Nvidia has begun rolling out a beta feature that automatically compiles game shaders while a PC is idle. It won't eliminate shader compilation the first time a game runs, but Ars Technica reports it could help reduce those repeated wait times. From the report: Nvidia's new Auto Shader Compilation system promises to "reduc[e] the frequency of game runtime compilation after driver updates" for users running Nvidia's GeForce Game Ready Driver 595.97 WHQL or later. When the feature is active and your machine is idle, the app will automatically start rebuilding DirectX drivers for your games so they're all set to roll the next time they launch.

While the feature defaults to being turned off when the Nvidia App is first downloaded, users can activate it by going to the Graphics Tab > Global Settings > Shader Cache. There, they can set aside disk space for precompiled shaders and decide how many system resources the compilation process should use. App users can also manually force shader recompilation through the app rather than waiting for the machine to go idle.

Unfortunately, Nvidia warns that users will still have to generate shaders in-game after downloading a title for the first time. The Auto Shader Compiler system only generates the new shaders needed after subsequent driver updates following that first run of a new title.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Shares of videogame companies fell sharply in afternoon trading on Friday after Alphabet's Google rolled out its artificial intelligence model capable of creating interactive digital worlds with simple prompts. Shares of "Grand Theft Auto" maker Take-Two Interactive fell 10%, online gaming platform Roblox was down over 12%, while videogame engine maker Unity Software dropped 21%.

The AI model, dubbed "Project Genie," allows users to simulate a real-world environment through prompts with text or uploaded images, potentially disrupting how video games have been made for over a decade and forcing developers to adapt to the fast-moving technology. "Unlike explorable experiences in static 3D snapshots, Genie 3 generates the path ahead in real time as you move and interact with the world. It simulates physics and interactions for dynamic worlds," Google said in a blog post on Thursday.

Traditionally, most videogames are built inside a game engine such as Epic Games' "Unreal Engine" or the "Unity Engine", which handles complex processes like in-game gravity, lighting, sound, and object or character physics. "We'll see a real transformation in development and output once AI-based design starts creating experiences that are uniquely its own, rather than just accelerating traditional workflows," said Joost van Dreunen, games professor at NYU's Stern School of Business. Project Genie also has the potential to shorten lengthy development cycles and reduce costs, as some premium titles take around five to seven years and hundreds of millions of dollars to create.

Longtime Slashdot reader jrepin writes: Plasma is a popular desktop (and mobile) environment for GNU/Linux and other UNIX-like operating systems. Among other things, it also powers the desktop mode of the Steam Deck gaming handheld. The KDE community today announced the latest release: Plasma 6.4. This fresh new release improves on nearly every front, with progress being made in accessibility, color rendering, tablet support, window management, and more.

Plasma already offered virtual desktops and customizable tiles to help organize your windows and activities, and now it lets you choose a different configuration of tiles on each virtual desktop. The Wayland session brings some new accessibility features: you can now move the pointer using your keyboard's number pad keys, or use a three-finger touchpad pinch gesture to zoom in or out.

Plasma file transfer notification now shows a speed graph, giving you a more visual idea of how fast the transfer is going and how long it will take to complete. When any applications are in full screen mode Plasma will now enter Do Not Disturb mode and only show urgent notifications. When you exit full-screen mode, you'll see a summary of any notifications you missed.

Now, when an application tries to access the microphone and finds it muted, a notification will pop up. A new feature in the Application Launcher widget will place a green New! tag next to newly installed apps, so you can easily find where something you just installed lives in the menu.

The Display and Monitor page in System Settings comes with a brand new HDR calibration wizard. Support for Extended Dynamic Range (a different kind of HDR) and P010 video color format has also been added. System Monitor now supports usage monitoring for AMD and Intel graphic cards -- it can even show the GPU usage on a per-process basis.

Spectacle, the built-in app for taking screenshots and screen recordings, has a much-improved design and more streamlined functionality. The background of the desktop or window now darkens when an authentication dialog shows up, helping you locate and focus on the window asking for your password.

There's a brand-new Animations page in System Settings that groups all the settings for purely visual animated effects into one place, making them easier to find and configure. Aurorae, a newly added SVG vector graphics theme engine, enhances KWin window decorations.

