theodp writes: Over at Polygon, games journalist Colin Campbell remembers the late Silas Warner in The Man Who Made Wolfenstein. Before Doom, there was Warner's Castle Wolfenstein (1981) and Beyond Castle Wolfenstein (1984), which counted id Software's legendary John Carmack and John Romero as fans. After completing his degree in Physics at Indiana University, Warner found work at IU installing a new system called PLATO, which he used to fork John Daleske's Empire (1973), which is sometimes credited as being the first multiplayer shooting game. Ultima creator Richard Garriott called Warner's Escape (1978) a major inspiration that "changed my life." Warner's Robotwar (manual, pdf) also did double-duty as a stealth learn-to-program tutorial. Sadly, Warner was plagued with bad health and passed away at age 54 without receiving the proper credit or rewards he was due.

FPS (first-person shooter) games have been a staple in the video game industry ever since the explosion of Wolfenstein 3D back in 1992. Since then, the genre has been evolving with graphical upgrades, huge budgets, and an eSports ecosystem. But what about its core, the shooting mechanics? How have we progressed on that front? Why do some guns feel like it's the real thing, while others feel like toys?

At the 2019 Game Awards today, Microsoft revealed the name and console design of its next-generation gaming console: Xbox Series X. The Verge reports: The console itself looks far more like a PC than we've seen from previous Xbox consoles, and Microsoft's trailer provides a brief glimpse at the new design. The console itself is designed to be used in both vertical and horizontal orientations, and Microsoft's Xbox chief, Phil Spencer, promises that it will "deliver four times the processing power of Xbox One X in the most quiet and efficient way."

The Xbox Series X will include a custom-designed CPU based on AMD's Zen 2 and Radeon RDNA architecture. Microsoft is also using an SSD on Xbox Series X, which promises to boost load times. Xbox Series X will also support 8K gaming, frame rates of up to 120 fps in games, ray tracing, and variable refresh rate support. Microsoft also revealed a new Xbox Wireless Controller today. "Its size and shape have been refined to accommodate an even wider range of people, and it also features a new Share button to make capturing screenshots and game clips simple," explains Spencer. This updated controller will work with existing Xbox One consoles and Windows 10 PCs, and will ship with every Xbox Series X.

Scott Stein, reviews Google Stadia cloud gaming service for CNET: Stadia's launch day was earlier this week... sort of. Really, consider this the start of Stadia's early-access beta period. Because Google's big promises haven't arrived, and at the price of the Stadia's Founder's Edition, I can't recommend anyone jump onboard at the moment. Google's experimental game streaming service, Stadia, launches without many of its promised features, and just a handful of games. It works, but there's not much incentive to buy in. We've heard about the promises of streaming games over the internet for a decade. Stadia really does work as a way to stream games. I've only played a couple of the 12 games Google promised by Tuesday's launch, though. That short list pales compared to what Microsoft already has on tap for its in-beta game-streaming service, xCloud. It's no match for what Nvidia's game streaming GeForce Now already has or what PlayStation Now offers. Prices of Stadia games at launch in the US are below. They're basically full retail game prices. This could get crazy expensive fast.

