We knew this was coming, especially after Google's teaser from earlier this month. Project Stream was a proof-of-concept in collaboration with Ubisoft, to see whether AAA gaming was possible over the internet. Things were smooth most of the time in our own experience, but there remained questions over how the concept would translate over to a finished product, especially with infrastructure challenges on the client side of things. Google's keynote at GDC just wrapped up, and the main focus was Stadia- the now named cloud gaming service borne out of Project Stream.

Stadia is built with instant access in mind. An example demo came in the form of Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed Odyssey, which was used in the public test before. It is integrated with partner YouTube channels such that a trailer for a supported game would have an option to play said game, which would then launch immediately. Stadia is built with support from a wide partner network including AMD, Unity, id Software, and more, with details seen past the break.

While the RPCS3 emulator has been in development since 2011, it is only recently that it has begun to see rapid improvements thereby Bringing PS3 games to the PC platform in a playable way. In their latest update video, the development team behind RPCS3 showed off the most recent performance improvements they have made. Multiple titles have seen tremendous gains thanks to Nekotekina, who managed to approximate Xfloat. This has allowed more games to benefit from the SPU LLVM recompiler which delivers better performance compared to ASMJTT. It also results in LLVM seeing better compatibility with a broader range of titles that before did not run with it or had game breaking issues. They also demonstrated Improvements to SPU cache building with LLVM now being multi-threaded. This change cut the cache build time from 12 minutes and 34 seconds to a 1 minutes 28 seconds on an AMD Ryzen 7 1700.

To display their hard work the development team used Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time which saw a roughly 20-30% performance increase but is still not considered fully playable as of yet. Even so, the performance uplift means Sly Cooper is running in the low 40-50 FPS range which is an excellent start all the same. They also chose a first party title in Uncharted Drake's Fortune which thanks to the same changes received a massive uptick in performance of around 50%. While this means the game only went from 20 FPS to 29 FPS, it is still a sizable improvement.

The Division 2 is shaping up to be one of the hottest releases of 2019 - particularly as the other shared world, third-person shooter, Anthem, has fared somewhat below expectations. And while Anthem offers very impressive visuals, it also comes with relatively steep performance requirements - at least comparing with The Division 2's requirement of an RX 480 for 1080, 60 FPS gaming. For 4K, 60 FPS, you'll require a much bigger hardware commitment, in the form of AMD'S Radeon VII or NVIDIA's RTX 2080 Ti graphics cards, with a minimum of 16 GB system RAM and a Ryzen 7 2700X or Intel Core I7-8700X CPU.

The Snowdrop engine The Division 2 makes use of, developed in-house by Massive Entertainment, features a particularly impressive DX12 implementation, which should offer some 10-20 fps improvement in certain scenarios. DSO Gaming, testing in the private Beta, saw differences between 59 FPS under DX 11 and 80 FPS, in the minimum frame rate, for the same scene. So if you're not running DX 12 or a DX 12 capable card, know that even a graphics card with the same performance as yours, but that supports the DX12 renderer, will bring tangible performance benefits - particularly if you have an AMD card, due to the title's extensive use of Async Compute. The Division 2's release is set for March 15.

Microsoft has confirmed that their latest Windows 10 update (KB4482887), which released on march 1st, can actually degrade graphics and mouse performance in some games. As Microsoft themselves put it, "After installing KB4482887, users may notice graphics and mouse performance degradation with desktop gaming when playing certain games (eg: Destiny 2)."

There's no word yet on a definitive listing of games that suffer this performance degradation, but Microsoft is hard at work fixing this for the next Windows release. Until then, users facing graphics and mouse performance degradation can simply uninstall the KB4482887 update.

NVIDIA today released the latest version of their GeForce Game Drivers. Marketed as Game Ready, this latest release aims to provide the optimal gaming experience for Apex Legends, Devil May Cry 5, and Tom Clancy's The Division 2.

