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NVIDIA's got a Shield 2 in the works with a next-gen Tegra heart, and why G-Sync is a big deal
At least according to NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang. NVIDIA employees filled Montreal Marriott's Salle de Bal 1,000-person capacity basement ballroom late last week, where Huang announced a hat-trick of major news for the company -- Gamestream, G-Sync, and the new GTX 780 Ti GPU -- to raucous applause. The highlight of the three, and the one that Huang emphasized by flying in a trio of game industry legends, is G-Sync. The module will arrive built into gaming monitors starting early next year, and it aims to solve the issues of tearing, stutter, and lag. The aforementioned trio of legends -- Oculus' John Carmack, Epic's Tim Sweeney, and EA DICE's Johan Andersson -- vouched for G-Sync, but we were lucky enough to grab Huang for a quick followup interview post-presentation. Beyond discussing last week's big announcements, Huang spoke to Project Logan (aka: the next Tegra chip) and NVIDIA Shield 2 (which may be coming sooner than you'd think); Huang told us he'd love to see Logan powering the next version of Shield as representative hardware ahead of anything else. Head below the break for the full video.
Hands-on with NVIDIA's Gamestream, the evolution of Shield's PC streaming tech (video)
NVIDIA Shield's PC streaming tech is impressive, but NVIDIA's Gamestream tech is even more impressive: employing the Shield's HDMI-out port, games can not only be streamed to the Shield, but also to your living room TV. The functionality goes live on October 28th and officially takes PC streaming on Shield from beta to final. It'll add "Console Mode" as well, which enables control of the Shield's entire OS on your TV screen via connected Bluetooth controller. Though gaming is, at launch, limited to 720p, NVIDIA says 1080p is on the way -- you'll of course need a pretty hefty GPU to make that happen. After today's announce of Gamestream, we had a chance to sit down and try it out with a Falcon Northwest Tiki PC and a Nyko wireless controller, playing Borderlands 2. As you'll see in the video below the break, streaming and controlling the Shield via Bluetooth controller is a snap -- we're actually quite looking forward to using a DualShock 3 with the Shield for controlling our favorite PC games.
Oculus Rift's John Carmack says a new Rift dev kit is in the works, sees consumer model running Android (video)
Oculus Rift's new Chief Technology Officer John Carmack says a new Oculus Rift dev kit is in the works and will arrive in developers' hands before the retail unit ships some time next year. In an interview with Engadget this morning, Carmack also spelled out what he sees as the future of the Rift's consumer model: an Android-powered standalone headset powered by an SoC. "The way I believe it's going to play out is you will eventually have a head-mounted display that probably runs Android, as a standalone system, that has a system-on-a-chip that's basically like what you have in mobile phones," Carmack said. Echoing company founder Palmer Luckey, Carmack said that the Rift was born from mobile technology's constant push forward, bringing down the price of Rift's components and making it accessible to consumers. He expects mobile tech to reach 4K resolution in the not-so-distant future, making future models of the Rift much sharper visually. The bigger issue, though, is head-tracking -- something Carmack's actively concerned with and working to solve ahead of a retail release. "A lot of the work at Oculus has gone into working out better position tracking," he told us. "The tracking side is something that there hasn't been as much of a push for and we're frantically working on a lot of that, because that is one of the other really large issues. But we expect that the next developer kit will have higher resolution and position tracking addressing some of these significant issues." As for how the Rift consumer version will launch, that's another question altogether -- he said that there are several camps within Oculus arguing for a retail release vs. direct-to-consumers vs. other options. Head below the break for the full video interview with much more from one of gaming's most famous faces.
NVIDIA reveals the GTX 780 Ti, a new 'high-end enthusiast' GPU
NVIDIA's news day apparently isn't over just yet, as the company just revealed a new graphics card: the NVIDIA GTX 780 Ti. It's apparently hitting retail shelves this November, and it's just one step below the company's super high-end GPU, the Titan. CEO Jen-Hsun Huang didn't offer many specifics on the new graphics card, instead choosing to leave it to reviewers who are apparently receiving units any day now. We're gonna go ahead and call it safe to assume that this is a pretty powerful little card, but we'll get some hands-on time in the coming hours with any luck! Zach Honig contributed to this report.
NVIDIA's G-Sync is a module for gaming monitors to alleviate screen tearing (update: video demo!)
NVIDIA head Jen-Hsun Huang revealed G-Sync this morning, a module for gaming monitors that helps alleviate screen tearing and skipping issues. A variety of display companies are already on board, including ASUS, BenQ, Philips and ViewSonic. Huang said the module kills stutter entirely, pushes down lag and kills tearing. The monitors with G-Sync look the same as a normal display, as the module is built into the rear (as seen above). We're told by NVIDIA's Ujesh Desai that the module won't make new monitors much more expensive, and the module works with GPUs that have Kepler architecture (so the GTX 660 and up). G-Sync monitors will be available starting in Q1 2014. "This eliminates the penalty for the drop in frame rate," Epic's Mark Rein said of the module. "The whole Rein family will be getting new monitors this year," he said with a laugh. A quick demo we were shown of a V-Sync'd monitor versus one with G-Sync did what NVIDIA promised: screen tearing was eliminated and lag was imperceptible. We'll have a video of NVIDIA's new G-Sync module coming up shortly -- stay tuned! Update: We've added a hands-on demo with G-Sync. It looked fantastic in person, but due to the limitations of our camera equipment, some of the improvements may not be apparent in our video. Find that demo just after the break.
NVIDIA's GeForce Experience will stream directly to Twitch, Shadowplay coming on October 28th
NVIDIA's GeForce Experience software is getting an update by the end of the year that'll add Twitch streaming directly from the application. The company says that Shadowplay, its DVR-esque service that automatically captures the last 20 minutes of gameplay video, will arrive on October 28th in beta. A live demo was shown of Ubisoft's Splinter Cell: Blacklist, streamed directly out and shown running natively on via GeForce Experience on a desktop. It looks like we're getting demos of all of today's NVIDIA announcements in the coming hours, so stay tuned! Zach Honig contributed to this report.
NVIDIA reveals Gamestream, a game streaming initiative powered by NVIDIA GPUs
NVIDIA announced Gamestream this morning, an initiative aimed at pairing the company's GPUs with streaming gaming via its Shield handheld game console. Company head Jen-Hsun Huang says the service takes NVIDIA's GeForce Experience software and pairs it with NVIDIA GPUs and the Shield to push streaming gaming to the living room. Huang said Gamestream's first stop is a re-branding of the Shield's streaming tech -- sounds like that PC streaming tech on Shield is coming out of beta. But Huang's not stopping there: he pulled NVIDIA's Ujesh Desai on-stage, and he showed Shield powering PC game streaming on a nearby LG 4K television. "What makes Gamestream special is the low-latency of it," Huang said. Desai used a Nyko wireless controller that he paired via Bluetooth with the Shield, and the Shield's Android OS ran on the television. Apparently the computer that powered the demo of Batman: Arkham Origins -- an unreleased WB game demoed via Steam's Big Picture Mode on Shield -- runs NVIDIA's $1,000 Titan GPU. The game sure looked snazzy running on a big 4K television, though we couldn't help but notice the same hitching issues with streaming that we encounter at home with our review Shield. Of course, the streaming will work on any old TV that has an HDMI-in. The Shield connected to the TV via its HDMI-out port -- something that previously made little sense. Huang said the game console mode of Shield will arrive in the coming months, as well as the update to GeForce Experience that enables streaming to televisions via Shield. Zach Honig contributed to this report.