[...] Stadia has so few games right now, and I'm trying them with no one else online. It isn't clear how things will work now that the service is going live, and what other features will kick in before year's end. I'm curious, but I might lose interest. Others might, too. I have plenty of other great games to play right now: on Apple Arcade, VR and consoles such as the Switch. Stadia isn't delivering new games yet, it's just trying to deliver a new way to play through streaming. One that you can already get from other providers. Until Google finds a way to loop in YouTube and develop truly unique competitive large-scale games, Stadia isn't worth your time yet. Yes, the future is possibly wild, and you can see hints of the streaming-only cloud-based playground Stadia wants to become. But we'll see what it shapes into over the next handful of months and check back in. Raymond Wong, writing for Input Mag looks at the amount of data playing a game on Stadia consumes and how the current state of things require a very fast internet connection to work: Like streaming video, streaming games is entirely dependent on your internet speed. Faster internet delivers smooth, lag-free visuals, and slower internet means seeing some glitches and dropped framerates. Google recommends a minimum of connection of 10Mbps for 1080p Full HD streaming at 30 fps with stereo sound and 35Mbps for 4K resolution streaming (in HDR if display is supported) at 60 fps with 5.1 surround sound. Reality didn't reflect Google's advertising, though. Despite having a Wi-Fi connection with 16-20Mbps downloads in a hotel room in LA, streaming Shadow of the Tomb Raider and Destiny 2 to my 13-inch MacBook Pro wasn't 100% stable. The visuals would glitch out for a second or two about every 10 minutes of playtime. [...] A fast internet connection isn't the only thing you need for Stadia to work right. You need a lot of bandwidth, too. One hour of playing Red Dead Redemption 2 at 1080p resolution on my 46-inch HDTV via a Chromecast Ultra ate up 5.3GB of data. This seemed insane until I saw an hour of Destiny 2 on a Pixel 3a XL with 6-inch, 1080p-resolution display gobbled up 9.3GB of data!

An anonymous reader quotes the Guardian: "Give us more guns!" is a common battle-cry among players of first-person shooters, the videogame industry's bloodiest genre. Doom co-creator John Romero has a rather different opinion. "I would rather have fewer things with more meaning, than a million things you don't identify with," he says, sitting in a Berlin bar mocked up to resemble a 1920s Chicago speakeasy. "I would rather spend more time with a gun and make sure the gun's design is really deep -- that there's a lot of cool stuff you learn about it...."

Modern shooters are too close to fantasy role-playing games in how they shower you with new weapons from battle to battle, Romero suggests. This abundance of loot -- which reflects how blockbuster games generally have become Netflix-style services, defined by an unrelenting roll-out of "content" -- means you spend as much time comparing guns in menus as savouring their capabilities. It encourages you to think of each gun as essentially disposable, like an obsolete make of smartphone. "The more weapons you throw in there, the more you're playing an inventory game." Romero contrasts this to the sparing design of the original Doom, which launched in 1993 with a grand total of eight guns. "For Doom, it was really important that every time you got a new weapon, it never made any previous weapons useless...."

Doom is also a game that knows how to keep a secret. It isn't just a firefight simulator but a treacherous, vaguely avant-garde work of 3D architecture. Its levels are mazes of hidden rooms and camouflaged doors that screech open behind you -- sometimes revealing a pile of ammunition, sometimes disgorging enemies into areas you've cleared. Today's shooters set less store by secret spaces, Romero says, because they cost so much to make.

"Fortnite just blew up its entire map and all that's left is a black hole," reports TechCrunch. Some are speculating that this is simply a teaser for a new Fortnite map, but it's unclear when that new map will arrive... Fortnite's website is currently just a Twitch stream featuring a black hole.
The Washington Post reports: Anyone looking for clues on Fortnite's multiple social media accounts were left staring at the same image. The same black hole greets all visitors to Fortnite's Instagram. And intrepid players discovered that inputting the infamous "Konami code" launches a Galaga-style shooting game starring the mascot of Greasy Grove restaurant Durrr Burger.... As the event happened, many Twitch users reported having trouble using the popular streaming service, with more than 4 million people watching the event. Millions more tuned in on YouTube and Twitter, as well.... Rumors have swirled that the famous Fortnite map was going to be completely replaced, and given that everything's now gone, it sounds plausible...

Fortnite's Season 10 has been expected to end soon, and since last year, spectacular one-time live events within the game have been used to build hype, signal changes to the one map the game has used for two years, and usher in a new season and battle pass. This time, players who logged in at 2 p.m. Eastern time witnessed a rocket launch from the Dusty Divot area of the island, which turned into multiple rockets, all zipping around in a manner similar to the rocket that players saw in the first season-ending live event in Season 4. The rockets then converged onto an area where a meteor was landing, and the collision caused players to fly up into the air to witness a black hole suck the entirety of the game inside.

And since then, players have been left with nothing but the black hole.

