NVIDIA have released the application behind their recent human face-rendering technology video, so that home users can run it for themselves.

You can adjust the rendering options in real-time during the video, to see how NVIDIA’s FaceWorks technology copes with different lighting conditions. Getting creeped out by the Uncanny Valley effect is not part of the demo but you’re welcome to do it anyway.

If you’d like, you can download the demo right here from our file library which is, of course, quota-free for iiNet group customers.

Source: NVIDIA

Welcome to the Friday Tech Roundup! Contained herein is a weekly dose of some of the best tech news from across the Internet, rounded up for your edification and entertainment. Read on for all the details of NVIDIA’s GTX 780, the man who took a year off from the Internet, and Virgin Galactic’s plan for relatively affordable commercial space travel.

Nvidia’s GTX 780 is probably going to be really expensive

The upcoming Nvidia GTX 780 is due for release in the US this month, and while it is iterative on the Kepler design, it includes some new features and optimisations that promise to make it a serious contender in the market.

Despite its basis in existing architecture, Swedish graphics card aficionados SweClockers have reported sources claiming that the GTX 780 may well be significantly more expensive than the opening price of the GTX 680, and could well end up being priced akin to the GTX Titan at around US$1000.

Through the Google Glass: Explorer Edition units reviewed

Google Glass Explorer Edition headsets are now in the wild, and various forms of review and hands-on impressions pieces are appearing all over the place.

The prevailing response seems to be positive, but also hopeful that future revisions will make good on the promise of this early prototype. By most accounts, the experience of actually using Glass’ refractive display is really exciting. Google have released a one-minute video that shows how the home interface works, and how basic functionality is performed via the touch panel on the right arm of the device.

Skype shedding local installations in favour of a browser-based plugin

Microsoft are trialling a browser-based Skype plugin, which allows users to make Skype calls from within an Outlook.com inbox, removing the necessity for the locally installed application. Those for whom Skype and other VoIP/video calling services were to spell an end of our reliance on phone providers, should find the release of a browser-based plugin interesting. The reason that Skype and its ilk haven’t become the first port of call for world communication is a lack of ubiquity — the mobile phone system is already incredibly well established, and integrated into most of our lives.

Skype remains something that needs to be organised in advance via “hey can I call you on Skype?” where SMSs and phone calls simply work. If Microsoft are to achieve ubiquity, they need Skype to be an easier alternative to pulling out your phone. The browser plugin is currently being rolled out in the UK, and should see release in Australia sometime between September and November 2013.

Paul Miller returns to the Internet after a year

One year ago, Paul Miller of The Verge decided that he wanted to see who he could be without the Internet. He felt that the Internet could be the reason for his procrastination habits, the restriction of his creativity, and perhaps even a significant factor of his self-confidence and depression issues.

Well, a full year later he has returned and has captured his experience in text and video. The article is really interesting, as it helps to address and deflect some of the vilification that the Internet receives. The experiment has helped Paul to come to the conclusion that the Internet is a one-stop-shop for many of our bad habits, habits that people are perfectly capable of fulfilling to the same or even a greater extent when disconnected, despite the inconvenience of not having them piped directly to our lap, pocket, or desktop.

Virgin Galactic hope to make space travel affordable to everyone

In a recent interview, Sir Richard Branson spoke with a strange mix of care and candour to Engadget’s Michael Gorman about their plans for consumer space travel, and the realities of making the practice commercially viable and more than mere dream fulfilment. Sir Richard was careful to avoid forecasting pricing for commercial flights in the future, but he is confident that the current price of US$250,000 will come down.

“[Our first thousand customers will] help us effectively fund the program. They’re the people who can afford to pay it, and we’re enormously appreciative of their support,” said Branson. “By the time you get to an age where you want to go to space, you’ll be able to afford it.”

As well as the exorbitantly priced initial 1000 flights, Virgin Galactic also plan to subsidise prices by offering a comprehensive satellite delivery service to businesses that wish to launch low-orbit satellites relatively cheaply and quickly. “We’re also going to be able to put more satellites in space in one month — three and a half thousand satellites in one month — than have been put up in the last 10 years,” Branson claimed. Virgin Galactic plan to be capable of launching low-orbit satellites within 24 hours instead of the current period of one year, which Sir Branson believes will be “transformative.”

Welcome to the Friday Tech Roundup! Contained herein is a weekly dose of some of the best tech news from across the internet, rounded up for your edification and entertainment. Read on for all the details of AMD’s response to Nvidia’s “bitter” PS4 put-downs, possible Internet sabotage attempts, the lifting of electronics use during take-off and landing, and yet another amazing discovery that could change the way we make and use electronics.

AMD calls NVIDIA “bitter” in response to recent lashing out

After NVIDIA’s recent dismissal of the PS4 and its technical specifications, AMD’s director of ISV relations Neal Robinson has flippantly responded in an interview with TechRadar. When asked about NVIDIA’s summary of the PS4 as running on “a low-end CPU, and a low- to mid-range GPU”, Robinson laughed and said “”Well, of course they’re going to do that, they’re a little bitter.” He then went on to clarify, “For us, really by looking at that APU that we designed, you can’t pull out individual components off it and hold it up and say, ‘Yeah, this compares to X or Y.’ It’s that integration of the two, and especially with the amount of shared memory that Sony has chosen to put on that machine, then you’re going to be able to do so much more moving and sharing that data that you can address by both sides.”

