While NVIDIA's hardware is the big start of the day, the software that we run on the hardware is becoming increasingly important. It's one thing to create the world's fastest GPU, but what good is the GPU if you don't have anything that can leverage all that performance? As part of their ongoing drive to improve the state of computer graphics, NVIDIA has a dedicated team of over 300 engineers whose primary focus is the creation of tools and technologies to make the lives of game developers better.

Gallery: NVIDIA GameWorks Overview

GameWorks consists of several items. There's the core SDK (Software Development Kit), along with IDE (Integrated Development Environment) tools for debugging, profiling, and other items a developer might need. Beyond the core SDK, NVIDIA has a Visual FX SDK, a PhysX SDK, and an Optix SDK. The Visual FX SDK offers solutions for complex, realistic effects (e.g. smoke and fire, faces, waves/water, hair, shadows, and turbulence). PhysX is for physics calculations (either CPU or GPU based, depending on the system). Optix is a ray tracing engine and framework, often used to pre-calculate ("bake") lighting in game levels. NVIDIA also provides sample code for graphics and compute, organized by effect and with tutorials.

Many of the technologies that are part of GameWorks have been around for a few years, but NVIDIA is constantly working on improving their GameWorks library and they had several new technologies on display at their GM204 briefing. One of the big ones has already been covered in our GM204 review, VXGI (Voxel Global Illumination), so I won't rehash that here; basically, it allows for more accurate and realistic indirect lighting. Another new technology that NVIDIA showed is called Turf Effects, which properly simulates individual blades of grass (or at least clumps of grass). Finally, PhysX FleX also has a couple new additions, Adhesion and Gases; FleX uses PhysX to provide GPU simulations of particles, fluids, cloth, etc.

Still images don't do justice to most of these effects, and NVIDIA will most likely have videos available in the future to show what they look like. PhysX FleX for example has a page with a currently unavailable video, so hopefully they'll update that with a live video in the coming weeks. You can find additional content related to GameWorks on the official website.

The holiday 2014 season will see the usual avalanche of new games, and many of the AAA titles will sport at least one or two technologies that come from GameWorks. Here's a short list of some of the games, and then we'll have some screen shots to help illustrate what some of the specific technologies do.

Upcoming Titles with GameWorks Technologies Assassin’s Creed: Unity HBAO+, TXAA, PCSS, Tessellation Batman: Arkham Knight Turbulence, Environmental PhysX, Volumetric Lights, FaceWorks, Rain Effects Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel PhysX Particles Far Cry 4 HBAO+, PCSS, TXAA, God Rays, Fur, Enhanced 4K Support Project CARS DX11, Turbulence, PhysX Particles, Enhanced 4K Support Strife PhysX Particles, HairWorks The Crew HBAO+, TXAA The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt HairWorks, HBAO+, PhysX, Destruction, Clothing Warface PhysX Particles, Turbulence, Enhanced 4K Support War Thunder WaveWorks, Destruction

In terms of upcoming games, the two most prominent titles are probably Assassin's Creed Unity and Far Cry 4, and we've created a gallery for each. Both games use multiple GameWorks elements, and NVIDIA was able to provide before/after comparisons for FC4 and AC Unity. Batman: Arkham Knight and The Witcher 3: The Wild Hunt also incorporate many effects from GameWorks, but we didn't get any with/without comparisons.

Gallery: GameWorks - Assassin's Creed Unity

 

Gallery: GameWorks - Far Cry 4

Starting with HBAO+ (Horizon Based Ambient Occlusion), this is a newer way of performing Ambient Occlusion calculations (SSAO, Screen Space AO, being the previous solution that many games have used). Games vary in how they perform AO, but if we look at AC Unity the comparison between HBAO+ and (presumably SSAO) the default AO, HBAO+ clearly offers better shadows. HBAO+ is also supposed to be faster and more efficient than other AO techniques.

