Gadgetory

the fractal design define our for case gets featured on the when show bill blogs the week section more than any other case click now to learn more about it alright guys so it's sort of day two it's actually still kind of day one but I'm splitting up the vlog a little bit just because things are happening or they're not happening anyway we came back very recently from the pretty underwhelming Ubisoft tour I think everyone's expectations were a little bit higher given how much hype there was but basically we walked through a building which was cool you know seeing a game dev studio where lots of people were working at desks and then we we saw that like kind of a cool like video about how they do some motion capture stuff but no real details and then and then we left so it was it was pretty short so that was a little bit disappointing but I'm on my way to a hockey game now so hopefully that will be much much more entertaining gonna go see some Habs action and a boom boom yeah I'm gonna boo them alright so we're going to the game now they split up me and this guy on account of he can get kind of rowdy and we're liable to end up scrapping and son really really that's it you're gonna assume that you'd be beating me up you won't even call it a fight you're gonna call it a beat-down bully basically bully you're not even that much taller than you you've got maybe 25 pounds on me yeah maybe maybe everybody six inches taller than me no so this is the this is the dessert tray so it's like the largest carrot cake ever oh oh I almost got in the way heart attack yeah Oh someone finally got the if the chocolate paradise is that right the last one this is the second Chuck oh that's the second one okay because I'm gonna need a piece of that one can I get one of those okay yes please oh we're out of plates so I'm back after the hockey game that was fun I might have lost my voice a little bit but not too bad what I heard through the grapevine is that there's something crazy going down tomorrow so without further ado I'm gonna go edit some video there's my computer get some sleep and hopefully we're gonna have some really exciting stuff to show you in just a moment here after I sleep I was up late last night editing and uploading and then trolling slick on Twitch so I'm pretty tired hopefully I get a reasonably good seed I'm gonna be I'm gonna be two minutes late for breakfast so I'm ready I'm ready for something crazy to happen as like tech press kits I do want a good seat though so so this much is true I'm gonna go for this one yeah this one right here things have changed a fair bit in here since yesterday so there's a bunch of prodigy based gaming rigs all over the sides here so I guess they're gonna be demoing something with those presumably they're like all around the back there we go there's people manning the station's presumably we should see what happens if we try to touch one just just for fun just for fun let's try and like play with one I can use this already right I don't have to wait until after the presentation yes okay so so as predicted I am not allowed to use it yet okay so as promised guys what we saw down here today was absolutely incredible so yesterday yeah they had flex so that was different types of physics calculations interacting with each other they showed us the new global illumination techniques which are outstanding and really can be total game changers because it's taking away the individual nitpick enos of programming lighting and instead just giving you a system that just works kind of on its own they've got flame works which I wasn't as sold on the demo for that one it's dynamic fire i'm the unfortunately the demo that they did was a dragon breathing fire which is very different from a more natural fire so i would have liked to see a demo that included that as well but you know well we'll wait for the wait for that but today what they showed off was absolutely crazy so first up was game streams so game stream is basically an evolution of what we already saw with shield so in your home you can already take a kepler GeForce graphics card equipped PC and then you can stream your PC games to Nvidia shield in 720p over Wi-Fi now we've seen this implemented in other ways so at PAX we saw Nvidia grid which is their cloud-based centralized computing server time machine intended for cloud-based gaming and we saw that streaming to shield wirelessly so you look at that technology and you go ok well this is going somewhere well game stream is where it's going so they've got a 4k TV demo that they did earlier on in the in the presentation where they had a shield being used as a game console effectively so you close it it goes into console mode and then you can stream to your shield from your PC you can use a third-party controller with shield rather than just relying on the controller that's built into it through bluetooth and they've got validated controllers that are supposed to be very low latency and then you can either through a wired connection stream @ 1080p or through a wireless connection stream at 720p this you guys is what I'm talking about this is why the game console as we know it doesn't really need to exist anymore particularly for PC gamers who already have a decent PC because you can centralize your computing power in one place and then you can use it on something like a shield around the house or you can use it on your TV and you only need one device for that now so that is absolutely fantastic to me so you couple that with the game bundles that was another thing that they announced today but it was on NVIDIA comm their GeForce talk on pardon me yesterday so they're giving $100 off a shield with 77078 II and Titan and presumably 780ti which they also announced today and then they're also giving you three games so the Splinter Cell blacklist it was Batman Arkham origins and oh I feel like I'm forgetting the most important thing