General Gaming Article |
- What Impact Will HoloLens Have on PC Gaming?
- Smaller Motherboard Players Regroup to Take on Asus and Gigabyte
- Newegg Daily Deals: Asus X99-A Motherboard, Dell 21.5-Inch LED Monitor, and More!
- Microsoft’s HoloLens Has the Potential to Be Transformative
- Stir Kinetic Desk Gets You Moving Up and Down
- Hey Look, Dropbox is Now Available for Windows Phone
- Backblaze Takes a Second Look at Hard Drive Reliability, Finds Capacity Matters
- Nvidia GeForce GTX 960 Video Card Review
| What Impact Will HoloLens Have on PC Gaming? Posted: 22 Jan 2015 12:36 PM PST
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| Smaller Motherboard Players Regroup to Take on Asus and Gigabyte Posted: 22 Jan 2015 11:45 AM PST
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| Newegg Daily Deals: Asus X99-A Motherboard, Dell 21.5-Inch LED Monitor, and More! Posted: 22 Jan 2015 11:21 AM PST
Top Deal: Don't you love the smell of fresh hardware? There's nothing like unwrapping a new motherboard, knowing that you're about to embark on a new build. If it's been awhile since you've had that feeling, why not jump back in the saddle? And if you need some guidance on a starting point, check out today's top deal for an Asus X99-A Motherboard for $235 (normally $250 - use coupon code: [EMCAKNN86]). This board is brimming with optimizations and features, including 3-way SLI support to show that 4K panel who the boss is. Other Deals: Dell 21.5-inch 5ms Widescreen LED Backlight LCD Monitor for $110 with free shipping (normally $130 - use coupon code: [EMCAKNN23]) G.Skill Ripjaws X Series 16GB (2 x 8GB) 240-Pin DDR3 1866 (PC3 14900) Desktop Memory for $124 with free shipping (normally $145 - use coupon code: [EMCAKNN34]) WD Re 1TB 7200 RPM 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5-inch Enterprise Internal Hard Drive for $85 with free shipping (normally $95 - use coupon code: [ESCAKNN29]) AMD A10-6800K Richland 4.1GHz (4.4GHz Turbo) Socket FM2 100W Quad-Core Desktop Processor for $120 with free shipping (normally $130 - use coupon code: [EMCAKNN28]) | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Microsoft’s HoloLens Has the Potential to Be Transformative Posted: 22 Jan 2015 11:07 AM PST We tried Microsoft's augmented reality demo and couldn't stop smilingMany suspected that Microsoft would toss its hat into the virtual reality headset game. After all, Oculus VR was successful enough with its Kickstarter campaign that Facebook ended up purchasing it for $two billion, and longtime console rival Sony jumped into the fray not long ago with its Project Morpheus. While Microsoft did reveal its own head-mounted display, the HoloLens isn't competing in the VR space, but is instead paving new paths for augmented realities. We got a chance to try it ourselves and you're probably wondering, "Is it any good?" Simply put, if it's executed correctly, it has the potential to be transformative.
