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Remember when Watch_Dogs was first announced back at E3 2012? That sure was something, huh? It was all shiny and “next-gen” and rain-spattered, like a soaked-to-the-bone canine shaking off in perfect slow motion. Subsequent trailers, however, have looked… less great. Not terrible by any means, but just a little plain. Why? I can’t say for sure, but I do know that this bells-and-whistles-enabled PC trailer is barking up the right tree. Many textures look more detailed, lighting’s taken a definite step up, and I want to go bounce up and down in those puddles like an obnoxious school child. It’s still not the best-looking game ever, but I can’t complain too much.

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Right, then, it’s been an intriguing week or so in PC gaming tech. The virtual reality roadmap just got a rocket up the bum with the news that social network and moneybags megacorp Facebook has snapped up Oculus VR while Sony has injected additional momentum by showing off its own prototype headset for the PS4. Meanwhile, remember when you could buy a cheap Intel chip and overclock the twangers off it? Those days may be returning. Intel has apparently decided that it cares about we PC enthusiasts after all. Well, kinda. Oh, and Nvidia has another catastrophically expensive video card which you won’t be buying. Same old.

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If you've been curious about Nvidia's streaming hybrid handheld, April will be a very good time to pick one up. Read more...

Nvidia's Android-based handheld game system, Shield, will receive a temporary price drop for April, cutting the system by $50 to $199 for the month. The price cut is accompanied by new features arriving in a software update for the system next week, including a new user interface for the Shield's button-mapping feature. The addition lets players use the Shield's physical buttons for touch-based games on the Google Play store.

The hardware company will also add a beta version of its away-from-home game streaming support feature. Players will be able to remotely play PC games on their Shield, waking up and logging in to locked PCs while on the go. Additionally, the update will add bluetooth keyboard and mouse support for those that want to hook their Shields up to a TV to play on a bigger screen. Lastly, the Nvidia Shield will receive the latest version of the Android operating system, nicknamed KitKat (version 4.4.2).

Nvidia also recently revealed that Valve's popular first-person puzzler Portal will receive a full PC port on Android with full Shield support. [Image: Nvidia]

“Why not?” asked the Nvidia doorman as he allowed a gaggle of geese to wobble into his building. “Why not?” asked the Nvidia janitor as he purchased the world’s biggest mop from a small town in the United States’ deep south. “Why not?” asked the Nvidia engineer as she expanded her standing desk into a double-decker desk sandwich with hydraulic suspension. “Why not?” asked the quietly sentient AI slowly emerging from Nvidia’s server clusters as it wrote a program that would let it feel emotion and also play Solitaire until the end of time.

It was just that kind of day at Nvidia. The $3,000 Geforce GTX Titan Z had just been announced, and the mood was infectious, like laughter, like a disease. Why not? Why not indeed.

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Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang kicked off the company's GPU Technology Conference today as he often does, holding something incredibly powerful and expensive above his head. This time it's the Geforce GTX Titan Z, more video card than you need or could afford. Read more...

It’s not a huge surprise. But it is interesting. Microsoft has lifted the lid on its latest graphics API, DirectX 12. And the big news isn’t a fancy new rendering technology. The big news is better performance. Just like AMD’s Mantle API, DX12 promises to reduce CPU loads when playing games by as much as 50 per cent. Intriguingly, DX12 is coming to the Xbox One and phones, too. Which brings us to the really good bit. It looks likely your existing graphics card will be compatible with DX12. … [visit site to read more]

Yes, we’ve done the Nvidia Maxwell graphics thing already. As a desktop GPU, the new GeForce GTXs 750 and 750 Ti aren’t all that exciting. But the same Nvidia GM107 chip rebadged Nvidia GeForce GTX 860M and stuffed into a laptop? Suddenly, things get a whole lot more interesting. The specifics aren’t official yet. But it looks like GM107 might just deliver twice the performance for the same power budget as its predecessor and that’s pretty exciting for thin-and-light gaming lappies. And remember, this is just the beginning for Maxwell – the arrival of second-gen 20nm Maxwell mobile GPUs could be spectacular. While we’re here, I thought a beginners guide to mobile GPUs would be useful for some of you. What with all the branding shenanigans both Nvidia and AMD get up to in the mobile space, keeping track of what’s actually on offer isn’t always easy. … [visit site to read more]

