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right guys so it's sort of day two it's actually still kind of day one but I'm
splitting up the Vlog a little bit just cuz uh things are happening or they're
not happening anyway we came back uh very recently from the Pretty
underwhelming Ubisoft tour I think everyone's expectations were a little
bit higher given how much hype there was but basically we walked through a
building which was cool you know seeing a Game Dev studio um where lots of
people were working at desks and then we
uh we saw like kind of a cool like video about how they do some motion capture
stuff but no real details and then uh
and then we left so it was it was pretty short so that was a little bit
disappointing but I'm on my way to the hockey game now so hopefully uh that'll
be much much more entertaining going to go see some Habs action going to boo
them yeah I'm going to boo them all
right so we're going to the game now they split up me and this guy on
account of uh he can get kind of Rowdy and we're we're liable to end up
scrapping at some point I to beat up any Canadians really really that's you're
going to assume that you'd be beating me up you you won't even call it a fight
you're just going to call it a beat down bullying right basically bullying not
even that much taller than me you got maybe 25 lbs on me yeah maybe maybe yeah
okay fine everybody's 6 in taller than me I'm
up your height though I'm just I'm just being
obser this is the uh this is the dessert tray so it's like the largest carrot
cake ever oh oh I almost got in the way
yeah oh someone finally got the uh the
chocolate Paradise destroyed the last one this is the second chocolate oh
that's the second one okay cuz I'm going to need a piece of that one can I get one of those choc yes
please oh we're out of plates what are you going
to no plates so I'm back after the hockey game
that was fun I might have lost my voice a little bit but not too bad what I
heard through the grape vine is that there's something crazy going down
tomorrow so without further Ado I'm going to go edit some video there's my
computer get some sleep and uh hopefully we're going to have some really exciting
stuff to show you in just a moment here after I sleep
tired I was up late last night editing and uploading and then trolling slick on
Twitch so I'm pretty tired hopefully I get a reasonably good seed I'm going to
be I'm going to be 2 minutes late for breakfast
so I'm ready I'm ready for something crazy
to happen it's all Rowdy and crazy and
everyone's running to get the best seats at least I guess this is about as Rowdy
and crazy as uh as like Tech press
gets I do want a good seat though so so
this much is true I'm going to go for this one yeah this one right
here things have changed a fair bit in here since yesterday so there there's uh
a bunch of Prodigy based gaming rigs all over the sides here so I guess
they're going to be demoing something with those
presumably they're like all around the
back here we go there's people manning the stations presumably we should see
what happens if we try to touch
one just just for fun just for fun let's
try and like play with one I can use
this already right I don't have to wait until after the
presentation main thing is we don't want want to mess with these just yet yes
okay so so as predicted I am not allowed to use it
yet a little patience okay so as promised guys what
we saw down here today was absolutely
incredible So Yesterday yeah they had
Flex so that was different types of physics calculations interacting with
each other they showed us the new Global illumination techniques which are
outstanding um and really can be total game changers
because it's taking away the individual
nitpicking of programming lighting and instead just giving you a system that
just works kind of on its own they've got flameworks which I wasn't as sold on
the demo for that one it was Dynamic Fire I mean unfortunately the demo that
they did was a dragon breathing fire which is very different from a more
natural fire so I would have liked to see a demo that included that as well
but you know we'll we'll wait for we'll wait for that but today what they showed
off was absolutely crazy so first up was gam Stream So gam stream is basically an
evolution of what we already saw with Shield so in your home you can already
take a Kepler equipped GeForce graphics card equipped PC and then you can stream
your PC games to NVIDIA shield and 720p
over Wi-Fi now we've seen this implemented in
other ways so at P we saw NVIDIA grid
which is their cloud-based uh centralized Computing server type
machine intended for cloud-based gaming and we saw that streaming to Shield
wirelessly so you look at that technology and you go okay well this is
going somewhere well gam stream is where it's going so they've got a 4K TV demo
that they did earlier on in the uh in the presentation where they had a shield
being used as a game console effectively so you close it it goes into console
mode and then you can stream to your shield from your PC you can use a third
party controller with Shield rather than just relying on the controller that's
built into it through Bluetooth and they've got validated controllers that
are supposed to be very low latency and then you can either through a wired
connection stream at 1080P or through a wireless connection stream at 720p this
you guys is what I'm talking about this is why the game console as we know it
doesn't really need to exist anymore particularly for PC Gamers who already
have a decent PC because you can centralize your computing power in one
place and then you can use it on something like a shield around the house
or you can use it on your TV and you only need one device for that now so
