The recent PlayStation 5 Pro specification leak has caused quite a stir—even games development studios were surprised by some of these details. Chris Dring (Head of GamesIndustry.biz) attended last week's GDC industry event, where he met many developers who "did not understand the point" of Sony's upcoming mid-generation console refresh. The most hardcore segment of the current PS5 userbase will likely enthusiastically embrace a more powerful variant, but Dring's observations indicate that development studios are not expressing as much excitement—over a refreshed model—as the gaming community. This topic was discussed during yesterday's GamesIndustry.biz Microcast—industry figures believe that the base PlayStation 5 model's full potential remains untapped.

This mirrors a debate over a possible upgraded Xbox Series variant—gaming fans have complained about restrictive 30 FPS performance, even on the more potent Series X console; but experts believe that developers need to spend more time optimizing their software or produce "truly next-gen" experiences. Dring's sources expressed doubt about the PS5 Pro's predicted ability to "grow the market" or "move the needle"—ultimately, Sony will make some more money and gain headline coverage post-launch. The refreshed variant is expected to reach retail later this year, but industry watchdogs reckon that momentum will be lost due to the absence of a system-selling title around launch time. Grand Theft Auto VI would be the ideal "killer app," but insider murmurs posit a delay into 2026.

Qualcomm's "Windows on Snapdragon, a Platform Ready for your PC Games" GDC presentation attracted a low number of attendees according to The Verge's Sean Hollister (senior editor). The semiconductor firm is readying its Snapdragon X Elite mobile chipset family for launch around mid-2024—prototypes and reference devices have been popping up lately. Leaked Samsung Galaxy Book 4 Edge specs suggest that Qualcomm's ARM-based solution is ready to take on Apple's M3 chipset series. Gaming is not a major priority for many owners of slimline notebooks, but Apple has made efforts to unleash some of its silicon's full potential in that area. Snapdragon Studios' GDC showcase outlined a promising future for their X Elite chips—according to Hollister's coverage of the GDC session, Qualcomm's principal engineer told "game developers (that) their titles should already work on a wave of upcoming Snapdragon-powered Windows laptops—no porting required."

Issam Khalil's presentation covered three different porting paths: x64 emulation, ARM64, and a hybrid approach (via an "ARM64EC" driver). He demonstrated tools that will be available for games developers to start enabling titles on Windows + Snapdragon platforms. The Snapdragon X Elite is capable of running x86/64 games at "close to full speed" via emulation, as claimed in presentation slides. Khalil posits that developers are not required to change the code or assets of their games to achieve full speed performance. Adreno GPU drivers have been prepped for DX11, DX12, Vulkan, and OpenCL—mapping layers were utilized to grant support for DX9 and OpenGL (up to v4.6). Specific titles were not highlighted as fully operational on Snapdragon X Elite-based devices, but the team has spent time combing through "top games" on Steam.

Assassin's Creed Mirage was envisioned as an homage to its franchise—a celebration of how it began and what it accomplished between 2007's Assassin's Creed and 2023's Mirage. Beginning as an idea for a DLC expansion that would take Eivor to the Middle East, it grew into a standalone prequel starring Basim, the enigmatic Hidden One from Valhalla. Developed as a shorter experience by Ubisoft Bordeaux, the return-to-roots game presented a distinctive set of challenges, which are explored in the March 22 GDC talk "Between Legacy and Modernity: Creating an Homage Game to the 15-Year-Old Assassin's Creed Franchise."

During the talk, Creative Director Stéphane Boudon and Lead Producer Fabian Salomon discuss the game's beginnings, its growth into a "remoot"—that is, something between a remake and a reboot - and how a streamlined approach helped them make tough choices and focus the game on the Assassin experience. To find out more, we spoke with Boudon and Salomon about some of the early concepts behind the game, a few features that didn't make the cut, and how Mirage re-introduced and redefined stealth as a gameplay pillar.

Denuvo by Irdeto, the leading provider of security solutions for the gaming industry, is excited to announce the launch of its groundbreaking product, TraceMark for Gaming, during the prestigious Game Developers Conference (GDC). This pioneering watermarking solution, part of the Irdeto anti-piracy suite and the first of its kind to be tailored specifically for the gaming industry, leverages the core invisible watermark technology trusted by Hollywood studios, sports leagues, and pay-TV operators.

