Stuff for you to do:

1. Watch the show, dummy! You can also grab it on iTunes and Zune. Leave constructive feedback at presspause@mevio.com.

2. Watch live and chat. The show tapes every Thursday at 3pm. We stream the taping of the show on justin.tv/presspause, and we interact with the chat room before and after the show. We ask you guys stuff, we answer your questions.

3. We’re in San Francisco, so if you’re a developer in the Bay Area, we’d love to shoot a quick and painless interview where you can talk about your games or company or whatever. Or we can talk about the meaning of life. Or what your favorite morning beverage is. We’re not picky. And we promise not to ask how many levels or how many weapons your game has. If you’re not a developer or publisher, use the power of the many social media thingies on the Inter-tubes to tell them you wanna see them go on Press Pause.

4. Follow us on Twitter. I don’t think there’s an official Facebook page yet.

Update: Just a clarification. This isn’t a new full-time job or anything like that. It’s a one afternoon a week gig. So you’ll still see my freelance work on other sites, and I’ll continue to update here.

I won’t bother to summarize all the individual features that were revealed today. Tech Report has a excellent article on it, so does AnandTech. I’m just going to editorialize a bit with some of my thoughts based on what we know (and don’t know) so far.

First, boards based on Fermi are going to cost a considerable bit more than the Radeon HD 5870 and 5850, which are ATI’s competing DX11 cards that just launched. The RV870 GPU powering ATI’s cards is 334 mm². It has a 256-bit memory interface. Nvidia didn’t talk about GPU size, but it did say that Fermi is 3.0 billion transistors – 40% bigger than RV870’s 2.15 billion. So, figure a chip somewhere around the 460-480 mm² mark. That’s huge.

The chip being 40% bigger doesn’t mean 40% more expensive to produce, though. Imagine chips A and B. Both are 40nm chips made at TSMC. Chip A can fit 100 chips on a wafer, and Chip B can fit 60 chips on a wafer, because it’s 40% bigger. But as chip size grows, it’s harder for the whole chip to come out without flaws, so the yields are worse. Chip A has a yield of 75% – three-fourths of all the chips on the wafer function properly within the intended specs. Chip B has a yield of 60%, because it’s so much larger. That means you’ll get 75 good chips on a wafer for Chip A, but 36 good chips for Chip B. That’s less than half.

In other words, depending on how the yield situation works out, Fermi could be twice as expensive to produce as RV870. Hell, it could be worse. We really have no way of knowing, except to say that a 40% larger chip is usually well more than 40% more expensive to make.

It’s not just the chip, either. A 384-bit memory interface means Fermi-based cards will likely have either 768 MB (not likely) or 1.5 GB of RAM, so that’s higher RAM costs. It also means more PCB layers on the board itself. So aside from higher chip costs, the board costs of Fermi-based products will be higher than Radeon 5800 products.

So if Fermi-based products are going to be considerably more expensive than Radeon 5800 products, what about performance? Well, all Nvidia has talked about so far are the chip design elements that impact GPU compute, rather than traditional graphics. There’s quite a lot there. Nvidia has clearly spent a fair chunk of the transistor budget doing things like dramatically improving double-precision floating point performance, increasing cache sizes, ECC memory support, and so on. These things typically do nothing at all for typical graphics performance (games and stuff). So the chip is 40% more transistors, but that won’t necessarily translate into 40% higher frame rates.

Nvidia seems to be gearing the world up for this. The mantra they keep chanting is that “graphics performance isn’t enough anymore.” Compute really matters a whole heckuva lot, they tell us. This sounds like PR code for “the card is going to be 50% more expensive than the competition and not 50% faster in games, so please place as much importance on GPU compute apps as possible so we look like a better value.”

