Game Tech News

With the official launch of the PS4 Pro less than a week away, we’ve started to hear how developers will use the increased horsepower available to improve existing titles. Sony has released a list of all the games that’ll formally support the PS4 Pro at launch, but we’ve got some specific information about how indie hit The Witness and the samurai-themed title Nioh will change when the improved PS4 hits store shelves. The Witness’ lead designer, Jonathan Blow, had already told fans to expect HDR support and that 4K (or 4K scaling) would be available without sacrificing frame rates, but now we know more about the specifics of the title.

The Witness will offer several options (HDR will be available in all cases, if you have an HDR-capable television):
If you own a PS4 Pro and connect it to a 1080p television, The Witness will render at 1080p at 60 FPS with 4x MSAA. The original version of the game ran at 900p and 2x MSAA, though it also had a 60 FPS target frame rate. That’s a significant upgrade from the PS4 version, both in terms of render target and overall MSAA level, and the difference between the two should be fairly easy to see.

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Earlier this year, we covered the story of the fan-created legacy World of Warcraft server, Nostalrius. Nostalrius was a so-called “classic” server that emulates World of Warcraft before its first expansion, The Burning Crusade, ever launched. These efforts have often been shut down by Blizzard when they gained enough momentum to be considered significant, and Nostalrius was no exception.

What was surprising was the initial engagement Blizzard offered. The Nostalrius team was invited to Blizzard HQ and had the opportunity to sit down with Mike Morhaime and the other WoW developers to talk about the Nostalrius project, the difficulty of creating legacy servers (these are servers dedicated to a previous iteration of the game), and whether or not there was any path forward for the project from there.


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Earlier this year, Google’s AlphaGo AI successfully beat world-class champion Go player Lee Se-dol in four games out of five. This was a significant milestone, thanks to the sheer number of positions that are possible within the game, and the difficulty of creating an AI that could efficiently evaluate them before the heat death of the universe. Now, Blizzard is teaming up with Google to create a next-generation AI capable of playing an actual computer game: Starcraft II.

At first glance, this might not seem to make much sense. After all, playing against an “AI” has been a feature of computer games for decades, in everything from first person shooters to RPGs, to chess simulators. The difference between game AI and the kind of AI Google is developing is simple: Most of what we call artificial intelligence in gaming is remarkably bereft of anything resembling intelligence. In many titles, increasing the difficulty level simply gives the computer player more resources, faster build times, inside information about player activities, or loosens constraints on how many actions the CPU can perform simultaneously. It turns the bots into overpowered thugs, but doesn’t really make them better at what they do.



Game AI isn’t really what you’d call “intelligent,” and when it breaks, the results can be hilarious

Game AI typically makes extensive use of scripts to determine how the computer should respond to player activities (we know Starcraft’s AI does this because it has actually been studied in a great deal of depth). At the most basic level, this consists of a build order for units and buildings, and some rules for how the computer should respond to various scenarios. In order to seem even somewhat realistic, a game AI has to be capable of responding differently to an early rush versus an expansionistic player who builds a second base, versus a player who turtles up and plays defensively. In an RPG, a shopkeeper might move around his store unless he notices you stealing something, at which point a new script will govern his responses to the player.



An example of AI scripting in Age of Kings

Game AI, therefore, is largely an illusion, built on scripts and carefully programmed conditions. One critical difference between game AI and the type of AI that DeepMind and Blizzard want to build is that game AI doesn’t really learn. It may respond to your carrier rush by building void rays, or counter your siege tanks with a zergling rush. But the game isn’t actually learning anything at all; it’s just reacting to conditions. Once you quit the match the computer doesn’t remember anything about your play, and it won’t make adjustments to its own behavior based on who it’s facing.

The AI that Google and Blizzard want to build would be capable of learning, adapting, and even teaching new players the ropes of the game in ways far beyond anything contemplated by current titles. It’ll still be important to constrain the AI in ways that allow for humans to win, since games like Starcraft are (to a computer) basically just giant math problems, and an unconstrained CPU opponent can micro at speeds that would make the best Korean players on Earth weep.

