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Filing taxes suck. If it weren’t for the sweet reward of a tax refund, many of us probably wouldn’t be filing our taxes (which are due on April 18th) at all this year to avoid the headache of leafing through physical and electronic paperwork. Luckily, there’s a new dating simulator that’ll help folks figure out how to… Read more... View the full article

Starting back in 2004, Far Cry has become one of Ubisoft’s biggest and most successful franchises of all time. Sure, the first game was technically developed by Crytek, the same folks who would later go on to make the Crysis series, but after that initial game, the rest have been handled by Ubisoft. These open-world… Read more... View the full article

I don’t have time to travel extensively, and New York City (where I live) is made of pigeon feathers and concrete, so I need to rely on video games to transport me somewhere fantastic, like a castle. Read more... View the full article

Game developer CD PROJEKT RED today at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco unveiled a technology preview for Cyberpunk 2077 with path tracing, coming April 11. Path tracing, also known as full ray tracing, accurately simulates light throughout an entire scene. It’s used by visual effects artists to create film and TV graphics that are indistinguishable from reality. But until the arrival of GeForce RTX GPUs with RT Cores, and the AI-powered acceleration of NVIDIA DLSS, real-time video game path tracing was impossible because it is extremely GPU intensive. “This not only gives better visuals to the players but also has the promise to revolutionize the entire pipeline of how games are being created,” said Pawel Kozlowski, a senior technology developer engineer at NVIDIA. This technology preview, Cyberpunk 2077’s Ray Tracing: Overdrive Mode, is a sneak peak into the future of full ray tracing. With full ray tracing, now practically all light sources cast physically correct soft shadows. Natural colored lighting also bounces multiple times throughout Cyberpunk 2077’s world, creating more realistic indirect lighting and occlusion. Cyberpunk 2077, previously an early adopter of ray tracing, becomes the latest modern blockbuster title to harness real-time path tracing. Coming shortly after path tracing for Minecraft, Portal and Quake II, it underscores a wave of adoption in motion. Like with ray tracing, it’s expected many more will follow. And the influence on video games is just the start, as real-time path tracing holds promise for many design industries. Decades of Research Uncorked Decades in the making, real-time path tracing is indeed a big leap in gaming graphics. While long used in computer-generated imagery for movies, path tracing there took place in offline rendering farms, often requiring hours to render a single frame. In gaming, which requires fast frame rates, rendering needs to happen in about 0.016 seconds. Since the 1970s, video games have relied on rasterization techniques (see below). More recently, in 2018, NVIDIA introduced RTX GPUs to support ray tracing. Path tracing is the final frontier for the most physically accurate lighting and shadows. Path tracing has been one of the main lighting algorithms used in offline rendering farms and computer graphics in films for years. It wasn’t until GeForce RTX 40 series and DLSS 3 was available that it was possible to bring path tracing to real-time graphics. Cyberpunk 2077 also taps into Shader Execution Reordering — available for use on the NVIDIA Ada Lovelace architecture generation — which optimizes GPU workloads, enabling more efficient path-traced lighting. Accelerated by DLSS 3 DLSS 3 complements groundbreaking advancements in path tracing and harnesses modern AI — built on GPU-accelerated deep learning, a form of neural networking — as a powerful gaming performance multiplier. DLSS allows games to render 1/8th of the pixels, then uses AI and GeForce RTX Tensor Cores to reconstruct the rest, dramatically multiplying frame rates, while delivering crisp, high-quality images that rival native resolution. Running on Ada Lovelace advances — launched with GeForce RTX 40 Series GPUs — DLSS 3 multiplies frame rates, maintaining image quality and responsiveness in games. Powerful Tools Now Available For game developers, NVIDIA today at GDC announced the availability of the RTX+ Path Tracing SDK 1.0. The package of technologies includes DLSS 3, Shader Execution Reordering (SER), RTX Direct Illumination (RTXDI) and NVIDIA Real-Time Denoisers (NRD). Learn more about full RTX path tracing. And catch up on all the breakthroughs in generative AI and the metaverse by joining us at GTC this week. View the full article

