Game Tech News

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The GTX 1070 isn’t at the top of Nvidia’s product stack. That said, it’s probably the most interesting card available for gamers who want high-end performance, but can’t afford to drop ridiculous amounts of money on an ultra-high-end GPU. Gigabyte was kind enough to send over its G1 Gaming GTX 1070, and we’ve put the card through its paces.

We’ve already talked about the GTX 1070’s architecture, but since this is our first Pascal review, let’s take a moment to review the core. The GTX 1070 has 1,920 CUDA cores, 120 texture mapping units, and 64 ROPS (this is often written as a 1920:120:64 configuration). It uses 8GB of conventional GDDR5 clocked at 8Gbps for 256GB/s of memory bandwidth. It doesn’t pack quite the oomph of the GTX 1080 — it’s functionally limited to setting up 48 pixels per clock, for one thing, even if it technically has all 64 ROPS.

General benchmarks have already shown the GTX 1070 to be a tough customer, capable of besting Nvidia’s previous GTX Titan X GPU. So what does Gigabyte bring to the table with its G1 Gaming GPU? As it turns out, a fair bit.

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Gigabyte’s G1 doesn’t use Nvidia’s reference-style blower. Instead, it offers three separate fans in an open-aired cooler. Whether you prefer a blower or an open-air cooler is partly a matter of taste and partly a matter of airflow. Because a blower exhausts hot air directly from the second PCI Express slot, they’re typically considered a better solution for low-airflow cases. If your case doesn’t run hot, there shouldn’t be much of a performance difference between the two.

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Nvidia launched its new mobile Pascal hardware today — and with a twist. Several months ago, we covered rumors that the company would use its standard desktop hardware in laptops rather than creating an entirely separate mobile product line. Turns out, that’s exactly what the company did.

The new GTX 1080, 1070, and 1060 for laptops are almost identically specced to their desktop counterparts. The GTX 1080 is identical, with 2560 cores in both form factors, while the GTX 1070 actually has slightly more cores than its desktop counterpart (2048 in mobile, 1920 on desktop). The 1060 is 1280 cores in both cases. Core clocks have been trimmed slightly, but RAM loadouts are the same — 8GB of GDDR5X on the 1080, 8GB of GDDR5 on the 1070, and 6GB of GDDR5 on the 1060.

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As the PlayStation 4’s third anniversary nears, the folks at Sony are hard at work developing a major new firmware release focused on cleaning up the user interface. Codenamed “Shingen,” this 4.0 update will begin closed beta testing in the near future. While we won’t get to see every nook and cranny just yet, the PlayStation team has given us a glimpse at the changes we can expect later this year.
Over at the PlayStation Blog, Sony’s John Koller outlined a handful of Shingen’s improvements. First off, he explains that the system’s main interface is getting a facelift. We’ll see new backgrounds, updated icons, and redesigned notifications. This isn’t the complete overhaul many of us have been hoping for, but we won’t turn our noses up at this so-called “fresh coat of paint.”

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Next, Sony plans on revising the Quick Menu — the simplified interface that comes up when you press and hold the PS button. The Quick Menu will no longer completely obscure gameplay, and we’ll have easy access to our party, friends, groups, and communities. Even better, the menu is customizable, so you’ll only have to see the options that matter most to you.


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Sony’s PlayStation 4 refresh is scheduled to debut on September 7, but fresh rumors suggest the company may debut more than one new product. A UK auction site has published photos of a “Slim” variant of the standard PlayStation 4, with a smaller footprint, simpler design, and lower price tag.
Sony and Microsoft both offered multiple SKUs last generation, but neither company has indicated whether they would continue to manufacture their older, non-refreshed hardware once newer SKUs were available. This PS4 Slim will supposedly launch at a lower price than the PS4’s current list price of $350. While the new unit was spotted on a UK auction site, Eurogamer visited the individual and filmed the console booting into the PlayStation OS.

Sony trimmed the PS3’s price throughout its life by also trimming features and reducing functionality and it appears to have done so with the PS4 as well. The dedicated optical port is missing, and it’s not clear if the hard drive is user-replaceable on this model. Of course, Sony may have moved those features to the new PlayStation 4 Neo rather than killing them altogether — the company will want to retain some premium features to encourage current PS4 owners to upgrade.


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When AMD announced its RX 480, it made it clear the new Polaris family would target the mainstream market rather than the high end. Nvidia launched the GTX 1060 in response, and the 1060 generally outpaces the RX 480, albeit at a higher price point. Now, Nvidia has launched a new GTX 1060 at $200 to compete against AMD’s lower-end 4GB RX 480 — but despite calling it a 1060, there are some important differences.

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While the massive galaxy of No Man’s Sky is unquestionably impressive, a number of technical limitations, public gaffes, and design decisions have caused some disappointment and anger to bubble up online. We now know exactly what the game is capable of, but is it worth jumping in on your platform of choice, or is a wait-and-see approach still your best bet?

Back on launch day, most reviewers hadn’t had enough time with the game to weigh in just yet, though it did become clear how well the game was performing on the PS4 (click the prior link for details). Since then, dozens of reviews have poured in. Our sister site IGN gave the PS4 version a score of 6/10, another sister site PCMag did like it and gave it 4 stars and Editors’ Choice, and the 78 reviews on Metacritic average out to 71/100 for that platform. Those aren’t bad*scores, but they’re not quite what any developer wants to see.