There's added support for three new G-SYNC compatible monitors (BenQ XL2540-B/ZOWIE XL LCD, Acer XF250Q and Acer ED273 A). Notable fixes include the DXGI_ERROR_DEVICE_HUNG error message that occurred in APEX Legends, fixes pixelated corruption issues in Hitman 2 and renders PhysX fog correctly in Batman: Arkham Origins. Check after the break for the full release notes, including 3D Vision profiles (remember them?), and download the drivers by following the link below.DOWNLOAD: NVIDIA GeForce 419.35 WHQL

That took a little while, but GIGABYTE has finally updated their lineup with an AMD RX 590 graphics card. Based on the 12 nm-revised Polaris 30 silicon with higher clocks than those that could be achieved by its 14 nm predecessors (already the RX 480 and RX 580 graphics cards), the GIGABYTE RX 590 Gaming rbings the already well-known 2304 Stream processors, and gets them to tick at 1560 MHz (against AMD's 1545 MHz reference). It's a usual GIGABYTE graphics card by all standards, with a dual-fan WindForce 2X cooling solution with fan-stop functionality.

It seems GIGABYTE finally went through some of that unsold RX inventory, and is now looking to keep the channel supplied until the next best thing from the red team makes its appearance (hopefully sooner rather than later.)

Google sent out a fairly cryptic invite to the game developers and associated press this week in the form of a GIF (converted into relevant images below). It teases a keynote on March 19, 2019 and more information was made available shortly confirming this would be in the form of a keynote to be held at 10 am PST during GDC this year. The media giant promises to "reveal all", and also has developer-focused sessions throughout the course of the event. An early report from The Information suggests the keynote will have Google talk about their new game-streaming service, code-named Yeti. This is in line with our own expectations, after having participated in the fairly successful Project Stream beta test that concluded recently.

Kotaku went further to suggest that Yeti is a streaming service in conjunction with a hardware platform- a simple streaming box, if you will, to take on the dedicated game consoles of 2019 and beyond. Indeed, Google has been wanting to get into this highly lucrative market, with intentions to take over Twitch before Amazon pulled one over them. There remain many challenges in general to a game-streaming world, not least of which were detailed in our own editorial linked above. But, with the next generation consoles getting ready for development and Microsoft willing to explore a game-streaming future themselves, perhaps Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo and others should pay very close attention to said Google keynote in less than a month's time.

SuperMicro may not be household name in consumer motherboards right now, but they once were a decent alternative in the market - or so I've been told by people much more knowledgeable than me in that regard, as I never laid my hands on one. The company is now more known for its server products, where it has focused most of its attention in the past decade - an effort that gave it a good, third-place hold in that market. And if the company can command such a market share in a much more requirements-heavy environment such as the server market demands, then it's likely those design decisions and developments will find themselves trickling down to the consumer side in any sort of consumer, gaming-grade product the company decided to tackle.

To that end, SuperMicro is gearing up to re introduce themselves to the consumer market, accompanying the wave of new technologies coming to the market in a few years - namely, PCIe Gen 4 and DDR5 memory. The company seems to think that this will mark a perfect opportunity for a strong comeback to the consumer market - where they now only offer a handful of motherboard solutions for Intel's CPUs. One such example is the C9Z390-PGW motherboard, based on Intel's Z390 chipset - with its 10-phase VRM design, PLC chip for doubling of PCIe lanes, and 10 Gigabit Lan. But not only on said "typical" consumer motherboard techonologies will SuperMicro be delivering - if the company has its way, anything from 5G, IoT, Mission Learning and Artificial Intelligence can be incorporated for some use case or another on consumer-grade motherboards, thus providing an axis of penetration for SuperMicro - and its entire partner eco-system.

Stories about single-player gaming's death have been greatly exaggerated, over and over again. Every once in a while, a good, single-player focused game that only looks to tell a great story, in a great setting, comes along to set company's perceptions straight. This has happened over and over again in the market, but the most notable, recent examples must be The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt and Red Dead Redemption 2.

News has just surfaced, courtesy of Take Two, that the game has shipped in excess of 23 million copies since its launch back in October, when it set the entertainment's biggest opening weekend of all time. That means more than 7 million copies have been sold on a monthly basis since then. And this was all done without the help of our own platform of choice: PC. When the game finally does release for our rigs (and there's no sensible reason it wouldn't), we'll see how starved the market actually was for a good, single-player, story-focused game, in the day and age of always-on content.

Digital Storm aims to strike the perfect trifecta for gamers between price, performance, and exceptional quality by launching Lynx, starting at $799.