You can read more about these and many other other features in the Plasma 6.4 announcement and complete changelog.

Electronic Arts CEO Andrew Wilson confirmed the company is considering putting ads in traditional AAA games, which players purchase for around $70 apiece. During EA's latest earnings call, Wilson said, "Advertising has an opportunity to be a meaningful driver of growth for us," and that teams are looking at how to thoughtfully implement ads within game experiences.

In-game advertising is not new, with the first recorded instance dating back to 1978. As the gaming industry is expected to grow to $583 billion by 2030, in-game ads are seen as a natural progression. However, player reception depends on the placement and unobtrusiveness of the ads. EA has faced backlash in the past for poorly placed ads, such as full-screen promotions for a TV show in UFC 4, which disrupted gameplay. The company has been experimenting with dynamic ads since 2006, with titles like Need for Speed Carbon and Battlefield 2142 among the first to feature them.

A Linux Foundation subsidiary has developed a free and open-source 3D game engine distributed under the Apache license. And last week the Open 3D Foundation announced "a big step forward, showcasing the power of open-source technologies in giving gamers around the globe unforgettable gaming experiences."

"We are proud to unveil MadWorld as the first mobile title powered by O3DE," said Joe Bryant, Executive Director of the Open 3D Foundation, "demonstrating the large potential of open-source technologies in game development."

And then this week Los Angeles Business Journal reported that El Segundo-based gaming studio Carbonated Inc. "has raised $11 million of series A funding to finance the development and release of its debut game title... Prior to its most recent round, Carbonated closed an $8.5 million seed funding round in 2020, which also included participation from Andreessen and Bitkraft." Since its founding [in 2015], the company has been focusing on research and development for its upcoming first title, called "MadWorld." The third-person, multiplayer shooter game is set in a post-apocalyptic world and features both player-versus-player and player-versus-environment features. Players of the game will battle for land control in a dystopian setting. Using a combination of open-source mapping tools and Carbonated's proprietary custom operations technology, called Carbyne, the game's world is designed around real-life cities and locations. Players are initially dropped into the game's version of their own real-time location.

The game allows players to optionally engage using blockchain technology with a digital asset-ownership layer powered by a blockchain network called XPLA.
Earlier this month Madworld "opened up for Early Access registration," reports the egamers web site, arguing that the game "is set to redefine the gaming landscape and will make its public debut later this year." After a catastrophic event named "The Collapse," MadWorld takes place in a desolate Earth where players engage in a battle for survival, highlighting the game's unique setting and immersive experience. The game's world is intricately designed with 250,000 land plots mapped out on a hexagonal grid, each presenting unique resources and strategic benefits. This innovative approach to game design enhances the gameplay experience and introduces a new layer of strategy and competition.

MadWorld's gameplay is centered around integrating Web3 technologies, which allows for the ownership, enhancement, and trading of tokenized representations of real-world locations. This feature encourages players to create clans and work together or compete for essential resources that are spread across the vast game world. Clans can acquire these resources by paying tributes to NFT landowners using "Rounds," the in-game currency. This mechanism not only fosters a sense of community and teamwork but also creates unique economic opportunities within the game by blending traditional gaming elements with the emerging field of digital assets.
"With its use of O3DE, Carbonated can enhance the game's visual fidelity, performance, and scalability," according to the Linux Foundation's announcement, "in order to deliver a fast-paced adventure on mobile platforms." O3DE is an open-source game engine developed by a collaborative community of industry experts. It includes state-of-the-art rendering capabilities, dynamic lighting, and realistic physics simulation. These features have enabled Carbonated to build realistic dystopian environments and create action-packed gameplay in MadWorld.
According to its official site, MadWorld "is set to be released to the public sometime in 2024 and is currently being tested on iOS and Android operating systems."

Carbonated's CEO Travis Boatman made this prediction to the site Decrypt. "We think mobile is where the breakout will happen for Web3."

