HA! I totally called this back in August!

I suspect they have a great deal of the digital market. I made a realization the other day that the vast majority of games I purchase are from 2 sources: Steam or Amazon. I haven't made a conscious effort to use those 2 exclusively, they just happen to be the most convenient and have very frequent sales.

I think the most startling thing for me is that 2 years ago, I didn't buy games from Amazon at all, but since then, they have managed to become my #2 go-to game shop, and I didn't even realize it.

It's also apparently not working. Over on the Answers HQ forum, there are more than a few people complaining about corrupt cities that can either be abandoned or rolled back, usually resulting in huge population and money loss. I can only imagine what kind of chaos this causes with the influence that cities are supposed to have over each other. I wasn't able to even get into the game in the 2 days since it launched so I requested, and received, a refund from Amazon. Last EA game I ever buy.

In the case of Skyrim, the game didn't work AT ALL with Crossfire on my system when it was first released. Had to disable Crossfire at first, then ATI released a profile that finally got it working, but it wasn't a performance boost, it was a bug fix.

I'm not saying Crossfire/SLI didn't give any performance boosts, what I'm saying is that for most models of graphics cards, it is a marketing gimmick to get you to pay twice for something that might average out to a 10% performance boost across all your games. In some cases, it was buggy and causes games to crash, in some other cases, the games didn't even support it.

Yes, at the bleeding edge, with super high resolution, you probably require SLI or Crossfire, but for those of us not in that 1%, who build our PC's within a budget, SLI and Crossfire are a waste of that budget

Bear in mind, this is just my experience. It's purely anecdotal, take it with a grain of salt. It's possible that newer cards may have gotten a lot more efficient at SLI/Crossfire, but given my experience last time with video cards, I can't justify paying for something twice when I can't see any real noticeable improvement.

Yeah, I don't get this either. How did they open source it, then sell it to LG who is now claiming complete ownership?

I discovered this about a year ago, when i wanted to add a 3rd monitor to my system, and discovered I couldn't do it in Crossfire mode with my dual 4850s, but COULD do it if i turned it off. Productivity being slightly more important to me than game performance, I turned it off and hooked up my 3rd monitor.

A few days later I decided to fire up Skyrim, and didn't notice any discernible drop in performance at all. My settings were all on medium, just because the cards were a few years old, but still, I expected to see *some* performance hit going from 2 GPUs to 1.

I have since upgraded to a 7950 that supports 3 monitors, but I'm never doing that SLI/Crossfire shit again.

Depending on the cost, this might make a nifty power supply for Raspberry Pi or Arduino based robots.

If this was the most recent beta over the weekend, it wasn't a *real* beta, it was a preview weekend to bump up pre-orders that just happened to be called a beta test. You could only play for an hour at a time, probably half the content wasn't there, and every time the game ended, Origin would open the SimCity pre-order page in the store and it would open the pre-order page in your browser as well. There was no *required* post-game reporting, feedback or bug reports.

Ah gotcha, thanks for the clarification.

Am I missing something? I don't see VM mentioned in the article at all, just cloud, which to me just means storage.

This is how I do my upgrades as well. My current machine started out with a Q6600, DDR3 ram and Crossfired Radeon HD 4850s. First upgrade I did was to swap the processor for a Q9650, and that gave me a mild performance gain, but tended to smooth things out quote a bit. My most recent upgrade was replacing the Radeon HD 4850s with a Radeon HD 7950. That got me HUGE performance gains and enabled a lot of video options that just weren't available on the 4850s. Next upgrade will be a new Mobo and i7 processor, probably around June or so.

I'll have to check when I get home, but I believe they removed the "no whipping" restrictions :)

Hey waitaminute! When did it STOP whipping/kicking the llama's ass? I still use winamp, quite simply, because I haven't found anything that works better

You have a toilet in the kitchen?

I find a couple of flaws in this whole thing:
Apparently, the cloud storage is so a user can take their mouse with them and use their profile from anywhere. The problem I have is that this particular scenario seems extremely rare, and I'll explain:

1. The general consensus seems to be the LAN party scenario, but every LAN party I have ever attended, I had to bring my own equipment, including my computer, which already has my mouse profiles on it, so no need for cloud storage, and in fact, local storage would be preferable in case the LAN party doesn't allow outside connections. Hell, the last LAN party I was at was probably 7 or 8 years ago. With high speed internet connections, are LAN parties even a thing anymore?

2. using the mouse in multiple locations (ie. work and home). In this situation I would just bring my profiles with me on a USB stick, or email them to myself. It's something I would only need to do once, and maybe once or twice later for adjustments or setting up profiles for different apps/games.

The only situation I can see where cloud storage would be really useful is a situation where you are using your mouse on a different computer every day. Even in that scenario, cloud storage would only be a useful secondary feature, if the mouse can't find profiles locally. Certainly not the primary storage medium.

This whole situation seems to be either that Razer wants the data for nefarious purposes (They pretty much claim the right to use anything their software can grab), or the marketing team was adamant about needing to add "new technology" and "cloud storage" was the buzzword around the office that day.

Their older devices actually had onboard storage. Not sure why they are moving away from that.