It sounds as though the primary advantage is the APU’s ability to share data. “It’s more than just a CPU doing all these amazing calculations and a GPU doing calculations. We are now going to be able to move certain tasks between the two.” When asked about AMD’s involvement with Microsoft and the next Xbox, Robinson deftly dodged the question, but made a point of mentioning the “tremendous success” they enjoy in their partnership with Microsoft for the Xbox 360. “It was a great partnership and we enjoy working with them,” he said, clearly inviting speculation.

Undersea cables damaged in possible Internet sabotage attempt

It can be easy to forget just how tenuous our access to Internet really is. The Washington Post recently reported on allegations from Egypt’s naval forces that three scuba divers were arrested during an attempt at “cutting an undersea cable” in the Meditteranean, and that the week-long Internet slowdown experienced in Egypt since March 22 was due to cable damage caused by either a speeding fishing boat, or a ship’s anchor. This kind of cable damage causes slowdowns because Internet traffic needs to be rerouted around the damaged cable, taking the long way around. In a piece over at Wired, Alexandra Chang highlights the fragility of our international network by pointing out that “Nearly 200 undersea fiber optic cables link the world’s telecommunications, and they are for the most part poorly armored, rarely patrolled and only occasionally monitored.”

She goes on to quote Andrew Blum, author of Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet, “Other than obscurity and a few feet of sand, [the cables] are just there,” he says. “The staff at a cable landing station might patrol the path to the beach landing once or twice a day, but otherwise I’ve never heard of or seen any constant security.”

Unreal Engine 3 ported to Firefox

Via the use of a newly updated ASM.js optimisation module for Firefox’s JavaScript engine, Mozilla claims that they are able to deliver incredible performance ability to C applications compiled to ASM.js. They believe that these applications can function in the browser at only twice as slow as natively executed code. In English, this means that it will be possible for browser applications to make better use of physical system hardware to allow for much more intensive applications to function in-browser. By way of example, Mozilla showed off this technology at their GDC session by running a web-based version of Epic’s Unreal Engine 3 via ASM.js. This differs from Google’s Native Client solution, which allows a browser to run native code within a sandbox.

Mozilla believe that the major advantage of ASM.js is that it works now. “The principal benefit of ASM.js over whole new technologies like NaCl and PNaCl is that it works today: existing JavaScript engines already optimize this style of code quite well. This means that developers can ship ASM.js today and it’ll simply get faster over time. Another important benefit is that it’s far simpler to implement, requiring very little additional machinery on top of existing JavaScript engines and no API compatibility layer.”

Electronic devices may soon be allowed to remain powered on during take-off and landing

An investigation is underway to finally decide whether or not it is okay for personal electronics to remain in use by aircraft passengers during take-off and landing. An industry group made up of representatives from Amazon, Boeing and other aircraft manufacturers, the CEA, FCC and elsewhere are working together on the investigation, and hope to present their findings on July 31. Tom’s Hardware’s Kevin Parrish has anecdotal evidence that seems to imply that the rules are unnecessary in their current state. Apparently, one of the pilots of his flight home from CES 2013 told him that “there’s no real reason why passengers must turn off their devices.

The only valid reason he could think of was the amount of incoming and outgoing transmissions per plane that could possibly interfere with the tower.” Parrish then quotes Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri, “So it’s O.K. to have iPads in the cockpit; it’s O.K. for flight attendants —and they are not in a panic —yet it’s not O.K. for the traveling public.” The industry group hopes to find that the takeoff/landing electronics rule, as established by the Federal Aviation Administration, was put in place without real evidence.

Will graphene become the new direction for electronics, or will it go the way of carbon nanotubes?

The same University of Manchester scientists that brought you the levitating frog, Andre Geim and Kostya Novoselov, may be on the cusp of an incredibly important scientific discovery. They have found that an isolated single-atom-thin layer of graphite has properties that makes it a serious contender to become the next foundational technology to propel electronics into the future. With “electrical conductivity 100 times faster than silicon; strength 200 times greater than steel; [and] astounding optical and thermal characteristics,” it is easy to imagine a wide range of potentially exciting applications for graphene. It is worth remembering, however, that this isn’t the first time that such astounding technological breakthroughs have been reported, we must remember the excitement at the discovery of carbon nanotubes, and the subsequent failure to find a commercially viable use for the technology.

That said, according to Novoselov’s roadmap for graphene, the next most viable commercial outcome will be in flexible displays. He and his colleagues believe that the hurdles that stopped carbon nanotubes from making it to mass scale production simply do not exist for graphene, and that commercialisation will come.