A prototype sample of Microsoft's Hololens headset. How does an AR headset differ from a VR headset? Whereas VR headsets try to take you into a virtual world completely, Microsoft's augmented reality HoloLens is happy to keep you in reality. It instead opts to inject virtual holograms into your own real-life world (think the Princess Leah hologram and you pretty much get the idea). "This is your world with holograms," Microsoft said of the device at its Windows 10 keynote. Unlike the fictitious technology in Star Wars, however, here you have to wear a headset. The HoloLens has a see-through visor, and augmented reality objects are beamed into a rectangle in front of you. The rectangle isn't all-encompassing, however. You'll still be able to see around the rectangle. The visual box is akin to you sitting in the middle of a movie theater, in that you can see more than just the screen. Technically, you can also see through this rectangle, considering it's a see-through glass-like material, but we must say that Microsoft has done an incredible job making the area behind the rectangle disappear. We had to stick up a hand in front of our face to make sure that we could still see through it, and even then it was hard not to focus on the augmented reality visuals right in front of us. While our developer kit unit was wired and featured a chest mount tethered to a janky-looking headset (so janky that Microsoft wouldn't let us take pictures of it), the company says that the consumer version of the HoloLens will be completely wireless and will not require a separate device, like a smartphone or computer. Nor will it require markers or have an external camera, even though it supports positional head-tracking. Instead, it will run Windows 10 itself and has its own dedicated CPU, GPU, and a new holographic processing unit (HPU) that processes all of these sensors together in real time. Another little dev-kit quirk is that Microsoft had to measure the distance between our eyes to properly configure the headset to our needs. The company says this will be handled automatically with the consumer release. The headset also has integrated speakers that provide spatial sound and a built-in mic that will allow you to issue voice commands. In addition, Hololens has an integrated depth sensor, supports stereoscopic 3D, and can track your finger gestures (provided they are in your line of sight). Activating a command is as easy as holding your right fist one foot away from your chest (with your knuckles facing you), lifting your index finger up to the ceiling, and flicking up and down with said finger. Slightly weirder was that you don't control the headset's cursor with your finger; instead, the cursor is always fixated in the middle of your vision, so you essentially use your eyes to point at objects. It took us about five minutes to get the hang of it.
The Minecraft-inspired demo looked nearly as good as this picture depicts. At the Windows 10 event, Microsoft showed off four HoloLens demos. The first one we tried was called HoloBuilder. It's essentially a Minecraft-inspired augmented reality demo. We were situated in a living room with the headset on, and when we looked around, the various desks and coffee tables had virtual 3D buildings and structures situated on top of them. The blending of the real and virtual was seamless and truly impressive. It never felt like the augmented reality objects were inappropriately floating in space, or didn't have a sense of presence to them. It felt like all the Minecraft castles and farmlands were actually there (albeit in virtual miniature LEGO form). We couldn't help but shout out expletives at how unbelievable it felt at times; we were blown away. One of the picture frames in the room featured a cavern and it really felt like we could stick our arm into the cave. The 3D depth here is amazing. Another experience had us looking at a short table on the floor. On top of the table were blocks of TNT that we could look at and explode with our activate finger gesture. When we blew up the box of dynamite, we saw the virtual earth open up to reveal magma underneath the floor. This might sound like hyperbole, but it looked so incredibly convincing that we had to step on it ourselves to make sure it wasn't actually there. The next demo we attended had Microsoft representatives showing off the HoloLens's HoloStudio tool. Microsoft believes that this program will bring about a "new medium for artistic expression and creation." HoloStudio is the company's tool that will allow you to use Hololens to easily create 3D augmented reality objects, using simple hand gestures and voice commands. From here, you'll be able to get these objects 3D printed. Microsoft says HoloStudio represents a "perfect print preview for 3D printing." This tool essentially blends the physical and digital worlds. We saw a live demo of a Microsoft employee building a virtual toy koala in under two minutes. The toy looked impressive, but perhaps more impressive is that, according to Microsoft, the employee didn't have any 3D modeling experience prior to prepping for the demo. He also showed us a 3D model of an X-Wing that looked accurate to the Star Wars incarnation. According to the rep, it only took him about an hour and a half to build it. The company says it wants to make building 3D objects easy for beginners; you won't have to be a professional 3D artist to construct interesting designs. In the live HoloStudio live demo, the Microsoft rep was able to pull objects out from a virtual toolbox and copy/reorient them with simple tap/voice commands. The software looks promising, but unfortunately Microsoft couldn't tell us if it would be bundled for free with the purchase of HoloLens.
