Game Tech News

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Nvidia’s GeForce Now service started life as GRID, a free beta service that could stream high-end PC games to Nvidia’s Shield mobile devices. In late 2015, the service was launched as GeForce Now, a Netflix-style subscription service for streaming games from the cloud. PCs were notably absent from GeForce Now, but at CES Nvidia has announced a new version of the service for PCs. The business model is much different, though. Instead of a Netflix-style all-you-can-eat, it’s more of a game hosting service.

Like GeForce Now on Shield, the idea here is that you’ve got a device that’s not powerful enough to play a game. Nvidia runs servers with tons of power, so you can run the game on that server and stream the video down while sending your control inputs up to the server. Based on my experience using GeForce Now on the Shield, this works better than you might expect. Lag was usually imperceptible compared with playing on a console or PC, although there was some occasional artifacting in the video stream.

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After all of the knockout titles we saw the year before, 2016 had a lot to live up to. And with the launch of three major VR platforms, a half-step console released from Sony, and the rise of 4K gaming, 2016 turned out to be extremely eventful. There was plenty of new hardware for devs to take advantage of, but raw horsepower doesn’t always win out in this industry. Pluck and ingenuity during the development process are just as important for the final product.

Today, we want to call out the year’s most impressive games. Each of these titles have noteworthy technical accomplishments, but this isn’t a pixel count and frame rate competition. Instead, we want to tip our hats to the games that astonished us the most.

Sadly, there’s just not enough time to discuss each and every impressive release — even some of our personal favorites. Games like Abzû and Rez Infinite make our hearts sing, but even they missed the cut. So with that in mind, here’s our list of 2016’s most impressive games. And as always, you’re welcome to give props to standout games in the comment section below.

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Razer brought neat hardware to show off, but someone thought it was so neat they wanted to take it home.


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Nintendo will unveil its Switch hardware this evening at 11 PM, with a small number of consoles up for pre-order beginning at 9 AM on Friday morning. We’ve heard a great many rumors about the platform, its capabilities, price, and battery life over the last few months, ever since Nintendo kicked things off with its initial unveil video.

Thus far, the rumors have pointed to a device built on Nvidia’s Tegra X1 (Maxwell) SoC on TSMC’s 20nm process. The screen is expected to be roughly*6 inches wide, with a target resolution of ~720p. Earlier rumors that the display could be 1080p with a 1440p upscale are by no means impossible, but it’s going to be a question of weight, battery life, and available horsepower. Higher-resolution targets help one of these factors, at the cost of the other two. Reports suggest the Switch or the Switch dock will include a cooling fan as well, to allow it to hit higher clock targets, but we don’t know all the details yet.

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Nintendo doesn’t do consoles like everyone else. Microsoft and Sony are competing with each other using traditional high-power gaming boxes that have essentially become small form factor PCs. Nintendo’s new Switch console appeals to a different kind of gamer. After announcing the Switch in October, we now have all the details on this 6.2-inch tablet with a game console inside.

The first big reveal was the price — $299.99. That’s a little higher than the more optimistic projections, which pegged a $250 starting price. That said, there’s plenty in the box. The Switch comes with the main tablet/console hardware, a dock, a left and right “Joy-Con” controller half, controller grip, controller straps, an HDMI cable, and the power adapter. Each half of the controller can actually be used as a separate controller for multiplayer in certain games, so Nintendo points out it’s almost like including two controllers, just like the old days.

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Over the last nine months, we’ve discussed the fate of the legacy server Nostalrius. The project was first*created by a team of dedicated World of Warcraft players who wanted to experience the game as it existed prior to the launch of The Burning Crusade in 2007. It was then hit with a cease-and-desist order from Blizzard and forced to shutdown.

In most cases, that would’ve been the end of it. But the Nostalrius’ story was big enough that Blizzard agreed to meet the team in question, inviting them to company HQ and discussing the possibility of a legacy server project. When that meeting didn’t produce the results the Nostalrius team hoped for, the group announced it had given the Nostalrius code and character records to a different group, named Elysium. Elysium was expected to bring compatible servers online, merge the codebase, and handle character transfers.