TXAA (Temporal Anti-Aliasing) basically combines a variety of filters and post processing techniques to help eliminate jaggies, something which we can all hopefully appreciate. There's one problem I've noticed with TXAA however, which you can see in the above screenshot: it tends to make the entire image look rather blurry in my opinion. It's almost as though someone took Photoshop's "blur" filter and applied it to the image.

PCSS (Percentage Closer Soft Shadows) was introduced a couple years back, which means we should start seeing it in more shipping games. You can see the video from 2012, and AC Unity and Far Cry 4 are among the first games that will offer PCSS.

Tessellation has been around for a few years now in games, and the concepts behind tessellation go back much further. The net result is that tessellation allows developers to extrude geometry from an otherwise flat surface, creating a much more realistic appearance to games when used appropriately. The cobble stone streets and roof shingles in AC Unity are great examples of the difference tessellation makes.

God rays are a lighting feature that we've seen before, but now NVIDIA has implemented a new way of calculating the shafts of light. They now use tessellation to extrude the shadow mapping and actually create transparent beams of light that they can render.

HairWorks is a way to simulate large strands of hair instead of using standard textures – Far Cry 4 and The Witcher 3 will both use HairWorks, though I have to admit that the hair in motion still doesn't look quite right to me. I think we still need an order of magnitude more "hair", and similar to the TressFX in Tomb Raider this is a step forward but we're not there yet.

Gallery: GameWorks - Upcoming Games Fall 2014

There are some additional effects being used in other games – Turbulence, Destruction, FaceWorks, WaveWorks, PhysX, etc. – but the above items give us a good idea of what GameWorks can provide. What's truly interesting about GameWorks is that these libraries are free for any developers that want to use them. The reason for creating GameWorks and basically giving it away is quite simple: NVIDIA needs to entice developers (and perhaps more importantly, publishers) into including these new technologies, as it helps to drive sales of their GPUs among other things. Consider the following (probably not so hypothetical) exchange between a developer and their publisher, paraphrased from NVIDIA's presentation on GameWorks.

A publisher wants to know when game XYZ is ready to ship, and the developer says it's basically done, but they're excited about some really cool features that will just blow people away, and it will take a few more months to get those finished up. "How many people actually have the hardware required to run these new features?" asks the publisher. When the developers guess that only 5% or so of the potential customers have the hardware necessary, you can guess what happens: the new features get cut, and game XYZ ships sooner rather than later.

We've seen this sort of thing happen many times – as an example, Crysis 2 shipped without DX11 support (since the consoles couldn't support that level of detail), adding it in a patch a couple months later. Other games never even see such a patch and we're left with somewhat less impressive visuals. While it's true that great graphics do not an awesome game make, they can certainly enhance the experience when used properly.

It's worth pointing out is that GameWorks is not necessarily exclusive to NVIDIA hardware. While PhysX as an example was originally ported to CUDA, developers have used PhysX on CPUs for many games, and as you can see in the above slide there are many PhysX items that are supported on other platforms. Several of the libraries (Turbulence, WaveWorks, HairWorks, ShadowWorks, FlameWorks, and FaceWorks) are also listed as "planned" for being ported to the latest generation of gaming consoles. Android is also a growing part of NVIDIA's plans, with the Tegra K1 effectively brining the same feature set over to the mobile world that we've had on PCs and notebooks for the past couple of years.

NVIDIA for their part wants to drive the state of the art forward, so that the customers (gamers) demand these high-end technologies and the publishers feel compelled to support them. After all, no publisher would expect great sales from a modern first-person shooter that looks like it was created 10 years ago [insert obligatory Daikatana reference here], but it's a bit of a chicken vs. egg problem. NVIDIA is trying to push things along and maybe hatch the egg a bit earlier, and there have definitely been improvements thanks to their efforts. We applaud their efforts, and more importantly we look forward to seeing better looking games as a result.