NVIDIA has been working on adding generative AI to non-playable characters (NPCs) for a while now. The company is hoping a newly-announced partnership with Ubisoft will accelerate development of this technology and, ultimately, bring these AI-driven NPCs to modern games. From a report: Ubisoft helped build new "NEO NPCs" by using NVIDIA's Avatar Cloud Engine (ACE) technology, with an assist from dynamic NPC experts Inworld AI. The end result? Characters that don't repeat the same phrase over and over, while ignoring the surrounding violent mayhem. These NEO NPCs are said to interact in real time with players, the environment and other in-game characters. NVIDIA says this opens up "new possibilities for emergent storytelling." To that end, Ubisoft's narrative team built complete backgrounds, knowledge bases and conversational styles for two NPCs as a proof of concept.

Apple is reinvesting in gaming with advanced Mac hardware, improvements to Apple silicon, and gaming-focused software, aiming not to repeat its past mistakes and capture a larger share of the gaming market. In an article for Inverse, Raymond Wong provides an in-depth overview of this endeavor, including commentary from Apple's marketing managers Gordon Keppel, Leland Martin, and Doug Brooks. Here's an excerpt from the report: Gaming on the Mac in the 1990s until 2020, when Apple made a big shift to its own custom silicon, could be boiled down to this: Apple was in a hardware arms race with the PC that it couldn't win. Mac gamers were hopeful that the switch from PowerPC to Intel CPUs starting in 2005 would turn things around, but it didn't because by then, GPUs started becoming the more important hardware component for running 3D games, and the Mac's support for third-party GPUs could only be described as lackluster. Fast forward to 2023, and Apple has a renewed interest in gaming on the Mac, the likes of which it hasn't shown in the last 25 years. "Apple silicon has changed all that," Keppel tells Inverse. "Now, every Mac that ships with Apple silicon can play AAA games pretty fantastically. Apple silicon has been transformative of our mainstream systems that got tremendous boosts in graphics with M1, M2, and now with M3."

Ask any gadget reviewer (including myself) and they will tell you Keppel isn't just drinking the Kool-Aid because Apple pays him to. Macs with Apple silicon really are performant computers that can play some of the latest PC and console games. In three generations of desktop-class chip design, Apple has created a platform with "tens of millions of Apple silicon Macs," according to Keppel. That's tens of millions of Macs with monstrous CPU and GPU capabilities for running graphics-intensive games. Apple's upgrades to the GPUs on its silicon are especially impressive. The latest Apple silicon, the M3 family of chips, supports hardware-accelerated ray-tracing and mesh shading, features that only a few years ago didn't seem like they would ever be a priority, let alone ones that are built into the entire spectrum of MacBook Pros.

The "magic" of Apple silicon isn't just performance, says Leland Martin, an Apple software marketing manager. Whereas Apple's fallout with game developers on the Mac previously came down to not supporting specific computer hardware, Martin says Apple silicon started fresh with a unified hardware platform that not only makes it easier for developers to create Mac games for, but will allow for those games to run on other Apple devices. "If you look at the Mac lineup just a few years ago, there was a mix of both integrated and discrete GPUs," Martin says. "That can add complexity when you're developing games. Because you have multiple different hardware permutations to consider. Today, we've effectively eliminated that completely with Apple silicon, creating a unified gaming platform now across iPhone, iPad, and Mac. Once a game is designed for one platform, it's a straightforward process to bring it to the other two. We're seeing this play out with games like Resident Evil Village that launched first [on Mac] followed by iPhone and iPad."

"Gaming was fundamentally part of the Apple silicon design,â Doug Brooks, also on the Mac product marketing team, tells Inverse. "Before a chip even exists, gaming is fundamentally incorporated during those early planning stages and then throughout development. I think, big picture, when we design our chips, we really look at building balanced systems that provide great CPU, GPU, and memory performance. Of course, [games] need powerful GPUs, but they need all of those features, and our chips are designed to deliver on that goal. If you look at the chips that go in the latest consoles, they look a lot like that with integrated CPU, GPU, and memory." [...] "One thing we're excited about with this most recent launch of the M3 family of chips is that we're able to bring these powerful new technologies, Dynamic Caching, as well as ray-tracing and mesh shading across our entire line of chips," Brook adds. "We didn't start at the high end and trickle them down over time. We really wanted to bring that to as many customers as possible."

