 The fractal design Define R4 case gets featured on the Wanshow Build Logs of the Week section more than any other case. Click now to learn more about it. Alright 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 because things are happening or they're not happening. Anyway, we came back 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, where lots of people were working at desks. And then we saw kind of a cool video about how they do some motion capture stuff, but no real details. And then we left! So it was pretty short, so that was a little bit disappointing. But I'm on my way to the hockey game now, so hopefully that'll be much, much more entertaining. Gonna go see some Habs action! Gonna boo them. Yeah, I'm gonna boo them. Alright, so we're going to the game now. They split up me and this guy on account of he can get kind of rowdy and we're liable to end up scrapping at some point. I'm gonna beat up any Canadians. Really? Really? You're gonna assume that you'd be beating me up? You won't even call it a fight. You're just gonna call it a beatdown. Like bullying, right? Basically bullying. You're not even that much taller than me. You got maybe 25 pounds on me? Yeah, maybe. Yeah, maybe, maybe. Yeah, okay, fine. Everybody's six inches taller than me though. I'm at more height though. I'm just being observant. This is the dessert tray. So it's like the largest carrot cake ever. Oh, I almost got in the way. Yeah. Oh, someone finally got the chocolate paradise cake. We just tried the last one. This is the second chocolate cake. Oh, that's the second one. Okay, because I'm gonna need a piece of that one. Can I get one of those? Chocolate? Yes, please. Oh, we're out of plates. What are you gonna have? 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 grapevine is that there's something crazy going down tomorrow. So without further ado, I'm gonna go edit some video. There's my computer. Get some sleep and hopefully we're gonna have some really exciting stuff to show you in just a moment here after I sleep. Tired. Well, 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 gonna be two 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 seeds. At least I guess this is about as rowdy and crazy as like tech press gets. I do want a good seat though. So this much is true. I'm gonna go for this one. Yeah, this one right here. Things have changed a fair bit in here since yesterday. So there's a bunch of Prodigy based gaming rigs all over the sides here. So I guess they're gonna be demoing something with those presumably. They're like all around the back. There we go. There's people manning the station. Presumably we should see what happens if we try to touch one. 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. The main thing is we don't want to mess with these just yet. So as predicted I am not allowed to use it yet. I'm a little patient. 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 and really can be total game changers because it's taking away the individual nitpickiness of programming lighting. And instead just giving you a system that just works kind of on its own. They've got flame works which I wasn't as sold on the demo for that one. It's dynamic fire. 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 we'll wait for that. But today what they showed off was absolutely crazy. So first up was Game Stream. So Game 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 in 720p over Wi-Fi. Now we've seen this implemented in other ways. So at PAX we saw Nvidia Grid which is their cloud based 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 Game Stream is where it's going. So they've got a 4K TV demo that they did earlier on 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. 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 yesterday. So they're giving $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 brain is 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 a 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 ShadowPlay. So they're announcing ShadowPlay 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 ShadowPlay. So aside from recording the last 20 minutes of your gameplay 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 AverMedia for example, I'm looking at something like ShadowPlay going, oh balls, because anyone running a GeForce 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 ShadowPlay is going to have integration with Twitch. So they're, rather than relying necessarily on XSplit, although XSplit's flexibility 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 in 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 cores or something like that. Or maybe it's more like something like Titan, but without the full double precision performance. So that'll be a slightly faster 780, which is cool, and maybe we'll see a price drop on 780. 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, because all of NVIDIA's graphics cards lately have looked outstanding. Okay, so let's move on to G-Sync. That's the one where they have demos 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, your monitor, most monitors these days are refreshing at 60Hz, high performance ones are up to 120 or 144Hz. 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 V-Sync in order to make sure that the monitor only draws a frame. 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 more. And that's very noticeable in games. Now they introduced adaptive V-Sync a while ago, and that somewhat alleviated the issue, because it would turn V-Sync on and off dynamically depending on what FPS you were running the game at. But now we have a more permanent solution. So okay, hold on. V-Sync introduces lag as well, because the monitor is waiting for, 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 V-Sync off, and you can get less lag, 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'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 scene is, you're looking at one scene and then 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 G-Sync 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 at its frame rate, and they were independent of each other, whereas now with G-Sync, and G-Sync 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 Radeon 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 G-Sync 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 V-Sync 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 cue from the GPU for the display. Now this isn't something that unfortunately I can show on camera, because we have another fixed frame rate device, the camera that's sitting right in front of me. So 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 it is very, very real and very, very impressive. It works and it's a game changer. So a lot of folks were speculating that Nvidia would have some kind of a response to Mantle. 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 3 in iFinity with 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 60 FPS. And that's 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... 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... Well, that's good too. So... Yeah, today was 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 my house because I'm using Powerline to my TV right now. I'm going to want to run Giggy so that I can run at full 1080p. 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 Q1 2014 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 $1000 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. So this is awesome. I love this. How much is Nvidia paying Linus? I actually wrote this in one of the comments on one of my recent videos, but I might as well just say it. AMD has actually got, in terms of money, more engagement with me than Nvidia. There, I'm going to let that sink in for a moment. So if I was selling out, I should sell out to the highest bidder, correct? No. Like every publication, I have to take advertising and sponsorships and I work with these partners, but that doesn't mean that what I say has anything to do with that. So if what I said had to do with that, then it would be because Nvidia is giving me a bunch of money, which they don't. So there you go. In fact, if you want to factor in sort of even things like events, AMD took me to Hawaii, and Nvidia took me to Montreal, which is great, but it's not Hawaii. So, you know, what I'm saying... Look, see? And I'm even getting in trouble for calling out Nvidia for not... 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 uninspiring. Today has been unbelievable because we saw some crazy awesome stuff. I gotta, like, Instagram this. So yeah, of course, I'm not gonna pass up a photo op, right? So I'm spending all my time in office right now, and I think that 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, 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 feel more like myself than I have for a long time. I'm in there spending all of my time on these hard technical problems, writing tons of code, making things happen, and 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 enforcer's back. He's stealing John Carmack from us. Sorry, guys. I'm really not a bad guy. Ask Lyna. There goes the bad guy. Alright, 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 and took him over there. Look at this. Enforcer just wants a photo op, I bet. See? Look. Look, I'm gonna get him in all kinds of trouble. See? He just wanted a photo op with John Carmack. 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.