Game Tech News

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.


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.”



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.



“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%.


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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