Team Green captures the single-GPU crown, again

Today Nvidia pulls the wraps off its $650 GK110-based 700 series flagship card, the GeForce GTX 780. This board slides directly into the yawning chasm that exists between the $500 GK104-based GTX 680 and the $1,000 GK110-based GTX Titan, though despite its price it's actually much closer in specs and performance to the Titan than it is to the GTX 680.

FROM: http://www.maximumpc.com/

Maker Faire 2013

This past weekend Maximum PC had the chance to check out Maker Faire 2013 in the heart of the San Francisco Bay Area. The event, billing itself as "the greatest show and tell on Earth," is one of the largest DIY conventions in the country and has inventors from all around the globe showing off their latest and greatest doodads. While it is technically an arts and crafts show, technology played a big part of Maker Faire 2013 with inventors showing off everything from interesting PC case mods to robots.

Click the "Read More" button for the full picture gallery!

FROM: http://www.maximumpc.com/

Microsoft confirms Halo 'Bootcamp' following ratings leak

Microsoft has confirmed the existence of a Halo-related project titled 'Bootcamp', which surfaced recently via Korean Ratings.

The Microsoft-filed Korean listing, spotted by Game Front, names 'Bootcamp' as a PC online action game, with mention of Halo 3 in the description.
Little else can be gleaned from the Google-translation, but a Microsoft rep was surprisingly willing to confirm the prematurely outed project with an albeit vague statement.

"What's Bootcamp? It is not related to our Xbox One efforts, or the Reclaimer Saga, but rather a project we're very enthusiastic about and will have more to say about in the near future," said the rep.

The 'Reclaimer Saga' refers to the second Halo trilogy, which is expected to continue on the next-gen Xbox One console.

A PC port of Halo 3 would seem unlikely at this point - a full six years after it originally hit Xbox 360 - unless it were some sort of experimental free-to-play multiplayer venture (think Quake Live). The project may also be related to a Halo novel by Reed Ruiz titled Halo: Fall of Reach: Boot Camp, but nothing is confirmed.

Perhaps we'll hear more on this at E3 next month.

FROM: http://www.computerandvideogames.com/

Microsoft seeks patent for TV Achievements

The patent application, which was filed last November and spotted by GamesIndustry International, reads: "Television viewing tends to be a passive experience for a viewer, without many opportunities for the viewer to engage or have interactive experiences with the presented content.
"To increase interactive viewing and encourage a user to watch one or more particular items of video content, awards and achievements may be tied to those items of video content.

"By tying the awards and achievements to particular items of video or advertising content, viewers may be encouraged to increase their viewership of the content, thus increasing advertising opportunities."

Achievements could be dished out for watching a single event such as the Super Bowl or viewing an entire series of a show, it adds.

Potential rewards include new avatar items, virtual money for a game, or even physical prizes.

Achievements could also be tied to viewers performing specific Kinect actions while watching content, Microsoft said.

At Tuesday's Xbox One reveal event, Marc Whitten, Microsoft's corporate vice president of Xbox Live, said that a new version of the online service will be "more powerful, more personal and more intelligent".

The new Xbox Live will offer enhanced cloud functionality, improved matchmaking, new social features, background downloads, skill tracking and an expanded achievements system, Microsoft added.

FROM: http://www.computerandvideogames.com/

No BS Podcast #203: Nvidia's GeForce GTX 780, Reader Questions, and an Intern Rant

GTX 780 mega-podcast!
We were busy little bees this time and could only spare three people: host and Senior Editor Josh Norem, Associate Editor Tom McNamara, and legendary intern Chris Zele. Ironically, we spent most of our time jabbering on about Nvidia's newest high-end video card, the GTX 780. We didn't have the MSRP in time for the taping of episode #203 of the Maximum PC No BS Podcast, but you can't let missing things like "facts" stop you from having an opinion!

FROM: http://www.maximumpc.com/

Black Ops 2 updates released for consoles

Treyarch has released Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 title updates for Xbox 360 and PS3.

Feature Improvements
Added support for free-trial of Revolution DLC from 5/24-5/28.
Added support for Personalization Pack Community Voting.
Improved and expanded who can be the host of a game lobby.
Multiplayer Issues Addressed

Resolved an issue reported by the community where the reticle would sometimes disappear.
Addressed an issue reported by the community where the Peacekeeper would sometimes disappear after a host migration.
Addressed an issue reported by the community where the Scorestreak progress bar would not fill up.
Fixed an issue reported by the community where the ammo count for the Death Machine and War Machine would reset on round change.
Fixed the player's character model shifting sideways slightly when the A10F Warthog makes a strafe run.
Addressed an issue with the Death Machine receiving the War Machine's ammo.
C4 will no longer detonate when it touches the front of moving gondolas on Downhill.
Resolved a client freeze when the client continually scrolls Create-a-Class sets while the host of a party changes lobbies and brings the party with them.
Fixed an issue with sound and visual effects not working when a tactical insertion is destroyed by the sliding alien targets on Studio.
Addressed an issue with C4 not being destroyed by the sliding alien targets on Studio.
Resolved an issue with the player floating down slowly when re-spawning if their tactical insertion was placed on a ledge.
Fixed an issue with held Scorestreak weapons not reloading the current ammo upon death.

FROM:  http://www.computerandvideogames.com/

Chip Wars

Chip Wars
The researchers point to the history of less expensive chips bumping out faster but higher-priced processors in high-performance systems. In 1993, the list of the world's fastest supercomputers, known as the Top500, was dominated by systems based on vector processors. They were nudged out by less expensive RISC processors like IBM's Power chip, whose use in supercomputers peaked early in the past decade. The RISC chips in turn were eventually replaced by cheaper commodity processors like Intel's Xeon and Advanced Micro Devices' Opteron, which today are used in more than 400 supercomputers on the Top500 list.

The transitions had a common thread, the researchers wrote: Microprocessors killed the vector supercomputers because they were "significantly cheaper and greener," they said.

"Mobile processors are not faster ... but they are significantly cheaper," the researchers wrote.