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Ever since Nintendo declared that the Switch would be a hybrid tablet/console that you can take on the go or play from home, there’s been chatter about what the new console would mean for Nintendo’s 3DS. Now that the Switch has formally been unveiled, general consensus has been that the tablet is an amazing improvement over the Nintendo 3DS or New 3DS, but only a modest step forward compared with the Wii U. Given how dramatically the 3DS has outsold the Wii U (61.6 million units vs. 13.6 million units), it made sense for Nintendo to focus on the Switch as a potent handheld follow-up — but that may not be the company’s plan.

In a recent interview with Wired, Nintendo of America’s president, Reggie Fils-Aime, answered questions about how the Switch and the 3DS would co-exist, post-launch:

3DS has a long life in front of it. We’ve already announced games that will be launching in the first couple quarters of this year. There are a number of big games coming. And in our view, the Nintendo 3DS and the Nintendo Switch are going to live side-by-side. You’re going to be meeting different price points, you’re going to be meeting different types of consumers, you’re going to have the newest, freshest content available on Nintendo Switch, you’ve got a thousand-game library available on Nintendo 3DS, plus some key new ones coming. They’re going to coexist just fine. We’ve done this before, managing two different systems.

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A few weeks ago, sharp-eyed users spotted something new in a Windows 10 Insider Preview build — reference to a new “Game Mode.” Discussions on what the feature might do, or how it could improve performance, have made the rounds since. But a new investigation suggests the new feature won’t make much difference for the vast majority of Windows 10 gamers.

PCGamesN has details on the latest Insider Preview build (15007) and what it exposes in the OS. While Game Mode can’t be enabled yet, you can read the description of what it’s going to do. Basically, it performs some low-level services tailoring to make the system work smarter when you’re actively using Microsoft’s GameDVR function.

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Gravity Rush 2 hits shelves this week, and there’s definitely cause for excitement. This lengthy follow-up to the original 2012 Vita game is receiving high praise from critics, and it seems that those of us fortunate enough to have a PS4 Pro are in for a real treat.

Created by Keiichiro Toyama (Silent Hill, Siren), the Gravity Rush series puts the player in control of Kat — a red-eyed woman who can manipulate gravity as she sees fit. Picking right up where the first game ended, you’re tasked with navigating the open world with your stupefying powers in hopes of learning more about a particularly troubling gravitational event.

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A few months ago, Sony launched the PlayStation VR after several years of work. Early reviews were generally positive, though they carried the caveats common to all VR today — the various experiences have some great moments, but a true killer app has yet to emerge. Since then, Sony has gone quiet about the platform, despite being happy to talk about total PS4 shipments through the holiday season or various other aspects of its gaming sales.

First up, there’s the recent closure of Guerilla Cambridge, a game development studio that created what’s been hailed as one of the PSVR’s best initial titles — the mech battlegame Rigs. The main studio, Guerilla Games in Amsterdam, won’t be affected, but Guerilla Cambridge had been in operation for 19 years — hardly a fly-by-night. Sony has stated that Rigs will be left online, but there won’t be any new DLC or support for the title going forward.
Next, there’s early evidence that the PSVR’s sales figures may not have been to the company’s liking. There was little mention of VR or upcoming VR titles at the PlayStation Experience last month, and Sony’s Kaz Hirai has refused to give concrete figures, saying: “We’ve always said it’s going to be a slow start, unfortunately, we did produce a lot of units but we ran out of stock in some retailers, but I think based on reports coming out of the holiday season, we’re actually happy with the numbers. One of the reasons we’re not talking about the numbers so much is because we don’t want the numbers to take a life of their own.”


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Moving your Steam installation from one PC to another has always been more of a “Technical workaround,” and less of a supported method of migrating games from Point A to B. This has been particularly true if you only wanted to change the installation location of a single title. Steam allows you to create a new folder on a separate drive to install games into without much argument, but it used to get grouchy if you tried to do it with games already installed to a specific system path. Now, a new client update has added the ability to move specific game folders without reinstalling a title or messing around with symlinks.

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Details on Microsoft’s Project Scorpio and how it might handle 4K gaming have been hard to come by ever since Microsoft announced the new platform. All we’ve known are a few basic specs, like the platform’s memory bandwidth (320GB/s), eight-core CPU, and available computational horsepower (6TFLOPS). Now we have more details thanks to a leaked PDF from a Microsoft developer website.