The PC version launched a few days after the PS4 release, and it currently has a 64/100 on Metacritic based on just 5 reviews. Many outlets didn’t see fit to put it through its paces for a formal review, but if you take a look at the Steam page for No Man’s Sky, you’ll quickly see why it causes such strong reactions. Some are simply upset with technical or design issues, but many of the harshest critics feel burned by perceived inconsistencies in the consumer-facing messaging from Hello Games. Even those of us who like it seem to have some reservations — it’s complicated.

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When Pokémon Go launched, it exploded into a worldwide phenomenon in short order. Massive downloads, huge amounts of user engagement, parties — for a brief period of time, it looked as if the new game might single-handedly revolutionize mobile gaming. The bloom, however, seems to fading off this particular rose in short order.

A new report from Bloomberg highlights the steep decline in Pokémon Go’s daily users and overall user engagement. While the app peaked at 45 million daily users, it’s since declined to just 35 million — and while that still qualifies it as a smash hit, it’s a worrisome drop for a game to shed 22% of its user base in just one month.

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“Given the rapid rise in usage of the Pokémon Go app since the launch in July, investors have been concerned that this new user experience has been detracting from time spent on other mobile focused apps,” senior Analyst Victor Anthony wrote for Axiom Capital Management. “The declining trends should assuage investor concerns about the impact of Pokémon Go on time spent on the above named companies.” (Said named companies included Facebook, Instagram, Tinder, Twitter, and Snapchat.)

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True advances in technology are rare. The expense and difficulty of launching brand-new initiatives means that companies tend to prefer iterative improvements. Every now and then, however, we get the best of both worlds — an iterative improvement that could deliver enormous gains to a wide slice of the consumer market. At Hot Chips, Samsung unveiled a pair of initiatives that could revolutionize computer memory by pushing High Bandwidth Memory further on the one hand, while cutting costs and introducing the technology to all-new markets on the other.

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The Xbox One doesn’t have many features that the PlayStation 4 lacks, but one significant exception is the ability to stream games from the Xbox One to the PC. Microsoft has made cross play a significant component of its branding initiative and it’s pushed for titles to be both Windows 10 and Xbox One compatible, often with mixed results. Sony doesn’t have the leverage to offer an analogous service, but the company does have its own game streaming business — and it’s bringing that service to the PC market.


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Virtual reality has the potential to reshape the entire gaming industry, but its early days for the technology. A recent survey by the UBM Game Network, which runs the Virtual Reality Developer’s Conference, GDC, and Gamasutra.com polled VR developers on their preferred platforms, game development plans, and long-term confidence in the medium.

The first surprise was that game developers prefer the HTC Vive over the Oculus Rift, though the gap between the two is fairly small, at 5.4 percentage points. This question allowed for more than one answer, which is why the percentages add up to well over 100%.

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There are a few things to keep in mind when evaluating this data. First, the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive are Windows-specific, while Google Cardboard and GearVR are both Android-only. There are third-party utilities and some workarounds to get some Windows games working in VR on Samsung’s headset, but nothing officially supported by Samsung itself. PlayStation VR is a minority interest, at least among the developers Gamasutra surveyed. There are 19 games currently listed on Sony’s PlayStation VR site, but only seven of them are launch titles for the platform’s debut. We may see increased developer interest if the PSVR sells well.

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Laptops have always traded performance for portability, particularly when it comes to GPUs — and Apple users have it worse than most. Apple laptops are generally quite competitive with their PC counterparts at equivalent prices. But PC users always have the option to buy a boutique system with a mobile GPU, while Apple customers are limited to either a $1,999 system with Intel’s Iris Pro and 128MB EDRAM cache or a $2,499 system with an AMD R9 M370X. Neither option is appealing at their respective price points if you care about GPU performance.

Now, a new Kickstarter project aims to bring additional flexibility to Macs via an external GPU chassis. We’ve seen this type of solution pop up before, both as a DIY solution and as a formal product from companies like Alienware and Razer. The team behind the Wolfe and its bigger brother, the Wolfe Pro, want to sell users either a GTX 950 or GTX 970 in an external enclosure and with all of the required engineering and assembly done for you (unless you buy the DIY kit). Both the Wolfe and Wolfe Pro come with a 220W PSU, three DisplayPort outputs, and one HDMI output.

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Over the past 12 years the Steam gaming service has transformed from a digital distribution hub primarily used by Valve’s own games into a colossus that stands astride the entire PC gaming industry. While competitor services like GOG and publisher-specific services like uPlay and Origin exist, Steam is still the 800-lb gorilla in the room. Now, Facebook has announced that it intends to challenge Valve’s dominance of the PC gaming industry — as well as taking on iOS and Android at the same time.

Facebook has announced a significant partnership with Unity Technologies, the company behind the Unity engine. The company’s goal is to create a new gaming platform explicitly tied to Facebook that would run across Android, iOS, Mac, and Windows PCs. This is an interesting concept in and of itself, since gaming is almost always sandboxed by operating system. Facebook claims Unity will help develop new game developer tools, services, and integrate support for the Facebook platform directly into the Unity engine itself.