Here is a 3D printed figure of what the virtual koala looked like. The following demo took us to space—Mars, specifically. Microsoft has been working with NASA's Jet Propulsion Labs to recreate a 3D rendering of Mars using Curiosity's images. While our physical body was located in an office in Bellevue, Washington, it felt like we were walking on the red planet. When we asked if any of the landscape were computer rendered, the Microsoft rep told us that all the imagery was actually from Mars, and that it was the closest man has ever come to walking on the planet. Suffice it to say our jaws hit the floor. It looked entirely realistic. Never did it feel flat or like images were being stitched together. We actually felt like we were on Mars (at least as best as a see-through augmented related lens can deliver). Microsoft also set up a tour guide in a different room to show us around the alien planet. Our tour guide was golden (picture the Silver Surfer, except gold). This is but one humanoid prototype Microsoft said it was working on. It had Superman-like laser beams pointing out of its eyes (minus the laser sound effects) that would point us in the direction of interesting objects spread throughout the desert terrain. By focusing in on objects, we could use the flick command to zoom in on surfaces. Again, the headset features positional head tracking, so we were able to get on our knees and closely observe the rocks underneath our feet. It was a surreal experience and we could definitely see NASA using this headset for more research.
Who knew Skype could be so informative? The final demo we took part in had us interfacing with a real human being over Skype. While that might sound less exciting than the other demos, it was actually pretty cool. The person on the other end of the line was going to help us repair a broken electric wall socket. Our Skype helper could see what we were seeing (as a function of the HoloLens), and she walked us through all the steps to fix the socket, connecting wires and all. We had a funny moment during this demo when she asked us to look down at the tools. We did what we were asked and looked at the virtual tools below her video feed. But she asked us to look down at the tools again, and we realized she meant the physical hammers and such on the desk beside us. It's sort of crazy how the physical and digital are already becoming hard to distinguish in AR. Once we got that squared away, we pinned her video feed to the side of the wall socket (so that it wouldn't float in the middle of our vision and obstruct our view of it). From there, she was able to give us very clear and precise instructions on how to fix the issue. It worked about as well as someone giving you instructions over the shoulder in real life. It's extremely exciting to see examples of what AR will allow people to do. Obviously, helping someone fix an electrical socket over Skype is one of them, but you'll also be able to get cooking lessons from your mom or learn how to fix a car from your dad, and so on. Virtual classes with one-on-one instruction seems like a natural next step. We see a lot of potential here in the professional world, too. It could potentially aid doctors in the ER or help soldiers avoid potential land mines in the field. Then, yes, of course, game opportunities abound. You could potentially do some unique eye-spy or hide-and-seek type games around your house or blast aliens as they start coming in from your kitchen. Microsoft says gaming will be a big component of HoloLens, but it will be up to the developers to push the boundaries of what's possible with AR games. In addition, as we also saw with the Mars demo, virtual tourism could be a big thing.
If pulled off correctly, HoloLens could be transformative. Of course, virtual tourism may be better suited for VR experiences, where you are completely visually isolated from the outside world, and some people were bothered by the fact that you could see through and around the lens. It didn't bother us, however. It was actually hard to stop smiling at points. When asked, Microsoft was coy about the technical aspects of the device. When we asked the HoloLens's resolution, the answer was merely "HD." In theory, this means 720p and up. Regardless, from our experiential test, we didn't have any major issues with the resolution and thought it looked quite sharp for a developer kit. Of course, we'll take higher resolution any day of the week, but the resolution that Microsoft is currently running seems ready for consumer release.