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On November 8, 2006, Nvidia officially launched its first unified shader architecture and first DirectX 10-compatible GPU, the G80. The new chip debuted in two new cards, the $599 GeForce 8800 GTX and the $449 GeForce 8800 GTS. Today, the 8800 GTX’s specs seem modest, even low-end, with 128 shader cores, 32 texture mapping units, and 24 Render Outputs (ROPs), backed by 768MB of RAM. But back in 2006, the G80 was a titan. It swept both Nvidia’s previous GTX 7xx generation and ATI’s Radeon X19xx series completely off the table, even in games where Team Red had previously enjoyed a significant performance advantage.

But the G80 didn’t just rewrite performance headlines — it redefined what GPUs were, and what they were capable of.
For this retrospective, we spoke with two Nvidia engineers who did a great deal of work on G80: Jonah Alben, Senior VP of GPU Engineering, and John Danskin, VP of GPU Architecture. Before we dive in, however, we want to give a bit of context on what made G80 so different from what came before. Beginning with the GeForce 3 and Radeon 8500 in 2001, both ATI and Nvidia cards could execute small programs via specialized, programmable vertex and pixel shaders. Nvidia’s last desktop architecture to use this approach was the G71, released on March 9, 2006. It looked like this:



G71 block diagram.

In this diagram, the vertex shaders are the eight dedicated blocks at the top, above the “Cull / Clip / Setup” section. The 24 pixel shaders are the large group of six blocks in the middle of the diagram, where each block corresponds to four pixel pipelines (24 pixel shaders, total). If you aren’t familiar with how pre-unified shader GPUs were built, this diagram probably looks a bit odd. G80, in contrast, is rather more familiar:



Nvidia’s GTX 8800 family were the first consumer graphics cards to swap dedicated pixel and vertex shaders for a wide array of simpler stream processors (SPs, later referred to as CUDA cores). While previous GPUs were vector processors that could operate concurrently on the red, green, blue, and alpha color components of a single pixel, Nvidia designed the G80 as a scalar processor, in which each streaming processor handled one color component. At a high level, Nvidia had switched from a GPU architecture with dedicated hardware for specific types of shader programs to an array of relatively simple cores that could be programmed to perform whatever types of shader calculations the application required at that particular moment.

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Just before Bethesda re-released Skyrim: Buggy Pretty Version, the company*announced a new change to its review program — and by “new change,” we mean “a cowardly attempt to avoid being buried by complaints that might jeopardize sales.” Bethesda argued it wanted everyone in the game industry to “experience [its]*games at the same time,” which is a ridiculous rationale with which to justify not telling people whether*a single-player game is amazing before they can purchase it themselves. It does, however, make perfect sense if you don’t want people to cancel preorders for a title that lands with the grace of a dead sperm whale flung out of a C-130 at 15,000 feet.

That’s the situation we find ourselves in with Dishonored 2, a game that’s being praised for its mechanics, its gameplay, and its story — on consoles. On PCs, frame rate stutters, crashes, and other problems are killing gamer opinion. Reviewers who have the console version have praised it to the heavens, while reviewers with the PC version have been reporting dropped frame rates to the point that it’s making some people seasick, even on advanced rigs. Pascal GPUs like the GTX 1080 can’t hold a stable frame rate, even with detail levels set to medium at 1920×1080, while reviewers with AMD solutions are reporting feeling seasick if they increase detail levels above Medium, even with GPUs like the R9 Nano.

Full disclosure: I’m a huge Dishonored fan. While the plot of the first game is a bit predictable, the characterization of the world and its people are excellent. There’s a rich backstory to explore, and the game world adjusts to how you complete missions. Decisions you make in early chapters impact how the game plays out and ends, and there are near-infinite ways to complete your objectives thanks to a robust set of skills and abilities and some evil room for experimentation. Not since Half Life 2’s Gravity Gun have a I seen a game that allowed for so much fiendish delight — Dishonored’s various abilities let you fire a crossbow bolt at your target, pause time, attach a deadly razor trap to it, and then watch as the combined bolt + spring razor wreak havoc upon impact. You can even put traps on rats that will then be triggered if the rat swarm approaches an enemy.



The art and visuals have been updated, while clearly recalling Dishonored’s distinctive style.