TraceMark for Gaming uniquely addresses the challenge of content leakage, especially during the sensitive pre-release phase of game development. It introduces a deterrent effect by enabling the precise tracing of leaked content back to its source. This capability makes potential leakers think twice, knowing that any unauthorized distribution can be directly linked to them. As a platform-agnostic tool, TraceMark effortlessly integrates into various stages of the game's lifecycle, providing a consistent layer of protection. Its adaptability ensures that, irrespective of the development phase or platform, TraceMark serves as an effective measure to discourage leaks by holding individuals accountable, thereby contributing to the overall integrity of the content distribution process.

AMD at GDC 2024 announced the FidelityFX Super Resolution 3.1 (FSR 3.1). While the original FSR 3.0 feature-set largely carries forward the super resolution upscaler from FSR 2.2, adding frame generation on top; the new FSR 3.1 adds several image quality improvements to the upscaler itself, improving image quality at every performance preset. Specifically, it improves the temporal stability of the output at rest and in movement, to reduce flickering and shimmering, or "fizziness" around objects in motion. The new upscaler also reduces ghosting, and better preserves detail.

Next up, is a rather important change in the way the frame generation technology works. AMD has decoupled FSR 3.1 frame generation from the upscaling tech, which allows frame generation to work with other upscaling solutions, such as DLSS or XeSS. The possibilities of such a decoupling are endless—have an RTX 30-series "Ampere" GPU that lacks DLSS 3 frame generation support? No worries, use DLSS 2 for the upscaling, and FSR 3.1 for the frame generation. AMD is also clumping its FidelityFX family of technologies into a new FidelityFX API that makes it easier for developers to debug, and paves the way for forward-compatibility with future versions of FSR. Lastly, FSR 3.1 supports Vulkan API, and the Microsoft Xbox GDK. AMD plans to release FSR 3.1 to developers through its GPUOpen platform in Q2-2024, and its first implementations on games are expected later this year. In the meantime, AMD implemented FSR 3.1 on "Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart," to showcase the new upscaler.

San Francisco's annual Game Developers Conference (GDC) returns next week, bringing game devs together to share stories, experiences, and advice on everything from lighting scenes to writing resumes. Electronic Arts speakers will be participating in more than 25 in-person sessions this year, including multiple talks touching on innovative technologies driving the creation of next-gen games at EA.

This year's tech-focused sessions dig into the details of several successes, including Frostbite's non-interruptive expansion to new gaming platforms, SEED's work generating photorealistic facial rigs, and techniques for high-fidelity cloth simulation in Frostbite for EA SPORTS FC 24. There's also a fantastic talk from Respawn's Christopher Pierse and Samy Duc that explores the evolution of matchmaking techniques in Apex Legends, going all the way back to 2019.

Microsoft's DirectX department is scheduled to show off several innovations at this month's Game Developers Conference (GDC), although a late February preview has already spilled their DirectSR Super Resolution API's beans. Today, retail support for Shader Model 6.8 and Work Graphs has been introduced with an updated version of the company's Agility Software Development Kit. Program manager, Joshua Tucker, stated that these technologies will be showcased on-stage at GDC 2024—Shader Model 6.8 arrives with a "host of new features for shader developers, including Start Vertex/Instance Location, Wave Size Range, and Expanded Comparison Sampling." A linked supplementary article—D3D12 Work Graphs—provides an in-depth look into the cutting-edge API's underpinnings, best consumed if you have an hour or two to spare.

Tucker summarized the Work Graphs API: "(it) utilizes the full potential of your GPU. It's not just an upgrade to the existing models, but a whole new paradigm that enables more efficient, flexible, and creative game development. With Work Graphs, you can generate and schedule GPU work on the fly, without relying on the host. This means you can achieve higher performance, lower latency, and greater scalability for your games with tasks such as culling, binning, chaining of compute work, and much more." AMD and NVIDIA are offering driver support on day one. Team Red has discussed the launch of "Microsoft DirectX 12 Work Graphs 1.0 API" in a GPUOpen blog—they confirm that "a deep dive" into the API will happen during their Advanced Graphics Summit presentation. NVIDIA's Wessam Bahnassi has also discussed the significance of Work Graphs—check out his "Advancing GPU-driven rendering" article. Graham Wihlidal—of Epic Games—is excited about the latest development: "we have been advocating for something like this for a number of years, and it is very exciting to finally see the release of Work Graphs."

