When The Witness landed in January 2016, it intrigued players with its silent mystery, mentally demanding puzzles, and picturesque landscape. It showed just how beautiful a game could be with a bit of care and a gentle hand, even with technically simple textures and models. And as these 4K The Witness screenshots demonstrate, it looks even better when you expand the resolution.
It did not take a whole lot of computing power to actually play the game at 4K, but we went ahead and threw everything we had at it anyway. We took the screenshots on our high-end test rig, which is powered by an Intel Core i7-6950X with 16GB of RAM. We chose the Zotac GTX 1080 Ti AMP! Edition with 11GB of graphical memory for our GPU, plugged into an Acer 4K monitor. We also went ahead and turned all of the settings up, and even then, did not see any framerate drops.
One of the more striking elements of the island in The Witness is the juxtaposition between detailed and simple shapes. While trees, rocks, and buildings have a clean, rounded look, there are a number of statues around the island that are deeply detailed, and depict people in lively situations, as if frozen in the middle of a struggle. That stark contrast lends to the eerie nature of the island’s mysteries, even as the colorful atmosphere and booming ecosystem attempt to distract you.
We tried to avoid any spoilers or puzzle solutions in our screenshots, in case you have not gotten around to play The Witness yet. The creator, Jonathan Blow, who is also responsible for the classic platformer Braid, is said to be working on another project. We found out through a post on his personal Twitter account in late March.
https://twitter.com/Jonathan_Blow/status/846865385143992320
If that sounds like an appealing position, a great place to start would be examining both The Witness and Braid with fresh eyes. The 4K The Witness screenshots up above should give you a good, deep look at the game, with plenty of emphasis on detail, without having to spend a few hours struggling through the often-enigmatic puzzles.
For years, Call of Duty’s campaign mode has used big, scripted set pieces to tell the overarching story amid all the adrenaline-pumping action. The 2023 Modern Warfare 3 tried to shake up the established formula by introducing a handful of short open combat missions, and I genuinely liked the idea, but the game's overall negative reception seeped into how those missions were received.
I feared the next iteration might abandon the idea because of the backlash, but I am glad it didn't. MW4’s “Stranded” mission uses the same approach, but instead of fragmenting it across the campaign, it puts it all in a single large-scale open-world mission.
Acer’s Predator Atlas 8 finally has a US release date and price, several months after the company first showed off the handheld in May. The highlight is the Intel Arc G3 Extreme chip inside, which has been adopted by only a couple of other consoles besides the Atlas 8. This version will go on sale exclusively at Best Buy on November 1 for $1,299.99.
Acer originally said the Atlas 8 would arrive in North America in October, but left pricing open at the time. The launch came amid the ongoing DRAM crunch, which has made memory more expensive across the PC industry and complicated pricing for hardware makers.
Gaming laptops and I have a complicated relationship. One of my first gaming rigs was an Acer Predator that was already outdated when I bought it. I was a broke college kid, and that was the best I could afford. So trying out high-end gaming laptops is always fun. But ASUS' ROG Zephyrus G14 is a lot more than a laptop that can run AAA games. It is portable, so you're not lugging around a 2.5kg machine everywhere you go. It is built well, none of that plastic chassis, and can even function as a normal laptop outside of just gaming.