Eurogamer has the full details on the PDF, which doesn’t appear to be publicly available. According to Microsoft’s documentation, the Xbox Scorpio ditches the ESRAM cache the Xbox One relied on to deliver higher performance and acceptable frame rates. The PS4 and Xbox One are much more alike, architecturally speaking, than any previous pair of game consoles. ESRAM was one of the major differences between them — the Xbox One uses a 32MB ESRAM cache (divided into four 8MB blocks) to supplement its DDR3 memory interface, while the Sony PS4 has a unified 8GB GDDR5 memory pool.

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Star Wars: Episode VIII now has an official title and the Internet is buzzing about what it might mean. The upcoming film will also apparently be Carrie Fisher’s last appearance in the franchise (more on that in a moment), and will be titled Star Wars: The Last Jedi. Before anyone panics, remember “Jedi” is both singular and plural — “Last” Jedi doesn’t mean that only Luke or Rey survive the film, it just means that, well, we’re obviously still pretty low on Force users.

According to director Rian Johnson, the film will pick up directly where Episode VII left off, with Rey standing on a rocky island, holding out Anakin Skywalker’s long-lost lightsaber to Luke Skywalker. “I don’t want to skip ahead two years. I want to see the very next moment of what happens,” he told USA Today in January. Rian added that “a large part of the movie” is devoted to exploring the story of what happened to Skywalker between the end of Return of the Jedi and The Last of the Jedi, as well as focusing on Rey’s use of the Force and her exploration of her own power. “She’s taking her first step to coming to terms with this thing inside her that she never knew was there and is just starting to reveal its potential,” Johnson said.

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Microsoft’s Xbox One unveil back in spring 2013 didn’t have a lot of high points, but the console did feature a new mode Microsoft clearly hoped would be a key differentiation factor in years to come: Snap mode. Microsoft made much of the fact that you could “snap” various types of content to the side of the screen while still playing a game, in what was clearly a console-specific implementation of the app-pinning Windows 8 and 10 both support. The feature never made a ton of sense to me — I’ve never had a TV so large that I felt like giving over a third of it to stream video content, and Microsoft’s early multimedia focus with the Xbox One seemed ill-timed and badly considered compared with Sony’s “it plays games” approach.

Today, Microsoft announced that “Snap” mode will be removed in an upcoming Xbox One patch, to make room for future improvements and updates. Microsoft’s Mike Ybarra took to Twitter to discuss the change, though he was vague on what “bigger things” Microsoft is referring to.

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When Nintendo announced the Switch, the company made it clear that the device wouldn’t require specific, proprietary SD cards. That’s in contrast to companies like Sony, which have previously required that their handheld devices use proprietary SD cards with correspondingly inflated prices.

It’s a bit of a surprise, therefore, to see Nintendo partnering with manufacturer HORI in Japan to release two official flavors of SD cards — a 16GB and a 32GB. Forbes reports that at least the 32GB microSD card is notably more expensive than it would be under other circumstances, writing: “The 32 GB card is ¥7,900, or about $70 USD. But on Amazon, the “high end” 32 GB SD card from SanDisk is ¥2,690, or about $23 USD. Past that, if you want a cheaper version with the same amount of storage (but with slower read/write speed perhaps), you can find one for as little as ¥1,180/$10.”

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When Microsoft first debuted HoloLens two years ago, it wasn’t clear if the company was working on a niche research concept that would find little life outside of tech demos, or if the company intended to push augmented reality as the Next Big Thing in the consumer market. HoloLens’ first release was strictly intended for developers and early deployment in enterprise settings, with its $3,000 price tag, lack of a warranty, and limited application support. In a recent interview, however, Alex Kipman, the inventor of HoloLens, said*Microsoft has bigger plans for its platform over the long term.

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Sony has been laughably bad at keeping users abreast of what to expect from any given release on the PS4 Pro. Instead of a clear message from the source, consumers are often forced to go to sites like Digital Foundry and our sister site IGN to learn more about which games take advantage of the hardware, and what changes are actually being made. It’s maddening.

But in spite of the failed messaging and embarrassing optimization problems, the PS4 Pro actually has a surprising amount of support just two months into its lifespan. Some of this generation’s best titles are looking better than ever, so we want to take a moment to call out 10 games that really benefit from this $400 half-step.