Microsoft has just announced that their new DirectSR Super Resolution API for DirectX will provide a unified interface for developers to implement super resolution in their games. This means that game studios no longer have to choose between DLSS, FSR, XeSS, or spend additional resources to implement, bug-test and support multiple upscalers. For gamers this is huge news, too, because they will be able to run upscaling in all DirectSR games—no matter the hardware they own. While AMD FSR and Intel XeSS run on all GPUs from all vendors, NVIDIA DLSS is exclusive to Team Green's hardware. With their post, Microsoft also confirms that DirectSR will not replace FSR/DLSS/XeSS with a new upscaler by Microsoft, rather that it builds on existing technologies that are already available, unifying access to them.

While we have to wait until March 21 for more details to be revealed at GDC 2024, Microsoft's Joshua Tucker stated in a blog post: "We're thrilled to announce DirectSR, our new API designed in partnership with GPU hardware vendors to enable seamless integration of Super Resolution (SR) into the next generation of games. Super Resolution is a cutting-edge technique that increases the resolution and visual quality in games. DirectSR is the missing link developers have been waiting for when approaching SR integration, providing a smoother, more efficient experience that scales across hardware. This API enables multi-vendor SR through a common set of inputs and outputs, allowing a single code path to activate a variety of solutions including NVIDIA DLSS Super Resolution, AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution, and Intel XeSS. DirectSR will be available soon in the Agility SDK as a public preview, which will enable developers to test it out and provide feedback. Don't miss our DirectX State of the Union at GDC to catch a sneak peek at how DirectSR can be used with your games!"

As GDC, the world's largest game developer conference, returns to San Francisco, Microsoft and Xbox will be there to engage and empower developers, publishers, and technology partners across the industry. We are committed to supporting game developers on any platform, anywhere in the world, at every stage of development. Our message is simple: Microsoft and Xbox are here to help power your games and empower your teams. From March 18 - 22, the Xbox Lobby Lounge in the Moscone Center South can't be missed—an easy meeting point, and a first step toward learning more about the ID@Xbox publishing program, the Developer Acceleration Program (DAP) for underrepresented creators, Azure cloud gaming services, and anything else developers might need.

GDC features dozens of speakers from across Xbox, Activision, Blizzard, King and ZeniMax who will demonstrate groundbreaking in-game innovations and share community-building strategies. Microsoft technology teams, with support from partners, will also host talks that spotlight new tools, software and services that help increase developer velocity, grow player engagement and help creators grow. See below for the Conference programming details.

In an interview done by PCWorld's Gordon Ung at GDC 2023, CD Projekt Red's VP and Global Art Director, Jakub "Kuba" Knapik, and NVIDIA's Senior Developer Technology Engineer, Pawel Kozlowski, shed a bit more light about the upcoming Cyberpunk 2077 Path Tracing update and what it brings to the game as well as what kind of hardware will you need to run it.

In case you missed it earlier, both CD Projekt RED and NVIDIA did talk about the RTX Path Tracing Overdrive Mode for Cyberpunk 2077, which will launch on April 11th. This will be a part of the Cyberpunk 2077 Update 1.62, which should bring additional gameplay improvements as well. It is worth to note that Path Tracing will be introduced to the game as a "technology preview," Jakub notes, as the developer is implementing this technology with NVIDIA and it is still a work in progress.

AMD issued briefing material earlier this month, teasing an upcoming reveal of its next generation FidelityFX at GDC 2023. True to form, today the hardware specialist has announced that FidelityFX Super Resolution 3.0 is incoming. The company is playing catch up with rival NVIDIA, who have already issued version 3.0 of its DLSS graphics enhancer/upscaler for a small number of games. AMD says that FSR 3.0 is in an early stage of development, but it is hoped that its work on temporal upscaling will result in a number of improvements over the previous generation.

The engineering team is aiming for a 2x frame performance improvement over the existing FSR 2.0 technique, which it claims is already capable of: "computing more pixels than we have samples in the current frame." This will be achieved by generating a greater number of pixels in a current frame, via the addition of interpolated frames. It is highly likely that the team will reach a point in development where one sample, at least, will be created for every interpolated pixel. The team wants to prevent feedback loops from occurring - an interpolated frame will only be shown once, and any interpolation artifact would only remain for one frame.

