It's been a long time coming but OnLive is finally ready to try and silence its critics as the on-demand gaming service makes its official debut today. To celebrate the launch, the company announced a partnership with AT&T to offer U.S. customers a free first-year membership, with an optional second year at $4.95/mo. -- down from the regular price of $14.95. Those interested can sign up to the Founding Member Program until July 15; they'll pick people on a first-come first-serve basis.
This won't get you complete and total access to their whole library, though, but rather access to the community, free demos and other content. Full games will cost from $9.99 to $49.99, depending on the title, while for those who don't want to pay for something they don't 'really' own, three or five-day rentals for five dollars will be available as well.
If you haven't been following the news, the idea behind OnLive is that instead of running a video game locally, players connect via broadband to a gaming system that runs and stores their data and the entire game itself. The service hopes to mark a big shift in the way gaming works. Not only it promises a fluid and lag-free experience on Windows and Mac OS X systems with very low hardware requirements, it also gets rids of downloads, patches and physical discs.
The service is launching today with over 20 titles available, including Prince of Persia, Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell, and Mass Effect 2. A "MicroConsole" that can be attached directly to HDTVs will be arriving later this year.
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AMD releases ATI Catalyst 10.6 graphics drivers
AMD has posted a new set of Catalyst graphics drivers on its 'Game' website today, bringing the monthly release up to version 10.6. The new driver supports all cards in the Radeon HD 2000, HD 3000, HD 4000 and HD 5000 series for desktops and laptops as well as Radeon HD 3000 and HD 4000 IGPs. In addition to the bunch of performance improvements, Catalyst 10.6 also brings a couple of new video filtering options, and OpenGL 4.0 support on 5000-series Radeons.
Among the titles receiving a bump in performance is Company of Heroes, Batman: Arkham Asylum, Crysis Warhead, DiRT 2, World in Conflict, and a handful of other. Most of the improvements are reserved for Radeon HD 5800 or HD 5970 cards in either single or Crossfire mode, with quoted frame rate speedups of anywhere from 3% to 18%.
Meanwhile, the new filtering options include video de-blocking support, which reduces blocking artifacts seen in low bit-rate video during playback, and Mosquito noise reduction support to help prevent the shimmering noise often found around the edges of sharp outlines in highly compressed progressive video. Both these features are only available to owners of Radeon HD 5000-series cards. AMD also mentions support for Flash 10.1 GPU acceleration.
As usual, the new driver is available for Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7 in both 32-bit and 64-bit flavors.
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