Microsoft is announcing the Surface Laptop Studio today, a successor to the Surface Book line of powerful laptops. It presents a total redesign for Microsoft's flagship laptop, ditching the removable display in favor of one that pulls forward to transform from laptop into tablet (or what Microsoft calls studio mode). From a report: "Surface Laptop Studio is the most powerful Surface we've ever built," says Pete Kyriacou, vice president of devices at Microsoft. "It is the culmination of years of Surface innovation -- on hinges, display, silicon, and more -- and brings the best of the Surface heritage together in one powerhouse device."

The most immediate and obvious change to this Surface Book successor is the display and hinge. The 14.4-inch PixelSense Flow display (2400 x 1600) supports up to 120Hz and Dolby Vision. Microsoft is using a new flexible Dynamic Woven Hinge, which it says is durable and allows this laptop to transition between modes much like the larger Surface Studio. The Surface Laptop Studio supports three modes: laptop, stage, and studio. The laptop mode arranges the display just like a regular laptop, with a full keyboard and a new touchpad with haptics. The stage mode is where things get interesting, as you can pull the display forward to an angle that's designed for gaming, streaming, or presenting. This will cover the keyboard, and the angle is more suited toward watching Netflix or playing games, touching the display, or using the new Surface Slim Pen 2 for digital inking.

Nvidia is now requiring, not just encouraging, companies selling laptops with its new RTX 30-series graphics chips to be more transparent about the kind of power people can expect. From a report: Nvidia tells The Verge these companies will have to disclose specific clock speed stats and total graphics power on online product pages -- all of which tells people everything they need to know about a laptop's graphics potential, for better or worse. However, companies won't have to mention that these chips are Max-Q variants because, according to an Nvidia spokesperson, "Max-Q is no longer part of the GPU name." Rather, Max-Q is now solely used to communicate that a laptop with an RTX 30-series graphics chip ships with efficiency features like Whisper Mode 2, Dynamic Boost 2, and Advanced Optimus. Previously, seeing Max-Q branding made it easy to determine a laptop's general performance without having to know its specific clock speeds. It's encouraging to see Nvidia no longer allows companies to hide this vital information from marketing materials. It should go far enough in helping buyers make an educated purchase without having to wait on reviewers and early adopters to report on the specs.

This week NVIDIA threatened to stop providing GeForce Founders Edition review units to reviewer Steven Walton, who runs the YouTube channel Hardware Unboxed (and is also an editor/reviewer at TechSpot). NVIDIA had complained "your GPU reviews and recommendations have continued to focus singularly on rasterization performance, and you have largely discounted all of the other technologies we offer gamers. It is very clear from your community commentary that you do not see things the same way that we, gamers, and the rest of the industry do."

NVIDIA's email to Walton had said that henceforward their review products would instead be allocated to other media outlets "that recognize the changing landscape of gaming and the features that are important to gamers and anyone buying a GPU today, be it for gaming, content creation, or studio and stream."

But TechSpot reports tonight that "Less than 48 hours later, Steve received the good news. Nvidia apologized and walked everything back." Great news indeed, but let's be clear this wouldn't have happened if not for the support of the community at large and key people in the tech space that have such an enormous influence that it was too much for Nvidia to ignore. Linus from LinusTechTips (his angry rant on the WAN Show embedded above is pure gold) and Steve from Gamers Nexus, were two of those persons.
And unfortunately, by then TechSpot had already composed a scathing takedown of NVIDIA's email: As a corporation, it's Nvidia's prerogative to decide on the reviewers it chooses to collaborate with. However, this and other related incidents raise serious questions around journalistic independence and what they are expecting of reviewers when they are sent products for an unbiased opinion...

In today's dynamic graphics hardware space, with 350W flagships, hardware ray tracing, and exotic cooling solutions, there's a wide range of data points Hardware Unboxed looks at. But at the end of the day, there's only one real question every GPU buyer wants to know: how well do games run on a particular piece of hardware? Considering that 99% percent of Steam games feature raster-only rendering pipelines, rasterization performance was, is, and will be, a key point that Steve considers in GPU reviews...