"As we've discussed in the past, old people are some of the only video game streamers worth watching," writes the AV Club: Filled with the wisdom that comes from age, seniors are the necessary corrective to Twitch and YouTube channels currently dominated by excitable whippersnappers. Fortunately, as outlined in a piece NBC's Kalhan Rosenblatt that explores this world, video games are gaining popularity among the elderly. The piece references a study that found "38 percent of Americans age 50 and older said they play video games" and looks at those who belong to this demographic.... Our old pal, the Skyrim-loving Shirley Curry pops up, too, when Rosenblatt gets into the seniors who stream games or upload videos of what they're playing online. Curry, who is 83, has "more than 700,000 subscribers on YouTube," and refers to her viewers as "grandkids," is mentioned alongside 66-year-old Twitch streamer GrandpaGaming (AKA Will R.). He streams games that include PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds and Apex Legends, uploading highlights that show him kicking the ass of other players who, when their age is compared to his, are probably quite literal noobs.

c Rosenblatt mentions the social benefits of video games as well as studies that show how, "with their complex controls and fast pace" they provide "a mental workout for seniors" that could help "delay or slow the onset of degenerative neurological diseases, such as Alzheimer's or other forms of dementia." This means that, aside from providing a subgenre of game streams that are far more entertaining than the usual, these seniors are potentially improving their health as well.

$30 million in prizes were up for grabs, the largest ever for an esports event, and more than 40 million attempted to qualify for a spot. Now IGN reports: The grand champion of the Fortnite World Cup finals has been crowned. Kyle "Bugha" Giersdorf, a 16-year-old American boy, took home the trophy and a $3 million prize... "Words can't even explain [how I feel] right now," Giersdorf said from the Champion's circle. "I'm just so happy. Everything I've done, the grind, it's all paid off. It's just insane."
And the Guardian reports that a 15-year-old won $1.25 million (£1m) when his two-man team placed second in the duos competition. He told the BBC that his mother initially thought he was wasting his time. "Now I've proved to her that I can do stuff, I'm really happy," he said. With regard to spending the prize money, his mother said her son was not materialistic, and that she anticipated he would spend the prize money on a "lifetime of Uber Eats".
IGN also reported on another Fortnite drama: A pair of Fortnite World Cup competitors, formerly banned by Epic for cheating, were the target of much ire Saturday, as the crowd loudly booed one's appearance onscreen and subsequently cheered for their loss...

Epic Games previously banned XXiF and Ronaldo from Fortnite for 14 days, after an internal review found that the players had colluded with other players in order to acquire easy elimination points during week 3 of the Fortnite World Cup qualifiers, according to Dexerto. The pair were subsequently dropped from their team, Rise Nation. That initially sounded like the end of the whole matter, but then XXiF and Ronaldo qualified during the week 8 qualifier, finishing in third place and securing a spot during the finals.

XXiF and Ronaldo ended up placing 28th during the duos finals, securing them $50,000 each in prize money.
Fornite had to ban more than 1,200 Fortnite accounts for cheating in just the first week of the World Cup Open online.

To celebrate the 25th anniversary of Doom, there's now mobile versions in the Google Play Store, reports Android Police, "and since this is a 25th-anniversary release, it includes the fourth expansion Thy Flesh Consumed. It's the complete package folks, and it's finally available on Android as an official release."

And in addition, three Doom re-releases are now available for the Nintendo Switch, Xbox One, and PlayStation 4, reports the Verge -- though there was one little glitch: Bethesda says it'll get rid of the strange requirement that players must log into an online account before they play the newly re-released versions of Doom, Doom II, and Doom 3, which went live yesterday. Players quickly criticized Bethesda for the seemingly ridiculous limitation -- the first of these games was released more than 25 years ago, at a time when there was obviously no internet requirement. The online login will be made optional in a coming update, Bethesda said today.
The re-releases were part of QuakeCon 2019, reports IGN, noting that Bethesda also showcased Doom Eternal's multiplayer, "revealing new details about the unique 1v2 Battle Mode."