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Nintendo released its annual financial report this week, and president Tatsumi Kimishima defended the Switch’s sparse*launch lineup, along with giving additional details on Nintendo’s mobile and console business performance. The Switch’s software lineup has been widely criticized for its unusually small size. Kimishima attempted to push back against this argument, saying:

Our thinking in arranging the 2017 software lineup is that it is important to continue to provide new titles regularly without long gaps. This encourages consumers to continue actively playing the system, maintains buzz, and spurs continued sales momentum for Nintendo Switch. April 28 Spring, 2017 Summer, 2017 For that reason, we will be releasing Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, ARMS, which is making its debut on the Nintendo Switch during the first half of 2017, and Splatoon 2, which attracted consumers’ attention most during the hands-on events in Japan, in summer 2017.

The problem with this argument is that the Switch’s lineup is painfully thin, no matter how Nintendo tries to paper over the issue. The North American Switch will launch with 10*titles:

• 1-2 Switch
• The Binding of Isaac: Afterbirth+
• Human Resource Machine
• Just Dance 2017
• The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
• Little Inferno
• I am Setsuna
• Skylanders: Imaginators
• Super Bomberman R
• World of Goo

The Wii U launched with 32 titles, while the PS4 had 25 and the Xbox One had 22. Clearly launch titles alone don’t make or break a console, or the Wii U would’ve beaten both its rivals. But consumers do tend to treat launch support as indicative of overall developer buy-in.

What’s perhaps more worrying is the way this problem doesn’t resolve through the end of 2017. There are more games coming through the rest of the year (17 in total), but comparatively few top-franchise games. Mario Kart 8 Deluxe is a warmed-over refresh of a two-year-old game, and Splatoon doesn’t have the mass market appeal of a Mario or Pokemon game. Super Mario Odyssey is the biggest post-launch game for Switch with a 2017 launch date, and it won’t drop until the holiday season. When you combine the weak game lineup with the high price ($300), accessory costs, and lack of a bundled game, it’s hard to make a strong argument for the handheld — especially since Nintendo remains resolute that the Switch isn’t a handheld at all.

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Graphics card makers often toss in a free game with the purchase of a new card. This used to take the form of a physical disc in the box, but these days it’s a code for online redemption. Until now, you could use those codes on any piece of hardware. Nvidia*has started to use a redemption system that is tied to the piece of hardware that included the game, effectively stopping consumers from reselling those codes.

The standard way of handling free promo games involves going to the Nvidia website, entering the necessary info from your new video card, and then waiting for the code to be spit out. These codes for Steam, Origin, or some other service are free and clear — completely unrelated to the video card that was purchased. That led many people to re-sell the codes in order to recoup some of the cost of the card. Nvidia is not in favor of this behavior.

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Over the last few months, we’ve seen some really impressive PS4 Pro updates for games both old and new. Native 4K releases have been few and far between. But for a $400 investment, the PS4 Pro is certainly delivering some fine-looking video games.

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Ever since Game Mode surfaced as an upcoming Windows 10 feature, we’ve been curious to see what the new mode would offer as far as performance and capability. Microsoft has given guidance that the feature could give players an extra 2-5% frame rate in general, and while that’s not much, if you’re trying to make a marginal title playable you can use all the help you can get.

The technology’s current benefits are minimal, however, early testing by Jarred Walton of PC Gamer shows. All of the usual caveats apply: This version of Game Mode is still being worked on, it’s only available as part of Microsoft’s Early Access program, and the versions of Windows you get in the Fast Ring builds can be pretty wonky.

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Recently, Sony began rolling out the beta for the PS4 4.50 software update, and with it comes a bevy of useful user-facing changes. External hard drive support and custom wallpapers are getting a lot of public attention from the PlayStation team, but they didn’t say much about the biggest feature — a new “Boost mode” for the PS4 Pro.
Based on some leaked videos and screenshots from users running the latest beta, the PS4 Pro will enhance the performance of some older releases without the need for an official patch from the developers. Simply toggle on the boost mode, and the games will be able to take advantage of at lease some of the additional horsepower in the Pro.

As is, the PS4 Pro runs non-optimized PS4 titles almost exactly like they would run on a base PS4. The CPU is clocked down, and roughly half of the GPU goes unused. This theoretically means that all PS4 titles should operate without any additional quirks. So logically, allowing these non-optimized games to run without those protections in place in boost mode could potentially lead to some unexpected behavior.

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Last year, Facebook announced it would push Oculus Rift demo kits in 500 Best Buy stores around the nation. The move was widely seen as key to establishing virtual reality in the consumer market. One of the biggest problems with VR is that it’s impossible to convey in text, images, or video what it’s like to actually wear a headset.