Gamers wanted better graphics. GPUs delivered. Those GPUs became the key to the world-changing AI revolution. Now gamers are reaping the benefits. At GDC 2023 in San Francisco this week, the gaming industry’s premier developers conference, NVIDIA made a series of announcements, including new games and game development tools that promise to accelerate innovations at the intersection of neural networking and graphics, or neural graphics revolution. DLSS 3 harnesses modern AI — built on GPU-accelerated deep learning, a form of neural networking — as a powerful gaming performance multiplier. DLSS allows games to render 1/8th of the pixels, then uses AI and GeForce RTX Tensor Cores to reconstruct the rest, dramatically multiplying frame rates, while delivering crisp, high-quality images that rival native resolution. It’s just one example of how gamers are benefiting from the advancements in AI supercomputing showcased at this week’s NVIDIA GTC technology conference, which is running concurrently with GDC. And game developers are adopting DLSS at a break-neck pace. DLSS complements ground-breaking advancements in ray tracing — a technology long used by filmmakers — to bring richer, more immersive visual experiences to gamers in real time. Thanks, in part, to DLSS, real-time ray tracing, considered by many to be impossible in 2017, exploded onto the gaming scene with the debut of NVIDIA RTX in 2018. Ray tracing is now everywhere in games. At GDC, game developer CD PROJEKT RED announced Cyberpunk 2077 will activate full ray tracing, also called path tracing, with the upcoming technology preview of Ray Tracing: Overdrive Mode in Cyberpunk 2077. Cyberpunk 2077, previously an early adopter of ray tracing, becomes the latest modern blockbuster title to harness real-time path tracing following Minecraft, Portal and Quake II. New DLSS 3 AAA Games Coming During GDC, NVIDIA also announced the addition of DLSS 3 support for even more popular AAA games, including Diablo IV, Forza Horizon 5 and Redfall. Diablo IV, the latest installment of the genre-defining Diablo franchise with multiple games, will launch on June 6 with DLSS 3, with ray tracing coming post-launch. Forza Horizon 5, named the best open-world racing game of all time, will update to DLSS 3 on March 28. Redfall, Bethesda’s highly anticipated, open-world, co-op first-person shooter from Arkane Austin is launching on May 2 with DLSS 3, with ray tracing coming post-launch. DLSS is now available in 270+ games and apps, and DLSS 3 is multiplying performance in 28 released games and has been adopted 7x faster than DLSS 2 in the first six months of their respective launches. DLSS Frame Generation Now Publicly Available for Developers NVIDIA announced DLSS Frame Generation is now publicly available for developers to integrate into their games and applications. The public release of DLSS Frame Generation plug-ins will allow even more developers to adopt the framerate-boosting technology. DLSS Frame Generation is now available via NVIDIA Streamline, an open-source, cross-vendor framework that simplifies the integration of super-resolution technologies in 3D games and apps. For all the details, dig into our full coverage on GeForce News. Unreal Engine 5.2 Integration to Speed Up DLSS 3 Adoption At GDC, NVIDIA and Epic announced the integration of DLSS 3 into the popular Unreal Engine game engine. Unreal Engine is an open and advanced real-time 3D creation tool that gives game developers and creators the freedom and control to deliver cutting-edge 3D content, interactive experiences and immersive virtual worlds. A DLSS 3 plug-in will debut in UE 5.2, making it more straightforward for any developer to accelerate the performance of their games and applications, further accelerating the adoption of DLSS. Cyberpunk 2077: A Showcase for What’s Next CD PROJEKT RED showcases a technology preview of path tracing with Cyberpunk 2077. Path tracing, also known as full ray tracing, allows developers to create cinematic experiences. Simulating the physics of light, using ray tracing as part of a neural graphics system, it’s capable of photorealism in 3D settings for more dynamic lighting and shadows. GeForce gamers will be able to activate full ray tracing with the upcoming technology preview of Ray Tracing: Overdrive Mode on April 11. These advancements are anchored in NVIDIA RTX technologies. To bring these incredible effects to life, CD PROJEKT RED and NVIDIA have worked hand in hand to integrate NVIDIA DLSS 3 and introduce new optimizations for this entirely new, fully ray-traced pipeline. NVIDIA Shader Execution Reordering helps GPUs execute incoherent workloads boosting performance; NVIDIA Real-Time Denoisers have been used to improve performance and image quality. As a result, with full ray tracing, now practically all light sources cast physically correct soft shadows. Natural colored lighting also bounces multiple times throughout Cyberpunk 2077’s world, creating more realistic indirect lighting and occlusion. More to Come Cyberpunk 2077 is a case study of how GPUs have unlocked the AI revolution and will bring great experiences to PC gamers for years to come. An expanding game roster, game engine support and continued improvements in performance and image quality are securing NVIDIA DLSS as a landmark technology for the neural graphics revolution in PC gaming. View the full article

Twitch is shedding employees and talent. Conversations about the platform are mired in scandals about deepfake porn and gambling. It’s the perfect time, in other words, for the Amazon-owned streaming platform to go on the offensive and pretend things have never been better. Read more... View the full article

