CES 2017: Nvidia launched Shield TV with Google Assistant and Nvidia Spot AI Mic

Image Credit: Nvidia

By tech2 News Staff /  05 Jan 2017 , 15:57

Nvidia has launched a new Nvidia Shield TV at CES 2017 in Las Vegas. The company claims that new Shield TV will deliver unmatched performance in providing experiences like gaming, streaming and AI integration. The company has integrated Google Assistant for TV in addition to bringing a new design to Shield TV. Nvidia has opened Shield TV for pre-order and will start shipping to United States, Canada and selected regions in Europe later this month.

The device is priced at $199.99, and it will now ship with Gaming controller and remote, and you no longer need to buy them separately. Nvidia Shield Pro will also be available later this month with the controller, remote, headphone jack and 500GB storage. One interesting thing is that the company will ship a separate version of Shield TV with custom software to China later this year.

Image Credit: Nvidia

Shield adds support to 4K HDR streaming while providing three times the performance to what other media streaming devices provide in the market. It will provide support to video streaming apps from Netflix, YouTube, Google Play Movies and VUDU. YouTube TV app is set to come to the new Shield devices in coming months. Jen-Hsun Huang, founder and CEO of Nvidia added, “NVIDIA’s rich heritage in visual computing and deep learning has enabled us to create this revolutionary device.”

Shield TV is not limited to being a media streaming devices, and the company highlighted that the Shield Library of games has expanded to thousands of titles along with the ability to stream Ubisoft games like Watch Dogs 2, Assassin’s Creed Syndicate, For Honor and others. New Ubisoft games will be available for Shield TV owners along with the launch of their PC releases. Highlighting the AI capabilities of the new device he further adds that “SHIELD’s new AI home capability, we can control and interact with content through the magic of artificial intelligence from anywhere in the house.”

Image Credit: Nvidia

Shield TV will provide the first hands-free Google Assistant integration on TV and Google has optimised the experience to work on large screens. In addition to streaming, gaming and AI, Nvidia has also added the support for Shield TV users to turn the device into a smart home hub which can be used to connect to hundreds of smart connected devices at home and control them. Nvidia Spot is one interesting add-on to Shield TV as it makes the device, the backbone of the AI home with improved control throughout the house.

Battlefield 1 Review: Here comes the cavalry

By Videep Vijay Kumar /  04 Nov 2016 , 17:50

When one thinks of a Battlefield game, visions of large maps come to mind, with 64-players running around like headless chickens; majority of whom are either getting mowed down by machine gun fire or run over by tanks.

One possibly also envisions skyscrapers collapsing into a city river, frigates crashing into an island, tanks, helicopters and lethal gadgets being deployed to eliminate even the most stubborn foe, all while squads of soldiers attempt to co-ordinate a push amidst the chaos of battle.

Battlefield is the series that encouraged players to “play the objective” — despite how confusing or daunting the prospect.

Battlefield 1 retains that fundamental philosophy of DICE’s beloved series, while transporting players to World War I, a period long forgotten; and one which quite literally birthed modern warfare as we know it. Unexpectedly, however, its brief single player campaign shines just as brightly as its chaotic multiplayer.

Dubbed “War Stories”, Battlefield 1’s campaign employs a

Study says that online gaming is not as addictive as gambling in real life

Image: Abhilash Pavuluri

  04 Nov 2016 , 17:32

You can successfully quit out of your favourite online game with much ease as playing internet games has been found not as addictive as gambling, new research has suggested. The study is the first to measure the scale of gaming addiction in the general population using symptoms of ‘internet gaming disorder’, which included preoccupation with internet gaming, anxiety and other withdrawal symptoms (if the game was taken away), increasing amounts of time spent gaming, loss of control, reduced interests, social withdrawal, and losing opportunities as a result of gaming.