[M]ost games (including almost all RTX titles) are built on raster renderers. A hypothetical graphics card with most of its die space reserved for ray tracing would run Quake II RTX great and... not much else. Ray tracing absolutely deserves a place in modern GPU reviews. But there's simply not enough of it in enough games for any responsible reviewer to put it center-stage, in place of raster performance. It wouldn't do justice to consumers, who will primarily be running raster workloads. This is why Nvidia's complaint is so puzzling.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: You won't be able to use Sony's DualShock 4 or other third-party PS4 gamepads to play PlayStation 5 games, Sony confirmed in a blog post today. Those older gamepads will still work with "supported PS4 games" running on the PS5, Sony said, and PS5 software will work with "specialty peripherals" designed for the PS4 -- including "officially licensed racing wheels, arcade sticks, and flight sticks." Those caveats highlight the fact that there's no technical limitation or communication protocol mismatch stopping the upcoming hardware from communicating with legacy controllers.

But Sony says it "believe[s] that PS5 games should take advantage of the new capabilities and features we're bringing to the platform, including the features of DualSense wireless controller." Those features include what Sony is calling "haptic feedback and dynamic trigger effects" and a built-in microphone (last month, Geoff Keighley hosted what is, thus far, the only public hands-on impressions of these new controller features). The DualSense compatibility decision casts Sony in contrast to Microsoft, which is promising that "your Xbox One gaming accessories come into the future with you, too" with the coming Xbox Series X. While that promise doesn't extend to the defunct Kinect camera, it does include specialty pads like the Xbox Elite Controller and Xbox Adaptive Controller. "We believe that your investments in gaming should move with you into the next generation," Microsoft wrote in a blog post last month. PlayStation Move controllers -- first released in 2010 for use with the PS3—will continue to work with PlayStation VR games on the PS5, Sony said. The PS4's existing PlayStation Camera accessory will also work on the PS5, though it will require an adaptor that Sony says it will be providing to users for free.

Players will have to pay $129.99 up front and $9.99 a month, on top of individual game purchase costs, when Google's previously announced Stadia game-streaming service launches in November. From a report: A free tier will be available some time in 2020, as will a paid subscription tier that doesn't require the upfront purchase. The Stadia Founder's Edition and its contingent Stadia Pro subscription will be the only way to get access to the Stadia service when it launches, Google announced today. That $129.99 package, available for pre-order on the Google Store right now, will include: A Stadia controller in "limited-edition night blue", a Chromecast Ultra, a three months of Stadia Pro service and a three-month "buddy pass" to give to a friend, and first dibs on claiming a "Stadia Name".

After the first three months, Stadia Pro users will have to pay $9.99 a month to maintain their membership. For that price, they will get access to Google's highest-quality streams, at up to 4K/60fps with high-dynamic range (HDR) and 5.1 surround sound. In 2019, users will not be able to sign up for Stadia Pro without investing in the Founder's Edition hardware package, and Founder's Edition packages will only be available "in limited quantities and for a limited time."

Several readers have shared an EuroGamer report: Just a week after the Santa Fe High School shooting in Texas that saw 10 people fatally shot and 13 others were wounded, Valve has come under fire for a Steam school-shooting game that encourages you to "hunt and destroy" children. Active Shooter, which at the time of publication is live on Steam and due for release on 6th June, is described by its developer as "a dynamic S.W.A.T. simulator." The idea is you're sent in to deal with a shooter at a school, but you can also play as the actual shooter, gunning down school children.

Now, an anti-gun violence charity has called on Valve to pull the game from Steam. The developer of Active Shooter is called Revived Games, the publisher Acid. Revived Games' credits include White Power: Pure Voltage and Dab, Dance & Twerk. "Acid", who plans to add a survival mode in which you play as a civilian and have to "escape or perform a heroic action such as fight against the shooter itself," took to Active Shooter's Steam page to defend the game. "First of all, this game does not promote any sort of violence, especially any soft [sic] of a mass shooting," Acid said.

dryriver writes: There are occasions where multiple big tech manufacturers all announce the exact same innovation at the same time -- e.g. 4K UHD TVs. Everybody in broadcasting and audiovisual content creation knew that 4K/8K UHD and high dynamic range (HDR) were coming years in advance, and that all the big TV and screen manufacturers were preparing 4K UHD HDR product lines because FHD was beginning to bore consumers. It came as no surprise when everybody had a 4K UHD product announcement and demo ready at the same time. Something very unusual happened this year at GDC 2018 however. Multiple graphics and GPU companies, like Microsoft, Nvidia, and AMD, as well as other game developers and game engine makers, all announced that real-time ray tracing is coming to their mass-market products, and by extension, to computer games, VR content and other realtime 3D applications.