The spring anime season is jammed packed with 50 more shows for your to watch and backlog. Read more... View the full article

It recently became clear that Xbox and Arkane’s upcoming shooter, Redfall, would require an always-online internet connection. This isn’t great for a host of reasons and people, predictably and understandably, cried foul, launching a barrage of complaints. Now, it seems Arkane has heard the backlash and is planning to… Read more... View the full article

Perhaps one of the most faithful and successful video game adaptations of all time, HBO’s TV treatment of The Last of Us has had a number of wonderful nods to the game, including various easter eggs, and cameos. One of the most profound, however, was a flashback scene in the final episode, showing Ellie’s birth and … Read more... View the full article

Valve is notoriously stingy with sequels, but hit multiplayer shooter Counter-Strike: Global Offensive is finally getting one. Counter-Strike 2 is set to come out sometime this summer as a free update to the existing game, with a limited player test that starts Wednesday. The Steam maker is calling it the “largest… Read more... View the full article

Roadhog’s love for the Pachimari character is well-documented throughout Overwatch 2. It’s a love that shines so bright that the Overwatch 2 team crafted an entire game mode and event surrounding it, allowing players to kill their enemies and plunder their Pachimari plush toys in a twisted “kill-confirmed” esque… Read more... View the full article

Like old friends catching up over coffee, two industry icons reflected on how modern AI got its start, where it’s at today and where it needs to go next. Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA, interviewed AI pioneer Ilya Sutskever in a fireside chat at GTC. The talk was recorded a day after the launch of GPT-4, the most powerful AI model to date from OpenAI, the research company Sutskever co-founded. They talked at length about GPT-4 and its forerunners, including ChatGPT. That generative AI model, though only a few months old, is already the most popular computer application in history. Their conversation touched on the capabilities, limits and inner workings of the deep neural networks that are capturing the imaginations of hundreds of millions of users. Compared to ChatGPT, GPT-4 marks a “pretty substantial improvement across many dimensions,” said Sutskever, noting the new model can read images as well as text. “In some future version, [users] might get a diagram back” in response to a query, he said. Under the Hood With GPT “There’s a misunderstanding that ChatGPT is one large language model, but there’s a system around it,” said Huang. In a sign of that complexity, Sutskever said OpenAI uses two levels of training. The first stage focuses on accurately predicting the next word in a series. Here, “what the neural net learns is some representation of the process that produced the text, and that’s a projection of the world,” he said. The second “is where we communicate to the neural network what we want, including guardrails … so it becomes more reliable and precise,” he added. Present at the Creation While he’s at the swirling center of modern AI today, Sutskever was also present at its creation. In 2012, he was among the first to show the power of deep neural networks trained on massive datasets. In an academic contest, the AlexNet model he demonstrated with AI pioneers Geoff Hinton and Alex Krizhevsky recognized images faster than a human could. Huang referred to their work as the Big Bang of AI. The results “broke the record by such a large margin, it was clear there was a discontinuity here,” Huang said. The Power of Parallel Processing Part of that breakthrough came from the parallel processing the team applied to its model with GPUs. “The ImageNet dataset and a convolutional neural network were a great fit for GPUs that made it unbelievably fast to train something unprecedented,” Sutskever said. That early work ran on a few GeForce GTX 5080 GPUs in a University of Toronto lab. Today, tens of thousands of the latest NVIDIA A100 and H100 Tensor Core GPUs in the Microsoft Azure cloud service handle training and inference on models like ChatGPT. “In the 10 years we’ve known each other, the models you’ve trained [have grown by] about a million times,” Huang said. “No one in computer science would have believed the computation done in that time would be a million times larger.” “I had a very strong belief that bigger is better, and a goal at OpenAI was to scale,” said Sutskever. A Billion Words Along the way, the two shared a laugh. “Humans hear a billion words in a lifetime,” Sutskever said. “Does that include the words in my own head,” Huang shot back. “Make it 2 billion,” Sutskever deadpanned. The Future of AI They ended their nearly hour-long talk discussing the outlook for AI. Asked if GPT-4 has reasoning capabilities, Sutskever suggested the term is hard to define and the capability may still be on the horizon. “We’ll keep seeing systems that astound us with what they can do,” he said. “The frontier is in reliability, getting to a point where we can trust what it can do, and that if it doesn’t know something, it says so,” he added. “Your body of work is incredible … truly remarkable,” said Huang in closing the session. “This has been one of the best beyond Ph.D. descriptions of the state of the art of large language models,” he said. To get all the news from GTC, watch the keynote below. View the full article