The findings showed that while many gamers may feel preoccupied and distracted from other responsibilities in a way akin to a sports fan whose team has reached the finals, they are not likely to have a pathological condition unless there are feelings of significant distress. “Internet games are currently one of the most popular leisure activities but we can’t leap to conclusions and assume that if 160 million people play them, one million of them might be addicted,” said lead author Andrew Przybylski, from the University of Oxford.

“Contrary to what was predicted, the study did not find a clear link between potential addiction and negative effects on health,” Przybylski added. For the study, researchers from the University of Oxford surveyed 19,000 men and women from the UK, the US, Canada and Germany. Over half of the sample said they had played internet games recently. Of these, between 2 per cent and 3 per cent reported they had experienced five or more of the symptoms on the list, with between 1 per cent and 0.5 per cent saying they also had feelings of ‘significant distress’ in being unable to curb their play.

Specific indicators like increasing playtime to increase excitement were reported three times more frequently than other indicators, such as risking social relationships, the researchers observed. However, the great majority of gamers — nearly three in four — reported no symptoms at all that we would link with addictive gaming behaviour, Przybylski said.

These rates are less than half those reported recently for gambling by the British Gambling Prevalence Survey, the researchers noted in the paper published in the American Journal of Psychiatry.

IANS

Diwali 2016: Essential gear for your gaming needs

By Videep Vijay Kumar /  22 Oct 2016 , 10:22

If there was ever a time to justify spending unreasonable sums of money on your gaming setup, that time is now. Take advantage of ridiculous price drops as a result of overstocking, product phasing-out, and the annual bonfire of investor money by your friendly neighbourhood e-commerce website in the coming weeks. It also happens that we’ve got a handy list of essentials you should keep an eye out for, so pounce on some of deals available right now, or monitor the situation for imminent acquisition.

PlayStation Gold Wireless Stereo Headset

You will be surprised at the sheer utility value of these cans. Compatible with PlayStations 3 & 4, PS Vita (if you still happen to own one) as well as PC, the Gold headset will also serve you well if you choose to plug it into your smartphone with a 3.5mm stereo cable. It packs in console specific features, such as a way to adjust game and party chat volume, while sporting a handy “mute” button for when you’re crunching on Doritos.

PlayStation Gold Wireless Stereo Headset

Tritton Katana 7.1 Wireless HDMI Headset

It’s got an effective range of up to 15-20 metres, while sound quality is pretty good as well (let’s just say it’s par for its price). The only real downside is the build quality. While it is solid overall, the Gold isn’t built for

Asus announces its first laptops with Nvidia’s GTX 1070 graphics cards built in. Prices start at Rs 1,81,990

By tech2 News Staff /  06 Oct 2016 , 13:27

Asus has unveiled a couple of Nvidia GTX 1070-toting laptops in India. The two devices pack in enough hardware to make a decent gaming rig blush.

To those not in the know, Nvidia’s 10xx series of graphics cards offer a significant bump in performance when compared to the previous generation. These GPUs, in addition to being more powerful, are also more energy efficient and include modules specifically for enhancing VR performance.

The first of the devices is the Asus ROG G752S. This laptop packs in an unlocked sixth generation Intel Skylake chip, an Nvidia GTX 1070 and up to 64GB of RAM. Yes, you read that right. The G752 packs in an unlocked, overclockable CPU. Also note that Asus claims to be using the 1070 and not the 1070m, which means that this GPU will offer desktop class performance in a laptop. It won’t beat a desktop-class 1070, but it’ll

5 Tips To Find The Right Gaming Hard Drive

Article by:Western Digital

A great video game hard drive not only stores all the games you play, but also loads them quickly. So, how do you know what type of drive has the best value? Which drive is big enough for your game collection, and fast enough to keep load times to a minimum?
Ultimately, it depends on what type of gamer you are.

