New Gadgets

Microsoft is in the process of testing its xCloud game streaming service, but that’s not the only way to get your Xbox games on more devices. The company has also launched a test of its new Xbox game streaming service. This streaming option has more hardware requirements, but it won’t require subscribing to a whole new service.

Microsoft’s xCloud relies on a server someplace online to render games and stream the video to your devices. The upshot there is you don’t need to have an Xbox running to play Xbox games. The new Xbox Console Streaming feature does require you to have an Xbox One, and that piece of hardware does all the rendering and streaming. If you already have a big game library, that could make your streaming experience much better.

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Cloud gaming services are all the rage these days. Microsoft and Google are both making major pushes into the area, joining services like Nvidia’s GeForce Now and PlayStation Now. The exact features of each service differ, however, and they aren’t fungible — the game libraries you can access and the requirements as far as local hardware are different in each case. Now there’s some evidence that Valve might be looking to get in on the action as well, with rumors of a Steam Cloud gaming service popping up in several places.

Steam already supports remote streaming if your hardware supports it, and there’s the mobile Steam Link app you can use for streaming to an iOS or Android device, but the company hasn’t taken the plunge into full-on cloud gaming just yet. In theory, the tremendous back-catalog of titles on Steam could allow for unique streaming experiences you can’t get anywhere else, though the requirements of some of those games (from eras when the mouse and keyboard were the assumed standard for PC gaming in all cases) might be troublesome. Then again, Steam has improved its own controller support significantly and would surely provide a compatibility layer for older games as well.

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Google began delivering the first Stadia Founder’s Edition kits last week, giving gamers access to the service for the first time. There have been some unfortunate hiccups in the launch including overheating Chromecasts and high latency. The latest Stadia shortcoming could make gameplay disappointing even when it’s working correctly. Google has confirmed Destiny 2 and Red Dead Redemption 2 don’t actually render at the promised 4K resolution.

One of the main selling points for cloud gaming is that you can play AAA games on almost any screen. All the hard work happens in the cloud, so any device that can decode a high-resolution video stream can be your gaming device. For example, Stadia lets you play titles like Mortal Kombat 11 and Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey on a smartphone that would never have any hope of rendering those graphics locally.

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Gigabyte has decided to swing for the fences where this whole eGPU thing is concerned. The company has announced a $1500 eGPU, the Gigabyte Aorus RTX 2080 Ti Gaming Box, with included water cooling. This isn’t a true water cooler, however — it’s a closed-loop liquid cooler, which limits how much improvement the system can offer. CLLCs are excellent for affordabilibility, but they don’t offer as much raw cooling capability as an open-loop cooler (open-loop coolers are, of course, more expensive and generally more difficult to work with, but they also offer better performance). It is not particularly surprising that manufacturers aren’t keen to be shipping open loop coolers.

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A good VR experience can make you feel like you could reach out and touch things in the virtual world. You can’t of course, but the Oculus Quest is getting you one step closer with full hand tracking technology. You can set down the controllers, and the headset will follow your hands, rendering them in the virtual world with the help of its cameras.

With the newest software update, you might be able to ditch the controllers completely… in certain situations. The headset has four built-in cameras, and it uses those to identify your hands, allowing the software to incorporate them into the virtual landscape. Theoretically, that will allow you to manipulate objects and play games sans controller. This feature doesn’t work with any games yet, though. You’ll only be able to go controller-free in the Oculus Quest’s root menu, but there is an SDK for developers to begin adding hand tracking.

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Earlier this week, I argued that the backward-compatibility features Microsoft is launching with the Xbox Series X will put consoles on an equal footing with PCs for the first time ever. My point was not to claim that PC and console gaming would now literally be identical, but that adding accessory and software backward compatibility represented the last major feature gap between the two platforms and that the Xbox Series X represented a convergence between PC and consoles.

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It’s CES 2020 and Intel is busy talking about its product lines for this year and beyond. We’ve got some updates for you on a variety of products. First up — Comet Lake-H, the high-end version of Comet Lake with support for CPUs drawing up to 45W.