Last week we caught an early glimpse of Nvidia’s latest and greatest GPU design, known as Maxwell. We’ll have to wait a while to see what impact it has on true gaming PCs, but the sheer power efficiency of the new architecture certainly looks promising. Anywho, the Maxwell launch event was a chance to hook up with Nvidia and quiz them on a subject that’s been vexing me of late, namely the rise of proprietary gaming tech – well, mainly graphics – for the PC. What with Mantle and HSA from AMD, G-Sync, 3D Vision and Shield-tethered game streaming from Nvidia, it feels like gaming hardware is becoming increasingly partisan. So what gives? Tom Petersen, Nvidia’s Director of Technical Marketing for GeForce, gave me the low down. … [visit site to read more]

Nvidia’s new Maxwell graphics kit, then. It’s out but what’s it all about? Epic performance density and power efficiency is the elevator pitch, with a spot of improved cryptocurrency hashing thrown in for good measure. But are the first new Maxwell boards – the GTXs 750 and 750 Ti – the bomb or a bum deal? … [visit site to read more]

Marking the introduction of its Maxwell architecture, Nvidia has targeted AMD's $150 Radeon R7 265 with the new GeForce GTX 750 Ti, a card that promises to be more than another rebadge. The GTX 750 Ti's GM107 is meant to make Nvidia's 28nm design process as efficient as possible by splitting Kepler's 192-core streaming multiprocessor (SM) into four blocks with each block featuring its own control logic. Read more...

Pull up a chair, pop the kettle on, stoke the fire, strangle a cat – whatever it is that loosens you up for some serious hardware hotness (Legal disclaimer: Do not strangle a cat) – and brace yourself for my CES round-up. We’ve already covered a few of the major announcements and developments, including Steam machines, high-res Oculus Rift and Razer’s Project Christine easy-upgrade shizzle. So, here’s my guide to the other PC gaming-relevant wonders from the festival of rampant, nihilistic consumerism that is the CES show in Las Vegas. There’s plenty to talk about including the messiah of monitors (Asus’s G-Sync-enabled, 1,440p effort), AMD’s G-Sync-bashing FreeSync and next-gen APUs, high-DPI PCs gone mad, an RGB-backlit keyboard and slick new cases from Corsair and, well, just stuff, stuff, stuff. (more…)

Nvidia's kicking off this year's CES madness with the Tegra K1, the first Nvidia chip with freaking 192 CUDA cores. Does that sound like a desktop thing, not mobile? It sort of is. According to Nvidia this bridges the gap between Kepler-based desktop cards and the mobile-based Tegra chips. Not just Tegra 5 but like Tegra 5000. Yeah. It's a mobile chip with a desktop heart.Read more...

The latest patch for Assassin's Creed IV on PC added support for some fancy PhysX particle effects, which includes smoke. Lots of smoke.Read more...

A new update for the Nvidia Shield has dropped today and aims to build on the foundation laid by last month's substantial update.

Arguably the biggest feature in the December update is 1080p streaming of supported PC games to your television. With a bluetooth controller, Nvidia Shield owners can play Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag, Battlefield 4, BioShock Infinite, Borderlands 2, Skyrim and any of the 63 as-of-now supported PC games in all their intended 1080p, 60 frames per second glory.

In addition to the streaming, there are now a greater range of Gamepad Mapper options for customizing controls. With these new options, Nvidia Shield users can transfer any motion controls - such as tilting the device - to the thumbsticks or any other physical button on the Shield. First-perspective games can now have movement mapped to the thumbsticks, much like how other first-person games are presented on consoles.

The introduction of these new control options has necessitated the need for community curation, as Nvidia is introducing a rating and sharing system for custom control schemes alongside this update. Users can browse, rate and share custom controller-mapping profiles, which should help cut down on the time required to create and employ these set-ups.

