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London, UK– March 19, 2007 – Today Ubisoft, one of the world’s largest video game publishers, soon and hopefully to be consumed by Electronic Arts, is pleased to announce that it has decided to devote additional time to increase sales and drive up revenue for the fiscal year, thus increasing its stock value for the impending buyout, by improving to acceptable levels, the stability and playability (and, thus, sales-ability and profitability) of the next installment in its award-winning squad-based military shooter, Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter™ for the PC. GR:AW2 will launch worldwide for the PC some time in June 2007, or possibly January 2008 if EA isn't inclined to ink the deal early in the next fiscal year. The additional time devoted to the development of this title will allow gamers to buy other games, such as Rainbow 6: Vegas, Silent Hunter: Wolves of the Pacific, or Rayman: Raging Rabbits. Meahwhile, the actual factual best episode ever of the award-winning Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon franchise will continue to break records and pull ever more PC gamers over to the XBox360. As far as EA knows, the delay of the release date will not impact Ubisoft’s revenue forecasts for the fiscal year, though it might boost Microsoft's.

It was on DVD at release in Orlando, Fl. I bought it.

You're right. While widescreen does help, there is still a sense of being zoomed a bit. As Peace said, it really shows up in stairs. Basically, it's as if your eyes are located a foot or two in front of your face.

The GR series doesn't need saving, Papa; it's the PC players that need saving. GR:AW and GR:AW2 are kicking ass, just not for us. GR:AW2 PC could outright fail to be released, and so long as the console side of GR:AW continues to kick ass, GR.net will be alive and well. If MS would officially support a keyboard and mouse, I would be tempted to the XBOX360, as well. As far as UBI not giving the PC players any marketing love, maybe they shouldn't. Maybe they shouldn't drive up the number of people who are waiting for a game that may get delayed yet again. We all saw people sick and tired of the disappointments with GR:AW before the demo was even released. I don't think UBI would want to repeat that.

I'm still not entirely sure what's being talked about. Are you simply describing the ability to lean to different degrees? Lean 15 degrees, 30 degrees, 45 degrees? Someone whip together a Flash animation.

I think AttackForceZ might be on the way. Looking forward to it.

They've been asked a million times already, not only have they not answered, they haven't (to my recollection) even responded to say they can't respond, which they have with other questions. Basically, they haven't acknowledged the question at all, which tells me that they can't, which tells me that it's pointless to ask.

Monster hunt. Sounds like a great time except for one thing -- I have no idea what a monster hunt is. Anyone care to enlighten me?

The beauty for me is that I downloaded the file this morning, installed it, and was promptly told by a beta server that my game files didn't match. Then, I joined another beta server, and it let me join, only to crash me to desktop. I uninstalled the whole game, erased every mention of ghost recon and ubisoft from my registry, reinstalled, and it behaved exactly the same way.

Back in the pre-release days, during a devchat, they asked us what we would like to see in the first expansion. That tells me, at least, that they were planning an expansion, so it's not a matter of whether or not they've made a decision to release one, it's a matter of whether or not they changed their minds and decided not to. As cheap as they are to produce, there's no way they would lose money on an expansion, so I can't see why they would decide against it.

Yeah, their numbers are supposed to be based on the highest playable settings, which inevitably is going to bring the framerates closer together. Maybe they're trying to differentiate themselves from other review sites, who knows? No, it doesn't. In the CRT test for GR:AW, the 7950GX2 averages 8 frames/second higher than the 1950XTX, and that's with two settings at higher levels. For Oblivion, the 7950GX2 has higher settings for grass distance, internal shadows, external shadows, grass shadows, and shadow filtering. The 1950XTX has 2x anti-aliasing. And the 7950GX2 is running at 9 frames more per second. I don't see that as the 1950XTX out-performing the 7950GX2. They have that quote that says: "Overall, we felt that the Radeon X1950XTX delivered the best gaming experience out of the cards tested in Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion when using a CRT." However, that's only because of the 2x anti-aliasing, which those reviewers apparently favor. They even use the phrase in the article "for people whose eyes are 'sensitive' to anti-aliasing." It's not a $600 part. I bought my Leadtek 7950GX2 within a week or two of release at $560. There were other models available at release for $540. You can get them now around $500 AFTER a small rebate.

My opinion is comparing the 1950XTX to the 7950GX2 is comparing apples to oranges. We can call the comparison apples vs. oranges if we like, but that's exactly the comparison that people are going to be making when they're shopping for a video card. People who don't have a serious brand loyalty and are buying in that price range will look at ATI's top dog and NVidia's top dog, and they will compare the two. Period. No, a flawed review was referenced. Those numbers are wrong. I own a 7950, and I get more than twice those average framerates at those settings.

But Driversheaven does test the single card config as well (i.e. not X1900XT Crossfire or 7900 GTX SLI)...see first chart...and the 7900 GTX win...??? Peace, I didn't even look at the numbers. Now that I do, the numbers for the 7950GX2 single card are WAY low, less than half of what I get. Honestly, I would guess that they don't know what they're doing.