Final Fantasy XVI is coming out this summer, and Square Enix just dropped a new teaser for its gritty fantasy RPG. While showing us more previews of its real-time battle system, new wolf buddy and stills of its gorgeous landscapes, the publisher served fans a real gem: The walls that you’ll be forced to squeeze… Read more... View the full article

Diablo IV, Blizzard’s upcoming loot-grinding RPG, featured a plethora of difficult bosses and trash mobs to kill during its early access beta last weekend. While players were stoked to jump back into the depraved world of Sanctuary to quell some demons, myself included, one jerk that the community is shooketh to face… Read more... View the full article

Building AI applications is hard. Putting them to use across a business can be even harder. Less than one-third of enterprises that have begun adopting AI actually have it in production, according to a recent IDC survey. Businesses often realize the full complexity of operationalizing AI just prior to launching an application. Problems discovered so late can seem insurmountable, so the deployment effort is often stalled and forgotten. To help enterprises get AI deployments across the finish line, more than 100 machine learning operations (MLOps) software providers are working with NVIDIA. These MLOps pioneers provide a broad array of solutions to support businesses in optimizing their AI workflows for both existing operational pipelines and ones built from scratch. Many NVIDIA MLOps and AI platform ecosystem partners as well as DGX-Ready Software partners, including Canonical, ClearML, Dataiku, Domino Data Lab, Run:ai and Weights & Biases, are building solutions that integrate with NVIDIA-accelerated infrastructure and software to meet the needs of enterprises operationalizing AI. NVIDIA cloud service provider partners Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Azure, Oracle Cloud as well as other partners around the globe, such as Alibaba Cloud, also provide MLOps solutions to streamline AI deployments. NVIDIA’s leading MLOps software partners are verified and certified for use with the NVIDIA AI Enterprise software suite, which provides an end-to-end platform for creating and accelerating production AI. Paired with NVIDIA AI Enterprise, the tools from NVIDIA’s MLOps partners help businesses develop and deploy AI successfully. Enterprises can get AI up and running with help from these and other NVIDIA MLOps and AI platform partners: Canonical: Aims to accelerate at-scale AI deployments while making open source accessible for AI development. Canonical announced that Charmed Kubeflow is now certified as part of the DGX-Ready Software program, both on single-node and multi-node deployments of NVIDIA DGX systems. Designed to automate machine learning workflows, Charmed Kubeflow creates a reliable application layer where models can be moved to production. ClearML: Delivers a unified, open-source platform for continuous machine learning — from experiment management and orchestration to increased performance and ML production — trusted by teams at 1,300 enterprises worldwide. With ClearML, enterprises can orchestrate and schedule jobs on personalized compute fabric. Whether on premises or in the cloud, businesses can enjoy enhanced visibility over infrastructure usage while reducing compute, hardware and resource spend to optimize cost and performance. Now certified to run NVIDIA AI Enterprise, ClearML’s MLOps platform is more efficient across workflows, enabling greater optimization for GPU power. Dataiku: As the platform for Everyday AI, Dataiku enables data and domain experts to work together to build AI into their daily operations. Dataiku is now certified as part of the NVIDIA DGX-Ready Software program, which allows enterprises to confidently use Dataiku’s MLOps capabilities along with NVIDIA DGX AI supercomputers. Domino Data Lab: Offers a single pane of glass that enables the world’s most sophisticated companies to run data science and machine learning workloads in any compute cluster — in any cloud or on premises in all regions. Domino Cloud, a new fully managed MLOps platform-as-a-service, is now available for fast and easy data science at scale. Certified to run on NVIDIA AI Enterprise last year, Domino Data Lab’s platform mitigates deployment risks and ensures reliable, high-performance integration with NVIDIA AI. Run:ai: Functions as a foundational layer within enterprises’ MLOps and AI Infrastructure stacks through its AI computing platform, Atlas. The platform’s automated resource management capabilities allow organizations to properly align resources across different MLOps platforms and tools running on top of Run:ai Atlas. Certified to offer NVIDIA AI Enterprise, Run:ai is also fully integrating NVIDIA Triton Inference Server, maximizing the utilization and value of GPUs in AI-powered environments. Weights & Biases (W&B): Helps machine learning teams build better models, faster. With just a few lines of code, practitioners can instantly debug, compare and reproduce their models — all while collaborating with their teammates. W&B is trusted by more than 500,000 machine learning practitioners from leading companies and research organizations around the world. Now validated to offer NVIDIA AI Enterprise, W&B looks to accelerate deep learning workloads across computer vision, natural language processing and generative AI. NVIDIA cloud service provider partners have integrated MLOps into their platforms that provide NVIDIA accelerated computing and software for data processing, wrangling, training and inference: Amazon Web Services: Amazon SageMaker for MLOps helps developers automate and standardize processes throughout the machine learning lifecycle, using NVIDIA accelerated computing. This increases productivity by training, testing, troubleshooting, deploying and governing ML models. Google Cloud: Vertex AI is a fully managed ML platform that helps fast-track ML deployments by bringing together a broad set of purpose-built capabilities. Vertex AI’s end-to-end MLOps capabilities make it easier to train, orchestrate, deploy and manage ML at scale, using NVIDIA GPUs optimized for a wide variety of AI workloads. Vertex AI also supports leading-edge solutions such as the NVIDIA Merlin framework, which maximizes performance and simplifies model deployment at scale. Google Cloud and NVIDIA collaborated to add Triton Inference Server as a backend on Vertex AI Prediction, Google Cloud’s fully managed model-serving platform. Azure: The Azure Machine Learning cloud platform is accelerated by NVIDIA and unifies ML model development and operations (DevOps). It applies DevOps principles and practices — like continuous integration, delivery and deployment — to the machine learning process, with the goal of speeding experimentation, development and deployment of Azure machine learning models into production. It provides quality assurance through built-in responsible AI tools to help ML professionals develop fair, explainable and responsible models. Oracle Cloud: Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) AI Services is a collection of services with prebuilt machine learning models that make it easier for developers to apply NVIDIA-accelerated AI to applications and business operations. Teams within an organization can reuse the models, datasets and data labels across services. OCI AI Services makes it possible for developers to easily add machine learning to apps without slowing down application development. Alibaba Cloud: Alibaba Cloud Machine Learning Platform for AI provides an all-in-one machine learning service featuring low user technical skills requirements, but with high performance results. Accelerated by NVIDIA, the Alibaba Cloud platform enables enterprises to quickly establish and deploy machine learning experiments to achieve business objectives. Learn more about NVIDIA MLOps partners and their work at NVIDIA GTC, a global conference for the era of AI and the metaverse, running online through Thursday, March 23. Watch NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang’s GTC keynote in replay: View the full article

