Nvidia’s presentation at Gamescom 2017 was light on major announcements — no new hardware or architecture to speak of — but it was nevertheless heavy with enthusiasm for the state of PC gaming. GeForce Senior Vice President Jeff Fisher emceed the event, starting the show with a victory lap of impressive statistics about the industry (2 billion people playing games worldwide, more than 200 million on GeForce alone), before leading into a series of developers talking about the exciting ways they are integrating GeForce-specific features into their upcoming releases, with a particular focus on sharing social content. Below is our roundup of everything announced during the presentation.
Community manager David “DeeJ” Dague took to the stage to update us about Destiny 2‘s highly anticipated PC release. Features for the PC version include: A fully-configurable mouse and keyboard settings, adjustable field of view, multisample anti-aliasing, an in-game framerate counter (to show off the uncapped framerates up to 4K resolution). Embracing the specs of as many machines as possible, Destiny 2 will support multiple GPUs and multiple monitors. DeeJ announced for the first time that Destiny 2 will support high dynamic range (HDR) lighting on PC as well.
He then elaborated a bit on the integration of Blizzard’s Battle.net service, which will include voice and text chat in-game, as well as whispers. Your friend list from other Blizzard games like Overwatch will slot right in, with the addition of your clan, which you can form with your friends and allies for cooperative play and manage them in-game or on Bungie’s website. In anticipation of the upcoming PC beta, NVIDIA will release a game-ready driver for Destiny 2 on Thursday. Also now available, GTX 1080 and 1080 TI graphics cards can be bought in a bundle with Destiny 2, which will include early access to the beta.
One feature of GeForce Experience that Fisher particularly highlighted was Ansel, its in-game photography engine, which basically provides players with a virtual SLR to take high-quality pictures of their favorite gaming moments. Ansel allows players to pause the action and move the camera around freely within the game to get the perfect shots and apply filters. Pro Evolution Soccer 2018 and Middle-earth: Shadow of War were highlighted as upcoming titles that will lend themselves particularly well to the platform.
One new and particularly interesting feature announced for Ansel is AI Style Transfer, which lets you choose a reference image from a favorite artist, then apply its style to your screenshot, making it look like, for instance, an impressionist painting. They demonstrated the feature with ARK: Survival Evolved to good effect. As in-game photography becomes a growing field of its own, Nvidia is committed to remaining on the cutting edge of player creativity.
PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds has been one of the biggest surprise hits of the year and has certainly been popular among our writers. Bluehole lead community manager Sammie “poopiequeen” Kang took to the stage to announced the integration of ShadowPlay Highlights into the game. That means your GeForce Experience will automatically record highlights (such as anytime you knock out or kill someone, or when you win that sweet, sweet chicken dinner), and then let you immediately share them to the social platform of your choice. Streaming has been a massive part of PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds success, so this will be a big boon to content creators, and will no doubt add fuel to the game’s viral fire. Be sure to tag Nvidia when you tweet out your highlights for the next month because they will be choosing the best in order to hand out prizes like GTX 1080 TIs and other hardware.
Lastly, Fisher brought out Final Fantasy XV game director Hajime Tabata to announce the Windows PC port of Final Fantasy XV. Tabata promises that this will be the most beautiful and definitive edition of the game yet. It is built on a new version of Square Enix’s Luminous Engine, which integrates features from Nvidia GameWorks such as advanced fire, hair, and shadow simulations, as well as Ansel for sharing those lush new visuals. It will natively support 4K and 8K resolutions and HDR10. There will also be a brand-new first-person gameplay mode, which was built from the ground up to be a fun and coherent way to play the game. Final Fantasy XV: Windows Edition comes to PC in early 2018, including all DLC and updates from the console versions (as well as the upcoming multiplayer mode, expanded even further).
The absolutely absurd idea of putting a touchscreen display on a mouse isn't exactly new. Turtle Beach already did it with its Command Series MC7, which features a 2.25-inch control screen. But apparently, even that wasn't ridiculous enough for Arctic Fox Technologies. Its new Super Mouse looks like someone took the chunky old Atari ST mouse, slapped a touchscreen and scroll wheel on it, and called it an upgrade.
The result is a rather unusual-looking mouse that is now on Kickstarter, starting at $199. And as ridiculous as it looks, some of its features are genuinely intriguing.
Apple is less than a day away from launching its highly anticipated OLED MacBook Pro with a touch-sensitive screen. But it appears that the upgrade is going to cost a pretty penny. According to a report by Bloomberg, Apple is reportedly eyeing a starting price of $2,899 for the 14-inch MacBook Pro, while the 16-inch version could start at $3,399 in the US.
"At $2,899, the 14-inch model would mark the highest starting price for a new MacBook Pro model, surpassing the $2,799 Apple charged for a 17-inch version introduced in 2006," says the report. The report claims that Apple is targeting a minimum price hike of $400 for its upcoming redesigned 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro models.
I've spent a good amount of time digging into the spec sheet of the new M6 MacBook Pro (14-inch), and for all intents and purposes, this is a classic Apple "chip and connectivity" refresh. It's not a full redesign. The chassis, Liquid Retina XDR panel, speakers, ports, and battery, all of them carry over unchanged.
However, the M6 brings more cores, stronger on-device AI, higher memory bandwidth on the larger configs, and modern wireless. Here’s the practical rundown of what actually improved, and whether those gains are worth your money.