HoloLens could open up 3D modeling for beginners. When will it be released? Microsoft says during the Windows 10 launch timeframe. As Microsoft aims to release Windows 10 sometime this year, you shouldn't have to wait too long to try it yourself. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Stir Kinetic Desk Gets You Moving Up and Down Posted: 22 Jan 2015 09:01 AM PST
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| Hey Look, Dropbox is Now Available for Windows Phone Posted: 22 Jan 2015 08:26 AM PST
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| Backblaze Takes a Second Look at Hard Drive Reliability, Finds Capacity Matters Posted: 22 Jan 2015 07:57 AM PST
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| Nvidia GeForce GTX 960 Video Card Review Posted: 22 Jan 2015 06:01 AM PST Asus and EVGA represent, plus DSR and VSR benchmarksOne of the nice things about PCs is that your budget has a wide range of entry points. If you don't need the heavy lifting of an Nvidia GeForce GTX 980 or an AMD Radeon R9 290X, you don't have to cough up hundreds of dollars for one. Both companies offer a variety of stuff to fit your budget. Historically, Nvidia's cards ending in "60" -- like the 560, 660 and 760 – have offered performance in between the premium cards and the more economical choices, putting them in a "Goldilocks zone" of balanced price and performance. Nvidia's latest, the GTX 960 is no exception. With a 128-bit memory bus, a little over a thousand shader cores, and 2GB of VRAM, it's not designed to be a giant leap over the GTX 660. But it's not designed to be modest, either. Let's take a look at the Asus Strix DirectCU II OC Edition of the GTX 960. (EVGA sent us a "Super Superclocked" version that uses the company's ACX 2.0 cooler, but Nvidia distributed the Asus card as the official one to test for review, so we'll talk about the Asus card first.) This mouthful of a card comes overclocked out of the box, and the company claims a 12% average increase in performance, versus Nvidia's stock or "reference" model. It features dual fans sitting on top of heatsinks that are fed by several heatpipes, and these fans are designed to not spin until the GPU core gets up to 65 degrees Celsius. When it does, the Strix fans are designed to operate quietly, yet still run the chip cooler than the stock version can. About 30% cooler, in fact.
The company also asserts that its cards will be free of coil whine, which is an annoying high-pitched squeal that some faulty electronics can emit, even when there are no moving parts. This is most commonly seen in power supplies but sometimes happens in video cards too. Since Asus says that their cards are free of this defect, it indicates that you can get a replacement if your card falls victim, rather than it being an issue that they can squirrel out of. It's nice to see a company willing to address this issue. The cards also come with a 1-year "Premium" subscription to the Xsplit game broadcasting service, which lets you to stream your gaming online. That would usually cost you over a hundred bucks. Next up is the EVGA SSC version that we mentioned earlier. This one is a bit longer than the Asus card, taping out at 10 inches or so, versus about 8.5 inches. But its height barely rises above the bracket, so the screw will be easier to install in a cramped space. The EVGA card also does not have a backplate, but it also costs a few bucks less. Notably, this SSC version uses an 8-pin PCI Express cable, instead of 6 pins on the Asus card. That means that it could pull up to 225 watts instead of 150, hypothetically giving it a higher overclock ceiling. Its dual fans are also a bit larger, at 90mm versus 70mm. The SSC also uses a copper plate on top of the GPU core, which can move heat faster than the partly aluminum plate on the Asus card. However, the Asus MOSFET chips have small heatsinks attached with thermal pads, whereas the EVGA card's MOSFETs are sitting underneath a metal plate that runs the length of the card. In our exprience, heatsinks generally perform better than plates.