Forbes hails the re-releases as "id Software's fast-paced, ultra-violent...classic shooters," adding that "It appears the re-releases are actually Unity remakes, though whether much has changed beyond resolution support remains to be seen." But they may also have some other minor differences, Engadget reports: There have been a few other complaints as well, such as the addition of copy protection, graphical changes (such as filtering that softens those 1993-era graphics) and apparent music tempo slowdowns on the Switch. That's not including the removal of downloads for the old PS3 and Xbox 360 versions. It's not a fiasco, but these clearly weren't the straightforward ports some were expecting.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from PetaPixel: A team of scientists from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH Zurich) have figured out how to capture super slow-motion footage using what's called an "Event Camera." That is: a camera that sees the world in a continuous stream of information, the way humans do. Regular cameras work by capturing discrete frames, recapturing the same scene 24 or more times per second and then stitching it together to create a video. Event cameras are different. They capture "pixel-level brightness changes" as they happen, basically recording each individual light "event" as it happens, without wasting time capturing all the stuff that remains the same frame by frame.

As ETH Zurich explains, some of the advantages of this type of image capture is "a very high dynamic range, no motion blur, and a latency in the order of microseconds." The downside is that there's no easy way to process the resulting "footage" into something you can display using current algorithms because they all expect to receive a set of discrete frames. Well, there was no easy way. This is what the folks at ETH Zurich just improved upon, developing a reconstruction model that can interpret the footage to the tune of 5,000+ frames per second. The results are astounding: a 20% increase in the reconstructed image quality over any model that existed before, and the ability to output "high frame rate videos (more than 5,000 frames per second) of high-speed phenomena (e.g. a bullet hitting an object)," even in high dynamic range "challenging lighting conditions." Their findings have been published in a research paper titled High Speed and High Dynamic Range Video with an Event Camera.

malachiorion writes: Facebook just open sourced a simulator for testing and training embodied AI systems -- like virtual robots. They worked with AR/VR researchers to release the simulator along with what they say are the most photorealistic 3D reconstructions of real world places available. [Facebook Reality Labs have named this "the Replica data set".]

The crazy part: Because more frames are always better for training computer vision in simulators, it can run at 10,000 FPS!
The simulator's ability to hit 10K frames per second prompted an interesting follow-up on the original submission. "It's a totally useless framerate for humans -- just absolute overkill for our brains/eyeballs -- but it's apparently a benefit for AI systems."

"As more researchers adopt the platform, we can collectively develop embodied AI techniques more quickly," explains Facebook's blog post, "as well as realize the larger benefits of replacing yesterday's training data sets with active environments that better reflect the world we're preparing machine assistants to operate in."

And if you're worried about privacy, Facebook assures readers that "The data used to generate Replica scans was anonymized to remove any personal details (such as family photos) that could identify an individual. The overall reconstruction process was meticulous, with researchers manually filling in the small holes that are inevitably missed during scanning and using a 3D paint tool to apply annotations directly onto meshes."

"Online marketplace eBay has revealed how it boosted performance of a demanding web app by 50x using WebAssembly," reports TechRepublic: The "astonishing" speed-up after switching from a JavaScript-based to a largely WebAssembly-based web app was detailed by the eBay engineering team, who say the performance boost helped make it possible to build a highly-accurate barcode scanner as a web app... a feature it offers in its Android and iOS apps to allow sellers to scan items they are auctioning. "WebAssembly was different. It has tremendous potential, we just did not have the right use case. Well, that changed recently," write the eBay software engineering team.

One of the advantages of WebAssembly (Wasm) is that it offers code portability for a variety of languages, allowing developers to take code they've written for other platforms and compile to WebAssembly so it can run in major web browsers. Consequently eBay was able to take the existing version of its barcode scanner written in C++ and compile that to Wasm using Emscripten, adopting the Docker and Node.js-based approach outlined here. After a few minor teething problems, the eBay team were able to run the barcode scanner in the browser, using a Worker thread and JavaScript glue code.

