The latest news concerning the two most anticipated games of the summer, Doom 3 and Half-Life 2, has raised a few questions about the games and the graphics manufacturers backing them.

Doom 3 which has now acquired an August 3 release date, seems to be nVidia's secret weapon, as the company expects the game to run up to 50 per cent faster on its boards than on, rival ATIs R420 chips.

ATI on the other hand has relied and paid heavily in order to secure a voucher deal with Valve and has been hit hard by the continuous delays of H-L 2s launch. It also seems that ATI partners are now pressuring the company to do something. ATI must have been listening if we are to believe the latest stories which claim that Gabe Newell has admitted that H-L 2 will be sent to VU Games in August.

The fight between the two graphics companies has evolved from one of technological achievement to one of semantics but it now seems that both manufacturers have been caught-up in their own hype about the games they chose to promote and are now left at the mercy of the developers.
Both companies will claim that the need to achieve a faster release has to do with prestige but what both nVidia and ATI are forgetting is that both titles have been delayed to such an extent that any vestige of credibility has long ceased to exist.

Still many will see this race to ship, as an adequate reason to support their graphics card manufacturer of choice. True gamers however, will be equally eager to get their hands on both games.

Along with a new box image, GameStop.com has posted up that they have confirmed the release date of DOOM 3 to be August 3rd 2004. Other retailers across the country such as EB Games have also switched to that date as well. Keep an eye on other game retailers to see if they join in with that date, but then again, keep in mind that April 15th and June 15th came and went without a peep when the retailers had that pegged as a release date as well.

Posting in a Half-Life 2 forum, Valve's Gabe Newell has confirmed that the troubled Half-Life sequel will go gold in August, suggesting that an end of summer release may be in the works.

To the best of our admittedly weak planning abilities, we are looking at August, said Newell, adding that the game will also appear in a less violent version, specially created for the German market. The game will also be localised into English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Korean, Simplified and Traditional Chinese, Japanese, and Thai.

Since VU Games has not yet confirmed a release date for the game, it is possible to assume that the publisher may sit on the title for a late September release in order to avoid the summer holiday sales lull.

Mr. Newell also mentioned what the installed size of Half-Life 2 will be. The total size of the game, on disk, will be 2GB while installed it will take-up 3 GBs of hard-disk space, not including the extras such as CS:Source, HL:Source and DOD:Source. This suggests that a DVD version of the game will be the most widely available, with a CD version also very likely.

although look how many release dates have been set for a certain Mr. Nukem