You know how drill sergeants tell recruits to begin and end everything they say with “sir?” Sir, yes sir! Sir, I didn’t mean to shoot the sergeants toe off, sir! That’s what it’s like listening to Nvidia these days, only with “CUDA” instead of “Sir.” For over a year, Nvidia has told everyone who will listen that GPU compute is super duper important, and has very aggressively flogged PhysX and CUDA. And you know what? Consumers just don’t care all that much. Maybe one day, when there are robust standards and quite a few GPU-accelerated applications that normal people use all the time, the average consumer will want a graphics card to make its non-gaming apps go faster just as much as it wants it to make its games go faster and look better. But we’re not there yet, and we’re not going to be there in the next six months, as much as Nvidia would like us to be.

So Nvidia’s facing a tough sell in Q1 2010 (or maybe late 2009) when the first Fermi-based cards go on sale. They’ll almost certainly cost $399 or more, judging by what we know so far. ATI has a chip and board design that will let them push Radeon HD 5850 cards below $200 and 5870 cards below $250 within the next six months, if they want to. Is a modest increase in frame rate and much higher performance in GPU compute apps going to be worth such a broad difference in price? Will it be a moot point, because the cards will be out of the cost and power budget for most consumers (and OEMs)?

Is it just me, or is this world just a lot more interesting than the generic island of Crysis? Video embedded after the break. After you watch it, watch this video, and then this one, which are the artist’s previous demo videos and sort of explain how he did this.

So a friend recently turned me on to a pretty neat site called SwitchGames. It’s not officially launched yet – it’s in “beta 2.0″ – but I kicked the tires and it looks like it’s in pretty good shape and definitely usable.

The whole point of SwitchGames is to serve as a trading community, where you directly swap games with other gamers. You make a list of games you have available for trade, and a list of games you want, and the site recommends trades with its other members. You propose a trade, they accept, and you ship your games to each other. The interface is clean and it all seems to work rather well. You can trade systems and accessories and stuff, too.

It’s free, but not really. Signing up is free, and trades are free (except for your shipping costs, duh). But you get these “badges” for doing things like getting positive reviews and completing a certain number of trades and so on. They’re mostly superfluous, but the “Verified Membership Badge” is important. It means you have paid $1.95 to verify your shipping and billing addresses. This helps assure users that you’re not just on there to propose a bunch of fake trades and screw people over. I don’t expect a lot of people are going to want to trade with people who don’t have that badge. Still, two bucks to verify yourself and then just the cost of shipping to trade is a much better deal than you’ll get from GameStop.

The site even does stuff like print shipping labels for you. Of course, even though almost everything is “free,” there are a few upsells. There’s the aforementioned Verified Membership Badge, and they sell a “SafeTrade” for $5.95 where they guarantee your trade and provide first-class USPS shipping. There’s a YouTube walkthrough of the site/service here.

I’m not here endorsing the service, to be clear. I haven’t completed a trade yet, for starters. But I did sign up, get the Verified Membership Badge, and kick the tires a bit. I thought it looked pretty interesting, and given the amount of GameStop griping I hear from my circle of friends, I thought you all might want to check it out.

Giveaway is all done – thanks to everyone who played! See Updates below.

By some weird quirk of fate, I find myself in possession of not one, but two sealed boxed copies of the truly excellent Batman: Arkham Asylum for PC. This is the best game of the year so far. No joke. Just check out that Metacritic score! I’ve already played through it entirely on the Xbox 360, which is pretty much the same, except the PC version looks sharper at higher resolution and if you have an Nvidia graphics card, it has extra PhysX effects.

Since I have two of these, I”m giving one away! Here are the rules:

1. Go on Twitter and tweet the following:

@jasoncross00 is giving away a copy of Batman: Arkham Asylum for PC. Just retweet this! Go to www.jasoncross.org for details.

2. Sit back and wait for me to pick you as the lucky winner! I’ll pick the winner in a couple days. I’d send a direct message through twitter to the person who wins, asking them to contact me with their address so I can ship it off.

One final stipulation here: This isn’t any kind of official sponsored contest thing, I don’t have a lawyer or anything, it’s just something fun I’m doing. And I’m not made of money. So the winner will have to be from the U.S. Shipping it outside the U.S. starts to cost more than it’s really worth, I’m afraid. Even if you’re not from the U.S., feel free to do the twitter thing!