Lynx is our evolution from distilling 17 years of knowledge in crafting enthusiast-class PCs for our clients. Our aim with this new launch is to deliver Digital Storm's unique brand to a more mainstream PC gamer audience. With a new in-house design, Lynx provides exclusivity not usually found at this price point by Digital Storm. Lynx is highly customizable, delivering the kind of bespoke custom aesthetic Digital Storm is known for, while still offering excellent value for the customer.

It seems only yesterday that we were discussing a Turing microarchitecture-based TU116 die that would power the yet-to-be-confirmed GeForce GTX 1660 Ti. With no RTX technology support, this was speculated to be NVIDIA's attempt to appease the mainstream gaming market that understands the GPU does not have enough horsepower to satisfactorily drive real-time ray tracing in games while still maintaining an optimal balance of visual fidelity and performance alike. Reports indicated an announcement next month, followed by retail availability in March, and today we got word of more concrete evidence pointing towards all these coming to fruition.

It appears that trade listings in various organizations are going to be a big source of leaks in the present and future, with MSI GeForce GTX 1660 Ti SKUs, including the Gaming Z, Armor, Ventus, and Gaming X, all listed on the Eurasian Economic Commission (EEC). The listing covers the associated trademarks, all awarded to MSI, and is one of the last steps towards setting up a retail channel for new and upcoming products. Does the notion of a Turing GTX GPU without real-time ray tracing interest you? Let us know in the comments section below.

SteelSeries, the global leader in gaming peripherals, today announced its newest full-size, multi-platform controller, the Stratus Duo. Gamers can swap between the low latency 2.4GHz wireless connection for gaming on Windows, and Bluetooth for mobile gaming on Android, Oculus Go and Samsung VR. Gamers can utilize the Stratus Duo in multiple ways using the 2.4GHz wireless, Bluetooth and wired connections. With its Bluetooth connection, the Stratus Duo supports Android, Samsung Gear VR and Oculus Go. Gamers no longer need to struggle with awkward touchscreen controls while playing mobile games on their Android devices.

The Stratus Duo allows gamers to enjoy playing on their Android device via Bluetooth or on their PC via the 2.4GHz wireless connection with no additional software needed for setup. "The gaming ecosystem is continuing to evolve and grow beyond PC and consoles to include mobile devices and VR systems," said Tino Solberg, SteelSeries CTO. "The Stratus Duo allows gamers to easily navigate across several platforms through wireless and Bluetooth technology to create a truly seamless experience."

ASRock is a relatively new entry into the graphics card market with its Phantom gaming brand, but has already delivered on AMD's previous-generation hardware with interesting solutions. The company, alongside Sapphire, has been one of the first to showcase their take on AMD's upcoming Radeon VII high-performance graphics card, which will slot in above the company's RX 580 graphics cards in terms of performance.

This is a reference design through and through, so it's more of a question of whether or not you like AsRock's stickers better than their competitors', though some changes to the backplate could have been made as well, in order to expand on ASRock's branding. The Asrock version of AMD's Radeon VII should be available come launch, on February 7h (see what they did there?) for $699.

ViewSonic Corp., a leading global provider of visual display products, announces a new sub-brand of professional gaming monitors. ViewSonic Elite gaming products are specifically engineered with a sleek and minimalist aesthetic, while boasting practical gamer-centric designs. With decades of display technology experience and heritage, ViewSonic Elite will deliver next-level gaming products that fit the needs of today's multifaceted gaming community.

"Gamers are defined by many factors, one being their gaming setup. With ViewSonic Elite, we want to represent maturity in style and high-performance gaming, as the industry continues to evolve," said Kevin Chu, Global Gaming Marketing Manager. "The ViewSonic Elite line of gaming monitors provides users with the latest spec requirements, and are designed to fulfill the diverse needs of gamers."The XGR240 is on the left, XG350R-C on the right.

Computer Upgrade King demoed 2 new extremely powerful and colorful mATX gaming desktops at CES that release in Spring 2019. On display at Patriot's suite, they featured their Continuum Mini which has an intense infinity mirror front panel with large side vents to ensure excellent air flow. Inside, there was an NVidia RTX 2080 TI GPU and an Intel i9-9900K CPU with their own custom cooling system consisting of an RGB CPU water block, anodized brushed aluminum reservoir and pump combo, front mounted 240mm radiator and lotus style ARGB fans.