Finding The Right Capacity

First, you want a drive that has enough storage to suit your needs. Hard drives that are 1TB or more in size, such as aWD Red hard drive, is a common starting point for many gamers, making sure to account for growing game sizes. While 500GB is standard for gaming systems nowadays, things like downloadable content (DLC), video recording, and live streaming, quickly use up the capacity of a drive. Storage space isn’t as expensive as it used to be, so the added investment now could make a

Best Buy to host PlayStation VR midnight launch events at 350 stores

By Shawn Knight on September 29, 2016, 12:45 PM



Sony’s PlayStation VR headset is scheduled to arrive in just a couple of weeks. Looking to cater to those that absolutely can’t wait any longer than humanly possible, Best Buy on Thursday said it will be hosting midnight launch events at around 350 of its stores across the country.

Shane Kitzman, Best Buy’s media relations leader, said in a post on the company’s corporate website that select stores will open their doors at 12:01 a.m. EDT on October 13. This trickles down across time zones moving from east to west, meaning stores in the Central time zone will open at 11:01 p.m., 10:01 p.m. for Mountain Time and 9:01 p.m. on the West Coast.



This seems like the best approach versus each time zone opening their stores at 12:01 local time, resulting in people on the East Coast getting the peripheral three hours ahead of gamers on the West Coast.

You can check out Best Buy’s Gaming Events page to find a store near you. As I quickly discovered, 350 stores sounds like a lot but depending on where you live, you may be out of luck. The closest late-night opening in my area, for example, is more than four hours and two states away.

Kitzman said there will be limited quantities of its VR gaming accessory at each Best Buy store nationwide the next day in the event you can’t get to an early opening. Of course, there’s also the far more convenient option of ordering online and having it delivered on launch day.

Nvidia job listing hints at collaboration with Apple for future Macs

Nvidia has been heavily focussing on its graphics card portfolio for both the consumer as well as professional segments. It has also gotten into automotive business and over the years its OEM business (where it makes integrated graphics solutions for PCs for non-gaming applications) has seen a decline.

But a recent job listing on Nvidia hints at a probable collaboration with Apple and its future Mac products. Currently Apple uses AMD graphics solutions on its Mac line of computers including MacBook Pros, iMacs and the Mac Pro which uses AMD FirePro graphics solution.

According to The Motley Fool, Nvidia posted this ad on its jobs listing page last week, which indicates that it is working on a software to allow its graphics processors to work with future Mac products. Another report on iTech Post hints at a job posting for a Mac graphics driver. All these are clear hints that Nvidia may most likely be having its own graphics solutions on future Mac products.

Nvidia job posting

Neither Apple, nor Nvidia have commented on the job listings that have been spotted. According to The Motley Fool, Nvidia has stated in the past that non-gaming graphics solutions that it has shipped in computers in the past haven’t really garnered much revenue for the company, specially when compared with its high end and discrete graphics solutions in the gaming, data centre and professional visualisation space.

Apple’s Mac lineup is up for a refresh, and it would not be surprising if it indeed goes with Nvidia graphics solutions in its future products. Whether it does go ahead with it, only time will tell.

Unlike PlayStation 4 Pro, the Xbox Scorpio will natively support 4K: Microsoft exec

#CONSOLE WARS

Microsoft has confirmed that at least some of the games developed for the Xbox Scorpio will natively support 4K resolutions.

Referring to games developed by Microsoft for the Xbox Scorpio, Microsoft Studios publishing manager Shannon Loftis told USA Today, “Any games we’re making that we’re launching in the Scorpio time frame, we’re making sure they can natively render at 4K.”

The recently announced PlayStation Pro console was expected to support 4K as well, but Sony has since confirmed that the console will only upscale games to 4K rather than render them natively. Sony claims to be using advanced algorithms to achieve this.

The Xbox Scorpio is expected to arrive in “Holiday 2017,” giving the PlayStation 4 Pro a huge lead in the market. The PlayStation 4 Pro will be available for purchase starting 10 November this year at a price of $400 (around Rs 27,000).

However, Microsoft claims that the Xbox Scorpio will be almost 50 percent more powerful than the PlayStation 4 Pro (six TFLOPS vs. 4.14 TFLOPS). It’s clear from Loftis’ statement that the Xbox Scorpio will be capable of 4K gaming, but it’s also clear that other developers don’t necessarily have to support 4K.