At the start of this year we saw the first half of the Maxwell architecture in the form of the GeForce GTX 750 and GTX 750 Ti. Based on the first generation Maxwell based GM107 GPU, NVIDIA did something we still can hardly believe and managed to pull off a trifecta of improvements over Kepler. GTX 750 Ti was significantly faster than its predecessor, it was denser than its predecessor (though larger overall), and perhaps most importantly consumed less power than its predecessor. In GM107 NVIDIA was able to significantly improve their performance and reduce their power consumption at the same time, all on the same 28nm manufacturing node we’ve come to know since 2012. For NVIDIA this was a major accomplishment, and to this day competitor AMD doesn’t have a real answer to GM107’s energy efficiency.

However GM107 was only the start of the story. In deviating from their typical strategy of launching high-end GPU first – either a 100/110 or 104 GPU – NVIDIA told us up front that while they were launching in the low end first because that made the most sense for them, they would be following up on GM107 later this year with what at the time was being called “second generation Maxwell”. Now 7 months later and true to their word, NVIDIA is back in the spotlight with the first of the second generation Maxwell GPUs, GM204.

More than 400 people have been evacuated from Serbian towns because of flooding following heavy rainfall in the east of the country.

Kelly Schindler/US Navy

This morning, a giant Navy surveillance drone landed at Patuxent River base in Maryland after flying over the Gulf of Mexico and the American Southwest from an airfield owned by Northrup Grumman in Palmdale, California. The test flight represented the first cross-country flight for the MQ-4C Triton drone after 15 previous test flights.

The drone flew 3,290 nautical miles over 11 hours, a Navy press release said. “Operators navigated the aircraft up the Atlantic Coast and Chesapeake Bay at altitudes in excess of 50,000 feet to ensure there were no conflicts with civilian air traffic,” the release noted.

The drone is just the first piece in what the Navy calls Broad Area Maritime Surveillance, or BAMS. The MQ-4C Triton will be used to keep tabs on a wide area using “radar, infrared sensors and advanced cameras to provide full-motion video and photographs to the military,” according to The Washington Post. Eventually, a network of these drones could be deployed to fly around the world and provide 24-hour, 7-day-a-week coverage of a given area.

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The cybercriminals that compromised Home Depot's network and installed malware on the home-supply company's point-of-sale systems likely stole information on 56 million payment cards, the company stated on Thursday.

In the first details revealed in its investigation of the breach, the company said the malicious software that compromised those payment systems had been custom-built to avoid triggering security software. The breach included stores in the United States and Canada and appears to have compromised transactions that occurred between April and September 2014.

"To protect customer data until the malware was eliminated, any terminals identified with malware were taken out of service, and the company quickly put in place other security enhancements," Home Depot said in its statement. "The hacker's method of entry has been closed off, the malware has been eliminated from the company's systems, and the company has rolled out enhanced encryption of payment data to all US stores."

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While many jurisdictions have tried (and failed) to put legal barriers in place to prevent children from buying or playing violent video games, Calfornia's Marin County is taking a different tack, asking families to voluntarily trade in their violent video games for ice cream and raffle tickets.

The Marin Independent Journal has a report on the county's efforts for Domestic Violence Awareness Month, which include weekly opportunities to trade in violent video games or toy guns. Participants will be provided with ice cream from the local Ben & Jerry's affiliate, according to the report, and parents of those participating will be entered in a raffle for further prizes.

The toy and game drive is being spearheaded by District Attorney Ed Berberian and the Center for Domestic Peace, who teamed up to host a firearm buyback program that took in over 850 weapons two years ago. Why move from collecting real guns to collecting fake guns and games that feature fake guns?

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Google's cutesy video on law enforcement requests.

The Washington Post is reporting that Google will finally step up security efforts on Android and enable device encryption by default. The Post has quoted company spokeswoman Niki Christoff as saying “As part of our next Android release, encryption will be enabled by default out of the box, so you won't even have to think about turning it on.”

That "next Android release" should be Android L, which is currently out as a developer preview and is expected to be released before the end of the year.

The move should bring Android up to parity with iOS. Apple recently announced enhanced encryption for iOS 8, which Apple says makes it impossible for the company to decrypt a device, even for law enforcement. While Android's encryption was optional, it seems to work in a similar way, with Christoff saying "For over three years Android has offered encryption, and keys are not stored off of the device, so they cannot be shared with law enforcement."