Closing out today’s news is NVIDIA’s just-released-out-of-GDC tech demo, showing real-time destruction of a Roman-esque colosseum. In it, you can see the crosshair moving across the scene and initiating explosions of rubble and masonry, and looking generally very impressive. It’s not really textured or in-game so it’s hard to tell how heavy the required processing is, but the video claims that it’s running on a single GTX 680. Check it out:

Source: VG247

NVIDIA have released GeForce 314.22 drivers for you to download, claiming a boost of up to 41% in BioShock Infinite and an astonishing 71% in Tomb Raider.

“Other highlights include single-GPU and SLI performance improvements of up to 30% in Civilization V, 22% in Sniper Elite V2, and 12% in Sleeping Dogs,” reads the announcement. “314.22 WHQL also includes SLI profiles for Dungeons & Dragons: Neverwinter, Resident Evil 6, and Sniper Elite: Nazi Zombie Army; 3D Vision profiles for Brutal Legend, MUD, and Tomb Raider; and a NVIDIA Control Panel Ambient Occlusion profile for BioShock Infinite.”

Head on over our file library (or to the GeForce website) and grab them for yourself.

Source: GeForce (Thanks, PalZer0)

It’s that time again; that time when every middleware and engine manufacturer suddenly remembers they haven’t told everyone how awesome they are lately – incidentally just ahead of the release of a bunch of new consoles, which, oh hey, developers need a new license for. Happily, for we the end users this just means we get to check out some great tech demos. Below you’ll find a demonstration of Nvidia’s new Face Works tech, which was shown at the company’s GPU Technology Conference this week.

You’ll want to skip to about 8:40 if you just want to see it in action; remember this is not pre-rendered, which makes up for the lack of hair and any real complexity in the scene. We probably won’t see tech like this in games for a very long time, alas, unless they’re games about disembodied heads floating in space.

Source: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Welcome to the Friday Tech Roundup! Contained herein is a weekly dose of some of the best tech news from across the internet, rounded up for your edification and entertainment. Read on for all the details of Nvidia’s dismissal of next-gen console processing power, a videogame controller for your feet, real-life Medi-gel, and more on science’s intention to destroy us all with robots.

Nvidia bares teeth, gnaws on PS4 specs

“Compared to gaming PCs, the PS4 specs are in the neighborhood of a low-end CPU, and a low- to mid-range GPU side,” said Nvidia’s senior vice president of content and development Tony Tamasi in a scathing interview with TechRadar. “If the PS4 ships in December as Sony indicated, it will only offer about half the performance of a GTX680 GPU (based on GFLOPS and texture), which launched in March 2012, more than a year and a half ago.”

Tamasi goes on to point out that the closed nature of console platforms means that upgrades are impossible, and if history repeats itself, “these next-generation consoles, while being more powerful than the current ones, will very quickly end up more than an order of magnitude behind the PC.” In a tonally similar interview with Gamespot, Tamasi insinuated that Nvidia considered and discarded the idea of working with Sony on the PS4, “I’m sure there was a negotiation that went on and we came to the conclusion that we didn’t want to do the business at the price those guys were willing to pay.”

Logitech release G series rebranded line of gaming peripherals

It’s been a while since Logitech last refreshed their range of gaming peripherals, but the newly announced Logitech G series is set to change that, and bring with it some thoughtful design choices that could benefit gamers of any stripe. The lineup includes four new mice, two keyboards, and two headsets. The new series focuses on comfort and customisation options, with vented surfaces, hydrophobic coatings, and fingerprint-resistant shiny bits designed to protect the fancy new gear from we sweaty users. Stay tuned for some fast-talking with Charles, the Gaming Community Coordinator at Logitech as he runs us through the new range.

The Stinky Footboard turns fancy footwork into keyboard inputs

While the name is somewhat self-deprecating, the company behind the Stinky Footboard is confident in the need for their upcoming oddball foot-controlled peripheral. “Why should we limit ourselves to two hands to control games?,” says Luc Levasseur, co-founder and R&D Director, Stelulu Technologies to MaximumPC’s Paul Lilly. The concept is that the Stinky Footboard sits on the floor, and the user rests their foot on the surface.

The Footboard should remain centred when the user is at rest, but respond to them tilting their foot in any of the four cardinal directions. Tension springs can be individually switched out for heavier or lighter versions based on the preference of the user. The four buttons can be mapped to keyboard inputs, and used in the same way. For example, forward and back could be respectively mapped to accelerate and break in driving games, or the four buttons could be used for weapons or inventory management in shooters and character action games. Stelulu intend to float the concept on Kickstarter after gathering public hands(feet?)-on impressions at PAX East.

Taking the “fiction” out of science fiction: Medi-gel is very nearly an actual thing

A substance named Veti-Gel has been developed by NYU student Joe Landolina, which is astonishingly similar to the all-purpose Mass Effect fixer-upper, Medi-gel. Veti-Gel is designed to instantly stop bleeding upon the application of the substance to any open wound, without the need to apply pressure. “In all of our tests we found we were able to immediately stop bleeding,” says Landolina in a recent interview with Humans Invent. “Your skin has this thing called the extracellular matrix,” he explains. “It’s kind of a mesh of molecules and sugars and protein that holds your cells in place.”