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Slide from Business Insider

When Facebook started becoming popular, it built much of that early popularity on hit games like Farmville and Mafia Wars. Social gaming hasn’t been as critical to FB’s growth and revenue as it used to be, but as the above slide from TechCrunch makes clear, the company still pays huge amounts of money to developers and it claims 650 million gamers among its user base.

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Update: Steam has published notice that it has not formally changed its refund policies and will examine requests on a case-by-case basis. Amazon and Sony have not responded to requests for comment.

Even in the run-up to No Man’s Sky’s debut, it was clear that no single game could possibly fulfill the sky-high expectations of its player base. Since the game launched, a number of websites have collected numerous examples of behaviors that were originally promised and never implemented. The animals on the various planets you explore never demonstrate the interesting behaviors they exhibited in launch trailers, there’s no variation between factions, the combat model is painfully simplistic, there’s no stealth capabilities for your own ship, no variations in ship types, no atmospheric modeling, no ability to fly your ship below a predefined height, no planetary physics, and minimal variation in functional ship types.

Space stations were supposed to be destroyable, they aren’t. The freighters you engage with were supposed to move, they don’t. Planets and moons do not orbit on their axis or orbit a sun. The trading and resource gathering components of the game were supposed to be robust and offer enough variety to allow players to focus on them.

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It’s been 16 years since the original Deus Ex hit store shelves, but the core concept of a cyberpunk RPG that revolves around player choice is still undeniably strong. Sneaking, shooting, and smooth-talking your way out of a dangerous situation still feels great when you pull it off the first time, but the lengthy load times add a heavy penalty for experimentation in Eidos Montreal’s latest release.
Deus Ex: Mankind Divided takes place two years after Deus Ex: Human Revolution (2011), and Adam Jensen returns as the game’s protagonist. Set mostly in the Czech Republic, the player is tasked with tracking down the Illuminati, and thwarting terrorism that is driving a wedge between traditional and augmented humans.

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Nvidia’s recent Pascal refreshes have focused mainly on the high end of the market, though that’s changed in the past month with the GTX 1060 hitting the $200 price point. Now, specs of the upcoming GP107 / GTX 1050 have supposedly surfaced. While all such data must be taken with a grain of salt, the specs make provisional sense.

According to BenchLife, the upcoming part will be a 768:64:32 core (that’s cores, texture units, and ROPS). That’s still a significant step down from the GTX 1060, which offers a base configuration of 1280:80:48 at 6GB and 1152:72:48 at 3GB. The GPU reportedly has a 128-bit memory path for 112GB/s of memory bandwidth altogether.

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The GTX 1050 is a very different card than the RX 470 it would presumably compete against. AMD’s 4th-generation GCN is a much wider beast, with a 2048:128:32 configuration. Historically, the GTX 1060 – 1080 have all wielded a significant clock speed difference over GCN, but that may not be the case here — the maximum boost clock for the GTX 1050 is supposedly 1380MHz, and while Pascal GPUs with Nvidia Boost 3.0 tend to hit much higher clocks, we doubt the GPU is designed to leap to 1900MHz+ from a 1380MHz maximum boost.

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Updated 3:46p ET: Well, that was a weirdly short show. The PS4 Pro will launch on November 10th at $399. PS4 Slim is $299. Hardly any love for PSVR. Kind of a crazy event.
Updated 3:12p ET: PS4 Pro is half-step that was codenamed “Neo.” 4K and HDR support.
Updated 3:06p ET: The event has begun. PS4 Slim right out of the gate.
We’re only two and a half months away from Black Friday, and Sony is gearing up for the holiday season in a major way. At today’s PlayStation meeting, Sony is likely to show off three upcoming products: The slim redesign of the PlayStation 4, the more powerful PlayStation 4K (AKA PlayStation Neo), and the PlayStation VR headset. The event starts at 3PM ET (12pm PT), so join us here as we liveblog the entire announcement.

Liveblog

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3:45p ET: Well… That’s a wrap for the announcement. Barely any PSVR talk. That price is great, but will it actually deliver smooth gameplay at 2160p? We’ll find out soon.

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3:44p ET: PS4 Pro coming November 10th. $399. Damn!
3:42p ET: Hmm… no talk about UHD Blu-ray, but… it’s Sony. That has to be in it, right?
3:41p ET: Wow! All PS4s can use HDR after a firmware update. That’s awesome. Now is the time to buy a new TV!
3:40p ET: Over 600 hours of 4K footage on Netflix. New Netflix app for PS4 Pro. YouTube is making a new app as well.
3:37p ET: BioWare exec confirmed FIFA and Battlefield 1 will support PS4 Pro. Now showing Mass Effect Andromeda footage. Exciting! But that won’t be out until 2017.

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3:33p ET: Activision rep says Infinite Warfare and Modern Warfare Remastered will support PS4 Pro features at launch. Black Ops III is getting a title update to support the new specs as well. Sweet.
3:31p ET: All games will play on both models, but Sony is having devs take advantage of the new hardware. Not surprising. We heard this before.
3:28p ET: Cerny is calling patches for existing PS4 games “Forward compatibility.” Some older games can be patched to take advantage of the better specs.