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US Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, Pasadena courthouse. --Mark--

In general, websites aren't responsible for the things their users do or post. That's because of a landmark federal Internet law, known as Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.

The law allows sites like Yelp, Craigslist, and YouTube to host loads of user-produced content, while directing most lawsuits over that content toward the users, not the websites.

However, an appeals court ruling yesterday may join the small batch of precedents that set out the murky limits of CDA Section 230. A three-judge panel of the US Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit has allowed (PDF) an alleged rape victim to sue ModelMayhem.com, a site she says was used by her attackers.

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"I am what I am, and I look like me, not everyone else."

On Tuesday, Norwegian news site VG reported that a 16-year-old boy found his newest Facebook profile photo deleted automatically by the site, but not for containing offensive content or misrepresenting himself. Embret Henock Haldammen, a high school student in Kristiansand, Norway, had posted his latest school portrait weeks earlier, only to receive a notice stating that "the profile picture violated Facebook's policies."

Without receiving a response clarifying what those policies were, Haldammen came to the conclusion that the image was deleted because of his face's lymphatic malformations, which he's had since birth.

"We're used to people pointing, looking, and laughing at him," Haldammen's father said to Norwegian news site Fædrelandsvennen (translated by Google). "But that Facebook acts as a youth, and not a company, is appalling." The reports also include a photo of Haldammen posing with a former Norwegian Prime Minister, which he had used as a profile photo in the past with no incident.

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While it's still unclear to me what the future of wearables will be, I must admit that all things considered I feel that glasses are a better idea than watches as a form factor. If the goal is glanceable information, a heads-up display is probably as good as it gets. This brings us to the ODG R-7, which is part of Qualcomm's Vuforia for Digital Eyewear (VDE) platform. This VDE platform brings new capabilities for augmented reality. What this really means is that developers no longer need to worry about coming up with their own system of aligning content from a VR headset to the real world, as this platform makes it a relatively simple process. Judging by the ODG R-7, there's no need for a 3D camera to pull this off.

So let's talk about the ODG R-7, one of the most fascinating wearables I've ever seen. While its primary purpose is for government and industrial use, it isn't a far leap to see the possibilities for consumers. For reference, the ODG R-7 that I saw at this show is an early rev, and effectively still a prototype. However, the initial specs have been established. This wearable has a Qualcomm Snapdragon 805 SoC running at 2.7 GHz, with anywhere between one to four gigabytes of RAM and 16 to 128 gigabytes of storage. There are two 720p LCoS displays that run at 100 Hz refresh rate, which means that the display is see-through. There's one 5MP camera on the front to enable the augmented vision aspects. There's also one battery on each side of the frame for a 1400 mAh battery, which is likely to be a 3.8V nominal voltage.

While the specs are one thing, the actual device itself is another. In person, this is clearly still a prototype as on the face it feels noticeably front heavy, which is where all of the electronics are contained. It's quite obvious that this is running up against thermal limits, as there is a noticeable heat sink running along the top of the glasses. This area gets noticeably hot during operation, and easily feels to be around 50-60C although the final product is likely to be much cooler in operation.

However, these specs aren't really what matter so much as the use cases demonstrated. While it's effectively impossible to really show what it looks like, one demo shown was a terrain map. When this was detected by the glasses, it automatically turned the map into a 3D model that could be viewed from any angle. In addition, a live UAV feed was just above the map, with the position of the UAV indicated by a 3D model orbiting around the map.

It's definitely not a long shot to guess the next logical steps for such a system. Overlaying directions for turn by turn navigation is one obvious use case, as is simple notification management, similar to Android Wear watches. If anything, the potential for glasses is greater than watches as it's much harder to notice glasses in day to day use as they rely on gravity instead of tension like a watch band. However, it could be that I'm biased though, as I've worn glasses all my life.

The Barbours. Fox8 WGHP Two newlyweds were each handed a life sentence Thursday for luring a stranger to his death via a Craigslist advertisement.

