![This is NVIDIA’s Project Holodeck [Release and Demo]](https://c.slashgear.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/holo.jpg)
This week at GTC 2017, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang revealed Project Holodeck to the masses. This system "brings visually stunning, collaborative, and shareable VR to everyone." The first demonstration had several users standing near a vehice rendered with 50,000,000 polygons - that's inside a virtual, shared space. The vehicle was a $1.9-million dollar supercar showed off via Christian Koenigsegg.
This week the folks at AMD are witnessing an odd occurrence with their latest RX 580 graphics card. While the RX 580 features a new power state and faster processing speeds, it's pretty much just a slightly modified RX 480 card. Users saw this and started in tweaking their hardware with software freely available from AMD. It would appear that an RS 580 BIOS file flashed to an RX 480 card results in what's pretty much an RX 580 - almost.
AMD has announced the launch of its new Radeon RX 500 Series, a lineup of graphic cards that, at the highest end, offer buyers AAA and VR gaming at a budget-friendly price. The series is comprised of four graphics cards, the RX550, 560, 570, and 580. According to AMD, the new Radeon RX 500 Series is suitable for '9 out of 10 PC gamers today who are hindered by outdated technology.'
Unlike in the world of PCs where you have the likes of NVIDIA and AMD/ATI butting heads over graphics cards, the mobile graphics chip scene is often less sensational. It does still have its big names, though, like Qualcomm’s Adreno, NVIDIA’s Tegra, and ARM’s Mali. Predating these, however, is Imagination’s PowerVR, which traces its roots back to the early days of desktop graphics hardware accelerators. The company has just announced its latest gen GPU architecture, the Series8XT, a.k.a. “Furian”, that could give next year’s iPhones 4K and VR capabilities.
NVIDIA's manufacturing partners will be ready to roll with GTX 10 processing power for laptop PCs very soon. NVIDIA's GTX 10 series graphics chips have been brought to notebooks in their original form - not just with lesser "M" iterations as they had in the past. These NVIDIA GeForce GTX 10 notebooks are ready to run AAA games with high end graphics right out the box.
Doom, the very first one, was widely regarded to have pushed the boundaries of PC gaming and graphics of that era, with its 3D graphics, 3D maps, networked multiplayer, and mature rating. Ever since then, id Software has been carrying on that tradition, like with RAGE's use of megatextures. Now under the ownership of Bethesda Softworks, that tradition continues with the announcement that the reincarnation of DOOM is now the first triple-A game to support the brand new Vulkan API, promising to deliver even better framerates, especially on slightly weaker hardware.
What you see here is the Blackbird. It's an electric dune buggy-like vehicle that can be adjusted in numerous way to mimic the driving of any production car. It's made by The Mill, a digital effects studio in London, and in addition to the fully customizable chassis, it's outfitted with 360-degree cameras. This allows it to be filmed while impersonating a specific car, and then CGI magicians use an overlay to turn it into that vehicle.
Now that we've got the first consumer-level VR headsets out in the wild, it's only a matter of time before we see full motion capture immersion. What I mean is when you see someone inside the virtual world, you'll see their whole body. Their face will reflect what's actually being shown on their actual head in real time. Their body will be represented by a reasonably reconstructed virtual version of their real form. All we need is faster internet and the world's best GPUs.
Since time immemorial … OK maybe not that too long ago, films, especially science fiction, have been the seed bed of the latest in CG technology. Year after year, we are treated to movies that push the limits of computer generated images, pushing the boundaries of our own perceptions and minds. Star Wars: The Force Awakens is, of course, no different and although not as revolutionary as some titles would claim to be, it has its fair share of CGI shots that are vying for a slot in awards night. Two breakdown edit videos give a glimpse of the craftsmanship behind those shots, especially in bringing the mysterious Maz Kanata to life.
NVIDIA says their new credit-card sized "Jetson TX1" module will enable "a new generation of smart, autonomous machines that can learn." Before you start thinking this is Skynet, all over again, terminators running wild, take heed: they're being made for good, not evil. NVIDIA suggests that these modules will be used in drones that scan crowds to "identify suspicious activity." They'll be used in drones that "navigate their way through a forest for search and rescue." They'll be smart - and they'll be able to grow more intelligent, too.
Launch day for Fallout 4 includes the release of NVIDIA's newest Game Ready driver, ready to pump the quality up to the tippety top of all your computer's abilities. Users will - of course - need an NVIDIA GeForce GTX GPU, the Game Ready driver itself, and GeForce Experience more than likely. Using the GeForce Experience, users will be able to tap into optimal settings for their unique setup with a couple of taps of a couple of buttons - far easier than going in to the game's settings and setting everything up yourself.
Despite the growing popularity of wearables, smartwatches, and IoT devices, few of the hardware inside them are specifically designed with those form factors in mind. The Qualcomm Snapdragon 400 used in many smartwatches, for example, is running on half its cores to maintain the balance between performance and power drain. ARM Holdings, designer of the popular computing architecture, is changing that status quo by releasing the Mali-470, a new graphics core that has been designed to address the needs of tomorrow's smartwatches and the Internet of Things.