On a 2D screen, the output from a VR headset just looks odd and weirdly doubled up (with one image for each eye).

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Earlier this week we discussed Sony’s Boost Mode for the PS4 Pro. The idea behind Boost Mode is that some of the PS4 Pro’s clock speed improvements can be harnessed to make older titles faster, even if those titles don’t receive updates to take full advantage of the improved hardware under the hood. Now, we have some idea what kind of benefits Boost Mode can deliver — and frankly, they’re pretty impressive.

Eurogamer has tested a number of titles and seen encouraging results, though the figures are a bit split. Boost Mode allows the PS4 Pro to use its higher core clocks — 30% higher on the CPU, 14% higher on the GPU — but which titles benefit is interesting. Some games, like BioShock Infinite, Killzone Shadow Fall, Mirror’s Edge: Catalyst, and Tomb Raider Definitive Edition see improvements in the 5% – 17% range, with several improving by 14% — exactly the size of the PS4 Pro’s clock speed boost over the PS4. Other games, like Assassin’s Creed Unity, Battlefield 4, Mighty No 9, and Project CARS see jumps of up to 38%.

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For most people, Resident Evil 7 has been a positive experience regardless of platform. On the PS4, it’s even better thanks to built-in PSVR support. Unfortunately, a small percentage of people running the game on the PS4 Pro are experiencing major graphical glitches. Even worse, neither Capcom nor Sony have been willing to step up to properly deal with this issue.

By most estimates, Resident Evil 7 is a well-liked game. It earned a “Good” score of 7.7 on our sister site IGN. And based on 86 reviews aggregated on Metacritic, the PS4 version is sitting nicely at an 86/100. It seems that the new direction worked out well for the long-running series, and that’s why this technical blemish is so infuriating. I’d really like to sit down and play RE7, but I keep running into a showstopping bug.

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After months in beta, Intel has announced official Vulkan support for Skylake and Kaby Lake GPUs. Intel’s 15.45.14.4590 driver is the first release to add full Vulkan API support (previous releases were all various flavors of beta). In keeping with Intel’s previous remarks on OS support, the latest driver will only support Windows 10 on Kaby Lake, but sixth-generation GPUs are supported in Windows 7, 8.1, and 10. That alone points to the artificiality of the restriction — as far as their graphics pipelines are concerned, Kaby Lake and Skylake use identical GPUs.

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Microsoft has announced it will take the lid off Scorpio at its E3 conference on June 11, four years after the Xbox One got taken apart by Sony during E3 2013. Scorpio, in many ways, is Microsoft’s first real chance to clean up the Xbox One baggage the company has been dragging around for nearly four years.

Microsoft’s early plans for the Xbox One were vastly different from what Sony offered with the PlayStation 4. Where Sony went simple and focused on the “It plays games,” message, Microsoft went broad. The Xbox One was a multimedia system where you could watch TV and game (despite lacking a DVR). It’s Kinect 2 camera was almost as expensive as the console itself, and Redmond was investing in creative partnerships to create custom Xbox One content, enhanced apps that took advantage of Kinect 2, and a live-action Halo TV series helmed by Steven Spielberg (Microsoft insists this is still happening, but the show is now 18 months behind schedule and Phil Spencer has taken to given single-word updates on it via Twitter).

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Back in 2014, Sony debuted a new, Netflix-like game streaming service dubbed PlayStation Now. The service was expensive, at $20 per month or $45 per three months, but it supported a wide range of hardware including televisions, Blu-ray players, the PlayStation 3, the PlayStation TV, the PlayStation Vita, all 2013 – 2015 Bravia TVs, and all Samsung television models. Strangely enough, PlayStation Now support for all of these devices will be turned off in August 2017,*except for the 2016 Bravia televisions, which go offline on April 1. Why the latest televisions go offline four months before everyone else hasn’t been explained. When our own Grant Brunner reviewed the service in August of 2014, he came away impressed.

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More like PlayStation Then.

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After a weak showing early in the generation, Sony’s first-party exclusives for the PS4 have been very impressive as of late. Uncharted 4, The Last Guardian, and Gravity Rush 2 have all garnered significant praise in recent months, and the latest title out of Dutch studio Guerrilla Games is another standout exclusive for Sony’s platform. Horizon: Zero Dawn tells a fascinating sci-fi story in an open world that can thoroughly impress on both the base PS4 and the PS4 Pro.