Today Daedalic Entertainment and NACON announced that their highly anticipated adventure game, The Lord of the Rings: Gollum, will release to PC, PlayStation, and Xbox on May 25th. A version for Nintendo Switch is planned for later this year.

Based on the beloved The Lord of the Rings trilogy by J.R.R. Tolkien, the fantasy game takes players on an epic journey across Middle-earth, starring one of the lore's most compelling characters: Sméagol - *Gollum, Gollum*.

Hexworks and CI Games have shown off their upcoming RPG, Lords of the Fallen, as part of the State of Unreal GDC Showcase. The trailer demonstrates the team's ambitions and the use of Unreal Engine 5 has allowed them "to create the most immersive game experience possible". The game's character customization system is a cumulation of UE5 generated geometry and 3D scans taken from real life human models. The development team states that this allows players to "create unique faces and bodies by dynamically morphing between a huge range of shapes before finessing the finer details."

Unreal Engine 5's Lumen Global Illumination has been put to good use by the team - the game's complex and rich environments are lit in dramatic and atmospheric fashion, all in real time, with an added layer of technical accomplishment due to the player being able to swap between two parallel worlds. Hexworks devised its own custom toolset to enable the seamless shift from Axiom, the realm of the living, to Umbral, the realm of the dead: "This means our artists and designers can ensure these worlds feel intrinsically linked, like two sides of the same coin... even if one side is decidedly more horrific than the other."

NCSOFT, a global premier game developer and publisher, unveiled its digital human technology together with Project M's trailer at the Game Developers Conference 2023 (GDC), currently being held in San Francisco, CA.

On March 22, NCSOFT revealed the video at State of Unreal, Epic Games' opening session at GDC held to introduce new Unreal Engine tools and technologies in collaboration with its partners. Here, Songyee Yoon, chief strategy officer (CSO) at NCSOFT, was on stage to introduce the company's latest project, Project M, and its trailer.

Ninja Theory has released a new trailer for its upcoming Senua's Saga: Hellblade II game, which was a part of Epic's State of Unreal showcase from GDC 2023. The new trailer focuses on Senua and character rendering rather than the game itself but at least we get an idea what to expect from the game when it comes out.

As you would have guessed, the game is developed on the Unreal Engine, and facial animation is definitely looking impressive. Previously, Ninja Theory revealed a bit of the gameplay at The Game Awards last year, and we certainly expect more from Microsoft at this year's Xbox Games Showcase on June 11th.

Unity, the world's leading platform for creating and growing real-time 3D (RT3D) content, will return to the Game Developer Conference (GDC) this year with a focus on celebrating the achievements of its developer community. Unity will spotlight 16 games across various platforms, from studios around the world at the Unity booth (#S327). Each title is made with Unity and uses Unity's platform and services to push the creative, experiential and visual limits of their games. Additionally, Unity will share more about its future open AI ecosystem that millions of Unity creators will be able to integrate into their existing workflows to deliver immersive games and experiences to billions of users around the world.

GDC attendees can visit the Unity booth to get hands-on with some of the most unique and visually arresting games that are either available now or in development: FEROCIOUS is a breathtaking survival shooter developed by designer Leonard Saalfrank who used Unity's High Definition Render Pipeline (HDRP), Shader Graph, and VFX Graph to deliver a mysterious world, rich with lush environments, stunning seascapes and terrifying creatures. One of the most authentic boxing games, Undisputed, will also be spotlighted. Developed by Steel City Interactive, the game pushes the limits of Unity's HDRP and Animation Rigging to create stunning visuals and bone-jarring action and also leverages Unity Gaming Services' Game Server Hosting and Matchmaker.

As promised and detailed earlier, NVIDIA has now released the first SDK for Path Tracing. Path Tracing, which should accurately re-create physics of all light sources in a scene, has been around and we already had a chance to see it in some demos like Quake RTX and Portal RTX, but now, thanks to some previously available NVIDIA tools and features, it could be finally coming to more games and not just tech demos.

According to NVIDIA, the thing that makes Path Tracing possible now, and more accessible to developers, is the combination of previously available NVIDIA technologies, as well as some new ones, including the new performance multiplier in DLSS 3, called the DLSS Frame Generation. The DLSS Frame Generation, working on GeForce 40 series cards and using the Optical Flow Accelerator, is what made real-time path tracing possible. The RTX Path Tracing SDK, according to NVIDIA, should re-create the physics of all light sources in a scene in order to reproduce what the eye sees in real life, and allows to build a reference path traces to ensure that lighting during production is true to life, while accelerating the iteration process; or build high-quality photo modes for RT-capable GPUs or real-time, ultra-quality modes that take advantage of the Ada Lovelace architecture.