The Wasm-based scanner was able to process images of the barcode at 50 Frames per Second (FPS), compared to about 1FPS in an earlier JavaScript-based scanner eBay had tested, a speed-up the team described as "astonishing".
Unfortunately, the Wasm code only successfully completed scans 60% of the time, because it wasn't using the inbuilt APIs available for the C++ code to either autofocus or provide user tap focus for the center of the scanned object. eBay's team ultimately ended up implementing three separate worker threads running the Wasm code, the open-source barcode reader ZBar, and their original JavaScript-based scanner code.

"The winning response (i.e. the first one to send a valid barcode) is sent to the main thread, and all workers are terminated... With three threads racing against each other, the success rate was indeed close to 100%."

dryriver explains the new buzz around "Dreams" for PS4 (now in open access). Created by the studio that made PS4's Big Little World, Dreams "is not a game. It is more of an end to end, create-your-own-3D-game toolkit that happens to run on PS4 rather than a PC... essentially an easy to use game-engine a la Unity or UnrealEngine." Dreams lets you 3D model/sculpt, texture, animate and create game logic, allowing complete 3D games to be authored from scratch. Here is a Youtube video showing someone 3D modeling a fairly sophisticated game character and environment in Dreams. Everything from platformers to FPS games to puzzle, RPG and Minecraft type games can be created.

What is interesting about Dreams is that everything anybody creates with it becomes available and downloadable in the DreamVerse and playable by other Dreams users -- so Dreams is also a distribution tool like Steam, in that you can share your creations with others.

While PC users have long had access to 3D modeling and game authoring tools, Dreams has for the first time opened up creating console games from scratch to PS4 owners, and appears to have made the processs quicker, easier and more intuitive than, say, learning 3D Studio Max and Unity on a PC. Dreams comes with hours of tutorial walkthroughs for beginners, so in a sense it is a game engine that also teaches how to make games in the first place.
Back in January Push Square gushed that "There's simply nothing like this that's ever been done before... This is one of the most innovative, extraordinary pieces of software that we've seen on a console in quite some time..."

"And it can be browsed for hours and hours and hours. It's like when you fall into a YouTube hole, and you're clicking from recommended video to recommended video -- except here, you're jumping from minigames involving llamas to models of crustaceans to covers of The King of Wishful Thinking..."

"It's an astounding technical achievement with unprecedented ambition."

MojoKid writes: NVIDIA has launched a new family of more budget friendly Turing graphics chips for gaming laptops, called the GeForce GTX 1650, GeForce GTX 1660, and GeForce GTX 1660 Ti. The new GPUs will power roughly 80 different OEM mainstream gaming notebook designs, starting in the $799 price range. Compared to a 4-year-old gaming laptop with a GeForce GTX 960M, NVIDIA says that a modern counterpart equipped with a GeForce GTX 1660 Ti can deliver 4x the performance in today's battle royale-style games like Apex Legends, Fortnite, and PUBG. As for the GeForce GTX 1650, NVIDIA is promising a 2.5x performance advantage compared to the GTX 950M and a 1.7x advantage compared to the previous generation GTX 1050. Gamers should expect consistent 60 fps performance in the above-mentioned gaming titles at 1080p, though the company didn't specifically mention GTX 1660 vs 1060 performance comparisons. According to NVIDIA, every major OEM will be releasing GeForce GTX 16 Series laptops, including well-known brands like ASUS, Dell/Alienware, Acer, Hewlett-Packard, and Lenovo (among others).

An anonymous reader quotes the Washington Post: Griffin Spikoski spends as much as 18 hours a day glued to his computer screen playing the wildly popular, multiplayer video game "Fortnite." His YouTube channel -- where he regularly uploads videos of himself playing the online game -- has nearly 1.2 million subscribers and more than 71 million views; figures that have netted him advertisers, sponsorships and a steady stream of income. Last year, that income totaled nearly $200,000... "It's kind of like my job," Griffin told ABC affiliate WABC-TV, noting he plays about eight hours a day in his Long Island home...