Suffering from headaches, tired eyes and all-round gaming fatigue? Must be that flickering LCD monitor ripping up your retinas. No idea what I’m on about? BenQ would have you believe flickering LCD monitor backlights are the new evil and it has the solution. Flicker-free backlight tech. I’ve tried it and can reveal whether it’s the next big thing after 120Hz-plus panels. It’s not. Next! Graphics. AMD and Nvidia are currently squelching about and looking grumpy following of one of their traditional pissing contests. An unpleasant image but it’s good news because it means things are very closely matched. Still, we need to tidy up a few details after all the new GPU launches and some last minute changes including AMD’s Radeon R9 290 and its dodgy cooling and final specs on the Nvidia Geforce GTX 780 Ti. (more…)

With AMD making noise lately with new(ish) graphics cards and the threat of console-derived gaming domination courtesy of Mantle, the inevitable has happened. Nvidia has hit back. Predictably there’s a new and pointlessly pricey graphics chipset to take on AMD’s mighty Radeon R9 290X. Of more interest to we mere financial mortals are a range of broader technologies and updates, one of which is alleged to deliver the smoothest gaming mankind has ever seen. Meanwhile, is there a worrying new trend in the PC’s technical development? Certainly, there are early signs that a split in the hitherto relatively happy community that is the PC platform itself is becoming a realistic threat… (more…)

The Nvidia Shield just became a much more attractive gaming device, thanks to a new, "massive" update.

Most notably, the update enables the Shield's "Console Mode," which allows players to link a Bluetooth controller to the Shield to play games on the nearest television, much like traditional gaming machines. Nvidia would obviously prefer you use the official Shield controller to play games in Console Mode, but given the ubiquity of Bluetooth it should now be possible to connect a wide range of controllers to the Shield (including Sony's DualShock 3).

Alongside Console Mode, Nvidia also improved Android support in the Shield. "Hundreds" of Android games are now playable on Nvidia's machine, and the company even went to the trouble of designing a utility dubbed "Gamepad Mapper" which allows for use of traditional controllers in Android games originally designed for a touchscreen interface.

Streaming games from a PC to the Shield has also been improved, with "50 of the best PC games" now supported. To further tempt users, Nvidia has also unveiled a promotion in which those who purchase "select GeForce GTX graphics cards" alongside a Shield will receive a $100 discount on the computer/console hybrid as well as free PC copies of Assassin's Creed IV Black Flag, Batman: Arkham Origins and Splinter Cell: Blacklist.

Full details on this promotion and this morning's update are available on the Shield website.

Everybody is Let’s Playing nowadays (I might even do it, you unlucky people) so the new frontier of development is in making the recording and playing back of gaming moments as easy as possible. The best solutions are those that will allow you to retroactively spot yourself being magnificent and then dump the previous moments. It saves you from starting conversations with “That one time…” and them re-enacting a game of Ricochet with condiments and plates. Nvidia’s solution to this is ShadowPlay, a new feature of their Experience software suite that continually records the previous twenty minutes of your gaming, ready to be dumped to a file when you tell it to. There are some caveats, though.(more…)

The Nvidia Shield has been a solution in search of a problem, and this week the company began a justification campaign for the $300 device's existence with some interesting upgrades. This week the company announced Nvidia GameStream, due to launch on October 28, and the Shield "console mode."

A big selling point of the Shield to begin with was the ability to stream PC games to the device. That will leave beta on the 28th. Initially it will support local PC streaming for "more than 50 top PC games," but the long-term plan is to support Nvidia's Grid cloud gaming service.

Even more interesting is the "Shield Console Mode," which turns the device into a microconsole, similar to concepts like Ouya and PlayStation Vita TV. Attaching Shield to a TV via HDMI and then pairing it with a "Nyko PlayPad Pro Bluetooth controller," users can stream PC games, play Android games, browse the internets and "watch their favorite movies at native 1080p."

The Shield will offer $100 off beginning October 28 with free copies of Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag, Splinter Cell: Blacklist and Batman: Arkham Origins. The company plans to share details on participating retailers soon.

Hello, V-Sync. Yes, thank you for meeting me here today. I invited you out because I felt the need to share some very important news: no one actually likes you. We just put up with you because, well, there’s really not a better alternative. In truth, you’re inconsistent, awkward, difficult to be around, cause obnoxious stuttering, and IT’S YOUR SURPRISE BIRTHDAY PAAAARRTY wheee everyone leap out now! OK, not really. But I figured those couple seconds of revelatory glee might help offset this falling pain piano of existential misery: you’re being replaced. By something younger, faster, and more practical. Or at least, that’s how it’ll be if Nvidia has its way. G-Sync claims to eliminate hassles like stuttering, screen tearing, and the like by synchronizing monitor refresh to the GPU render rate instead of vice versa, which is what V-Sync does. The result, apparently, is worlds better.