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3:26p ET: PS4 Pro seems like a solid purchase even if you don’t have an UHDTV.
3:24p ET: Devs can use the extra horsepower to make 1080p output better. SSAO!
3:19p ET: Discussing what human eyes can actually see. HDR is impressive, but it only really makes a difference in person. Hard to sell, I think.
3:17p ET: Showing off games in 4K. Obviously it doesn’t make much difference for livestreamers.
3:16p ET: Not only will this benefit UHDTVs, but Cerny says that 1080p displays and PSVR will benefit.
3:14p ET: Better GPU, faster CPU, and 1TB hard drive.
3:12p ET: Mark Cerny on stage to talk PS4 Pro.
3:11p ET: PS4 Pro is the 4K model.
3:10p ET: Talking 4K and HDR, and what that means for PlayStation.
3:08p ET: PS4 Slim announced right away. It’s exactly what we thought it was. Launches September 15th. $299.
3:06p ET: Andrew House is on stage.
3:03p ET: Waiting for things to kick off. A bit late.
2:53p ET: Less than ten minutes to go before the event starts!

What we expected before the show

The PS4 Slim was discovered a few weeks back, so we might know everything there is to know about this slightly smaller console. It’s likely cheaper, uses physical buttons instead of capacitive buttons, and is missing the optical audio port. Otherwise, it seems to be pretty much the same as the current PS4. And because it’s been found in the wild, there’s a decent chance it will launch very soon.

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We’re less than two weeks away from the release of Forza Horizon 3, but eager drivers can already get a taste of what it’s like to race around the streets and open terrain of Australia. If you have an Xbox One, you can download the massive 18GB Horizon 3 demo, and go Down Under a little bit early.

It’s hard to believe the Forza franchise is over a decade old. Starting with the 2005 original Xbox release of Forza Motorsport, Microsoft and its partner studios have delivered the goods time and time again. The straight-laced Motorsport sub-series is perfect for traditional racing enthusiasts, but the freewheeling Horizon spin-offs allow for more exploration and open-world high jinks.

The first Horizon took place in Colorado, the second brought us to France and Italy, and this third installment is set in Australia. While it’s easy to assume that it’s little more than a massive desert, the outback is just a single aspect of this highly diverse mega-island. There’s plenty of lush greenery, gorgeous beaches, and city streets to keep this setting interesting.
If that sounds appealing, you can now try out the game for yourself. Head over to the Xbox Store, and click the blue “Get it now” button to attach the demo to your account. On your Xbox One, go to the “My games & apps” screen, and it should be waiting for you in the “Ready to install” section.

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Nvidia’s GTX 1080 and 1070 may win the overall performance competition, but they don’t represent the bulk of the GPU market. According to both AMD and Nvidia, they sell far more GPUs in the midrange than the luxury market. Today we’ll be reviewing Gigabyte’s GTX 1060 G1 Gaming 6GB to see how it compares with a range of current and previous-generation hardware from both AMD and Nvidia.

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Ever since Facebook bought Oculus several years ago, there’s been fears that the social media company would begin requiring mandatory Facebook integration or would otherwise hijack the VR headset in some way. Oculus’ new 1.8 software update doesn’t make that integration mandatory, but it includes capabilities that may raise eyebrows with its current users.

The new update prompts users to log into Facebook, according to Ars Technica. Once you do, your Oculus username changes to your Facebook real name, without prompting and without any ability to switch it back. Once you sign in via Facebook, all of your friends who own a Rift are automatically populated into your Oculus friends list. But since Oculus Home doesn’t offer any filtering options or the ability to block individuals from seeing what games you’re playing, that means you can either be online and visible to everyone, or online and invisible with no option in-between. It’s not clear if you can remove people once they’ve been added; Oculus’ help pages note that: “When you connect to Facebook, your Oculus friend list is continuously updated so your can share VR easily.”

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Oculus continues to promise that Facebook integration will never be mandatory. But its decision to apply a real-names policy and mandatory friends integration are depressingly typical for Facebook. The corporation has a long-standing tradition of destroying user privacy before offering back some of what it took in obfuscated menus and difficult-to-understand settings. That said, there’s no evidence that the company is planning to make Facebook mandatory at any point. Just be aware that if you link Oculus Home to your Facebook account, you may not be able to walk that connection back in the future. If you play games that you might not want your co-workers, family, and friends to know about — and given the stigma still attached to gaming as a time-wasting event, that might include just about anything — it’s best to skip the integration step altogether. Oculus came under fire earlier this year for some of its privacy and data collection and was asked to submit information to Congress clarifying what it collects and how it uses that information. Recent surveys have suggested that headsets like the Vive, with its integrated motion controllers, are more popular than Oculus Rift, but sales data from HTC and Oculus isn’t currently available. Sony will roll out PlayStation VR in a matter of weeks, and how well or poorly that platform sells will probably set expectations for developers and investors regarding the long-term feasibility of virtual reality.