Why is this odd? Because for many years any mention of 30+ FPS real-time ray tracing was thought to be utterly impossible with today's hardware technology. It was deemed far too computationally intensive for today's GPU technology and far too expensive for anything mass market. Gamers weren't screaming for the technology. Technologists didn't think it was doable at this point in time. Raster 3D graphics -- what we have in DirectX, OpenGL and game consoles today -- was very, very profitable and could easily have evolved further the way it has for another 7 to 8 years. And suddenly there it was: everybody announced at the same time that real-time ray tracing is not only technically possible, but also coming to your home gaming PC much sooner than anybody thought. Working tech demos were shown. What happened? How did real-time ray tracing, which only a few 3D graphics nerds and researchers in the field talked about until recently, suddenly become so technically possible, economically feasible, and so guaranteed-to-be-profitable that everybody announced this year that they are doing it?

MojoKid writes: Qualcomm provided a deep-dive view today of its Snapdragon 845 mobile processor platform that it recently announced, highlighting key advancements in what the company is referring to as a completely new silicon design. The new chip now employs a Kyro 385 CPU with four high performance cores at 2.8GHz (25 percent faster than the previous gen Snapdragon 835) and four "efficiency" cores operating at 1.7GHz. The new chip also includes the new Spectra 280 image signal processor (ISP). Compared to its predecessor, the image signal processor (ISP) in the Snapdragon 845 promises a 64x uplift in the ability to capture high dynamic range (HDR) color information for 4K HDR video capture and playback. The chip's new Adreno 630 GPU promises a 30 percent boost in gaming performance compared to its predecessor, along with room-scale VR/AR experiences that support 6 degrees of freedom along with simultaneous localization and mapping, or SLAM. Finally, the new SoC platform incorporates Qualcomm's second-generation gigabit LTE modem: the Snapdragon X20. This Cat 18 modem supports peak download speeds of 1.2Gbps along with 5x carrier aggregation, 4x4 MIMO, and Dual SIM-Dual VoLTE. Qualcomm says that the first Snapdragon 845 processors will begin shipping in production devices in early 2018.

Computer hardware company Razer has unveiled its first smartphone. While the design doesn't appear to be up to par with the competition, it does pack some impressive specifications under the hood. The Razer Phone features a 5.7-inch, 2,560x1,440-resolution display, Snapdragon 835 chipset with 8GB of RAM, 12-megapixel dual camera with a wide-angle lens and 2x optical zoom, 4,000mAh battery, dual front-facing stereo speakers, and Android 7.1.1 Nougat running out of the box. While there is a microSD card slot for expandable storage, there is no headphone jack, no waterproofing, and no wireless charging. The device also won't support CDMA carriers like Verizon or Sprint. CNET reports: [W]here most new flagship phones are shiny rounded rectangles with curved screens, the Razer Phone is unabashedly a big black brick. It flaunts sharp 90-degree corners instead of curved edges. You can even stand the phone on end. The 5.7-inch, 2,560x1,440-resolution screen is flat as a pancake, and you'll find giant bezels above and below that screen, too -- just when we thought bezels were going out of style. When the Razer Phone ships Nov. 17 for $699 or £699 -- no plans for Australia at launch -- the company says it'll be the first phone with a display that refreshes 120 times per second, like a high-end PC gaming monitor or Apple's iPad Pro. And combined with a dynamic refresh technique Razer's calling Ultramotion (think Nvidia G-Sync), it can mean beautiful, butter-smooth scrolling down websites and apps, and glossy mobile gameplay.