The Pennsylvania federal judge who sentenced Miranda Barbour, 19, and Elytte Barbour, 22, said the sentence, which prohibits parole, was necessary for their "permanent removal" from society.

The pair killed Troy LaFerrara, 42, of Central Pennsylvania in a scene local media described as right out of a horror movie.

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Microsoft has made its next set of layoffs, continuing the downsizing announced in July. Some 2,100 jobs have been cut worldwide, with 747 of those in the company's home state of Washington.

CEO Satya Nadella plans to shrink the company by about 18,000 people overall, with 12,500 of these coming from the 25,000 staff that came with the newly acquired Nokia handset business. In the first round of cuts in July, 13,000 jobs were lost. With today's cuts, that leaves another 2,900 positions that Microsoft wants to eliminate.

One victim is Microsoft Research's Silicon Valley lab, reports Mary Jo Foley at ZDNet. The lab, which focused on distributed computing and large-scale systems, will be closing on Friday. Microsoft has said that some researchers will be offered positions at other labs.

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New York, one of the RGGI states, has nearly two Gigawatts of installed wind capacity. NY Department of Environmental Conservation

Economists and policymakers frequently talk about the "social cost of carbon"—the price that society as a whole pays for disruptions caused by climate change and ocean acidification. Although there are various ways of calculating it that give different results, the US currently estimates the cost at $37 a ton. At least nationally, however, there have been no attempts to get anyone to actually pay this price for their emissions.

But locally, a number of states are trying. Most of the Northeast has banded together to form the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, or RGGI. This is a cap-and-trade system, where emissions allowances are auctioned by the group. Unfortunately, plans for the auctions were made prior to the boom in fracking, which has dramatically lowered the emissions of electricity generation in the US. As a result, RGGI emissions allowances have been auctioned off at the legal minimum, just under $2 a ton—well below just about any estimate of the social cost of carbon.

As a result, the group decided to take two actions. To begin with, it reduced its total cap on CO2 emissions by 45 percent. Then, it reduced the number of allowances auctioned off. It does so by holding back a pool of allowances until the auction price reaches a preset value. Currently, that value is $4/ton. As a result, three consecutive auctions have resulted in prices above $4. The reserve price is set to rise by $2 every year until it hits $10, then rise by 2.5 percent each following year.

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Simon Greig

While Apple won't confirm it, the company has removed its warrant canary from its latest transparency report, issued this week. While this could mean that the company has received a new secret government order to provide user data, there is still another more likely possibility: it's not publishing warrant canaries at all.

Warrant canaries work like this: a company publishes a notice saying that a warrant has not been served as of a particular date. Should that notice be taken down, users are to surmise that the company has indeed been served with one. The theory is that while a court can compel someone to not speak (a gag order), it cannot compel someone to lie. The only problem is that warrant canaries have yet to be fully tested in court.

In November 2013, the second time (the first was in June 2013) Apple issued its transparency report (for a period covering the first half of 2013), the company wrote as its warrant canary:

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Oracle CEO Larry Ellison. Photograph by Oracle PR

Larry Ellison, CEO of multinational software company Oracle, is leaving his position as CEO effective immediately. According to the company's official statement, Larry Ellison will continue to work for the company as its Executive Chairman and Chief Technology Officer.

In his stead, Oracle executives Mark Hurd (formerly of HP) and Safra Katz will take over as co-CEOs. Oracle's statement says that Ellison will continue to be in charge of "all software and hardware engineering functions" in his new role as the company's CTO.

"Safra and Mark will now report to the Oracle Board rather than to me," said Ellison via the statement. "All the other reporting relationships will remain unchanged. The three of us have been working well together for the last several years, and we plan to continue working together for the foreseeable future."

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Facebook's News Feed pays attention to trending topics, right, but news feeds have lately seemed to be lacking in news.

Following criticism of the lack of current events in Facebook news feeds, Facebook has announced tweaks to its algorithms meant to help surface timely content. The company plans to do this by giving more value to posts that get interactions, such as likes and comments, and pushing posts when that activity seems to be cresting.