His big break came last year when Spikoski beat a well-known Fortnite player and uploaded a video of the battle to YouTube, quickly resulting in 7.5 million views, according to WABC-TV. It didn't take long, the station reported, for the teenager to make his first $100 from Twitch. Not long after, his father, Chris said, everything changed. "Two months went by and we were like, 'Alright, we're going to need to get an accountant and get a financial adviser,'" he said.

Spikoski's parents told filmmakers that they decided to remove their son from high school as his dedication to gaming deepened... Spikoski's parents said their son had been pushing them to allow him to pursue online schooling. With his success growing, they eventually relented. "It's been his dream to be a gamer, to be in e-sports, just to be in this field since he was a kid," Spikoski said, noting that his son began playing video games at age three. "We don't really see that you need a 9-to-5 job to get by in life and you can actually have fun with a career and enjoy your love and do what you love and make a living out of it," he added.

New submitter pecosdave writes: I need suggestions for commercially-made ARM systems that will work in temperature ranges from -35F to 140F (-37C to 60C) for an engineering project. These things are going to be in metal boxes on the side of Texas Highways. The existing Intel systems we're using in other areas are all fan-less, but I'm not going to rule out systems with fans. Considering the extremes of Texas temperatures I'm actually contemplating putting fans on top of our fan-less systems anyways. Almost everything I can find pre-made with ARM is a bare board, or something not nearly as temperature tolerant as some Intel systems I can find. The very nature of an ARM processor should be more tolerant simply because they produce less heat, but I can't seem to find any manufacturers exploiting that fact. Slashdot reader pecosdave added more details in a comment: "It's more closely related to speed cameras, but it's not a speed camera. It's for a toll road, and its main job is to take pictures of a sign at about 10 FPS, though less is probably fine, with a time-stamp so if someone runs the toll we have a separate picture of the current price. If there's a problem with the sign it shows up as well. They just want something local to store it I guess in case the fiber link goes down. We're going to run it rather low-res too to keep the CPU and storage overhead low. I figure 640x480@10FPS is reasonable, but that's not set in stone."

Player Unknown's Battlegrounds is facing a "ferocious" backlash in India, Bloomberg reports: Nowhere has resistance to the game been quite like India. Multiple cities have banned PUBG, as it's known, and police in Western India arrested 10 university students for playing. The national child rights commission has recommended barring the game for its violent nature. One of India's largest Hindi newspapers declared PUBG an "epidemic" that turned children into "manorogi," or psychopaths. "There are dangerous consequences to this game," the Navbharat Times warned in a March 20 editorial. "Many children have lost their mental balance...."

What's different about India is the speed with which the country has landed in the strange digital world of no laws or morals. It skipped two decades of debate and adjustment, blowing into the modern gaming era in a matter of months. Rural communities that never had PCs or game consoles got smartphones in recent years -- and wireless service just became affordable for pretty much everyone after a price war last year. With half a billion internet users looking for entertainment, PUBG has set off a frenzy.
Over 250,000 students entered one recent PUBG competition, according to the article.

At least one local minister criticized the game as "the demon in every house."

dryriver writes: Crytek has published a video showing an ordinary AMD Vega 56 GPU -- which has no raytracing specific circuitry and only costs around $450 -- real-time ray tracing a complex 3D city environment at 4K 30 FPS. Crytek says that the technology demo runs fine on most normal NVIDIA and AMD gaming GPUs. As if this wasn't impressive already, the software real-time ray tracing technology is still in development and not even final. The framerates achieved may thus go up further, raising the question of precisely what the benefits of owning a super-expensive NVIDIA RTX 20xx series GPU are. Nvidia has claimed over and over again that without its amazing new RTX cores and AI denoiser, GPUs will choke on real-time ray tracing tasks in games. Crytek appears to have proven already that with some intelligently written code, bog ordinary GPU cores can handle real-time ray tracing just fine -- no RTX cores, AI denoiser or anything else NVIDIA touts as necessary.