Roadhog is one of Overwatch 2’s quieter heroes. Where some characters like Tracer and Junkrat are real chatterboxes, the chain-slinging, shotgun-toting Tank is a man of few words. That changes with the game’s latest limited-time mode, which makes him the announcer. Not only is he the one to declare your team the… Read more... View the full article

Gamers have finally had a chance to test drive the highly anticipated next entry in Blizzard’s action RPG series, Diablo IV. While the game offers up some contentious changes and sees balance concerns that will be debated furiously in the days to come, first impressions reveal a game that’s perfect to zone out to,… Read more... View the full article

GameStop shocked investors, and anyone else who’s been paying attention to the meme stock video game retailer, when earlier this week it reported its first profitable quarter in over two years. It’s all the more surprising considering that everything else about the business, from botched pre-orders to employees just … Read more... View the full article

Hello Goodfoot, Welcome to UnityHQ Nolfseries Community. Please feel free to browse around and get to know the others. If you have any questions please don't hesitate to ask. Goodfoot joined on the 03/22/2023. View Member

Hello Doomdog19, Welcome to UnityHQ Nolfseries Community. Please feel free to browse around and get to know the others. If you have any questions please don't hesitate to ask. Doomdog19 joined on the 03/22/2023. View Member

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, successor to 2017's Breath of the Wild, is out soon. And while there’s a big fancy collector’s edition of the sequel available, which includes a book, Nintendo is this week taking the time to revisit the original, releasing for free a book called The Explorer’s Guide. Read more... View the full article

After a few months off for Winter, the North American cosplay season is starting to heat up once again, with the year’s first major show—Katsucon—taking place last month just outside of DC. Read more... View the full article

Ubisoft, the publishers behind Assassin’s Creed, Far Cry and Ghost Recon, tonight announced that an “AI tool” is currently helping its developers write dialogue for some of its games. Read more... View the full article

Shazam! Fury of the Gods was released in theaters last week to a resounding “meh, okay” from audiences and critics alike. And now its main star and Jordan Peterson admirer, Zachary Levi, is out here on Twitter asking Neil Druckmann to cast him in the next season of the popular HBO Max series, The Last of Us. Read more... View the full article

We’re a few months away from Final Fantasy XVI’s June 22 release date, and more details about the upcoming not-so-final fantasy-RPG keep tricking out. In addition to learning that the game is approximately 80 hours long, we’ve finally gotten a short-but-sweet glimpse of the cute wolf buddy kicking 'donkey'. Read more... View the full article