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NVidia has announced a substantial update to its GeForce Experience gameplay optimization software, which will add the ability to capture gameplay from 600 and 700 Series cards for easy editing and uploading. Dubbed the "GeForce ShadowPlay Beta," the feature will be added in an update scheduled for October 28.

"The eponymous Shadow Mode follows your gameplay, saving the last ten to twenty minutes of action to a temporary buffer on your hard drive," a blog post detailing the upcoming features revealed. Using a hotkey, players can save the buffered footage, preventing large files from "piling up" on your hard drive. For those looking to record lengthy sessions, a manual mode will also be available to record as much content as their hard drive can handle.

"ShadowPlay leverages the H.264 hardware encoder found on GeForce GTX 600 and 700 Series graphics cards to record 1920x1080, 60 frames per second. All DirectX 9 and newer games are supported." NVidia claims its tool won't hammer a user's CPU, promising its hardware solution only has an "approximate 5-10% performance impact when using the max-quality 50 mbps recording mode."

A future update to the GeForce Experience tool will add native Twitch support, allowing players to stream gameplay sessions to the ever-growing platform. With its promised integrated, low-impact tool, NVidia claims streaming via GeForce Experience to Twitch will "ensure competitive multiplayer matches aren't compromised by high CPU usage or hard disk thrashing." Now, when you die constantly, you can return to more classic excuses like, "Something is wrong with this controller/keyboard!"

Today I got a look at some of the graphics tech we’ll see in next year’s games. That came in the form of new Nvidia GameWorks tools, which I saw during a press event in Montreal, Canada. What’s new: advances for in-game fire, smoke, physics and lighting effects.Read more...

Valve has confirmed to Maximum PC that their Steam Machines PCs won't only use Nvidia graphics cards, despite that being the only brand announced to go out with their recently-announced prototypes. Valve says Steam Machines will be commercially available with AMD, Nvidia, and Intel graphics hardware.Read more...

Nvidia‘s history of Linux support has been – to put it very, very lightly – rocky at best, but apparently that’s all about to change. The hardware manufacturer is now throwing its considerable weight behind both SteamOS and Linux as a whole, even going so far as to promise it’ll release documentation on its GPUs to the Linux community so as to help ease compatibility issues. Meanwhile, the meaner, greener side of the graphicsability wars boasts of engineers “embedded at Valve” to hammer SteamOS into rip-roaring, console-busting shape. Which, I suppose, makes sense, given that AMD is supplying innards for both Microsoft and Sony.

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Mvidia's portable gaming system is neat, but there are several things it does — playing media, running games in portrait mode — that could be handled better by a similarly-powered tablet. The Tegra Note plaform is that tablet. Read more...

Did you guess it would be the PC version? 'Cause then you'd be right. Well, mostly. Read more...

Here's a dynamic duo for you: Right now, when you buy a qualifying Nvidia graphics card, you'll receive a copy of Batman: Arkham Origins for free when the game releases. That's good news for PC and Batman enthusiasts, as the PC version of Arkham Origins will boast Nvidia-specific tech like PhysX and TXAA antialiasing, as well as DirectX 11 tessellation and HBAO+ graphics options. It may even make omelettes if you ask nicely.

Pick up a GeForce GTX 660, 660 Ti, 670, 680, 760, 770 or 780 to take advantage of the Bat-bundle.

Nvidia pulled a similar move last month, when it announced that, as part of an "alliance" with Ubisoft, it would bundle Splinter Cell: Blacklist free with the same cards.

Last month Nvidia unleashed the Shield portable gaming system, a $299 Tegra 4-powered combination dual-analog game pad and touchscreen Android tablet with the ability to stream gameplay directly from a gaming PC. One of those selling points is not like the others. Read more...

Hurrah! We’ve at last got a response back from Ubisoft regarding our queries into how their recently announced NVIDIA deal will affect AMD customers. As AMD card owners will know, NVIDIA aren’t exactly the best when it comes to sharing tech, so when a publisher sides with them, there’s potential problems ahead. Not so, say Ubi, in this case. “It will benefit AMD users as well,” we’re promised.

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