Julie Strain goes digital, Windows 8 gets rid of Metro and the R600 gets 1 GiByte RAM (PCGH-Retro, August 2)

…2000: On August 2nd, 2000, Ritual Entertainment unleashed the 3D action game Heavy Metal FAKK² on mankind. The main actress of the Quake 3 engine title is a digital version of B-Movie-Star Julie Strain with whom she also shares first name and voice. The colorful graphics were very attractive for the time, and the ability to have two weapons active at the same time was unusual, allowing you to combine their areas of effect and options.

…2007: The first test of the Radeon HD 2900 with one gigabyte of video memory appears on PCGH.de. We summarized the performance as follows:

In our benchmarks, the HD2900 XT can only set itself apart from the 512 MiB version with GDDR3 RAM in inhuman resolutions of 2,560×1,600 with at least 4x FSAA, despite the 21 percent higher memory clock. Differences can be seen particularly in the minimum fps of our two benchmark games, Call of Duty 2 and Oblivion (including HDR rendering).

…2012: Microsoft is really into Metro, the angular, full-color user interface that conceals loading times due to cumbersome animations, which seems to make sense on smart phones and flat Tatsch PCs. Also for the upcoming desktop operating system Windows 8. But the Redmond-based company is pretty much alone with that, and so you decide aloud media reports from this August 2 to remove Metro from Windows 8. If you are now wondering that everything turned out to be much more angular than expected: Microsoft issued an internal memo, according to which employees should please stop calling the user interface Metro – consultations with a large European partner would have a possible one here problems arise – but should rather speak of the Windows 8 GUI or later Modern GUI. However, that hasn’t changed anything about what distinguishes Metro (or, depending on your taste, doesn’t either).