I respectfully disagree, GreyHaired. In all my years of nerding it up at hardware sites, I've never seen anyone say that it was unfair to compare two competing companies top-of-the-line enthusiast parts because one had too severe a hardware advantage over the other. I've also never seen ATI wait 8 months (1900XTX was January) to release a new top-of-the-line card to compete with NVidia's second-best model. The 1950XTX and 7900GTX might be a closer race, but the ATI counterpart to the 7900GTX is the 1900XTX. That's the way it's been since March when NVidia released the 7900GTX. Then came the 7950GX2, and since early summer, ATI has touted their upcoming 1950XTX as their answer to the 7950GX2, and it does beat the 7950GX2 in some games and in some cases. It's a great card. However, this is what it is -- each company has a high-end enthusiast card. Nvidia's is the 7950GX2. ATI's is the 1950XTX. They were expected to be compared. They have been. Th33f is correct, and XBitlabs was not the only site to bone that up. GR:AW with Crossfire or SLI needs some playing around with to run correctly. The 7950GX2, however, worked right out of the box.

Okay, so people have been speculating for a while now about the performance of ATI's 1950XTX vs. the 7950GX2, with many of the experts estimating that ATI's single GPU solution would best NVidia's dual-GPU card. Well, those experts were wrong. The card launched today, and Anandtech has already released a comparison. The complete article can be found here: Anandtech.com -- ATI's New High End and Mid Range: Radeon X1950 XTX & X1900 XT Of course, the review included several other cards, which can make visually picking the two cards in question out of several tables a little annoying, so I decided to cannibalize them and make one image with only the 7950GX2 vs. the 1950XTX. There were two games I didn't include: Black & White 2 and Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory. I didn't exclude them for any other reason than it was a tedious job to begin with. Their numbers show the same thing as the ones in the image I made from Anandtech's images -- ATI loses every comparison in both games, with and without anti-aliasing, and at every resolution. The comparison used 7 high-end games, both with anti-aliasing and without, and at resolutions from 1280x1024 to 2048x1536. The ATI 1950XTX narrowly won 3 out of the 4 resolutions in Quake4 with anti-aliasing enabled. The NVidia 7950GX2 won the other 45 out of 48 total comparisons, sometimes with MUCH higher framerates. I highlighted the winner in green. Rumors of the 7950GX2's demise were greatly exaggerated.

Often enough for you to reduce my kill/death ratio. That said, what I wanted from GR:AW was a first-person shooter where I could take down people with one or two rounds, where I could win by being smarter than the next guy, not faster. That's what I got. I'm happy.

If it happened on the Beer Drinking Assassins or Shadow Company Elite servers, it's probably their custom maps, which you can download at their websites.

I hope they do. They were useful. Of course, if that happens, I might have to plug in a hand grenade chat taunt. Hey, Mister, have you seen my baseball?

Papa, those are open-air structures that you're in while playing GR:AW. Open a window of your house, stand next to it, and have someone run around in the back yard. You can hear them. I don't disagree with anything you said there, Rabbi. I wasn't saying it was all mature, and I wish those things didn't exist. My point was specific. I do see all of those things you just named. However, I do NOT see chat-spamming of owned, pwnt, elite, l33t, etc., which is what that guy said was "ALL" he saw. The people in this game who could say those things are the people who wouldn't say them to begin with, except maybe to each other on comms. BTW, come by the server more often, and bring your crew. Always good to see familiar faces, even when one of them belongs to Rob Zombie. p.s. pwnt

I'm going to have to call BS on this one. I play this game every day, and I never see that sort of chat spamming. I'm not saying that it never happens, because I'm not in every server, but your characterization of this sort of chat-spamming as something that happens all the time is utter nonsense. Nice job with the mature re-naming of Gamespy, and nice job unjustly smearing the multi-player experience for those who don't play it.

That is not a practical solution to the problem because there are going to be maps in the custom levels server that are NOT being replaced by the map pack. Taking a list of the maps and comparing them one by one to our custom levels list is also not practical, because it's the internal names that count, and people might see two maps with similar names and think they're the same when, in fact, on is Domination and one is TDM. You would think people would clearly note the game type for their maps, but I've already seen cases of that not happening. The best solution is for modders to change file names, as well as internal names, using naming conventions that note game type and revision, like Trainstation_TDM_v1 Trainstation_TDM_v12 Trainstation_TDM_v13 Trainstation_HH_v1 Trainstation_HH_v12 Trainstation_DOM_v1 Trainstation_DOM_v12 That way, in addition to having them not crash the game, we could easily spot the old ones to delete so we could keep our custom levels folder clean.

There are some zones that run from one end of the map to another, which is of little help when you're trying to eliminate a single person in a no-respawn deathmatch. Also, as people play TDM exclusivley, their memory of the DOM zones will fade because there are some zones where action seldom takes place. I will always know where D and E zones are in Warehouses, but I've already forgotten A zone. We need grids.

Zul, get on and play some more and you'll pick up your skills... Absolutely, Zulater, it was good seeing another GRnetter last night. Some of your boys are killers already.

ZJJ, if GRnet doesn't want to sanction him in any way, sobeit. I'm not even saying you should. I'm not saying that someone glitching and making it his/her mission to ruin the game for others on public server should earn them an automatic ban at GRnet. That's your call. However, don't make that call based on the idea that it might not be him. That is a static IP. It's located in Atlanta, Georgia. It's him. Your member using that IP is M9Whore. And M9Whore*AFZ*. And Tsohg. And SCE_GEN.TsohG. Also, no one starts a game knowing ahead of time what weapon is going to be his/her favorite, so M9Whore is not this person's primary name. I suspect that the name he's registered under with GRnet is.

You absolutely do not want to remove the human element from the equation. Otherwise, legit players would end up getting globally banned for bugs. My personal opinion on this is that there should be a global list available from which admins can pull if they so choose, either all of the list at once, or individual entries.