Earlier today, Google launched its long-awaited "Stadia" cloud gaming service at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. Unlike services from Xbox, PlayStation, and Nintendo, Stadia is powered by Google's worldwide data centers, allowing users to play games across a variety of platforms -- browsers, computers, TVs, and mobile devices -- all via the internet at a 4K resolution. One major problem with Stadia, which Google didn't mention in its presentation, is that it will require a ton of bandwidth, testing the limits of data caps that most U.S. internet service providers have.

"Most US ISPs cap their customers' bandwidth usage, usually somewhere in the neighborhood of 300 GB per month. And streaming 4K content eats up about 7GB an hour," Steve Bowling from YouTube gaming channel GameXplain tweeted. "And that's based on Netflix's publicly available guidelines for 4K video content, which is shot at 24 fps, a far cry from 60fps, meaning content at 4k60 could be more costly." He added: "Your average consumer likely isn't rocking a 100Mbps+ connection, and in some parts of America such options aren't even available, limiting Stadia's potential reach. And if you are, that cap can come at you fast, especially considering most folks are going to use their internet for more than just streaming games. Most ISPs offer additional data at a premium, but how many are going to want to pay that premium to stream 4K games?"

What's unknown is whether or not Google will work with ISPs to help alleviate this concern. PCWord also notes that there's no option to download and install a game if you want, which is an option available on Steam's streaming service. "You're always streaming it, and presumably copies sold through the Google Play store won't come with more traditional versions from other storefronts," reports PCWorld. "You're either all-in on Stadia and streaming or you're not."

UPDATE: A Google spokesperson told Kotaku they were able to deliver 1080p, 60 FPS gameplay for users with 25 Mbps connections. They also said that they expect Stadia to deliver 4K, 60 FPS for people with "approximately the same bandwidth requirements." How exactly they will achieve this is still unclear.

NVIDIA's older GeForce GTX 10-series cards will be getting the company's new ray-tracing tech in April. The technology, which is currently only available on its new RTX cards, "will work on GPUs from the 1060 and up, albeit with some serious caveats," reports Engadget. "Some games like Battlefield V will run just fine and deliver better visuals, but other games, like the freshly released Metro Exodus, will run at just 18 fps at 1440p -- obviously an unplayable frame-rate." From the report: What games you'll be able to play with ray-tracing tech (also known as DXR) on NVIDIA GTX cards depends entirely on how it's implemented. In Battlefield V, for instance, the tech is only used for things like reflections. On top of that, you can dial down the strength of the effect so that it consumes less computing horsepower. Metro Exodus, on the other hand, uses ray tracing to create highly realistic "global illumination" effects, simulating lighting from the real world. It's the first game that really showed the potential of RTX cards and actually generated some excitement about the tech. However, because it's so computationally intensive, GTX cards (which don't have the RTX tensor cores) will be effectively be too slow to run it.

NVIDIA explained that when it was first developing the next gen RTX tech, it found chips using Pascal tech would be "monster" sized and consume up to 650 watts. That's because the older cards lack both the integer cores and tensor cores found on the RTX cards. They get particularly stuck on ray-tracing, running about four times slower than the RTX cards on Metro Exodus. Since Metro Exodus is so heavily ray-traced, the RTX cards run it three times quicker than older GTX 10-series cards. However, that falls to two times for Shadow of the Tomb Raider, and 1.6 times for Battlefield V, because both of those games use ray tracing less. The latest GTX 1660 and 1660 Ti GPUs, which don't have RT but do have integer cores, will run ray-traced games moderately better than last-gen 10-series GPUs. NVIDIA also announced that Unity and Unreal Engine now support ray-tracing, allowing developers to implement the tech into their games. Developers can use NVIDIA's new set of tools called GameWorks RTX to achieve this.

"It includes the RTX Denoiser SDK that enables real-time ray-tracing through techniques that reduce the required ray count and number of samples per pixel," adds Engadget. "It will support ray-traced effects like area light shadows, glossy reflections, ambient occlusion and diffuse global illumination (the latter is used in Metro Exodus). Suffice to say, all of those things will make game look a lot prettier."