Also, did you know that your PlayStation 4 now supports HDR?

Tags: game consoles, Microsoft, PlayStation, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 4 Pro, PS4, Scorpio vs Pro, Sony, video games,Xbox, Xbox One, Xbox Scorpio

Nvidia's Tesla P4 And P40 GPUs Boost Deep Learning Inference Performance With INT8, TensorRT Support

Nvidia Tesl P40Nvidia continues to double down on deep learning GPUs with the release of two new “inference” GPUs, the Tesla P4 and the Tesla P40. The pair are the 16nm FinFET direct successors to Tesla M4 and M40, with much improved performance and support for 8-bit (INT8) operations.

Deep learning consists of two steps: training and inference. For training, it can take billions of TeraFLOPS to achieve an expected result over a matter of days (while using GPUs). For inference, which is the running of the trained models against new data, it can take billions of FLOPS, and it can be done in real-time.

The two steps in the deep learning process require different levels of performance, but also different features. This is why Nvidia is now releasing the Tesla P4 and P40, which are optimized specifically for running inference engines, such as Nvidia’s recently launched TensorRT inference engine.

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Unlike the Pascal-based Tesla P100, which comes with support for the already quite low 16-bit (FP16) precision, the two new GPUs bring support for the even lower 8-bit INT8 precision. This is because the researchers have discovered that you don’t need especially high precision for deep learning training.

The expected results will appear significantly faster if you use twice as much data with half the precision. Because inference operates on already-trained data, even less precision is needed than for training, which is why Nvidia’s new cards now have support for INT8 operations.

Tesla P4

The Tesla P4 is the lower-end GPU from the two that were announced, and it’s targeted at scale-out servers that want highly-efficient GPUs. Each Tesla P4 GPU uses between 50W and 75W of power, for a peak performance of 5.5 (FP32) TeraFLOP/s and 21.8 INT8 TOP/s (Tera-Operations per second).

Nvidia compared its Tesla P4 GPU to an Intel Xeon E5 general purpose CPU and alleged that the P4 is up to 40x more efficient on the AlexNet image processing test. The company also claimed that the Tesla P4 is 8x more efficient than an Arria 10-115 FPGA (made by Altera, which Intel acquired).

Tesla P40

The Tesla P40 was designed for scale-up servers, where performance matters most. Thanks to improvements in the Pascal architecture as well as the jump from the 28nm planar process to a 16nm FinFET process, Nvidia claimed that the P40 is up to 4x faster than its predecessor, the Tesla M40.

The P40 GPU has a peak performance of 12 (FP32) TeraFLOP/s and 47 TOP/s, so it’s about twice as fast as its little brother, the Tesla P4. Tesla P40 has a maximum power consumption of 250W.

TensorRT

Nvidia also announced the TensorRT GPU inference engine that doubles the performance compared to previous cuDNN-based software tools for Nvidia GPUs. The new engine also has support for INT8 operations, so Nvidia’s new Tesla P4 and P40 will be able to work at maximum efficiency from day one.

In the graph below, Nvidia compared the performance of the Tesla P4 and P40 GPUs while using the TensorRT inference engine to a 14-core Intel E5-2690v4 running Intel’s optimized version of the Caffe neural networking framework. According to Nvidia’s results, the Tesla P40 seems to be up to 45x faster than Intel’s CPU here.

So far Nvidia has been comparing its GPUs to Intel’s general purpose CPUs alone, but Intel’s main product for deep learning is now the Xeon Phi line of chips with its “many-core” (Atom-based) accelerators.

Nvidia’s GPUs likely still beat those chips by a healthy margin due to the inherent advantage GPUs have even over many-core CPUs for such low-precision operations. However, at this point, comparing Xeon Phi with Nvidia’s GPUs would be a more realistic scenario in terms of what their customers are looking to buy for deep learning applications