Landolina is able to synthesise ECM using plant polymers, which forms the basis of Veti-Gel’s amazing restorative properties. “It goes into the wound and the pieces of the synthetic ECM in the gel will recognise the pieces of the real ECM in the wound and they’ll link together. It will re-assemble into something that looks like, feels like and acts like skin.” The video below demonstrates Veti-Gel’s ability to stop profuse bleeding, but if the sight of blood makes you queasy, maybe you’d be better off taking our word for it.

Robotic birds of prey could spell the end of aquabots and robo-rodents everywhere

Okay, what is it with researchers attaching claws to robots? First BigDog was given a cinderblock-throwing arm, and now researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have attached a claw to a quadrotor, which can snatch up stationary objects while flying past at horrifyingly high speeds.

Taking inspiration from birds of prey, an articulated 3D-printed claw has been designed to hang from centre-point of a quadrotor chassis, and can scoop up its “prey” while travelling at a startling three meters per second. The researchers plan to add a camera to the system that would allow the quadrotor and claw to automatically adjust angle of attack and elevation to improve accuracy and success. Eventually the researchers hope that UAVs fitted with limbs will be used to open doors and carry burdens from locations unsafe for human access.

We’ve already experienced the occasional crash and weird graphical artefact while trying to play Tomb Raider on our GTX670 here, and NVIDIA are on the case — but they need to collaborate with Crystal Dynamics to clean it up.

“We are aware of major performance and stability issues with GeForce GPUs running Tomb Raider with maximum settings,” claims NVIDIA’s Andrew Burnes on the GeForce web site. “Unfortunately, NVIDIA didn’t receive final code until this past weekend which substantially decreased stability, image quality and performance over a build we were previously provided. We are working closely with Crystal Dynamics to address and resolve all game issues as quickly as possible.”

Burnes also clarified that they would need time to collaborate with Crystal Dynamics on the fix. “Please be advised that these issues cannot be completely resolved by an NVIDIA driver. The developer will need to make code changes on their end to fix the issues on GeForce GPUs as well. As a result, we recommend you do not test Tomb Raider until all of the above issues have been resolved.”

“In the meantime, we would like to apologize to GeForce users that are not able to have a great experience playing Tomb Raider, as they have come to expect with all of their favorite PC games.”

NVIDIA overnight revealed their new GTX Titan, the card with the sort of power you’ll find in the Titan, the the Oak Ridge Supercomputer. Their site features a flashy video but it doesn’t tell you a lot about what’s inside, so — courtesy of Anantech, whose breakdown you should absolutely read — I’ve embedded the following chart below that shows where it falls on the NVIDIA GTX scale.

NVIDIA are pushing it hard on their site as the ultimate gaming solution, touting its TXAA, PhysX and GPU Boost 2 support with temperature control, overclocking and overvoltage all within the utility.

Note the launch price: $1,000, the same as the GTX 690. But that’s the US price — what will we see here in Australia? Fingers crossed.

More coverage at  Guru3D, Hardware Canucks, Hardware Heaven, Legit Reviews, and Overclockers Club (thanks, Blue’s News).

The open beta test for Crysis 3 will kick off later today, and games.on.net is doing our part by booting up our multiplayer servers so that you’ll have a solid Australian presence to kick ass and take names on.

But what can you do to prepare? Well, NVIDIA owners can grab the latest drivers for their cards, with the company promising that these 313.95 beta drivers can improve performance in Crytek’s latest rig-melter by 35%.

“Other highlights include sizeable SLI and single-GPU performance gains of up to 27% in Assassin’s Creed III, 19% in Civilization V, 14% in Call of Duty: Black Ops 2, 14% in DiRT 3, 11% in Just Cause 2, 10% in Deus Ex: Human Revolution, 10% in F1 2012, and 10% in Far Cry 3,” claims NVIDIA in their announcement.

“Rounding out the release is a SLI profile for the newly released DmC: Devil May Cry, and an updated profile for the free-to-play, third-person co-op shooter, Warframe.”

We’ve uploaded these new drivers to our file library to save you the quota: grab the 64-bit Windows ones here and the 32-bit Windows ones here.

Source: Thanks, PalZer0!

Downloading drivers and optimising graphics settings is basically what PC gaming is all about, and NVIDIA are trying to make it easier with a new tool called ‘GeForce Experience’. It’s been in private testing for a while now but has just gone into open beta which means you can download it for yourself right here.

What does it do? Well, it automatically detects when there’s a new driver available for your card, and downloads it for you in the application. Secondly, it also allows you to optimise the graphics settings for your games and gives you examples of where and how increased settings will show improvement.

GeForce experience supports 41 titles, including Far Cry 3, Batman: Arkham City, Borderlands 2 and Skyrim. Check out their video below to see what it’s all about.

Fresh from yesterday’s reveal at this year’s CES, NVIDIA have deployed this demo footage of their ‘Project Shield’ Android console/Steam streaming device. A lot of tech sites are labelling this a ‘real-time’ demo but it’s not clear what, if anything, is being rendered here in real-time. Was this whole movie rendered on the chipset in the Shield? Even the footage of Hawken at the end is presumably just stuck on during the final cut. So! Take it with a grain of salt, but it sure is shiny:

NVIDIA have also deployed an official website for the device, which you can peruse if you’re keen for more info and shiny package shots.