Considering the relatively low amount of power that these cards draw, however, the differences in cooling design may not matter that much. EVGA claims that its straight heat pipes cool 6% than the kind of bent heat pipes that the Asus card uses. What kind of gaming should you expect, though, with the 960's architecture? Let's take a look at the spec charts:
The GTX 960 price and clock speeds noted here are specifically for the Asus Strix version. (Update: Asus tells us that the MSRP of their card changed this morning from $215 to $210.) The EVGA SSC card has a launch price of $210, and Nvidia expects the average launch price across all cards to be closer to $200. The Asus card also has an "OC mode" setting that increases its core clock speed to 1253MHz and its boost clock to 1317MHz. The default clock speeds of the GTX 960 are 1126MHz and and 1178MHz, respectively, so it's a sizeable jump. It's been a while since we've seen a mid-range gaming card with only a 128-bit memory bus. The GTX 660 was 192-bit, and the 560 was 256-bit. Nvidia tells us that its Maxwell chips use particularly good data compression techniques to effectively increase the bus speed, though. Nvidia has also said in the past that the shader cores in this new Maxwell generation of GPUs are up to 40% faster than the ones that Kepler (the GTX 660) uses. In fact, EVGA says that its GTX 960 is up to 60% faster than a GTX 660. Still, 1024 shader cores doesn't seem like a lot. The 960 has half the shader cores of the GTX 980, half its memory bandwidth, and half its VRAM. But it still supports MFAA, VXGI, Dynamic Super Resolution, and DirectX 12. So its added feature set alone is compelling, even if it turns out to be "only" 30% faster than a GTX 660. The 960s are also launching at a lower price than the 660 and 760. (We're not putting the 760 or 770 cards in the spec chart because they are just refinements of the 670 and 680, respectively.) Click here for Page 2, to check out the benchmarks!Our test rig is as follows:
Armed with this knowledge, let's see how the GTX 960 stacks up. All of these games were tested at or near their highest settings, with 4xMSAA. What do we mean by "near"? For example, we turned off PhysX so as not to tilt the score too much in Nvidia's favor, and we turned off TressFX so that AMD could not tilt either. We did not use Nvidia's proprietary TXAA or MFAA either. Just straight-up 4xMSAA. (Tomb Raider does not have an MSAA setting, so we used 2xSSAA instead.) Lastly, we set the texture quality in Shadow of Mordor to medium, since the game itself says that higher settings are not intended for video cards that have less than 3GB of VRAM. Both the GTX 960 and the R9 285 have 2GB (though we may see 4GB versions later on). We wanted to look at GPU performance without the result being colored too much by brand-specific extensions. Our mix of games is intended to be a balance of Nvidia-friendly titles and AMD-friendly titles. We used these games' built-in benchmarks to conduct all tests, to keep the evaluated input the same each time. First off, here's the results at 1920x1080, which Nvidia considers the target resolution for the GTX 960. We're using the Asus Strix version of the GTX 960, since it's more or less the officially approved one. The R9 285 is a Sapphire ITX Compact version; the GTX 660 is an MSI Frozr II; the GTX 970 is an Asus Mini; and the R9 290 is the reference model. 1920x1080 Bechmark Results, Average Frames Per Second
As we can see, the GTX 960's relatively narrow memory bus does not appear to be the obstacle that we feared. In fact, the card edges out the R9 285 in Tomb Raider, a game that is customarily in AMD's camp. However, AMD seems to have found some optimizations in its new Omega drivers elsewhere, and the R9 285 overtakes the GTX 960 in Batman Arkham Origins, a game that usually favors Nvidia gear by a healthy margin. The 960's performance there is a bit puzzling (since it pretty much matches that of the 660), but the score did not budge after several re-tests. The R9 290, meanwhile, quietly keeps pace with the GTX 970, falling short only in Tomb Raider. Before AMD released its Omega drivers, you could expect the 290 to be 5-10% slower across the board, but it looks like this is no longer the case. Overall, the GTX 960 and R9 285 cards do quite respectably at 1920x1080, with each game's visual settings cranked up. So everything is working by design. Both GTX 960s are also very quiet cards. You have to look at the fans to know they're spinning, because you'll probably never hear them. The EVGA SSC card uses one 8-pin PCI Express cable instead of a 6-pin, but Nvidia tells us that this is for higher overclock potential, not because of a higher power requirement. The card never cracked 70 degrees Celsius during our tests, and