that is absolutely fantastic to me so you couple that with the game bundles
that was another thing that they announced today but it was on NVIDIA.com
or GeForce.com pardon me yesterday so
they're giving a $100 off a shield with 770 780 and Titan and presumably 780 Ti
which they also announced today and then they're also giving you three games so
it was Splinter Cell Blacklist it was Batman Arkham Origins and there was one
other one oh I feel like I'm forgetting the most important
thing anyway sorry my my brain's kind of going a mile a minute here anyway and
then on lower end gpus I think 660 and up but don't quote me on that you get
$50 off of Shield so they want you to do this game streaming thing where you've
got a powerful PC and then you're able to use it in other ways next up is
Shadow play so they're announcing Shadow play again sort of I guess availability
is probably coming soon the build that they were running here was a
beta and they've announced new functionality for shadow play so aside
from recording the last 20 minutes of your game play and allowing you to save
that on demand they showed off exactly
how low the performance impact is and it's very very low I mean if I'm someone
like um a media for example I'm looking
at something like Shadow play going oh ball
because anyone running a gForce graphics card will not have a reason unless they
must capture to an external PC for some
reason to use a device like that because you can just record to your computer and
there's very little performance impact I mean it looked like less than a couple
percent just based on the numbers that we saw and then they've also announced
that shadow play is going to have integration with twitch so they're
rather than relying necessarily on xsplit although xplit flexibility is
looks a little bit more than what they've got there but
they're allowing you to have your game you can stream at 1080p 720p you can
overlay your webcam and whichever corner you can adjust the size so very
rudimentary but very simple to use from the look of things so the interface is
pretty well thought out the next thing they showed off was you know what
actually I'm going to save that for last so they showed off 780 Ti which
presumably is I don't know 780 with a clock bump and some more Cuda cor or
something like that or maybe it's more like something like Titan but without
the um the full double Precision performance so so that'll be a slightly
faster 780 which is cool and maybe we'll see a price drop on 780 we don't we
don't know yet so more details on that to come the ID is very similar so it looks
the same but that could mean anything cuz all of NVIDIA's graphics cards
lately have looked outstanding okay so let's move on to gsync that's the one
where they have demo set up all around the room and they talked a lot about the
fundamental problems that we have as PC Gamers or gamers in general because on
the console they spend a lot of time optimizing the title and yes that
includes optimization for visual Fidelity and programming as close to
Bare Metal as they can on the hardware and all those console optimizations that
we're used to talking about but what they can also optimize for is a target
frame rate and making sure that it stays there so it delivers a consistent
experience at a consistent frame rate so you don't see those issues like
stuttering and tearing that you do on PC
games because on a PC you're monitor
most monitors these days are refreshing at 60 HZ high performance ones are up to
120 or 144 Hertz you don't have to deal
with the fact that your graphics card is going to be drawing frames at a much
different rate than your monitor so whenever those two things don't match up
perfectly in an Ideal World I'm hopefully going to remember to put a
slide up here right now that shows you how it would work so your GPU would
within the refresh rate of the monitor would draw a new frame then your monitor
would display it to you and while it's displaying it to you your GPU would draw
a new frame and it would be ready to go when the monitor is ready to refresh in
the real world that's not really how it works so you can turn on vsync in order
to make sure that the monitor only draws a frame so so basically the graphics
card will wait for the monitor to refresh but what happens is anytime the
frame rate dips below 60 FPS you're going to see what's called stuttering
where sometimes the same frame is displayed on the monitor for two full
refresh Cycles or heaven forbid even even more
and that's very noticeable in games now they introduced adaptive vsync a while
ago and that somewhat alleviated the issue because it would turn vsync on and
off dynamically depending on what FPS you were running the game at but now we
have a more permanent solution so okay so hold on but vsync introduces lag as
well because the monitor is waiting or
the graphics card rather is waiting for the monitor to display something before it continues to work so you're wasting
GPU Cycles effectively you can turn vsync off and you can get less leg which
means that the GPU will output as soon as it's ready but you're going to
sometimes have the monitor refresh when you're halfway through rendering one
scene and halfway you you're still looking at the last thing you saw and
that's called tearing so that's where you have those vertical lines where the
the scene is you're looking at one scene and then and sometimes multiple scenes
if the frame rate is very very high on the same frame on your monitor so that's
not really optimal either so gsync is
NVIDIA's technology that will allow
those issues to go away and the problem existed because the graphics card and
the monitor were never working in sync the monitor was displaying at its frame
rate and the graphics card was displaying its frame rate and they were