On display at AMD's suite, they featured their Stratos Mini which has a triple RGB fan front panel with metal blade design to ensure excellent air flow. Inside, there was a Gigabyte Vega 56 GPU, an AMD Threadripper 2950X CPU with their own custom cooling system, a Team Group T-Force Delta RGB SSD, and halo style RGB fans.

MSI showed off their GeForce RTX 2080 Ti Lightning at CES 2019. This latest and greatest offering from them is built around overclocking with the graphics card having been designed with a 19-phase power delivery subsystem and 3x 8-pin power connectors. It offers a dual BIOS support with the default BIOS coming with a factory overclock of 1770 MHz while the second BIOS is configured for LN2 and comes with NVIDIA's reference clock speeds but offers a boosted power limit of 350-watts. Display connectivity options consisted of 3x DisplayPort, 1x HDMI and 1x USB Type-C output for VirtualLink.

Product context: HP showcased their new and upcoming Omen X Emperium 65 at CES, an NVIDIA BFGD (Big Format Gaming Display) with all the features the company deems premium and attractive to gamers: 4K resolution, a huge, 65" diagonal AMVA panel, HDR (1,000 nits of peak luminance and 95 percent of the DCI-P3 color gamut) , G-Sync, and 120 - 144Hz refresh rate (144 Hz is overclocked) with a gray-to-gray response time is rated for 4ms. It features an incorporated sound bar with 120 W of power and three amps. An integrated NVIDIA Shield makes an appearance as well as a multimedia juggernaut solution. All of this in a $4,999 body, launching in February 2019.

Thoughts: Rollback. A $4,999 price-tag. Maybe this is just me, but NVIDIA seems to be finally introducing their BFGDs at the worst possible time, considering the company has just formally announced that their GeForce graphics cards would be finally supporting VESA's VRR (Variable Refresh Rate) standard. This brings with it FreeSync support - for monitors and, we'd expect, TV's as well, considering that the driver solution will be toggable by users even in a non-NVIDIA certified display.

Steam has releases its statistics for the state of gaming in 2018, where the company reveals which games provided the most engagement, either in sales or players, throughout the year. Top Sellers, Top New Releases, Top Selling VR Titles, Top Early Access Grads, and Most Played Games are the categories across which Steam divided 2018's games, and some of these found themselves on the top spot of more than one category.

Warframe, DOTA 2, Monster Hunter: World, PUBG and CS: GO all find themselves on the Platinum tier of both the Top Sellers and Top Played categories, with more than 100,000 concurrent players at some point in time. The Witcher 3 finds itself in the Gold category of the Top sellers, again, and in the Silver category for Top played. No man's Sky, Stellaris, and Kingdom Come: Deliverance all find themselves in the Gold tier of the Top played game as well, with more than 50,000 concurrent players - No man's Sky, for one, surprises here. The game with one of the worst receptions ever has actually managed to keep relevant for much, much longer than other, much more critically-acclaimed games. Check out the top tiers in the images below.

beyerdynamic, one of the world's leading manufacturers of headphones, microphones and conferencing products, announces the TEAM TYGR bundle, pairing the TYGR 300 R gaming headphones with FOX Professional USB Studio Microphone. beyerdynamic will showcase TEAM TYGR during CES 2019 from January 8 - 11, 2019.

beyerdynamic's TYGR 300 R is the ultimate gaming headphone with adjustable yokes and a spring steel headband to adapt to any head size. Designed for gaming applications in quiet environments, the TYGR 300 R features an innovative acoustic fleece with soft ear cushions. The single-sided connection cable is terminated with a 3-pole, gold-plated mini jack plug and a screw-on gold plated adapter.

3DFX is a well-known name for most in our community, I'd wager (I don't have the data to back me up on that, but bare with me). The company is one of the highest-profile defunct companies that vied for a place in the desktop, high-performance GPU space back in the day, and brought its guns bearing on NVIDIA and then ATI. The Rampage was the last GPU ever developed by the company, and looked to compete with NVIDIA's GeForce3. That never saw the light of day, though, with the company shutting its doors before development became viable for market release.

