Game Tech News

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.



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.



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.