In the blog post announcing the changes, Facebook wrote that it often prioritizes posts about "trending" topics that appear in the chart of hashtags posted on the right side of users' homepages. Facebook also places higher value on posts according to how many interactions (likes, comments, shares) they receive.

But as things are, some users have noted that Facebook seems to miss news waves, or is late to them, as with the fatal shooting of Mike Brown and the related protests that played out over weeks in August. When Facebook's curation methods didn't acknowledge those events, users noticed the news vacuum in their news feeds.

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"Man Controlling Trade," 1942, by Michael Lantz. brian mcneal

There are hundreds of so-called "patent trolls," but MPHJ Technology became one of the most well-known when it sent thousands of letters to small businesses around the country suggesting they should pay around $1,000 per worker for using basic "scan-to-email" functions.

The legal and political blowback since then have made MPHJ truly unique in the patent-licensing world. The sheer mass of the company's demand letters caused it to get sued by attorneys general in Vermont and Nebraska, making it the only patent troll to ever be sued by the government. The company's tactics were denounced in Congress, and it drew the attention of the Federal Trade Commission.

In January, MPHJ took the stunning step of actually suing the FTC. According to MPHJ's complaint, the FTC had threatened to file suit, saying that its letter campaign constituted a deceptive trade practice. That was a violation of its right to talk about and enforce its patents, a right protected under the First Amendment.

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The accelerator where the work took place. https://www.gsi.de/en/research/accelerator_facility/storage_ring.htm

Einstein is most famous for general relativity, which is really a theory of gravity. But his theory of special relativity has been just as important. Special relativity is all about how to interpret measurements: if you measure the speed of an object from a moving vehicle, how do I reconcile that number with a measurement I make from the side of the road? At low speeds this is a fairly simple task, but at very high speeds things start to get strange. This strangeness arises as a consequence of the speed of light being constant.

Tests of the validity of special relativity abound, but they've been limited to a few classes of objects. The ones done in the lab are usually very sensitive experiments performed on relatively slow-moving objects, while natural tests use the motion of the Earth or other astronomical objects. Now, a German facility has measured time dilation very accurately. But in a twist, these measurements were performed on things moving at just under 40 percent of the speed of light in the laboratory.

The researchers tested how clocks slow down when they are in motion. For example, if you are in motion relative to me, and I can see the watch on your hand, I should observe that it runs slightly slow compared to the one I'm wearing. Indeed, if you put an atomic clock in an airplane and fly it around the world, it will end up with a slightly different time than an identical clock that remained at the airport.

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@OccupyWallStNYC

On Wednesday, three years to the day since the beginning of Occupy Wall Street, one of its former leaders has sued another leader over a disputed Twitter account.

@OccupyWallStNYC has 177,000 followers, and it's apparently controlled by Justin Wedes, a self-identified "educator and activist based in Detroit, Michigan" and a "founding member" of the New York City General Assembly. Wedes did not respond to Ars’ requests for comment.

According to the suit, which was filed by the OWS Media Group in the Supreme Court of the State of New York, Wedes "hijacked" the account in early August 2014, "making himself the sole person in control of the Twitter Account."

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Aurich Lawson

AT&T’s proposed $48.5 billion acquisition of DirecTV will reduce competition for TV subscribers, increase AT&T’s “incentive to discriminate against online video services,” and give AT&T more reasons to neglect its aging copper network, consumer advocacy groups argue in a petition to deny the merger.

AT&T has claimed the merger would help it expand fiber buildouts to an additional two million locations, but this claim is unverifiable because AT&T hasn’t said how much fiber it will deploy if the merger is not approved, says the petition to the FCC filed Tuesday by Public Knowledge and the Institute for Local Self-Reliance.

AT&T has a lot of copper throughout its 22-state wireline footprint, but it has no intention of deploying faster fiber networks throughout the entire territory. Some customers prefer copper over fiber for telephone service anyway, because of its ability to work through many power outages. But AT&T has been accused of failing to maintain its copper networks, and the petition says purchasing a satellite TV provider would increase AT&T’s incentive to push customers from copper to wireless.

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