DSOGaming has some images of some of the Rampage GPUs that survived 3DFX's closure, though, and the graphics card is shown running Max Payne, Unreal Tournament & 3DMark 2001. For those of you that ever had a 3DFX graphics card, these should bring you right down memory lane. Enjoy.

Oh hey remember this news post from July last year? Damien Triolet's work history off-late has been one of many such recent stories. These tend to begin with AMD, and RTG in particular, getting a cash infusion and growing in 2016 and 2017 to where they hired some of the best engineers and marketing personnel from the industry- media or otherwise. This follows a more stagnant GPU division in 2017-2018, Intel deciding to dip their toes back into the discrete GPU market, and in turn.. persuading many to cross over to the blue side.

According to Damien's LinkedIn and FaceBook profiles, he has started working for Intel from November 26, 2018 in a technical marketing position in their Gaming and Graphics division, a role analogous to his from his days at AMD. Presumably, he joins Raja Koduri and the many others who have followed this exact path of late, and everyone remains curious as to what the finished retail product will be. In the meantime, we here at TechPowerUp wish him the best again for his new venture. We had the pleasure of interacting with Damien on multiple occasions in the past, some as colleagues in the media giving hardware manufacturers a hard time, and others when he was hosting us as an AMD employee. His tenure at Hardware.fr has been inspiring to us, with excellent reviews that no doubt were what caught the eyes of AMD in the first place, and Intel will definitely gain from his presence.

Last week was quite busy with news, and one thing that slipped through the cracks then was the announcement of ZOTAC's new NVLink bridging solutions. Marketed under the ZOTAC Gaming brand, these follow in line with other major NVIDIA add-in card (AIC) partners in providing an alternative to the first-party OEM offering, just in case you preferred a different aesthetic. These are available in either a 3-slot (74.5 x 75.5 x 25 mm) or a 4-slot (74.5 x 96 x 25 mm) spacing option, with backlighting support for the ZOTAC Gaming logo in the center that can be configured by their SPECTRA software lighting suite.

These NVLink bridges have not yet been made available for purchase in most regions, with expected retail availability ranging from December 14-20, but those in East Asia can already find them available for comparable prices as with other such options from MSI, ASUS, and GIGABYTE. ZOTAC also put out an unboxing video which gives a better look at the product relative to the renders below, for those interested.

INNO3D, a leading manufacturer of pioneering high-end multimedia components and various innovations including the recent addition high performance gaming iCHILL Memory. Its introduction to the market has been very well received due to the various capacities that the iCHILL memory series offers including 4GB to 16GB at speeds of 2400MHz to 4000MHz and with ultra-low latencies up to 15CL.

INNO3D has done wonders with the iCHILL series over the last decade in the graphics department so wanted to apply the same principles, intricacies and devotion to creating a series of performance gaming memory with the ice cool touch. The iCHILL memory modules are equipped with a unique heat spreader design that optimizes system performance for smoother gaming experience with that extra kick to your PC.

RAPOO, a leader in Wireless peripheral technology, introduces its newest 'VH300 Gaming Headset'. Designed to make even the most casual gamer feel like a pro, VH300 brings the eternal gaming experience, unbeatable! Sporting the clutter free and integrated design with Cool Blue LED backlight, the headset adds a touch of sophistication to gamers personality.

Game Boosting refers to the practice of gamers to pay other, more skilled players to "boost them up" to higher ranks, mainly in competitive multiplayer games. The practice sometimes takes the form of paid partnership with a team of skilled players (where the player that's receiving the boost is of much lower skill, but gets pulled along with the remaining members of the team's efforts) or by actually giving a player access to your account, to play as if he/her was you, and cashing in on his/her better "skillz". This practice, it goes without saying, goes against the competitive nature of certain games, and if you know your South Koreans, you know they take competitive gaming very, very (really, very) seriously.

This is why the country is seemingly looking to put an "illegal" tag on game boosting, as in, illegal enough to warrant prosecution and an actual sentence to jail (a maximum prison sentence of two years and a fine of 20 million won ($18,000). This isn't something that has been cooked up overnight: an amendment to the "Law on Game Business Development" bill was first proposed earlier this summer, and has now passed the National Assembly Legislation Review Committee, bringing it one step closer to becoming law.