Game Tech News

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.


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.




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.



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.



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.


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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