More than anything else, Guerrilla Games is known for creating Killzone — the sci-fi FPS franchise that started its life way back on the PS2. The latest installment of that series had a handful of high points, but it was clear by 2013 that sequel fatigue had set in. Frankly, that’s a large part of why the public unveiling of Horizon at E3 2015 was met with so much excitement. Guerrilla was finally developing something brand new, and it looked incredible.

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For months, computer enthusiasts have chafed for fresh official information on Ryzen, as opposed to the stream of unverified leaks. Today, AMD is releasing detailed product information, pricing, and estimated IPC improvements over Excavator. Hold on to your hats, ladies and gentlemen — things are about to get real interesting in the PC market.
For those of you just tuning in, Ryzen is AMD’s last, best chance to prove it can compete effectively against Intel’s Core i3/i5/i7 product lines. For years, AMD has been stuck trying to compete against Intel’s top-end chips with its Piledriver-based architecture. Ryzen is a new architecture, completely unrelated to AMD’s previous Bulldozer / Piledriver / Steamroller / Excavator product lines. It’s no exaggeration to say that AMD’s future in the PC market depends on this core. Based on what we saw at the Ryzen launch event on Tuesday, that future is in good hands.
For years, AMD has talked about a 40% IPC uplift for its chips compared with Excavator. Today, AMD revealed that it didn’t just meet that goal, it beat it by 12 percentage points. There’s no evidence whatsoever that this 52% uplift is a cherry-picked figure. If anything, it might be somewhat conservative.


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It’s common, in tech enthusiast circles, to conceptualize conflict between companies as a battle or war. This isn’t solely a conceit of journalists — read the comments on any GPU review or game performance debate, and it quickly becomes clear that plenty of enthusiasts themselves view Teams Red and Green locked in an existential conflict. Intel would be Team Blue in this example, though it doesn’t really enter the fray.

There is, however, such a thing as taking a friendly (or unfriendly) debate too far. Last year, two Russian men got into an argument over who made the superior GPU, AMD or Nvidia. The fight ended when Aleksander Trofimov murdered his former friend, Evgeny Lylin in a disagreement over who made the better GPU. I say “former friend” because it’s never made any sense to me to describe this sort of thing as friendly. However close you might have thought you were to someone, you were clearly less close than you thought if they’re willing to shish kebab you over a graphics card.

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The NES Classic Edition was a hot gift over the holidays — Nintendo couldn’t make them fast enough to meet demand. Who would have thought people would be so excited to play the 30 retro games on this box? Well, that wasn’t all buyers were excited about. If you give people interesting new hardware, they’ll start modding it. In the case of the NES Classic Edition, it’s fast becoming the gaming emulator of your dreams.

The NES Classic Edition comes stocked with some of the most popular titles from the original console, but the selection varies a bit by region. In the US, some of the big games include all three Super Mario Bros., Metroid, Castlevania, and The Legend of Zelda. The obvious drawback of this device is that you get the games it comes with and that’s it — no installing new ones. The NES Classic Edition is not designed to have writable memory beyond the game saves. Modders seem to have taken that as a challenge.

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SAN FRANCISCO — At GDC 2017, Nvidia announced its long-expected GTX 1080 Ti. The GPU, which has been rumored since at least the Nvidia Titan X’s unveil, is a potent upgrade compared with Nvidia’s previous top-end consumer card, the GTX 1080.

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The gap between the GTX 1080 Ti and the 1080 is one of the smallest we’ve seen Nvidia field. Like Titan X, the 1080 Ti is a GP102 design that relies on GDDR5X memory to hit its bandwidth targets. It’s a 12 billion transistor part, with 3584 cores, 224 texture units, and 88 ROPS (3584:224:88). That’s eight fewer ROPS than the Titan X. Memory bus width is also slightly lower, at 352-bit instead of the full 384-bits on Titan X. This difference is compensated for with faster RAM — the Titan X uses 10Gbps memory, while the GTX 1080 Ti raises uses memory rated for 11Gbps. “11”, in fact, is something of a theme for this card. It has 11GB of RAM, 11/12 the ROPs of the Titan X, 11Gbps RAM, and 11/12 of the memory bandwidth.