anyway sorry my brains kind of going a mile a minute here anyway and then on lower-end GPUs I think 660 enough but don't put me on that you get $50 off a shield so they want you to do this game streaming thing where you've got a powerful PC and then you're able to use it in other ways next up is shadow play so they're announcing shadow play again sort of I guess availability is probably coming soon the build that they were running here was a beta and they've announced new functionality for Shadow plays so aside from recording the last 20 minutes of your gameplay and allowing you to save that on demand they showed off exactly how low the performance impact is and it's very very low I mean if I'm someone like avermedia for example I'm looking at something like shadow play going Oh balls because anyone running a GeForce graphics card will not have a reason unless they must capture to an external PC for some reason to use a device like that because you can just record to your computer and there's very little performance impact I mean it looks like less than a couple percent just based on the numbers that we saw and then they've also announced that shadow play is going to have integration with twitch so there rather than relying necessarily on xsplit although xsplit flexibility is looks a little bit more than what they've got there but they are allowing you to have your game you can stream @ 1080p 720p you can overlay your webcam in whichever corner you can adjust the size so very rudimentary but very simple to use from the look of things so the interface is pretty well thought out the next thing they showed off was you know what actually I'm gonna save that for last so they showed off 780ti which presumably is I don't know 780 with the clock bump and some more cuda cores or something like that or maybe it's more like something like titan but without the full double precision performance so so that'll be a slightly faster 780 which is cool and maybe we'll see a price drop on 780 we don't we don't know yet so more details on that to come the idea is very similar so it looks the same but that could mean anything because all of them videos graphics cards lately it looked outstanding okay so let's move on to gsync that's the one where they have demos set up all around the room and they talked a lot about the fundamental problems that we have as PC gamers or gamers in general because on the console they spend a lot of time optimizing the title and yes that includes optimization for visual fidelity and programming as close to bare metal as they can on the hardware and all those console optimizations that were used to talking about but what they can also optimize for is a target framerate and making sure that it stays there so it delivers of consistent experience and a consistent frame rate so you don't see those issues like stuttering and tearing that you do on PC games because on a PC your monitor most monitors these days are refreshing at 60 Hertz high performance ones are up to 120 140 for your Hertz you don't have to deal with the fact that your graphics card is going to be drawing frames at a much different rate than your monitors so whenever those two things don't match up perfectly in an ideal world I'm hopefully gonna remember to put a slide up here right now that shows you how it would work so your GPU would within the refresh rate of the monitor would draw a new frame then your monitor would display it to you and while it's displaying it to you your GPU would draw a new frame and be ready to go when the monitor is ready to refresh in the real world that's not really how it works so you can turn on vsync in order to make sure that the monitor only draws afraid so basically the graphics card will wait for the monitor to refresh but what happens is anytime the framerate dips below 60fps you're gonna see what's called stuttering where sometimes the same frame is displayed on the monitor for two full refresh cycles or heaven forbid even even more and that's very noticeable in games now they introduced adaptive vsync a while ago and that's somewhat alleviated the issue because it would turn vsync on and off dynamically what FPS you were running the game at but now we have a more permanent solution okay so hold on but vsync introduces lag as well because the monitor is waiting for the graphics card rather is waiting for the monitor to display something before it continues to work so you're wasting GPU cycles effectively you can turn vsync off and you can get less leg which means that the GPU will output as soon as it's ready but you're going to sometimes have the monitor refresh when you're halfway through rendering one scene and halfway you're still looking at the last thing you saw and that's called tearing so that's where you have those vertical lines where the scene is you're looking at one scene and then and sometimes multiple scenes if the frame rate is very very high on the same frame on your monitor so that's not really optimal either Shoji Singh is invidious technology that will allow those issues to go away and the problem existed because the graphics part in the monitor we're never working in sync the monitor was displaying at its frame rate and the graphics card was displaying its frame rate and they were independent of each other whereas now with G Singh and gsync enabled monitors which is a hardware chip so guys for those of you wondering is this gonna work on Radeon graphics cards is this going to work on my current monitor the answer is I mean they haven't said that it's not gonna work on Radeon graphics cards but I can tell you with a fair degree of confidence that the answer is no it will not you will be expected to buy a certified monitor and a Kepler or greater GPU from Nvidia in order to take advantage of g-sync and what g-sync does is allows the GPU to control the refresh rate of the monitor so when the framerate dips the monitors refresh