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For the last few years, AMD and Nvidia have offered competing versions of the same technology. Both FreeSync (AMD) and G-Sync (Nvidia) are designed to smooth out gameplay presentation and offer superior image quality by matching a display’s refresh rate to the delivery of each new frame. In traditional v-sync, in contrast, frames are either displayed at a steady interval (typically 30 or 60 times per second) or are displayed as soon as they are ready. The first method can lead to dramatic dips in performance if new frames aren’t ready and creates a small-but-discernible amount of stutter in some cases. The second can lead to image tearing as frames are shoved out as quickly as possible.

Right now, FreeSync and G-Sync are both confined to computer monitors or mobile systems, but Tom’s Hardware thinks we might see them come to TVs as well. During a conference call touting the one-year anniversary of AMD’s decision to found the Radeon Technology Group, AMD’s Raja Koduri, head of RTG, had this to say: ““We are definitely working with the entire display community on getting FreeSync to more places,” said Koduri. “I think this is something we should follow up…on what we can share at this point on FreeSync TVs.”

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The PC market has largely moved to digital sales, thanks in part to aggressive down-sizing from chain stores like GameStop over the last decade, and partly because online PC gaming has been baked in for twenty years. There are, however, still people who like buying a game on physical media and prefer having a CD or disc with the game’s content rather than relying on a digital service. In recent years, we’ve seen a trend where game developers don’t bother putting the entire game on-disc, instead relying on the end user to download it from a secondary service. Now, Titanfall 2 is simply getting rid of physical media entirely. If you buy a physical boxed game, all you get is a code in a box. No disc, no nothing.

A leaked copy of the Titanfall 2 box art shows the game with a prominent “Download ONLY / No Disc Included” sticker, as you can see below:

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There are several ways to look at this. On the one hand, boxed copies of games are a dying breed. Outside of collector or deluxe editions, which typically come with various value-adds of highly questionable value, few people collect boxed games anymore. The entire concept of the “Deluxe” or “Collector” edition is directly tied to both the sale of DLC and pre-order benefits (which is generally terrible for the industry and gamers), or just a money-grabbing mechanism designed to make a few bucks of profit off a games’ most die-hard fans.

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The original BioShock is considered a classic of modern PC gaming. Hailed as the spiritual successor to 1999’s System Shock 2, BioShock tells the story of Rapture, an underwater city and libertarian paradise gone badly wrong. Ruled by the increasingly unhinged and tyrannical Andrew Ryan, the city you descend to explore is a madhouse utopia gone wrong. Andrew Ryan’s Objectivist paradise, always on unsteady footing, was destroyed by the discovery of ADAM, a substance that could be used to grant incredible powers to those who use it, but which also fatally undermined their sanity and biology in the long-term. In BioShock, you play as Jack, a man who descends into Rapture after a plane crash and learns the truth about the social experiment — and himself.

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There’s a new set of rumors cropping up about AMD’s Vega. Last month, we covered an AMD press slide that stated the GPU would only arrive sometime in the first half of 2017. Now, reports indicate that the chip could drop in the first quarter — still quite late compared with Nvidia’s Pascal, which will have been in market for nearly a year at that point, but better than the late June timeframe typically hit by “H1” launch windows.

The upcoming Vega 10 chip will feature 24 TFLOPS of 16-bit precision performance, 16GB of HBM2, and 512GB/s of memory bandwidth, with 64 compute units in total, according to VideoCardz. If Vega keeps GCN’s 64 compute cores per compute unit, that puts a full-size Vega core at 4,096 cores in total. The 16GB of HBM2 is expected based on the specs we’ve seen for that standard, but the RAM bandwidth is significantly lower than what we’ve expected to date. HBM2 is designed to support up to 256GB/s of bandwidth per stack, and first-generation HBM2 solutions are expected to ship with 4GB stacks. That works out to up to 1TB/s of memory bandwidth for a full implementation — and the first-generation HBM implementations that AMD shipped were full implementations.

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If these stats are accurate, it implies that AMD has kept bandwidth flat between Fiji and Vega rather than improving it further by pushing HBM2. Nvidia’s GP100, which is set to debut in 2017, offers 720GB/s of memory bandwidth. 512GB/s of bandwidth would compete well against Nvidia’s GTX 1080 and Titan X, however, and AMD may have scaled its bandwidth accordingly. TDP on the new high-end card is supposedly 225W, which would put it near Nvidia’s Titan X.

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Well, that didn’t take long. When Sony unveiled the new PS4 Pro, we spent some time talking about 4K, the difference between native and upscaled content, and what Sony can and can’t deliver as far as 4K is concerned with a GPU based on the RX 480. Now, we’ve got Microsoft weighing in on the capabilities of Project Scorpio.

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When No Man’s Sky launched in August, it was already clear that the game would primarily appeal to a niche audience. The title’s lead designer and head of developer Hello Games, Sean Murray, has been blasted for promising the game would include features that didn’t actually ship. Not long after launch, Murray and Hello Games went radio-silent as players began requesting refunds. Now, nearly a month later, the game has transformed into a ghost of its former self.

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Palmer Luckey, the founder of Oculus VR who sold the company to Facebook in 2014 for $2 billion, has been confirmed as the major financial backer behind a pro-Donald Trump group called Nimble America. Nimble America, in its own words, is a “social welfare 501(c)4 non-profit dedicated to shitposting in real life.”