independent of each other whereas now with gsync and gsync enabled monitors
which is a hardware chip so guys for those of you wondering is this going to
work on Radeon graphics cards is this going to work on my current monitor the
answer is I mean they haven't said that it's not going to work on radon graphics
cards but I can tell you with a fair degree of confidence that the answer is
no it will not you will be expected to buy a certified Monitor and a Kepler or
greater GPU from NVIDIA in order to take advantage of g-sync and what gsync does
is allows the GPU to control the refresh rate of the monitor so when the frame
rate dips the monitor's refresh rate will actually lower so that they match
so we're getting the vsync experience without the leg because the GPU can
output whatever it wants whenever it wants and the monitor will be ready for
it because it's actually taking a from the GPU for the display now this isn't
something that unfortunately I can show on camera because we're we have another
fixed frame rate device the camera that's sitting right in front of me
that's how am I going to show you a variable frame rate on one monitor versus one side by side but they have
side by side demos all over the place here you guys and um it
is it is very very real and very very
impressive it works and it's a game Cher
so a lot of folks were speculating that NVIDIA would have some kind of a
response to mantle um they haven't announced any
kind of proprietary API so there's no direct response to
mantle but the way that the landscape is
changing right now is going to make the job of
demonstrating how great a gaming experience is much different than it
used to be it's not a matter of firing up fraps and seeing which GPU runs at a
higher FPS AMD had a demo at their event
where there were three 4K monitors running dirt three uh in ifinity with uh
two cards running in crossfire and I actually ended up half arguing with the
guy about what frame rate it was running at because he told me it was 60 which
with fraps running it turned out to be but it was very noticeably not running
at a perceived FPS and that's that's the
the frame timing issue that AMD is struggling with right now there are
driver fixes that they're working on they've partially fixed it in certain
scenarios but 4K ifinity isn't one of them so it was very noticeable now
NVIDIA so okay so let's say mantle dramatically improves the frame rates
that an AMD graphics card can kick out but if NVIDIA is able to run at a lower
frame rate but eliminate those issues to
the point where it looks butter smooth to the gamer
right right well that's that's good
too
so yeah today was uh unbelievable I mean
the fact that they've got live demos here that we can sit and play with and how noticeable and tangible the
performance Improvement is I mean I already love Shield I might be one of
the only six people in the world who actually think Shield's awesome and I
just got yet another great reason to care about Shield I'm actually going to
have to upgrade the networking in house cuz I'm using power line to my TV right
now I'm going to want to run giggy so that I can run at full
1080p but um so they've given me another great reason to care about Shield
they've given us g-sync which we have no idea how much the monitors are going to
cost we're looking at q124 availability
so you know I think it's all kind of up in the air right now in terms of how
easy they're going to be to get how many are going to be available how much they're going to cost it is going to be
a significant investment into the
ecosystem for someone who doesn't already have a Kepler GPU to buy that
GeForce graphics card and buy that g-sync monitor but one of the cool
things about it is that NVIDIA is showing this off with a GTX 760 they
didn't load up all of these test systems with Titans or dual Titans or anything
like that so what they're really showing off is that you don't have to spend
$1,000 on the GPU necessarily to have a great gaming experience you could get a
reasonable GPU and then you could get a g-sync monitor and have a great gaming
experience that way
he's saying Montreal is a beautiful city which it is and you're right anyway guys
I think that's pretty much it for the update for right now this has been an
unbelievable two days yesterday was unbelievably not as exciting as I had
hoped with that Ubisoft tour that was very uh uninspiring uh today has been
unbelievable because we saw some crazy awesome stuff I got to I got to like
Instagram this
um so yeah of course I'm not going to pass up a photo op
right so I I'm spending all my time at Aus right now and I think that the the
head mounted displays have there's a lot of what I'm doing now that feels a lot
like the early days of 3D of the first person stuff and I'm having a blast I
mean I'm working on the core technology stuff you know in many ways I I feel
more like myself than I have for a long time you know I'm I'm in there spending
all of my time on these hard technical problems writing tons of code making
things happen and you know it feels like it's for a worthy cause glad to hear
Sean thanks a lot thank you for your time we'll see you the enforcers back
he's stealing John carac from us sorry I'm really not a bad guy
as there goes the bad guy Ste
you all right there we go guys so unfortunately they need to steal him for
the panel but the good news is that means that you can probably watch the
panel at some point here although they stole him took him over
there look at this enforcer just wants a photo op I
bet see look look I'm going to get him in all
kinds of trouble see he just wanted a photo op with John
carac and that is why he took him away from
us see he claims to not want a photo op
and yet that is a camera phone and that was a
flash
he