamHack Winter 2015 in Sweden
• BIOSTAR HyperOC Technology for Non-K Overclocking Revealed
• Creative Sound BlasterX G5 Portable Sound Card Now Available
• Aqua Computer Intros Spacer for Skylake CPUs
• Aerocool Presents 80Plus Gold Certified XPredator PSU Models
• AMD Dual-Fiji “Gemini” Video Card Delayed To 2016, Aligned With VR Headset Launches
• Introducing TRENDnet’s New AC2600 StreamBoostT MU-MIMO WiFi Router
• Aqua Computer Makes 3D-Printable Skylake CPU Delidding Tool

Genocidal Tyrant or Saviour of Europe? The Story of Charlemagne.

To mark the recent release of Age of Charlemagne, the biggest expansion yet for Total War: Attila, historian and archaeologist Dr. Paul Harrison takes us through the highlights of the life of one of the most celebrated and feared kings ever known.

Featuring footage from the game, this documentary short covers the often controversial achievements of the ‘Father of Europe’ as he dragged the entire continent out of the Dark Ages and set it on the road to enlightenment and prosperity. From the subjugation of the Saxons and the mass execution of his prisoners, to the widespread establishment of education and literacy, Charlemagne life is an incredible tale, and you can get a flavour of it here.

The Age of Charlemagne Campaign Pack includes a brand new campaign map resplendent in medieval-style artwork and focuses on Europe from the year 768AD. With the introduction of Knights, Housecarls and other new era units, battlefield conflict takes an iconic turn. With over 50 conquerable provinces and new campaign mechanics, a detailed and vibrant geopolitical starting position will offer hundreds of hours of gameplay.

Total War: Attila - Age of Charlemagne is out now on Steam.

Welcome to the chaotic and devastated world of Tom Clancy’s The Division

Source: GameSpot

Just in time for the holidays, Ubisoft has published a Christmas-themed live-action trailer for The Division.

In the video, directed by Xavier Gens (Hitman) and shot at the Fox Studios lot in LA, a young boy sings the famous Christmas carol, “Silent Night.” It starts off with a peaceful, Christmastime backdrop. But soon, the scene and the lyrics take a dark turn. We won’t spoil it for you, but it’s a powerful trailer.

Watch the “Silent Night” video here.

Obsidian Entertainment and Paradox Interactive today announced that “The Road to Eternity,” the behind-the-scenes documentary following the incredible fan-funded role-playing game (RPG) Pillars of Eternity, has been released in its entirety for viewers worldwide. Created as part of the wildly successful Kickstarter campaign in late 2012, “The Road to Eternity” provides a rare and unfiltered in-depth look at how crowdfunding not only saved the studio during one of the darkest points in its history, but led to the creation of one of the most anticipated and highly reviewed RPGs of all time. Pillars of Eternity is often quoted as not only fulfilling promises made to its backers, but far exceeding them. Its overwhelming critical and commercial success has contributed greatly in validating crowdfunding as a movement in funding games.

In “The Road to Eternity,” Obsidian’s talented team of developers Josh Sawyer, Adam Brennecke and CEO Feargus Urquhart who have contributed to such notable franchises as Fallout, Star Wars, and Dungeons & Dragons pull back the curtain on the Pillars of Eternity development story, and share unguarded thoughts and testimonials about the bleak lows and the dizzying highs of their journey. The documentary offers a great deal of inside information for fans, as well as a rare look into what crowdfunding can mean to an independent game developer.

It will cost $0.99 to view the 1 hour and 24 minute “The Road to Eternity” documentary here.

Source: Legit Reviews

Months ago NVIDIA promised GeForce video card owners that were using the Fermi GPU that Windows Display Driver Model (WDDM) version 2.0 support would be coming in 2015. This is a big deal for many Fermi owners as they have patiently been waiting for mixed WDDM support and the other Windows 10 features. Windows 10 includes WDDM 2.0, which is designed to dramatically reduce workload on the kernel-mode driver for GPUs that support virtual memory addressing, to allow multithreading parallelism in the user-mode driver and result in lower CPU utilization.

The new NVIDIA GeForce 361.43 WHQL Drivers along with the Windows 10 November Update will now allow Fermi GPU owners to use WDDM 2.0 in single GPU configurations. For mixed-GPU configurations (Fermi being used in the same system with Kepler or Maxwell GPUs) you’ll be able to use WDDM 2.0 for the very first time. For those that are running Fermi GPUs in SLI, you are still stuck on WDDM 1.3.

Other than Fermi WDDM 2.0 support, the GeForce 361.43 WHQL drivers has support for GameWorks VR 1.1 including VR SLI support for OpenGL applications and support for the latest Oculus SDK. If you want the latest drivers for the best VR gaming experience, look no further.

You can download the new GeForce 361.43 WHQL drivers from GeForce Experience and GeForce.com.