The birth of the gaming industry, Quake de-indexes the GTX 560 Ti 448 Core and Sony’s Playstation 4 (PCGH-Retro, November 29)

…1972: The games industry was born: On November 29, 1972, Atari founder Nolan Bushnell and his colleague Allan Alcorn set up a wooden device in Andy Capp’s Tavern, a bar in California – the first “pong” machine. This prototype is based on a simple black and white TV, a hardwired circuit board for the game and two paddles to play the ping pong variant. Atari did not in any way invent the game, since May 1972 everyone has been able to buy the “Odyssey” from Magnavox, the very first game console that – among others – also allows this game to be played on the television at home. The Pong machine is also not the first arcade machine, because Atari had already tried “Space War” beforehand, but its operation proved to be too complex, which is why it hardly found any friends. It’s different with “Pong”: According to legend, the bar owner called Bushnell the day after the machine was set up and complained that the machine was broken. When you open it, it turns out that only the coin holder is overflowing… Although there are sources that doubt this version of the story. Nevertheless, one thing is certain: “Pong” will be the first commercial success in the young video game industry and thus the founder of an entire industry. See the article Game Consoles from 1972 to the Present for more information.

…1975: The name “Micro-Soft” is mentioned for the first time in a letter from Microsoft founder Bill Gates to Allen. The current spelling “Microsoft” is registered on November 26, 1976.

… 1994: The FAZ is the first major German medium to report on the Pentium’s FDIV bug.

… 1999: AMD launches the Athlon with 750 MHz. The basis of the chip is the K75 core.

… 2011: German youth protection is one of the strictest in the world. The souls and state of mind of German children and young people can obviously be more strongly influenced by pixel blood and Vertex opponents than anywhere else in the world. Ergo, milestones in PC gaming history such as id Software’s Quake were only allowed to be sold to adults for many years and were not discussed in German media for advertising purposes. But that’s the end of it as of today – at least in the case of Quake, which the Federal Inspection Agency for Media Harmful to Young People has removed from its list on November 28th (report including update from November 30th, 2012). As a result, there are no phrases such as “quake” or “Quake engine game” to be found in PC Games hardware reports, but we call things by their proper name.

… 2011: The non-disclosure agreement for the Geforce GTX 560 Ti 448 Core also expires today, November 29th – even if the sparrows in the rumor mill had of course whistled everything from the roofs beforehand. Nvidia’s second infusion of the GTX 560 Ti is based on a GF110 chip with 448 shader ALUs – or in Nvidia’s language: Cuda cores. The GF110 chip provides the technical foundation for the Geforce GTX 560 Ti 448 cores. This means that the architecture-related features such as the high geometry performance compared to the GF114 and Radeon GPUs are also available when using tessellation. Our detailed review of the Ti-448 provides information about gaming performance, fill rates, memory transfer rates and more.

… 2013: Sony is launching a new generation of next-gen consoles (which may also be called years after their release…) with the Playstation 4 this November 29th. Its inner life is based almost entirely on technology known from the PC. Like Microsoft with the Xbox One, Sony has opted for highly integrated chips (SoCs) from AMD. These SoCs combine eight x86-compatible CPU cores with Radeon graphics of the (then) current GCN 1.1 expansion stage. In terms of hardware, the Playstation 4 is superior to its biggest competitor, the Xbox One, and has a slightly higher clock rate for the CPU cores, 18 instead of 14 compute units for the graphics, and the much faster GDDR5 memory. In return, it has to do without the integrated 32 MiB ESRAM, which Microsoft wants to score with. The PCGH print edition 02/2014 also offers a comprehensive comparison of the consoles (for the reorder service).