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Given the massive investment in VR, it was only a matter of time before someone figured out how to get rid of one of its biggest limitations — the tethering cord. Whether you’re using an HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, or one of their lesser-known competitors, they all rely on a cable to relay high-resolution video, and sometimes other information, in real time. Startup TPCAST is changing that, with a $220 wireless accessory that will work with the HTC Vive when it ships early next year.

TPCAST looks good in the demo



One of the biggest problems with using existing high-performance wireless solutions with VR headsets is that the user is typically in constant motion. That means a head or hand sometimes blocks the receiver. The performance needed to stream the two HD video streams needed for VR typically means high-frequency signals, which are particularly susceptible to losing line of sight.

In other applications, intermittent delays are acceptable. But in VR, every frame needs to be delivered in a few milliseconds; typically a total system lag time of 11 milliseconds is the goal. One way the TPCAST device tries to minimize this problem is by including the small receiver clip in*the top headband of the Vive headset, so that it’s minimally affected by the user turning around.

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Every VR demo on a PC I’ve seen begins with someone apologizing for the tether. At least with hosted demos, there is someone to manage the cord. Once you set up your own system, you’re left to trip over it shortly after you immerse yourself in your favorite VR game. Currently, the only way around having a tether is by using an expensive, special-purpose, backpack VR PC. Those aren’t all that much fun, either. Researchers at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) aim to fix the problem by letting you cut the cord. By harnessing millimeter waves (mmWaves) along with a programmable reflector called MoVR, they expect to be able to provide enough two-way bandwidth to enable high-quality VR experiences without wires.

High-performance VR is hampered by the need for a tether



High-end VR headsets like the Vive and Oculus Rift feature two HD or better displays. That means they need to be fed data at nearly 6Gbps, with very-low latency. This has to happen while the user is moving around as they play a game or go through a VR experience. Today, that is almost always achieved by using a high-quality HDMI cable from the PC to the headset. In commercial settings it may be partially suspended from above, to stay off the floor. But for most consumers it’s snaked across the floor, where it can easily be run over by a chair, tripped on, or tangled up.

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Last week, Sony unleashed the PS4 Pro — a mid-generation update that’s focused on serving the emerging 4K market. It’s quite a bit more powerful than the base PS4, and the one-two punch of HDR and a high-res output are sincerely impressive for a $400 box. We know that some releases actually deliver native 4K, other games will use the ingenious checkerboard rendering method to get close to 4K, and many titles won’t take advantage of the extra power at all. Those scenarios are easy enough to understand, but what about everything else? Is it even worth buying without a UHD TV?

We wanted to know how updated games look at 1080p, how PSVR benefits from a little extra juice, and how well the new hardware handles streaming and video capture. We spent about a week with our launch unit, kicked all the tires, and here’s what we saw.


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Ever since Nintendo announced the Switch, there have been questions about the platform’s launch lineup, especially after we discovered all of the footage displayed in the launch trailer was inserted in post-production. A new set of rumors about the platform suggests it’ll launch with a new Super Mario Bros, possibly a new Splatoon (it’s not clear yet if this will be a brand-new game, a port of the Wii U version, or something in-between), and maybe Skyrim, but Bethesda isn’t saying one way or the other yet. Earlier information suggested Nintendo would push The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild out for the Switch’s launch, but follow-up reports have suggested the game needs more localization and bug-fixing work and may not arrive until summer. Nintendo has no experience with this kind of open-world title, so we aren’t surprised to see the company may need some extra time to finish it.

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Note: Because I didn’t play through the majority of Mists of Pandaria or Warlords of Draenor, this review is best treated as a comprehensive update on how WoW has evolved over the past four years rather than a strict list of changes introduced solely in Legion.

World of Warcraft launched almost exactly 12 years ago, on November 23, 2004. I played World of Warcraft for roughly seven months before it launched, as part of the closed beta program, and then from its 2004 debut until 2012. I quit not long after the Mists of Pandaria expansion shipped and was gone until August, 2016 (I wrote a separate story detailing what it was like to come back to the game after so long away). World of Warcraft: Legion is proof that a 12-year-old game can still find ways to innovate and improve itself, and it’s got the strongest storyline of any previous entry.

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