Well, Need for Speed: Shift is the 13th installment of the long-running racing video game franchise Need for Speed, published by Electronic Arts (EA). You would think that after this many game titles that patches would come rather quickly, but here it is nearly two months later and the game title is just now getting ready to receive a patch that will improve performance on AMD graphics cards according to the EA forums.

So fail EA. Were have we seen that happen before?

* fixed potential corruption of character statistics * fixed portrait appearance sliders when importing a character from the downloadable Character Creator
* fixed import for preset face settings from the downloadable Character Creator
* made Easy difficulty easier
* slightly increased attack, defense, and damage scores for all party members at Normal difficulty
* fixed video issues when running on a very wide screen display, including ATI Eyefinity displays

It seems that AMD’s list has a time-sensitive release date mishap in regards to the upcoming S.T.A.L.K.E.R. title, which has recently been delayed until Q1 2010. On another note, we can expect to see the latest Alien vs. Predator glimmer in DirectX 11 glory in a few months this coming February. Around the same timeframe, Lord of the Rings Online and Dungeons and Dragons Online: Eberron Unlimited will receive patch updates to support the new graphics rendering API, but we wouldn't count on a significant quality boosts. Finally, we can expect China’s popular MMORPG-market title Genghis Khan to receive a graphics API update as well.

We don’t expect that the few games that will come out in the first half of 2010 will make a big difference in both visual quality and performance, as most of the games in 2009 are programmed for consoles first, and then ported to PC. The basic game, let's take Dirt 2 as an example, is finished for consoles as „DirectX 9“ as this is the best that R500 from ATI in the Xbox 360 or RSX from Nvidia in Playstation 3 can cope with.

Each month, Steam collects data about what kinds of computer hardware our customers are using. The survey is incredibly helpful for us as game developers in that it ensures that we're making good decisions about what kinds of technology investments to make. Making these survey results public also allows people to compare their own current hardware setup to that of the community as a whole.