News breaking moments ago out of CES indicates that NVIDIA are about to move out of the graphics hardware market and into the general gaming hardware market, deploying a prototype of what they’re calling ‘Project Shield’, a handheld Android gaming console.

Project Shield is said to be able to play ‘PC quality games’ and is running on an NVIDIA Tegra processor capable of 4K resolution video playback. The battery claims 5-10 hours of play time or 24 hours of HD video playback, and the screen is a 720p retinal multi-touch display that folds over the controller inputs in a clamshell-like design. Controller inputs are standard, incorporating a dual control-stick setup and four action buttons.

NVIDIA have just sent through some official details, and it seems the main selling point for PC gamers is this: “Created with the philosophy that gaming should be open and flexible, Project SHIELD flawlessly plays both Android and PC titles.”

“As a pure Android device, it gives access to any game on Google Play. And as a wireless receiver and controller, it can stream games from a PC powered by NVIDIA GeForce GTX GPUs, accessing titles on its STEAM game library from anywhere in the home.”

Source: The Verge

Playing Call of Duty: Black Ops 2? Want up to 26% more frames per second? Of course you do. Get yourself to the NVIDIA website, where the company are promising exactly the above with their new 310.54 beta drivers.

But that’s not all! “Today’s driver also adds a new and improved version of TXAA anti-aliasing to Call of Duty: Black Ops II and Assassin’s Creed III,” writes NVIDIA, “allowing GTX 600 Series users to maximize image quality and eliminate unsightly temporal aliasing in two of the year’s most popular games.”

“Furthermore, there’s a handy new Sparse Grid Supersampling feature for all GeForce GTX users that improves image quality when using the advanced anti-aliasing technique, and for SLI users there are new Hawken, Hitman: Absolution, Natural Selection 2 and Primal Carnage profiles.”

Meanwhile, Treyarch’s @pcdev has tweeted that “Kick problems should be resolved.” Good news!

Source: PC Gamer

There’s a lot going on in the world of Linux gaming today, with Steam not only announcing that the closed beta for which it was seeking participants has now begun, but NVIDIA rolling out a whole new set of drivers specifically for Linux owners.

Valve’s announcement confirms that their flagship Team Fortress 2 is now fully Linux-compatible, along with about two dozen other Steam titles. Also confirmed was the news that Valve is looking at support for Linux distros other than Ubuntu 12.04, saying “We intend to support additional popular distros in the future; we’ll prioritize development for these based on user feedback.”

Meanwhile, NVIDIA have announced that their R310 drivers are now available for Linux, giving “double the performance” for Linux users of their cards. Valve are pretty happy about it too, saying “NVIDIA took an unquestioned leadership position developing R310 drivers with us and other studios to provide an absolutely unequalled solution for Linux gamers.”

The R310 drivers support the latest 600 series of NVIDIA cards and can of course be downloaded from NVIDIA’s site.

Source: Steam, NVIDIA

Nvidia’s GeForce Grid Cloud Gaming general manager Phil Eisler is, understandably excited about the future of cloud gaming. So excited, in fact, that he thinks consoles are on their way out.

“They say this is the last console, and I am certainly a believer in that,” Eisler remarked to Venture Beat. “The last one is almost 10 years old now in terms of the technology. As we go through time, the good thing about cloud gaming is it’s going to get better every year. One of the reasons we’re investing in it is we see that there are some issues today, but they’re all solvable and they’re all moving in the right direction. Bandwidth is going up. The cost of server rooms is going down. We’re bringing latency down. The experience will just get better and better every year, to the point where I think it will become the predominant way that people play games.”

Traditionally Australians have been reticent to embrace cloud gaming due to latency concerns, but Eisler believes NVIDIA’s new Grid technology will help to shave those precious milliseconds off. “One of the things we’ve done with Grid is do a much faster capture and encode. We’re able to save about 30 milliseconds of latency, which helps a lot. We’re also working on client optimizations, which can save maybe another 20 milliseconds of latency.”

Source: Venturebeat (via VG247)

NVIDIA have released a new GeForce driver to get you ready for Borderlands 2 and Mists of Pandaria. The driver builds on the recently-added support for the GTX 660 Ti (which you may recall as what we’re giving away at the moment), as well as adding support for the GTX 660 and GTX 650.

“This is the first WHQL-certified driver from the R304 family of drivers (304.xx to 306.xx) and the first WHQL-certified GeForce driver to combine support for Windows 8, Windows 7, and Windows Vista into a single driver package,” reads the announcement.

“This is the recommended driver for the upcoming blockbuster PC games Borderlands 2 with PhysX and 3D Vision technology and World of Warcraft: Mists of Pandaria with 3D Vision and DirectX 11 support.”

You can grab the 175MB download from the GeForce site or our local mirror.