The DailyBeast broke the story and confirmed with Luckey that he was the near-billionaire NimbleRichMan associated with Nimble America.


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If you’re a diehard PC gamer, you probably don’t have much of a history with the Forza franchise. This traditionally console-based series dipped its toe into the PC market with the free-to-play release of Forza Motorsport 6: Apex earlier this year, but Forza Horizon 3 marks the first simultaneous release on console and PC. And now that it’s been in the wild for a few days, we’re starting to see exactly how far Playground Games and Microsoft can push this engine on high-end PC hardware.

Even though Horizon 3 runs relatively smoothly at 30Hz on the Xbox One, the recommended specs for the Windows 10 version of the game are surprisingly high. The developers think you should be running at least a Core i7-3820 CPU, a GTX 970/R9 290X graphics card, 4GB of VRAM, and 12GB of RAM for a 1080p experience. Want to run the game at 2160p? Well, the “ideal specs” are listed as a Core i7-6700 CPU, a GTX 980Ti/R9 Fury X graphics card, 6GB of VRAM, 16GB of RAM, and an SSD.

After fighting with the Windows Store for a few days, the Digital Foundry team has finally given the game a once-over on a top-tier setup. With a Core i7-6700K and a Titan X Pascal, 2160p at a solid 60 frames per second was achievable as long as the anti-aliasing was configured to use FXAA instead of 4x MSAA.

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For the last few years, Apple has been an AMD-only shop. Graphics may not be a core area that Apple focuses on — OpenGL support in the latest version of macOS remains stuck in 4.1 territory). But it does include*discrete graphics cards in several of its MacBook Pro and iMac products, as well as in all of the Mac Pro SKUs. Now, there’s talk that Apple might switch back to Nvidia.

Bloomberg first noticed multiple job listings at Nvidia (some of which have since been edited) that talk about “help[ing] produce the next revolutionary Apple products” and claimed the role would require “working in partnership with Apple” and writing code that will “define and shape the future” of the Mac’s graphics software. There are also openings on the Mac driver team, and Nvidia doesn’t bother writing drivers and software for a platform it doesn’t intend to sell.

The report also notes that winning Apple’s business back would be a coup for Nvidia, which has lost some small amount of market share to AMD in recent quarters. Overall, Nvidia remains in control of the desktop add-in market, with roughly 75% market share. AMD’s own Polaris launch earlier this year was meant to reverse this trend, but Polaris is still priced well above its initial MSRP. GTX 1060 stock, in contrast, is both more widely available and more likely to be found at its target $200 to $250 price point. Both companies are still running hot, but Nvidia is doing a better job of managing the temperature.

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Nvidia’s GP100 Pascal GPU.

As for the proverbial feather in Nvidia’s cap, Apple occupies a weird spot in the overall PC market. Its shipments are significant (Apple typically claims the fourth or fifth spot in total PC market share), but it’s dwarfed by its competitors. At the same time, however, people talk about the decisions Apple makes, whether that means building an extremely powerful system in a small wastepaper basket or removing useful ports from smartphones. When Apple shipped twin GPUs with the Mac Pro, it was seen as a sign the company would move towards improving its own graphics implementations and support emerging standards more aggressively. This hasn’t really happened; Apple has Metal, but it doesn’t support OpenCL 2.0 or any version of OpenGL past 4.1.

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After a disappointing showing with 2014’s Civilization: Beyond Earth, Firaxis Games is returning to the classic Civ formula. In Civilization VI, you’ll pick a society to control, build a nation from scratch, and ultimately work towards world domination in one way or the other.
If you’ve played Civ games before, you almost certainly know what you’re getting into here. It doesn’t seem like Firaxis is shaking things up too much this time around, but the move to a more exaggerated art style is rather divisive. Our sister site PCMag spent some time with an early build of the game, and didn’t care much for the new art direction. In contrast, I’ve actually quite liked what I’ve seen so far, but that mostly comes down to personal taste.

More worrisome are the criticisms about the user experience. In a game so heavily focused on reading stats and interacting with menus, any steps backwards in usability will undoubtedly enrage Civ fans from the word “go.” At this stage, it seems that some rather vital information (overall happiness) is not being surfaced properly, but the UI can also get cluttered with less important notifications. It’s disappointing, but those can definitely be improved in a post-release patch.

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Game developer Bethesda Softworks has announced the upcoming Skyrim Special Edition and Fallout 4 will both be receiving mod support on the PS4. Previously, this had been in some doubt — while Bethesda announced plans to bring FO4 mod support to both the Xbox One and PlayStation 4, updates from earlier this summer suggested that Sony wasn’t keen on the idea and Bethesda might scrap it altogether. It’s not clear how the two companies came to agree on extending modding support for Sony’s new system, but Skyrim Special Edition will arrive with modding options on Sony’s console when it ships on October 28.

Bethesda also announced that Skyrim Enhanced Edition will run at native 4K on the PS4 Pro. That’s honestly not very surprising — Skyrim is a PS3-era title and we’ve already seen how developers like Naughty Dog were able to take a late-generation title that was heavily optimized for the PS3 (The Last of Us) and improve visual quality on the original PS4 while simultaneously boosting the frame rate. The PlayStation 4 Pro offers even more firepower than the original PS4, which likely puts 4K in range — especially since the graphics updates Bethesda has showcased appear to focus more on the game’s lighting engine than on upgraded textures or new levels of detail.