Razer, the leading global lifestyle brand for gamers, today announced the release of the Interhaptics universal HD haptic SDK and directional haptics at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) 2023 in San Francisco. This free SDK release focuses on enabling a heightened immersive gaming experience, bringing audio and visual effects to life with HD haptic feedback that can now be completely customized through the Interhaptics SDK.

With today's announcement, Interhaptics, the leading haptic technology platform, has expanded its support to include PlayStation 5*, PlayStation 4, Meta Quest 2, X-input controllers, iOS, and Android devices for game engines such as Unity and Unreal Engine. Additionally, the haptic composer software has been upgraded to include in-app testing for DualSense wireless controllers for PS5 and select Razer HyperSense headsets. Interhaptics can now deploy HD haptics on over 5 billion devices across multiple ecosystems. Developers can sign up for the waiting list for the Razer Kraken V3 HyperSense Dev Kit with programmable directional HD haptics at the Interhaptics website.

Cooler Master, the high-performance component and peripherals brand, today announced it worked with D-BOX to produce its latest entry into the gaming chair market, The Motion 1 Haptic Gaming Chair. Cooler Master and D-BOX are currently present at the 2023 Game Developers Conference—GDC, taking place in San Francisco, from March 20 to 24, 2023. We invite all gaming studios to experience the Motion 1 haptic gaming chair at booth P1679 (Games from Quebec)

Motion 1 is the world's first haptic engine gaming chair developed in collaboration with D-BOX, a worldwide leader in haptic technology. Motion 1 is engineered to provide haptic feedback to your games and entertainment. Feel the bullets strafing your canopy in your favorite air battle movie, ocean waves crashing into your boat during a raid in Assassin's Creed Valhalla or the gentle tug as you accelerate in your favorite racing game. It's an entirely new dimension of realistic feedback that enhances your gaming and entertainment in a premium package replete with ergonomic comfort.

Ahead of next week's Game Developers Conference (GDC), NVIDIA announced an expanded game roster and new developer plug-ins for NVIDIA DLSS 3. The latest version of NVIDIA's AI-powered Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) technology is now supported in an assortment of blockbuster games and franchises, and being integrated into Unreal Engine, one of the world's most popular game engines. The company is also publicly releasing the DLSS Frame Generation plug-in to further ease developer adoption of the technology.

"Neural graphics has revolutionized gaming since its introduction with NVIDIA DLSS, and we're now taking it to new heights," said Matt Wuebbling, vice president of global GeForce marketing at NVIDIA. "PC gaming super-franchises such as Diablo and Forza Horizon and Bethesda's new Redfall are raising the bar for image quality with stunning graphics while using DLSS to keep gameplay smooth as silk." Since its launch in 2018, NVIDIA DLSS has driven a neural graphics revolution in PC gaming. Neural graphics intertwines AI and graphics to create an accelerated rendering pipeline that continuously learns and improves. Instead of natively rendering every pixel in a frame, DLSS allows the game to render 1/8th of the pixels then uses AI and GeForce RTX Tensor Cores to reconstruct the rest of the pixels, dramatically multiplying frame rates, while delivering crisp, high-quality images that rival native resolution.

According to the description of NVIDIA's session for GDC 2023, we will finally get to see S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl.

NVIDIA will be holding a session at GDC 2023 on March 23rd together with GSC Game World's 3D Animator, Anton Riabchuk, where it will give an exclusive look at S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2: Heart of Chornobyl.

While GSC Game World released a few screenshots as well as an official trailer for the game, GDC 2023 could be the perfect place to show an in-engine gameplay. The description of the GDC session also reveals that GSC Game World is working closely with NVIDIA and the session will also include an introduction to Omniverse Audio2Face AI SDK.

AMD could tease its next-generation graphics performance enhancement rivaling NVIDIA DLSS 3, at the 2023 Game Developers Conference (GDC 2023), slated for March 23. While the company didn't name it, its GDC 2023 session brief references an "exciting sneak peek of new FidelityFX technologies" that will be "available soon," meaning that it isn't the recently released FSR 2.2. We expect this to be the very first look at FSR 3.0.