rate will actually lower so that they match so we're getting the vsync experience without the leg because the GPU can output whatever it wants whenever it wants and the monitor will be ready for it because it's actually taking a cue from the GPU for the display now this isn't something that unfortunately I can show on camera because we're we have another fixed framerate device the camera that's sitting right in front because how am I going to show you a variable framerate on one monitor versus one side-by-side but they have side by side demos all over the place here you guys it is very very real and very very impressive it works and it's a game changer so a lot of folks were speculating that Nvidia would have some kind of a response to mantle they haven't announced any kind of proprietary API so there's no direct response to mantle but the way that the landscape is changing right now is going to make the job of demonstrating how great a gaming experience is much different than it used to be it's not a matter of firing up fraps and seeing which GPU runs at a higher FPS AMD had a demo at their event where there were three 4k monitors running dirt3 in Eyefinity with two cards running and crossfire and I actually ended up a half arguing with the guy about what frame rate it was running at because he told me it was 60 which with fraps running it turned out to be but it was very noticeably not running out of perceived 60fps and that's that's the frame timing issue that AMD is struggling with right now their driver fixes that they're working on they've partially fixed it in certain scenarios but 4k Eyefinity isn't one of them so it was very noticeable now Nvidia okay so let's say mantle dramatically improves the frame rates that an AMD graphics card can kick out but if nvidia is able to run at a lower frame rate but eliminate those issues to the point where it looks butter smooth to the gamer well that's that's good too so yeah today was unbelievable I mean the fact that they've got live demos here that we can sit and play with and how noticeable and tangible the performance improvement is I mean I already love shield I might be one of the only six people in the world who actually think Shields awesome and I just got yet another great reason to care about shield I'm actually gonna have to upgrade the networking in my house because I'm using power lines to my TV right now I'm gonna want to run Giggy so that I can run at full 1080p but so they've given me another great reason to care about shield they've given us g-sync which we have no idea how much the monitors are gonna cost we're looking at q1 2014 availability so you know I think it's all kind of up in the air right now in terms of how easy they're gonna be to get how many are gonna be available how much they're gonna cost it is going to be a significant investment into the ecosystem for someone who doesn't already have a Kepler GPU to buy that GeForce graphics card and buy that g-sync monitor but one of the cool things about it is that Nvidia is showing this off with a GTX 760 they didn't load up all of these test systems with tighteners or dual Titans or anything like that so what they're really showing off is that you don't have to spend $1000 on the GPU necessarily to have a great gaming experience you could get a reasonable GPU and then you could get a g-sync monitor and have a great gaming experience that way so this is this is awesome I love this how much is Nvidia paying Linus I actually wrote this in one of the comments on one of my recent videos but I might as well just say it AMD has actually got in terms of money more engagement with me than Nvidia there I'm gonna let that sink in for a moment so if I was selling out I should sell it to the highest bidder correct no like every publication I have to take advertising and sponsorships and I work with these partners but that doesn't mean that what I say has anything to do with that so if what I said had to do with that would be because nvidia is giving me a bunch of money which they don't so there you go in fact if you want to factor in sort of even things like events AMD took me to Hawaii and NVIDIA took me to Montreal which is great but it's not Hawaii so you know what I'm look see and I'm even getting in trouble for calling out Nvidia for not he's saying Montreal is a beautiful city which it is and you're right anyway guys I think that's pretty much it for the update for right now this has been an unbelievable two days yesterday was unbelievably not as exciting as I had hoped with that Ubisoft tour that was very uninspiring today has been unbelievable because we saw some crazy awesome stuff I got a I got a like Instagram this so yeah of course I'm not gonna pass up a photo op right so I'm spending all of my time in hospitals right now and I think that the head-mounted displays have there's a lot of what I'm doing now that feels a lot like the early days of 3d of the first-person stuff and I'm having a blast I mean I'm working on the core technology stuff you know in many ways I feel more like myself than I have for a long time you know I'm in there spending all of my time on these hard technical problems writing tons of code making things happen and you know it feels like it's for a worthy cause left up here Charlie thanks Ella thank you for a time okay let's use the enforcers that's not dealing John Carmack lemmas I'm really not a bad guy there goes the bad guy all right there we go guys so unfortunately they need to steal him for the panel but the good news is that means that you can probably watch the panel at some point here although they stole him took him over there look at this enforcer just wants a photo op I bet see look look I'm gonna get him in all kinds of trouble see he just wanted a photo op with John Carmack and that is why he took him away from us see he claims to not want a photo op and yet that is a camera phone and that was a flash