Reserve Battlefield Bad Company 2 and receive access to the PC multiplayer beta. Beta begins January 28th, 2010 and ends February 25, 2010. Available for online customers only while supplies last. Not available for in-store or in-store pickup orders.

Online Customers: A beta activation code and download instructions will be emailed beginning January 26th, 2010.

• Adds support for CUDA 2.2 for improved performance in GPU Computing applications
• Expands GPU hardware acceleration for the NVIDIA Video Encoding library to GPUs with less than 32 cores. Applications using this library include CyberLink PowerDirector 7, Nero Move it 1.5, Loilo SuperLoiloScope MARS, and CyberLink MediaShow Espresso
• Accelerates performance in several 3D applications and, compared to Release 182 drivers, delivers:o Up to 25% performance increase in The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena
  o Up to 22% performance increase in Crysis: Warhead with antialiasing enabled
  o Up to 11% performance increase in Fallout 3 with antialiasing enabled
  o Up to 14% performance increase in Far Cry 2
  o Up to 30% performance increase in Half-Life 2 engine games with 3-way and 4-way SLI
  o Up to 45% performance increase in Mirror's Edge with antialiasing enabled
  
• Automatically installs the new PhysX System Software version 9.09.0408
• Supports GeForce Plus Power Pack #3
• Numerous bug fixes. Refer to the release documentation notes for Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7

• Crysis DX10 gains up to 20%
• Crysis Warhead DX10 gains up to 20%
• World in Conflict gains up to 5%

• Recommended for the best experience in F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin.
• Boosts performance in numerous 3D applications. The following are some examples of improvements measured with Release 182.06 WHQL drivers vs. Release 181.22 WHQL drivers (results will vary depending on your GPU, system configuration, and game settings):
• Up to 8% performance increase in Fallout 3 at high resolution and AA.
• Up to 10% performance increase in F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin.
• Up to 9% performance increase in Half-Life 2 at high resolution with AA.
• Up to 11% performance increase in Left 4 Dead at high resolution with AA.
• Up to 10% performance increase in Race Driver: GRID at high resolution and AA.
• Includes full support for OpenGL 3.0 on GeForce 8-series, 9-series, and 200-series GPUs.
• Automatically installs the new PhysX System Software version 9.09.0203.
• Additional information on specific bug fixes can be found in the release documentation notes.

A new dev blog has been posted today over on the official Battlefield Heroes website. Here's what it had to say:

James Salt here again, Senior Producer on Heroes. I thought I could use this development blog to show you a little about how we make our maps, or levels if you prefer to call them that. I’ll start with how we begin the process, through to playtesting and then describe some of the work the art team does to make the new map come to life.

Ok, so, we want to make a new map for Heroes. Where do we start? Firstly we decide if we want the map to be focused around vehicles, just soldiers, or a blend of the two. Vehicle focused maps tend to be quite a lot larger than the ones focused around soldiers. This is to give the vehicles space to let their various gameplay abilities shine. For instance, a small soldier focused map with Planes on wouldn’t be much fun, as the pilot would be constantly turning to stay within the map boundaries. So maps with Planes on tend to be the largest ones. In the screen shots and videos we have released you can see an example of both of these. Seaside Skirmish is focused around being a playground for all our current vehicles; Jeeps, Tanks and Planes. Victory Village is focused on the soldier versus soldier fight.

All the maps in Battlefield Heroes are designed for 16 players. We chose this number for quite a few reasons, although the main one is to allow people with older computers to play. If we were to create a 64 player map, we would need a larger landscape and more vehicles for those players to use. This would increase the system specifications needed to play quite significantly.

There's plenty more to read and see from this blog so visit here to check it all out.

 

Having staff to cover any major problems after release is always a key part when we release updates so releasing so close to Christmas would have been a risk we probably wouldn't want to have taken.

As for news of when it will release I'll have more information on that in the next week or so as I have to do some investigations on some things as everyone gets back from Christmas vacation.

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We have one thing left to do on the update and thats to compile and build the installer for the update. So now we are very close to having something. Once we make the installer we'll do some internal testing then open it up to you all.

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Highway Tampa will be compulsary from 1.50 onwards (as it was optional with 1.41). We are looking to make a full and incremental version of the update. The incremental with be a couple of hundred Mb while the full would be well over 500Mb.

A Steam client update is now available. To apply the update, click the File menu inside of Steam and then select "Check for Steam Client Updates...". The specific changes include:

Steam Client

• Fixed not correctly pausing any current downloads when launching a game
  
• Improved cache mounting checks. This should decrease the startup time when launching Garry's Mod
  
• Fixed startup to only request info about apps once
  
• Fixed rare cache corruption caused by defragging
  
• Fixed vgui crash when hitting pageup/pagedown in a sectioned list-panel
  
• Fixed rare crash when downloading
  
• Fixed -voicerelay steam command line to actually force use of the relay
  

Updates to Team Fortress 2 have been released. The updates will be applied automatically when your Steam client is restarted. The specific changes include:

Team Fortress 2

• Fixed team switches on Attack/Defense maps spamming the console
  
• Fixed the Kritzkrieg not working on servers with crits turned off
  
• Fixed some clipped localized strings in various in-game dialogs
  
• Fixed several cases where files were synchronously loaded while the game was running
  
• Fixed a shutdown crash in the material system
  
• Cached rendering of item model panels to improve performance, in particular while weapon selection was visible
  
• Added a gear symbol behind the health bar for Engineer buildings, in both target IDs and freeze panels
  
• Players killing themselves will now give a kill credit to the last enemy who damaged them
  
• Fixed grenades, rockets, and flamethrower being able to fire through grates at round starts
  
• Fixed players being killed and creating ragdolls during team switches
  
• Fixed various exploits and performance problems in CP_Badlands, CP_Well, and CP_Fastlane
  
• Removed health bonus from the Backburner