According to John Burek at our sister site PCMag, Intel will offer a larger selection of 8C/16T CPUs with Comet Lake-H. Currently, Intel offers one CPU that hits a 5GHz boost clock with 8 CPU cores — the Core i9-9980HK. PCMag reports that the Core i7 H series will be capable of boosting to 5GHz, while the i9 variants will boost even higher. This is a bit of a surprise, given that no Intel desktop chip has pushed above 5GHz for boost clocks yet.

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Google’s Chrome OS started out as little more than a browser, but Google has slowly added more application support with Android and Linux modules. Chrome OS might be getting a lot more fun, too. According to a new report, Google is looking to make gaming on Chromebooks happen by adding support for Steam.
The report comes from Android Police, which recently talked with Kan Liu, Director of Product Management for Chrome OS. Liu was vague on some of the details — for example, he implied that Valve was involved in the development process but wouldn’t come out and say it. Although, that would make sense as Valve is experiencing more competition than ever on Windows with the launch of the Epic Games store. Being first on Chrome OS could give it access to many millions of devices. Liu was, however, confident Google could make this work considering the increasingly cross-platform nature of games and universal computing APIs like Vulkan.

Valve already has a Linux Steam client, and that’s probably Google’s starting point. Chrome OS has support for Linux via its “Crostini” module. That’s currently a beta feature that you need to enable in the settings, but it works surprisingly well. Steam has a selection of games that support Linux, or at least they should on x86-based systems. You might not get all the latest AAA games on Linux, but that’s not going to be a problem here. After all, we’re talking about Chromebooks.

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As we hurtle toward the next generation of game consoles, both Sony and Microsoft have started teasing the features they hope will encourage gamers to upgrade. In a recent podcast, Microsoft’s Larry Hryb talked about how the Xbox Series X could save you from losing game progress. The console can apparently save your game state, even through a reboot. Who needs save points?

On the Major Nelson podcast, Hryb explained his experience testing a game on the Xbox Series X. He had to reboot because of a system update. On current-gen consoles, that would mean either saving your game manually or finding a save point in games that don’t have manual saves. The alternative is losing some progress when the system reboots. However, Hryb says he was able to jump right back into his game where he left off because the Series X can save a game state across reboots.

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Modern system power management is anything but simple. Modern CPUs (or APUs in AMD’s parlance) have complex sensor networks and power management schemes that take temperature reads from multiple points inside the system, including its skin temperature. A recent investigation into Intel’s Linux P-state driver showed this — end-users were reporting better results if they used the “powersave” governor as opposed to the “performance” governor.

A series of patches created by Francisco Jerez, one of Intel’s open-source driver developers, is intended to help resolve the issue. Here’s how he frames the problem:

In IO-bound scenarios (by definition) the throughput of the system doesn’t improve with increasing CPU frequency beyond the threshold value at which the IO device becomes the bottleneck, however with the current governors (whether HWP is in use or not) the CPU frequency tends to oscillate with the load, often with an amplitude far into the turbo range, leading to severely reduced energy efficiency, which is particularly problematic when a limited TDP budget is shared among a number of cores running some multithreaded workload, or among a CPU core and an integrated GPU.

The goal here is not to waste CPU cycles on I/O-bound workloads where they are literally of no use, whether that’s in a multi-threaded scenario or a simultaneous CPU and GPU workload, like gaming. At the same time, however, Intel wants the system to maintain a certain minimum level of responsiveness. The solution, Jerez writes, is to limit the CPU to a “reasonably energy-efficient frequency able to at least achieve the required amount of work in a time window approximately equal to the ramp-up latency target.”
In other words, the CPU drops to a lower and more energy-efficient frequency without sacrificing Intel’s latency requirement. The software is still under active development. Currently, it may not work very effectively if used in heavy multi-tasking environments where multiple applications request very low ramp-up latency targets, because the lowest target is always used.

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