At the Game Developers Conference 2015 in San Francisco today, GPU manufacturer NVIDIA unveiled that it would be launching a series of new devices in the immediate future. NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang didn't waste time in teasing the company's future direction, including promises of a retargeted living room gaming focus. Part of that focus will include an NVIDIA-made game console, smart TV, and supercomputer.

Dungeons & Dragons defined the role-playing genre in nearly every aspect of its modern representation. As video games became possible and grew in popularity, upstart game developers -- to include industry legend Richard Garriott -- began adapting their own D&D campaigns to PC gaming. This spawned the likes of Ultima and similar titles, but inevitably gave way to Baldur's Gates 1 & 2, Icewind Dale, Neverwinter Nights, and many more RPGs.

Classic RPGs with tabletop-like mechanics seem to be undergoing a bit of a resurgence right now. Shroud of the Avatar is being developed by Garriott's new team, Portalarium; Underworld Ascendant just received Kickstarter funding, presented by Paul Neurath's upstart; and now, Sword Coast Legends revisits gameplay elements introduced in Baldur's Gate, with the addition of a DM mode.

The only perceivable competitive threat faced by the world’s most successful silicon company, Intel, is the one posed by ARM. For an understanding of just how large Intel is, we can use market capitalization as a relative measurement: AMD sits under $3B these days, NVIDIA (for point of reference) is marked at $12.19B, ARM has grown to $25.5B, and Intel’s market cap rests near a staggering $161B. AMD is a non-threat, but ARM has continually ensured fierce competition in the mobile and integrated devices markets with its low-TDP, high-performance processors.

ARM wasn’t at GDC to talk about its CPUs, though.

GDC’s opening day saw a session with publisher Paradox Interactive and developer Pieces Interactive, the duo responsible for bringing Magicka 2 to the world. Magicka’s unique “competitive co-op” charm netted the first game a staggering 3 million units shipped, giving way to the forthcoming PvP “Wizard Wars” title and co-operative sequel, Magicka 2.

Having surpassed 125 million users, Steam is the largest digital distribution platform in gaming. Given that Steam offers 4500 games and 400 million pieces of user-created content -- such as skins and weapons for your Valve games -- the attraction is no surprise.

After offering reddit's computer hardware & buildapc sub-reddits the opportunity to ask us about our nVidia GTC keynote coverage, an astute reader ("asome132") noticed that the new Pascal roadmap had a key change: Maxwell's "unified virtual memory" line-item had been replaced with a very simple, vague "DirectX 12" item. We investigated the change while at GTC, speaking to a couple of CUDA programmers and Maxwell architecture experts; I sent GN's own CUDA programmer and 30+ year programming veteran, Jim Vincent, to ask nVidia engineers about the change in the slide deck. Below includes the official stance along with our between-the-lines interpretation and analysis.

In this article, we'll look at the disappearance of "Unified Virtual Memory" from nVidia's roadmap, discuss an ARM/nVidia future that challenges existing platforms, and look at NVLink's intentions and compatible platforms.

(This article has significant contributions from GN Staff Writer & CUDA programmer Jim Vincent).

I’m always incredibly skeptical when presented with any form of MMO, especially of the F2P variety; so many dwell within a realm of repetition and disguised bypass-this-grind-with-a-microtransaction mechanics that it’s tough to get excited about them anymore. This is a classic instance of abuse by the industry – abuse so pervasive that it turns players off before they’ve even laid hands on the game. Some games shine through the pile of opportunists – like ArcheAge, which has deeply interesting economy and warfare mechanics – but they’re big productions and tough to pull-off.

World of Speed is a bit different in that it’s a closed-world MMO racing game driven primarily by player skill. At least, that’s what they tell me. I got a hands-on with the game at GDC 2014 and had a chance to speak with Sean Fitzpatrick of Slightly Mad Studios, a company you might recognize for its work on the high-fidelity “Project Cars” game. Slightly Mad’s track-record with Project Cars – to include widespread use by nVidia as a graphics demonstration – carries over to World of Speed as the teams share experience internally.

Korean studio XL Games offered Korean and Japanese gamers a chance to enjoy the freedom of creating a player-specific experience while enjoying core MMORPG gameplay when they released ArcheAge last year. Bay Area-based studio Trion Worlds (End of Nations, Rift, Defiance) has been working with XL Games ever since to bring the sandbox MMORPG to Western audiences. 

We caught up with Producer Victoria Voss at last week’s Game Developers Conference to learn more about and the game’s extensive crafting skills, XP system, and unique treatment of crime and punishment.

ArcheAge is a fantasy MMORPG that creates massive PVP battles and features 15 crafting skills; in this preview, we’ll look at the game’s merits in the MMO marketplace.

I figured I’d write a quick blog-style post for those of you who check the site regularly for convention coverage and new games/technology analysis. We’re coming off the tail-end of GDC, the Game Developers Conference, and GTC, the GPU Technology Conference, and will be heading to PAX East next. We had some of our best convention coverage yet at these two events, so as a quick recap, here are the must-read articles from each:

The Game Developers Conference for 2014, held in San Francisco, broke last year’s record (~23,000) attendee count. GDC is known to the industry as the premiere developer event, often housing numerous big-name and rising game makers on-site and off-site; as a testament to this, we met with the likes of SOE (EverQuest Next: Landmark), Intel (Devil’s Canyon), AMD, Red Thread Games, and more. GDC hosts innovating hardware manufacturers in the GPU and CPU markets, to include ARM, Intel, NVIDIA, and AMD, each providing support to developers in advancing their games and underlying graphics or computational technology.