Update:

After giving more than an hour’s warning, I just went to random.org and chose a winner. Tried to contact them via direct message on twitter, but they don’t follow me. So I sent a follow request and we’ll see how that goes.

So for now, the contest is over. If I can’t get in touch with the winner or if they for some reason can’t be a winner (if they’re in the UK or something) then I’ll pick another one. Either way, you all can stop tweeting now. I’ll announce the winner on twitter and update here after they get in touch with shipping info.

Update 2:

The new winner is MichaelBills, an artist. Check out his site michaelbills.com for some of his nifty concept art and stuff. Big thanks to everyone who participated in my shameless and cheap ploy to increase my totally anemic web traffic!

So today is the official release of Turbine’s free to play (but supported with micro-transactions) massively multiplayer Dungeons and Dragons Online. I guess technically that’s “Dungeons & Dragons Online: Eberron Unlimited.” I really don’t know if it’s the bees knees or not, but for the sum total price of $0.00 I’ll give it a shot and report back later.

What I do know is that when you go to the site you’re greeted with a very Evony-like marketing message (accompanying this post). Some demonic succubus or something with barely-covered knockers and some sort of demon-thong. All we need is a “Play now, My Lord” and we’re done.

Really, Turbine/Hasbro/Wizards of the Coast? With the absolutely enormous amount of amazingly good Dungeons & Dragons artwork at your disposal, this is what you go for? Ridiculous.

Anyway, I’m curious to see how this experiment in tiered, pay-for-content-but-not-playtime exercise plays out. Right now I’m downloading the client at a fantastic pace, and I’ll certainly roll up a few characters and give the free play a shake. I might even buy a thing or two. If you’re playing, drop a note in the comments and let me know what you think.

Anyway, I’m going to try embedding the episode after the break here. I have no idea how I did – I can’t stand watching myself on video, so I try not to do it.

Evony apparently directly steals graphics from Age of Empires II: Age of Kings. You can find some damning evidence here.

I don’t really have a whole lot to ad to the discussion at this point except, you know, Age of Empires games are owned and published by Microsoft. I’m sure their lawyers will be cool with it. Microsoft’s lawyers are famous for letting stuff like that slide.

Oh sure, I take breaks. I quit for months at a time, play other stuff. Even now, I don’t play it obsessively. It’s one of the games I play, but I don’t play it more than all the other games. I have time for gaming, and I play WoW or I play other stuff. But when the expansions roll around, I just play the hell out of it. WoW effectively kills all other games for me for a month or two after a new expansion hits.

For a long time now, I’ve been saying that I hope the next expansion doesn’t go adding a new continent to the world. Give me a new reason to play through the existing stuff with a new character. Revamp the whole existing world, with the better graphics of the latest expansion, the new technology like vehicles and “phasing”, the better and more cohesive storytelling quest threads. Basically, bring the five-year-old stuff up to the level of the latest stuff.

If this post at MMO-Champion is to be believed (and they’re typically very reliable), Blizzard is giving me exactly what I wanted. I mean, the list of stuff they’re talking about is as if the company were directly reading my mind. Hopefully we’ll hear during Blizzcon. Please don’t disappoint me, guys!

I mean, I know which console I think has the best downloadable games. I mean, I love Fat Princess and all, but I generally find a whole lot more games I like on XBLA. That’s personal preference. What can we learn about the quality of the games on these services, statistically? So I headed on over to Metacritic (a site that averages review scores for movies, TV, DVDs, and Games, in case you’re unaware) and found the top 20 games for XBLA, PSN, and WiiWare. Here’s the raw data, with analysis at the end.

Average score of top 10 games:
XBLA:     88.9
PSN:       86.6
WiiWare: 84.4

Average score of top 20 games:
XBLA:     86.7
PSN:       84.2
WiiWare: 81.9

Number of games with a score 85 or higher:
XBLA:     14
PSN:       9
WiiWare: 4

Some analysis on the next page…