Microsoft said today it will start rolling out Windows 10 Creators Update, the latest major update to its current desktop operating system, starting April 11. The company says Windows 10 Creators Update brings with it a range of new features. Some of the chief ones are:

1. Visual previews of tabs in Microsoft Edge.
2. Edge now has built-in support for ebooks.
3. Microsoft Paint now lets people create models in 3D.
4. Picture-in-Picture mode for videos. Essentially you can now have a small window with video playing on it placed on top of any other application.
5. Night Light: A baked in feature in Windows that will allow you to change the color and tone of display so that it doesn't pain your eyes to look at the screen at night.
6. Dynamic Lock: The feature first requires you to pair your phone or tablet with the computer. Once done, it will automatically log you out everytime you're away from desk (or technically speaking, the device is out of the computer's proximity).
7. Native support for surround sound.
8. Ability to scribble and make notes on Microsoft's Maps app.
9. Game mode: It "ensures" your computer is always maximizing its resources for an optimal gaming experience.
10. Built-in support for mixed reality handsets.

Over the past two years, we have seen numerous instances where Microsoft has been pushing Windows 10 update to customers who have Windows 7 or 8 running on their machines. There are still hundreds of millions of customers who're yet to upgrade from Windows 7, arguing that they either prefer how Windows 7 looks and functions, or (in some cases, and) why fix something when nothing is broken. That said, would you consider upgrading your system to Windows 10 Creators Update?

Sony announced today it is rolling out a new system updated -- dubbed Shingen -- to all the PlayStation 4 to bring High Dynamic Range (HDR) support. The new update, in addition, also brings Spotify integration, LAN data migration transfer, and tweaks to interface. From a CNET report: Other refinements to the system's interface include a redesigned content info screen -- the thing you see when pressing down after highlighting a game on your home screen. Similarly, the What's New screen has been updated with a new layout. 4.00 also adds support for HDR to all play PS4s, something Sony announced last week. This will be an option located in the Video Output Settings menu for existing PS4s and the new slim PS4, as well as the PS4 Pro. Those who get a Pro when it launches in November will also find support for several new features added in this update. As we learned recently, the system features 1080p streaming for Share Play and Remote Play (but only to PC/Mac and Xperia devices, not Vita), as well as 1080p/30 FPS streaming to Twitch and 1080p 30/60 FPS streaming to YouTube.

Details of Microsoft's rumored new console have dropped ahead of the company's conference at E3 tradeshow Monday. It appears the long-anticipated smaller and more powerful variant of company's current console is real. According to a leaked press render, Microsoft will be announcing the Xbox One S (where S stands for Slim) at the gaming event. The Xbox One S will be 40 percent smaller than the Xbox One, and pack in more powerful processing and graphics muscle. According to the render, the Xbox One S will come with a 2TB hard drive, and feature support for 4K video playback and High Dynamic Range. According to separate reports, the Xbox One S is likely to be priced at $399 for the 2TB variant. Update: 06/13 16:58 GMT by M : Microsoft has officially taken the wraps off the product. It will be available for purchase starting August. AnandTech has more details.Also at its event, Microsoft announced Xbox Play Anywhere. The Verge reports: It lets you buy participating cross-platform games once, and own them on both platforms. If you buy a game on Xbox One it will simply appear in your Windows 10 library, and vice versa, and your saved games, achievements, and other information will carry over between the two versions.Microsoft also unveiled "Project Scorpio", a high-powered Xbox One launching next year that is capable of supporting 4K content as well as virtual reality headsets. "We are creating more choice in your gaming experience than ever before," said Xbox chief Phil Spencer to open Microsoft's E3 conference. No word on its pricing yet.

Vigile writes: Valve took another step to prepare the world for VR gaming by releasing the SteamVR Performance Test today. This application that is free to download through Steam, runs a portion of the Aperture Science Robot Repair demo originally built for the HTC Vive VR headset, and reports back performance metrics and a grade for your PC's hardware. Scores include a Not Ready, Capable and Ready result as well as an "average fidelity" numeric score that is even more interesting. Valve integrated a dynamic fidelity feature "that adjusts image quality of the game in a way to avoid dropped frames and frame rates under 90 FPS" — a target for an acceptable VR experience. Early results put the GeForce GTX 980 Ti at the top of the GPU stack though AMD's Radeon products do very well at every price point below $600. Is your wallet ready?