Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Nvidia’s Shield is technically an Android-based device, but a) what kind of mighty android machine overlord needs a shield and b) we’re a PC gaming website. So then, why am I posting about this rare breed of land-dwelling game clam? Well, because it flawlessly streams just about any PC game you can throw at it – or at least, it will once that feature leaves beta a couple months after launch. Do you feel like an itsy bitsy screen, infinitely twiddle-able thumbsticks, and the ability to play anywhere in the whole wide worrrrrrrrrrrld (as long as your PC is, er, pretty close by) will greatly enhance your experience?  Then stream your eyeballs past the break for details.

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It feels like it was only, ooh, 1 month and 24 days since we last risked our collective sanity. We stared into the cold, shark-like eyes of the technological advancement of NvIdIa’S FaceWorks and lived. But at what cost? Back then, we were given a peep into the future of GraphicsFace with Digital Ira, a sadly uninteractive demonstration of what gamefaces will be like in the future. It looked impressive, but with the caveat that it was shown on stage and running on a Titan, Nvidia’s mahoosive card of graphics. Well the tech monolith has just released the demonstration for everyone to play with. If you fancy making a high-fidelity head gurn, then your fetish is well catered for.
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I feel like I should apologise for the headline but Nvidia call their middleware physics engine PhysX, for crying out loud. ‘Making a splash’ is almost Nabokovian in comparison. You may recall recent advances in convincing/crazed coiffures and I care about that about as much as I care about the latest floppy-fringed hair fashions in the real world. Not a jot. Fluid physics though? Ever since the invention of physics, which was sometime just before I balanced bricks on a plank to create a see-saw bridge in Half Life 2, I’ve been waiting for a game with proper water. The latest PhysX tech demo got my juices flowing and you can see it below.

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Don’t sling your old CPU on eBay just yet. Too many Rumsfeldian known unknowns remain, never mind the unknown unknowns. But the known knowns suggest Intel is bringing back at least a slither of overclocking action to its budget CPUs. It’s arrives with the incoming and highly imminent Haswell generation of Intel chips and it might help restore a little fun to the budget CPU market, not to mention a little faith in Intel. Next up, local game streaming. Seems like a super idea to me. So, I’d like to know, well, what you’d like to know about streaming. Then I’ll get some answers for you. Meanwhile, game bundles or bagging free games when you buy PC components. Do you care? I’ve also had a play with the latest bonkers-wide 21:9-aspect PC monitors… Read the rest of this entry »

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH

Also, wow. NVIDIA aren’t the only ones doing remarkable things with videogame faces – Activision have their own take on a very similar real-time rendering concept – and indeed using the same bald, parfait-obsessed character. This is apparently all done on current hardare – a GeForce 680 can muster it at 120FPS, they say, although obviously that’s without anything else being rendered. More impressively, Activision R&D are demonstrating this face-sim at GDC, using a two-year-old laptop, whereas NVIDIA talked about their own tech needing a GeForce Titan. I don’t own a GeForce Titan. I might have mentioned that once or twice.

If you aren’t at the show, you can watch this surprising video. I should warn you that the phrase ‘frozen fruit’ may take on faintly nightmarish associations for the rest of your natural life.
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Faces are everywhere in games. NVIDIA noticed this and has been on a 20-year odyssey to make faces more facey and less unfacey (while making boobs less booby, if you’ll remember the elf-lady Dawn). Every few years they push out more facey and less unfacey face tech and make it gurn for our fetishistic graphicsface pleasure. Last night at NVIDIA’s GPU Technology Conference, NVIDIA founder Jen-Hsun Huang showed off Face Works, the latest iteration. Want to see how less unfacey games faces can be?

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NVidia have written a little apology note to all suffering with Tomb Raider graphics issues. Although I’ve yet to receive chocolates. I mentioned in yesterday’s Tomb Raider review that I had some issues with running the game on prettier graphics, and it seems I’m not alone. Apart from the silly hair mode reducing NVidia cards to jelly, I had peculiar problems with the OSD occasionally causing the game to judder, and couldn’t play above the normal settings. Extraordinarily, as spotted by Joystiq, this is because for some reason NVidia didn’t receive final code of the game until the weekend before release, so didn’t have a chance to create an update to accommodate it all.

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While the next round of consoles wait in the wings, potentially setting the general game graphics bar higher even if, as rumour has it, their actual hardware lags behind top-end PCs, NVIDIA’s just done a new thing to help sew up the PC’s status as Top Pixel Dog. If there’s to be similar from ATI we don’t know much about it yet, other than it has the rather pretty codename “Sea Islands” and it’s not due any time soon, but we’ll shout once we know more.

GeForce GTX Titan is the hilarious name of NVIDIA’s new flagship card, it has been ripped from the heart of an IRL supercomputer (sort of), and £827 is its terrifying pricetag.
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Hey tiny ArmA soldier man who’s tiny now, something’s different about you. Something tremendous, but in a comparatively puny package. But what– sorry, WHAT COULD IT BE. Oh, wait, you’re the one who should be shouting to compensate for your newly diminutive stature? Not me? Right, I always get that mixed up. Anyway, I guess I’m just going to give up on guessing now– wait! I figured it out! I’ve become a giant. Now all will cower before me and write melodious odes to my unkempt toenails. Or I suppose Bohemia could be downsizing and XCOM-ifying ArmA’s brand of modern military simulation for Nvidia’s Project Shield gizmo, but no, that’d just be crazy.

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As I awaken from my Christmas hibernation, I awake blinking in confusion at a world that appears to be announcing a new Game & Watch device. NVidia have declared they are releasing a handheld gaming system known as Project Shield, for Summer this year. And it looks… well…

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