the Asus card ran in the low 60s. The 285, for its part, operated in the high 60s. Next up, we're taking DSR and VSR for a spin. DSR stands for Dynamic Super Resolution. Technically, this uses ordered-grid super-sample anti-aliasing with a 13-tap Gaussian filter. In more straightforward terms, DSR takes a higher resolution than your monitor can display, squishes it down to fit, and applies a filter to enhance smoothness on the edges of objects in the game world. It can scale up to 3840x2160, also known as "4K," and can stop at points in between, such as 2560x1440. A 1440p monitor has roughly 80% more pixels than a 1080p monitor, and it's a common resolution for gamers with deeper pockets. This next set of benchmarks is run using the same 1080p monitor as before, just with DSR and VSR applied. We couldn't get either resolution tech to work correctly with Shadow of Morder, however; it ran at 2880x1620 instead, which is exactly twice as many pixels as 1920x1080. So the performance there will be a little lower than someone with a 1440p monitor should expect. 2560x1440 Benchmark Results (via DSR and VSR), Average FPS
*2880x1620 resolution Despite the much higher bandwidth requirements, Nvidia's GTX 960 scales up quite respectably (as does the comparable Radeon R9 285). Hitman: Absolution continues to be a thorn in Nvidia's side, but the 960 meets the R9 285 blow-for-blow. The R9 290 is looking pretty good once more, losing surprisingly little steam in Hitman: Absolution and running in stride with the GTX 970, even pushing decisively ahead of it in Hitman and Batman. Since we acquired two GTX 960s for this review, it would be a shame not to try them in SLI. We had two R9 285s on hand anyway, so we'd have to hand in our geek cards if we didn't give Crossfire a shot as well. The video cards are not identical in either case, but that's not necessary to get SLI or Crossfire to work. The cards just both need to be 960s or 285s. The one wrinkle is that the higher-clocked card will reduce its speed to match that of the lower-clocked card. So your results with identical pairs will be slightly different from what we got. Since SLI and CF don't add RAM together (the contents just get mirrored), Shadow of Mordor will remain running with "Medium" textures. For these benches, we paired our Sapphire R9 285 Compact with an Asus Strix R9 285. These cards in SLI/CF would be overkill for 1080p, so we focused on repeating our 1440p test set instead. 3DMark remained at 1920x1080, however. We wanted to make direct comparisons between this set of 3DMark score and the earlier set. SLI and Crossfire (via DSR and VSR), Average FPS
*2880x1620 resolution The 285s in Crossfire didn't seem to like Tomb Raider and remained locked at 64 FPS throughout the test. No amount of fiddling seemed to fix it. We know that it was detecting the card, because we were getting higher performance than would be possible with just one 285. The GTX 960's performance in Batman is also a bit puzzling. We'll have to dig into both of these issues further. Other than that, the 285 and 960 both scale pretty well when paired with a buddy, though the 285 indicates better scaling overall in the games that correctly recognized the second card. The GTX 960 does really well with Tomb Raider, though. Given the 285's performance elsewhere, we doubt that it would pull ahead here. The picture might change at 4K, but this tier of card is not advisable for resolutions that high anyway. We'd recommend at least two GTX 970s or two Radeon R9 290s. At around $250, though, the R9 290 is not a bad choice, if you can stretch your budget a little. But we'd recommend a 600-watt power supply for a single 290, and an 850-watt PSU for two of them, so there may be additional costs involved. The GTX 960, meanwhile, is rated for a 400-watt PSU, so it can plug into a wide range of systems without needing additional upgrades. The 290 also does not do 4K VSR, maxing out instead at 3200x1800, because it uses the older Hawaii core instead of the newer Tonga core. The 960 and the 285 can go all the way. And definitely do not get the black-and red "reference" version of the 290 with the single fan. It runs really loudly. A better choice would be the Sapphire Tri-X model, or the Gigabyte GV-R929WF3-4GD. Both choices need a good 12 inches of space inside your case, though. If you have a mini-ITX case and want something both compact and beefy, Gigabyte and Asus both make shorty GTX 970s (and of course there's the compact Sapphire 285 that we used for this review). If you're a fan of the Green Team and have been holding off for a Maxwell card at this price point, Nvidia has delivered -- though AMD is no pushover, thanks in part to the optimizations in its new Omega drivers. |
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