AMD frantically dropped in the first mention of FSR 3.0 in its Radeon RX 7900 series RDNA3 announcement presentation (slide below). The company let out precious little details of the new technology except the mention that it offers double the frame-rate versus FSR 2 (at comparable image quality). Does this involve a frame-rate doubling technology similar to DLSS 3? We don't know yet. It could just be a more advanced upscaling algorithm that doubles performance at a given quality target compared to FSR 2. We'll know for sure later this month. It would be a coup of sorts for AMD if FSR 3.0 doesn't require RX 7000 series GPUs, and can run on older Radeon GPUs, whereas DLSS 3 requires the latest GeForce RTX 40-series GPUs.

NVIDIA at GDC dropped a major hint at where it wants to take PC gaming post the Arm acquisition. The company is demonstrating its RTX real-time raytracing technology, and the DLSS performance enhancement, on an Arm processor by MediaTek. To the PC, this means NVIDIA is laying the foundations of gaming in the post-x86 world where it holds Arm IP; foundations that were dug up by Apple and its mighty M1 chip, based on Arm CPU technology.

Making this unequivocal, was MediaTek. "RTX is the most groundbreaking technology to come to PC gaming in the last two decades," said PC Tseng, general manager of MediaTek's Intelligent Multimedia Business Unit."MediaTek and NVIDIA are laying the foundation for a new category of Arm-based high-performance PCs." The Taiwan-based Arm SoC major has developed a new Arm-based PC processor called Kompanio 1200, which it hopes will power PC platforms much like the Apple M1 or the Qualcomm Compute Platforms.

The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, today announced an intent to form the Open 3D Foundation to accelerate developer collaboration on 3D game and simulation technology. The Open 3D Foundation will support open source projects that advance capabilities related to 3D graphics, rendering, authoring, and development. As the first project governed by the new foundation, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) is contributing an updated version of the Amazon Lumberyard game engine as the Open 3D Engine (O3DE), under the permissive Apache 2.0 license. The Open 3D Engine enables developers and content creators to build 3D experiences unencumbered by commercial terms and will provide the support and infrastructure of an open source community through forums, code repositories, and developer events. A developer preview of O3DE is available on GitHub today. For more information and/or to contribute, please visit: https://o3de.org

3D engines are used to create a range of virtual experiences, including games and simulations, by providing capabilities such as 3D rendering, content authoring tools, animation, physics systems, and asset processing. Many developers are seeking ways to build their intellectual property on top of an open source engine where the roadmap is highly visible, openly governed, and collaborative to the community as a whole. More developers look to be able to create or augment their current technological foundations with highly collaborative solutions that can be used in any development environment. O3DE introduces a new ecosystem for developers and content creators to innovate, build, share, and distribute immersive 3D worlds that will inspire their users with rich experiences that bring the imaginations of their creators to life.

Intel is expected to unveil its 11th generation Core "Tiger Lake-H" performance-segment mobile processor, and the highly anticipated 11th Gen Core "Rocket Lake-S" desktop processor family on March 18, 2021. The two will be launched on the sidelines of the 2021 GDC (Game Developers Conference), an online event. The agenda page of GDC mentions both "Tiger Lake-H" and "Rocket Lake." The "Tiger Lake-H" family of processors begin with quad-core SKUs based on the 4-core "Tiger Lake" silicon, extending to 6-core and 8-core ones based on a newer 8-core silicon. Both dies are built on the 10 nm SuperFin node, and combine Intel's highest-IPC "Willow Cove" CPU cores with a Gen 12 Xe iGPU.

The 11th Gen Core "Rocket Lake-S" has been unveiled back at the 2021 International CES (online event) in January, and is heading toward a mid/late-March launch. The chips pack up to eight "Cypress Cove" CPU cores, which are a back-port of Intel's 10 nm CPU core architectures to the 14 nm node, bringing the first IPC increase on the client desktop platform from Intel since 2015. At GDC, we expect Intel to detail individual SKUs within the 11th Gen Core processor family, giving us a broader idea of what chips will launch this month. The GDC backdrop also foreshadows the marketing strategy for Intel with both these platforms—gaming. The company will take advantage of the IPC uplift to present its processors as being better for gaming, and sufficiently fast in most client-relevant tasks. The GDC backdrop could also let Intel show off the ISV relations it's built with game developers, detailing how certain popular game engines are optimized for Intel.