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There’s been good news on the VR front of late, but precious little of it is coming from Oculus. Earlier this week, Sony announced it was closing on one million VR headsets sold since the launch late last year. Sony has moved 915,000 VR units to date, even though we haven’t seen many new VR games launch for the platform (though Resident Evil 7 is a notable exception).

Oculus has been busy these last few months bringing its touch controllers to market, working on a new standalone headset that doesn’t require tethering, and working with developers on new Oculus VR-compatible games. Despite the company’s early position as an industry leader, the last year saw much of Oculus’ pole position drain away, sapped by launch woes, the lack of touch controllers (which HTC’s Vive had), no initial full-room tracking (which again, Vive supported) and consumer blowback over Oculus’ use of DRM. Palmer Luckey himself came under heavy fire for earlier promises to foster an open VR ecosystem followed by attempts to lock content to the Oculus Store.

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The other major launch this week, besides AMD’s Ryzen 7 1800X, was Nintendo’s Switch console. We’ve talked about the platform, its theoretical capabilities, and the games Nintendo has showcased already. But there’s no substitute for hands-on time with the hardware.

Ars Technica, Eurogamer, and Kotaku have all published their reviews of the platform, and they agree on a number of points. As we suspected, the Switch is at its most impressive when it’s operating as a portable. The matte screen is much easier to use outside, and the console maintains a playable frame rate, even in games like Breath of the Wild.

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For the last few months we’ve heard tidbits and hints about Microsoft’s upcoming Game Mode for Windows 10. The new mode, which is part of the Creators Update, is supposed to help some games run modestly faster — and as we suspected, it’s all about tuning system resources to dedicate more game-specific work to the CPU or GPU.

At GDC this week, Microsoft said*Game Mode will dedicate a certain number of CPU cores to game rendering rather than allowing other background tasks to be scheduled concurrently on those chips, according to Ars Technica. An eight-core system, for example, might have six cores dedicated to gaming, with other tasks shunted to the “spare” cores.

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The Legend of Zelda has captivated us for more than three decades now, and this franchise still has the capacity to surprise and delight. With Breath of the Wild, the latest installment, Nintendo has made a clean break from much of the traditions and baggage that comes with the name “Zelda” in favor of a Switch launch title that feels exciting and modern.

We saw the 3DS-exclusive A Link Between Worlds hit in 2013, but we haven’t had a full-fledged console Zelda release since November of 2011 — more than five years ago. The last console Zelda game was on the freaking Wii! Nintendo teased Breath of the Wild as early as 2013, but game-starved Wii U owners were met with delay after delay. Thankfully, it seems to have been well worth the wait.

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According to Nintendo, the Switch‘s sales on Friday and Saturday broke every record at Nintendo for the fastest, best-selling launch ever. Meanwhile, the new Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild set its own records for the bestselling title not included as a pack-in game, beating out even the legendary Super Mario 64.

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Today, Nvidia launched the GTX 1080 Ti ($699), its new highest-end consumer GPU. This release follows a pattern Nvidia established with the GTX 700 series back in 2013 of releasing a new workstation / prosumer GPU at the highest end of the market (the original Titan back then), followed by a cheaper consumer variant some months later. The “Ti” cards have historically been much better values than the Titan family, and we expect to see that trend continue here as well.

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The GTX 1080 Ti is a GP102-based design with 3,584 GPU cores, 224 texture units, and 88 ROPS (3584:224:88). Its base clock is 1480MHz with a 1582MHz boost clock, and it features 11GB of RAM as opposed to the 12GB buffer on the Titan X. Nvidia has stated they expect the GTX 1080 Ti to equal or surpass the Titan X’s performance, making this card a far more cost-efficient choice compared with its $1,200 predecessor.

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With Sony’s PlayStation 4 Pro now shipping, there’s a great deal of speculation around Microsoft’s upcoming Project Scorpio. Microsoft has implied it wants to leapfrog both the Xbox One and the PS4 Pro by a significant margin, but details on how these improvements would impact the existing Xbox One ecosystem have been few and far between.
While Scorpio will have extra bells and whistles for 4K players, the console’s advantages won’t be reserved for them, Windows Central reports. Existing Xbox One games with dynamic resolutions will hold their target resolutions and frame rates more often, even without patches and updates. Given the horsepower Scorpio is supposed to pack relative to the Xbox One, “more often” really ought to be “all the time,” since the new platform is supposedly so much more powerful than its 2013 predecessor, but we’ll have to see how that plays out.