NVIDIA have released a new beta GeForce driver (306.02) which not only adds support for the GTX 660 Ti, but comes full of buffs to various games, including the addition of an ambient occlusion option to Guild Wars 2 and anti-aliasing for Diablo III. SLI profiles have been added to a whole slew of new games including Borderlands 2, and the following key fixes applied:

• Fixes an intermittent vsync stuttering issue with GeForce GTX 600-series GPUs.
• Fixes an issue where some manufacturer’s factory overclocked cards default to and run at lower clocks.
• Fixes a performance issue in Total War: Shogun 2 with the latest game patch.

Read the full patch notes and grab the download link by clicking here, or click here for our review of the GTX 660 Ti.

It’s not often that I get to say this, but it’s never been a better time to be a PC gamer. Today’s console dinosaurs have both feet in the silicon grave, leaving the PC to reclaim its place as the enthusiast gamer’s platform of choice. These aren’t merely the claims of a PC gamer desperately trying to justify a maxed-out credit card to his disapproving spouse; even EA recently acknowledged that the PC was the second biggest platform over the last financial quarter, not to mention the fastest growing.

It’s not just about the popularity of PC games though; we’re also spoilt for choice when it comes to hardware. The latest round in the ongoing NVIDIA versus AMD slug-fest has been closer than ever, with both companies trading blows over each successive GPU release. AMD delivered an opening haymaker with the powerful Radeon HD 7970 and 7950 back in December 2011, delivering oodles of performance at the cost of watt-guzzling energy needs. It took a few months for NVIDIA to get back on its feet with a technically perfect uppercut in the Kepler-based GTX 680 and 670 products, exceeding AMD’s performance while also delivering products that didn’t need a fusion reactor for power. AMD’s response? Slashing and burning prices, making the choice of which high-end card to buy harder than ever.

This brings us to today’s magical moment, the release of a new product that could not have existed without such close competition between the two GPU giants. The GeForce GTX 660 Ti is NVIDIA’s offering to those who demand the impossible – high performance at mainstream prices. Once again NVIDIA has wheeled out the impressive Kepler design to do the polygon pushing, but unlike the previous GeForce GTX 560 Ti it hasn’t taken a silicon sledgehammer to the card’s ankles. As you’ll see, the GTX 660 Ti has barely been touched by the engineer’s laser scalpel.

Kepler – the nitty gritty

At the heart of the GTX 660 Ti is the Kepler architecture. First announced in 2010, this design was largely a result of the PC industry’s new love affair with mobility. While core gamers crave the desktop behemoths that make up a tiny percentage of NVIDIA’s business, laptops are far bigger slice of the pie.

NVIDIA’s prior GPU design, Fermi, was a gas-guzzling brick that doubled as a cosy foot heater during the winter months, making it a laptop-melting monster. The new GPU design needed to be as comfortable ripping up Battlefield 3 in a desktop as it was in a laptop. Accordingly, NVIDIA’s biggest goal for Kepler was to improve performance per watt — and the company used a variety of means to arrive at its new eco-friendly destination.

First and foremost was the move to a smaller manufacturing process; smaller transistors need less power to operate and also pump out less heat in the process. Fermi’s transistors were built on a 40 nanometre process, while Kepler adopted a smaller 28 nanometre process. Take a peek inside the Radeon 7970’s GPU and you’ll find the same 28nm process at work, yet AMD’s latest cards pump out exorbitant levels of heat by comparison. Obviously something else helped drop NVIDIA’s electricity bills, and that’s where Kepler’s CUDA cores come into play.

Most of the transistors inside Kepler are grouped into units called CUDA cores, and they’re the worker bees in this silicon hive. To lower each CUDA core’s energy consumption, Kepler runs them at the same speed as the graphics clock, whereas Fermi ran them at twice the speed of the graphics clock — but there’s an obvious problem with this approach. Half the speed usually equals half the performance, so NVIDIA came up with a brute-force solution. Where the GTX 580 Fermi had just 512 CUDA cores, the Kepler found in the GTX 680 has a whopping 1536 CUDA cores. These are in turn grouped into eight Streaming Multiprocessor (SMX) units, each comprised of 192 CUDA cores.

All of these SMX units need to be fed data from the graphics card’s on-board memory, and NVIDIA also whipped Kepler’s memory bandwidth into shape. It doubled the total theoretical memory bandwidth of Fermi by using a 256-bit wide bus while also running the memory at a whopping 6GHz memory clock. This gave the GTX 680 a rather impressive 192.3GB/sec of memory bandwidth, which it shared with the GTX 670.

These are just three of the major improvements to Kepler over Fermi, but there are many other smaller improvements too numerous to mention here. The end result was a product that could out-perform AMD’s best, all while using considerably less energy to get the job done. As desktop gamers with a permanent lifeline to the electricity grid, power improvements might not sound too exciting, unless you’ve had to live with a high-end PC that sounds like a hive of wasps every time your GTX 580 kicks into sixth gear. The Kepler purring at the heart of the GTX 680 delivers blistering performance, with whisper-quiet cooler noise as an added bonus.