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Skyrim SE appears to use most, if not all, of Bethesda’s original texture assets, but the new lighting engine is gorgeous.

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Ever since the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive debuted, the Vive has had one significant feature that the Rift lacked: handheld controls. While not technically necessary for VR gaming, as many games default to an Xbox controller, the Vive’s support for touch controls was a critical difference that led some sites to endorse it over the Rift — despite the Vive’s $800 price, as opposed to Oculus’ $600. Oculus has been working on its own touch controls for some time, and the company finally debuted them at Oculus Connect this week, along with an expected $200 price tag.

Early feedback from reviewers who have spent time with the controls has been quite positive. The new system comes with a second sensor for detecting the environment around you. If you want a room-scale VR experience like the Vive offers, you’ll need to pony up an additional $79 for a third camera, which does make the Oculus + Touch + third sensor more expensive than the Vive’s base price ($879 versus $800). It’s not yet clear if the third sensor offers Oculus more flexibility in room-scale VR than HTC can offer, or if Oculus will create a bundled SKU that matches the Vive’s $800 price point. Both CNET and Ars Technica have published detailed reports on the various Touch-compatible games and the overall experience of using the hardware.

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At its Oculus Connect event today, Oculus announced a new set of $500 systems designed for fast, smooth VR at a much lower price point. When the Oculus Rift launched this year, Oculus’ official minimum recommendation was an 900 system running a GTX 970. Today, the company described a new technology it’s invented, asynchronous spacewarp, that allowed it to bring VR to much more affordable computers without compromising the user experience. This is also the first time we’ve seen Oculus partner up with AMD and CyberPower to launch a new VR system configuration; the first round of recommended systems for VR used Nvidia GPUs.

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Sources we’ve spoken to confirmed the GPU inside the new CyberPower PC is an RX 470. That GPU is somewhat less powerful than the GTX 970 Oculus formerly recommended as a minimum standard for VR, but that’s where asynchronous spacewarp comes in. Details on the new technology are a bit scarce, but here’s what we know so far.

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Cloud Imperium Games, makers of the sprawling, controversial, and long-delayed space simulator/FPS shooter/single-player space combat title known as Star Citizen, announced the game’s single-player campaign, Squadron 42, will be delayed indefinitely. The reason is simple: With so much left undone, there are huge chunks of the single-player campaign yet unfinished. CIG had originally promised Squadron 42 would ship in 2016, but it’s now clear there’s no way that could happen. The fact that the company has yet to announce a new shipping date isn’t particularly promising, either.

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This slide is courtesy of Kotaku UK, which recently did a huge write-up on what happened to Star Marine, the FPS segment of Star Citizen, as well as an overview of Star Citizen as a whole. That story does much to explain what happened, and paints its delays and troubles as being born of both technical difficulties — CryEngine was never designed to deliver the kind of title Chris Roberts, the CEO of CIG and the creator of game franchises like Wing Commander, wanted to create. Overhauling the engine has, according to some CIG developers, been more work than actually writing a new engine from scratch would have been.

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Gears of War was undoubtedly one of the most influential franchises of the Xbox 360 era. Originally developed by Epic Games, those blockbuster releases helped make Unreal 3 the go-to engine for the previous generation. But now that Microsoft owns the series, and a Vancouver-based studio dubbed “The Coalition” has taken the reins, many die-hard fans have been biting their nails to see if the next game will live up to its pedigree.

Set a quarter of a decade after the last installment, Gears of War 4 features Marcus Fenix’s son JD as the protagonist. A new team of soldiers will be teaming up with last generation’s hero to fight a new threat: The Swarm. After Gear 3 wrapped up so nicely, that seems as good of an excuse as any to jump back into this beloved setting.

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Ever since HTC and Oculus launched their respective headsets earlier this year, people have wondered which company had shipped more units and how the VR market was evolving as a whole. The Vive took an early lead over the Rift, thanks to unexplained component shortages that took several months for the Facebook subsidiary to iron out. But both firms have been shipping on time for months. Today, Oculus and HTC both promise to ship within a matter of days, not the weeks or months it took earlier this year.

Unfortunately, that immediate shipping promise may be partly because very few people are buying into VR at all. Steam’s Hardware Survey isn’t perfect — in fact, it tends to regularly have problems identifying video card makes and models correctly, months or even years after AMD and Nvidia launch new products. In VR, however, there are only a handful of SKUs that need to be tracked, and one of them is a headset Steam partnered with. The figures we see here should be closer to accurate, and what they show is quite concerning.

Steam gives us two pieces of information. First, the market split between the various headsets it tracks (HTC Vive 59.8%, Oculus Rift 30.22%, Oculus Rift DK2 9.98%). Given that the vast majority of gamers of all types have Steam, this suggests the HTC Vive has outsold the Rift roughly 2:1, with a fairly steady group of DK2 owners.

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If you were worried about Sony’s walled garden limiting your enjoyment of the PlayStation VR, you can breathe easy now. Sony just pushed an update to the PS4’s Media Player app, and the new features it brings will undoubtedly make the PSVR much more appealing to some of us.