Pruning time

When it came time to release the cheaper GTX 670, the solution was simple; cut a single SMX out of the 680’s loop. This also gave NVIDIA a way to use chips that had minor flaws in one SMX unit, something that happens surprisingly frequently when you’re building a postage stamp out of more than three billion transistors. The GPU frequency was also dropped slightly, yet the memory bandwidth remained identical. Now, most techies expected NVIDIA to do exactly the same thing with the GTX 660 Ti, disabling one more SMX unit to deliver a product one more rung down the performance ladder from the GTX 670. If the race between AMD and NVIDIA wasn’t so close, it’s quite likely that the GTX 660 Ti would only have had six SMX units, comprised of a total of 1152 CUDA cores.

The good news is that this isn’t the case.

NVIDIA hasn’t touched the number of CUDA cores within the GTX 660 Ti when compared to the GTX 670 – they’re both built using 7 SMX units, for a total of 1344 CUDA Cores. Even better news is that the GTX 660 Ti GPU runs at the exact same speed as the GTX 670, with a base speed of 915MHz. Thanks to NVIDIA’s new GPU Boost technology, when the GPU detects it has thermal headroom to spare the GTX 660 Ti even boosts to the exact same speed as the GTX 670, up to 980MHz. By now you’re probably wondering just what the hell NVIDIA has done to justify selling the GTX 660 Ti for $100 less than the GTX 670?

Instead of touching the number of CUDA cores, NVIDIA has lowered memory bandwidth. While the GTX 680 and 670 use 256-bit memory buses, the GTX 660 Ti drops this to a 192-bit memory bus. However, NVIDIA has kept the same 6GHz memory frequency, theoretically dropping memory bandwidth by just 25%. This should only be a concern for those running stupidly high resolutions or anti-aliasing.

Unfortunately this has been achieved by dropping one of the four ROP partitions that usually make up the 256-bit memory bus. Without getting too technical, the original four-way ROP design plays nicely with the 2GB of on-board memory usually found on GTX 660 Ti cards, but a 192-bit bus is usually associated with either 1.5GB or 3GB of memory. The former is too little for the 660 Ti to be competitive, while the latter is too expensive at this price point (though 3GB GTX 660 Ti products will be possible). Instead NVIDIA is using proprietary technology to force the ill-fitting memory to be friends with the three ROP partitions, technology which it is keeping secret for the time being.

We’re left with a card that is almost identical to the GTX 670, with slightly less memory bandwidth and a recommended retail price $100 cheaper. As you’ll see though, RRPs don’t mean a whole lot in the real world, and the price pressure on every other product has left the GTX 660 Ti in a rather sticky situation. Let’s see why.

To the testbench

We’d like to thank Gigabyte for supplying our review sample in the form of the new Gigabyte GTX 660Ti Windforce 2X. As seen with the release of the GTX 670, most GTX 660 Ti cards will ship pre-overclocked with a faster base and boost frequency, and the Gigabyte GTX 660 Ti is no exception. Base frequency has been given a healthy shot in the arm, increasing to 1032MHz, while Boost speed has also increased, up to 1111MHz. As the name suggests Gigabyte has employed its unique Windforce 2X cooler on this card, while output duties are handled by dual DVI ports and a single DisplayPort and HDMI port. Gigabyte has set a recommended retail price of $399 for this card, but retailers are currently selling it for anywhere between $398 and $450 at the time of writing.

When compared to AMD’s offerings, today’s price puts it somewhere between the price of an AMD Radeon HD 7950 and 7970, the former of which has just received a healthy 15% performance increase courtesy of a new AMD BIOS. It’s also dangerously close in price to the cheapest GTX 670s on the market.

To ensure the testbench wasn’t the limiting factor in the benchmarks, I tested the cards on a machine out of the price range of mere mortals. At its heart is Intel’s rather zippy and ridiculously expensive i7 3960X CPU, mounted in an Intel DX79SI motherboard with 8GB of DDR3-1800. Continuing the Intel theme was the use of a 520 series SSD, while all audio was disabled for testing. Given that this card is aiming at users with 1920 x 1080 displays, all tests were run at this resolution. Ultra detail was selected for every benchmark, and I used the in-game benchmarks for both DiRT 3 and Shogun 2. Battlefield 3 doesn’t include an automatic benchmark, so instead I recorded the minimum and average FPS of the opening 60 seconds of the Operation: Swordbreaker mission with FRAPS.

So, how did the card perform? As expected, 3DMark 11 performance was extremely respectable, almost matching the more expensive Radeon HD 7970. DiRT 3 sadly wasn’t nearly as impressive, with the 660 Ti left eating the dust of the 7970 but proving an even match for the more affordable Radeon HD 7950. Battlefield 3 performance also saw the 660 Ti keeping pace with the 7950, albeit with a better minimum frame rate. The final test of Shogun 2 saw the GTX 660 Ti record a healthy lead over its more expensive brethren, which caused more than a few raised eyebrows. After pinging my local NVIDIA rep, it turns out that this is caused by a performance fix incorporated into the review drivers for the GTX 660 Ti, which should soon make their way into NVIDIA’s WHQL drivers.

The final test used a sound meter to test fan noise while each card was under extreme load, and the Gigabyte card came out in the middle of the pack. Amazingly, Gigabyte’s cooler managed to stay at the exact same volume during my overclocking tests, where I reached a maximum stable GPU core speed of 1250MHz and memory frequency of 7GHz. At these speeds it’s safe to expect another 10% boost in performance, if not a little more.

To buy, or not to buy

There’s no denying that ordinarily the Gigabyte GTX 660 Ti would be a very capable product for the price. But these are no ordinary times, with the fierce competition between AMD and NVIDIA causing video card prices to plummet. At the time of writing, the cheapest GTX 670 in Australia is selling for just $399, while the most affordable Radeon HD 7970 is only $50 more, both prices that the Gigabyte GTX 660 Ti is currently selling for. At these prices both offer noticeably better performance than the GTX 660 Ti, so they obviously get our nod of approval.

Thankfully the shine will start to wear off the GTX 660 Ti’s launch in a month or two, and street prices should drop to around the $350 price point. But even then it’s going to be hard to swallow a 20% performance drop for a mere $50 saving, so Gigabyte is going to have to figure out how to drop the prices even more. As we’ve seen in the past with the GTX 670 versus the GTX 680, NVIDIA (and Gigabyte’s) greatest competition isn’t even AMD – it’s itself.

Good:

• Excellent performance while remaining whisper quiet
• Decent overclocker
• Solid value for money

Bad:

• Outshone by the GTX 670 and Radeon 7970
• Retailers aren’t sticking to the RRP

If you ever wanted to put your new rig through its paces, NVIDIA have just the thing: they’ve released their ‘New Dawn’ tech demo, designed to showcase the power of their GeForce 670, 680 and 690-range cards (but they’re more than happy for you to try it on any card you like). The results, as you can see from their screenshot, are fairly staggering.

Head on over to our file library and download the tech demo for yourself today.

GeForce GTX 660 to be launched at Gamescom?

nVidia is set to launch the GTX 660 at Computex on August 16 according to well-placed sources within SweClockers, and more details of the card have been revealed. The card will have the same clock speed as the GTX 670 and have the same number of CUDA cores enabled, but the key difference will be in the width of the memory bus which has been reduced by 25% from 256-bit to 192-bit. TechPowerUp is predicting that the upcoming Gamescom event in Cologne, Germany will be used for an official unveiling.

Google launches ‘Google Fiber’ service

Google overnight revealed their plans for a new ‘Google Fiber‘ service, which is a Google’s own fibre-optic connection service that they claim is 100 times faster than today’s average broadband. The service is initially only rolling out in Kansas City in the USA, the service comes with Google’s own modem that allows you to record up to eight TV shows simultaneously, as well as a bunch of frankly fantastic options that demonstrate the power of fibre connections. There’s even a free option, assuming you’re willing to pay the $300 construction fee to get the hardware to your home. Yes, free internet. Alright then. Thanks, Novocaine.

Apple patents game controller

Oh Apple, you just can’t stay out of the games business, can you? GamesIndustry International yesterday revealed that Apple have been discovered filing patents for a game controller peripheral, one that looks suspiciously – okay, almost exactly like – that of the PlayStation 3. An illustrative diagram for the controller shows it interacting directly with an iPhone, so there’s no doubt that Apple intend to lock down the ability of controller-like peripherals to integrate with their hardware. The same patent also explores the possibility of using the iPhone as a universal remote, with what looks suspiciously – okay, almost exactly like – an Xbox 360 seen in the background. Alrighty then.

Intel i7-3970X revealed

A new report is claiming that the Intel Core i7-3970X will arrive in Q4 2012, claims DonanimHaber. The LGA2011 six-core processor will ship with clock speeds of 3.50 GHz, or 4.00 GHz with maximum Turbo Boost frequency. It is based on the 32 nm “Sandy Bridge-E” silicon, and, much like the Core i7-3960X, will come with HyperThreading, 15 MB shared L3 cache, and unlocked base-clock multiplier. Plus it’s got an X on the end, so you know it’s badass. X.

Razer launches new hardware

You’re probably sick of hearing about Razer lately, but they’ve just gone and announced two new products to be released later in this year and next: a 2013 edition BlackWidow keyboard (now with green backlighting instead of blue, much to James Pinnell’s delight) and the new configurable Ouroboros mouse. The Ouroboros comes with multiple configurable and detachable panels allowing it to change shape to suit all shapes and sizes of hands (as well as lefties) and a dedicated DPI clutch trigger that you can temporarily squeeze to change your DPI. Technology!

Samsung phones outselling Apple 2:1 in Q2 2012

Apple’s iPhones, normally viewed as a license to print money, were outsold at a staggering rate by Samsung in Q2 2012. Apple is still making money hand over fist in other departments of course, but news from the second quarter shows a drastic slump in iPhone sales of only 26 million units compared to 50 million from their rival Samsung, who they are currently engaged with in about fifty separate lawsuits across ten different countries internationally. Madness. Samsung’s flagship Galaxy S III smartphone shipped 19 million units alone, leaving many to wonder what Apple’s next move with the iPhone will be to regain momentum.

Thanks to our relentless tech moderator steve_rogers42 for sending through a bunch of links this week!