In a post on the European PlayStation blog, Sony outlines a few of the new features added to version 2.5 of the Media Player app. With this newest update, FLAC playback and “audio upscaling” for MP3s and AACs with Sony’s own DSEE HX tech are now available to all. That’s great news for console-loving audiophiles, but the new features specifically tailored for the PSVR headset are much more interesting.

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Game streaming has been a major focus for multiple companies over the past few years, with new devices (or new capabilities for existing hardware) arriving from Microsoft, Nvidia, Sony, and Valve. Companies like Samsung, which lack any kind of game library, are getting in on the action from a different direction and baking support for existing products directly into its own televisions. Some Samsung TVs already support streaming from services like PlayStation Now, and the company has announced it intends to bake in support for Valve’s Steam Link as well.

For those of you who aren’t aware, Steam Link is a $50 product from Valve that plugs into your television and attaches to your home network (wired networking is strongly recommended). It scans for computers already on your network, joins them, and can stream games directly from your PC to your living room television. This works particularly well if you want to game on the couch via controller, though it obviously depends on how well the title supports that control scheme.

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By baking that kind of capability directly into Samsung TV’s, the company is positioning itself to lead the market with PC gamers in general — at least in theory. The ability to link a Steam system easily to a new TV makes it that much easier to bring gaming into the living room without worrying about carrying a heavy box or situating a PC near the television. The cost of integrating this kind of capability is likely negligible for Samsung, since smart TVs already regularly carry quad-core processors and several GB of RAM. Running the entire system over wired networking also makes it easy to keep latency low and performance high, provided you have a halfway decent router.

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Nvidia will launch its GTX 1050 Ti and GTX 1050 next week, pushing its 14nm Pascal hardware into lower price points and presumably offering some tough competition for AMD’s Polaris family. The GTX 1050 Ti will be a 768-core card, with 4GB of RAM, a 128-bit memory interface, 48 texture units, and 32 ROPS, while the GTX 1050 is a 640-core card with 2GB of RAM, 40 texture units, and 32 ROPS. Boost clock is 1392MHz on the 1050 Ti and 1455MHz on the 1050.

The GTX 1050 Ti and 1050 aren’t built on TSMC’s 16nm technology like the rest of Nvidia’s products, according to Anandtech — these chips are 14nm hardware and apparently built at Samsung. We first reported on rumors that Samsung and Nvidia would work together more than a year ago, and while we weren’t sure which chips the two companies would collaborate on, it appears that Nvidia chose to bring up some of its lower-power designs on Samsung silicon. 16nm availability may be tight at TSMC, given that the firm is building Apple’s A10, or Nvidia may just be taking advantage of having more than one firm with cutting-edge process technology on the market.

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The PlayStation VR ($399) has been out in the wild for about a week now, and I’ve been busy giving it a thorough workout. Since my headset arrived last Thursday, I’ve spent countless hours fixing cars, golfing, defusing bombs, and leaning perilously over the virtual abyss.
With a few days of VR exploration under my belt, I’ve emerged from my dark and sweaty headset to lay bare exactly what the launch experience was like for the PSVR. I’ll hit on some of the biggest successes and failures, run down the seven games that I spent most of my time with, and by the end you should know if it’s worth making the investment. Now, let’s take a look at what the PlayStation VR is like in the real world.

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Sony’s headset is immaculately designed. It slides on smoothly, adjusts easily, and looks sleek and futuristic. It doesn’t feel heavy at all when it’s resting on your head, and it feels solid in spite of the plastic exterior. Of the big three headsets, Sony delivered a product that’s much more attractive and comfortable than the competition. Even if the specs don’t quite match up to the Oculus and HTC Vive, it’s clear that the PSVR excels in other ways.

But once you get past the headset itself, you’re confronted with countless wires, a breakout box, and a camera that you need to work into your existing setup. It’s a huge hassle, and I still haven’t figured out a good way to store the PSVR and its massive cables when it’s not in use. Until we get low-latency, high-bandwidth wireless communications, this rat’s nest of cables and accessories is what we’ll have to put up with for this tier of VR. It goes without saying that the simplicity of the Gear VR is nice, but it’s just not the same thing. For now, my desk looks like a war zone.

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Console reveals are tricky to manage. On the one hand, major corporations want to build support for features and capabilities to excite customers and developers. On the other, tipping your hand too early can give your competitors a leg up on beating you. Nintendo is particularly vulnerable in this regard — while the company is trying to build support for fundamentally new approaches to gaming, it needs to woo customers that might otherwise be looking to hardware from Sony or Microsoft.

For more than a decade, Nintendo has focused on offering different approaches to gaming with devices like the handheld DS and 3DS, the motion controllers on the Wii, and the Wii U’s gamepad. Polygon has*written an in-depth description of the capabilities of Nintendo’s Switch as described in various patent filings. Patent filings don’t necessarily guarantee certain capabilities will come to the Switch. But the fact that Nintendo has described a controller with a wide range of features improves the chances that we’ll see this hardware in shipping devices.

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It’s not clear if the NX can perform these types of functions, but the patents that describe the device include these capabilities.

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