Author: Mark Walton

While graphics cards with more than 8GB of memory might seem like overkill to gamers, those in the creative industries like VFX and 3D modelling can't get enough of the stuff. After all, VFX studios like MPC often create scenes that require upwards of 64GB per frame to render. The trouble is, even the most capacious graphics card—AMD's FirePro S9170 server GPU—tops out at 32GB GDDR5, and there are steep cost and design issues with adding more.

AMD has come up with another solution. Instead of adding more expensive graphics memory, why not let users add their own in the form of M.2 solid state storage? That's the pitch behind the all new Radeon Pro SSG (solid state graphics), which was revealed at the Siggraph computer graphics conference on Monday.

The Radeon Pro SSG features two PCIe 3.0 M.2 slots for adding up to 1TB of NAND flash, massively increasing the available frame buffer for high-end rendering work. The SSG will cost you, though: beta developer kits go on sale immediately for a cool $9999 (probably £8000+).

Virtual reality may have launched with gamers in mind, but so far the most interesting applications for the technology have come from outside the games industry. Case in point: Marshmallow Laser Feast's In the Eyes of the Animal, a VR experience showcased at this year's Sundance film festival, which showed what it would be like to see and hear a forest through the eyes of its fluffy (and not so fluffy) inhabitants.

The experience is, as you might imagine, a strange one. When it launched, In the Eyes of the Animal was set in the dream-like Grizedale Forest in the Lake District. Amongst the ferns and ancient oaks, viewers strapped on an Oculus Rift headset (weirdly encased in a grass-covered pod), and were transported through a pink and purple landscape, transforming from a midge into a dragonfly, and then from a frog into an owl.

In the Eyes of the Animal was made using a combination of 360-degree cameras, drones, and laser and CT scans. London's Natural History Museum pitched in too, offering up animal footage captured with photogrammetry, while surround sound and audio vibrations were added to help complete the experience.

Forget the GTX 1080: there's a new slab of graphics card hotness on the way from Nvidia, and its name is, er, the GTX Titan X. Yes, Nvidia has taken its most expensive graphics card and given it a Pascal-architecture makeover. $1200—UK price TBC, but probably £1,100—buys you 11 teraflops of FP32 performance, which is a significant 24 percent jump over the 8.9 teraflops of the GTX 1080, and just over 60 percent higher than the 6.6 teraflops of the original Titan X.

The new Titan X launches on August 2 in the US and Europe. At first it'll only be available from the Nvidia website, but it will percolate down to other retailers soon after.

The Titan X is powered by a new chip, GP102, which packs in 3584 CUDA cores. While Nvidia hasn't revealed the amount of Streaming Multiprocessors (SMs), texture units, and the like, if the company uses a similar architecture to the GP104 chip (as used in the GTX 1080 and GTX 1070), expect a 40 percent boost in SMs over the GTX 1080 to 28. The chip runs at a 1417MHz base clock and 1531MHz boost clock.

(credit: Ian Waldie/Getty Images)

40 years after the first VHS video cassette recorder rolled off the production line, the last known company making the devices is ceasing production. According to Japanese newspaper Nikkei, Funai Electric, a Japanese consumer electronics company, will give up on the format by the end of the July after 30 years of production.

Declining sales, plus a difficulty in obtaining the necessary parts, prompted Funai Electric to cease production. While the Funai brand might not be well-known in the west, the company sold VCRs under the more familiar Sanyo brand in China and North America.

Funai Electric began production of VCRs in 1983 following the unsuccessful launch of its own CVC format in 1980. While CVC had its strengths—its quarter-inch tape made its machines smaller and lighter than VHS machines, which used half-inch tape—VHS and Betamax were strong competitors.

Specs at a glance: Nvidia GeForce GTX 1060
CUDA CORES	1280
TEXTURE UNITS	80
ROPS	48
CORE CLOCK	1,506MHz
BOOST CLOCK	1,708MHz
MEMORY BUS WIDTH	192-bit
MEMORY BANDWIDTH	192GB/s
MEMORY SIZE	6GB GDDR5
Outputs	3x DisplayPort 1.4, 1x HDMI 2.0b with support for 4K60 10/12b HEVC Decode, 1x dual-link DVI
Release date	July 19
PRICE	Founders Edition (as reviewed): £275/€320/$300; Partner cards priced at £240/€280/$250

What a difference a little competition makes. Nvidia was always going to release the GTX 1060, just like it released the GTX 960, GTX 760, and GTX 560 before that. But few could have predicted how soon it would appear after the launch of the GTX 1080 and GTX 1070, the company's first Pascal-based graphics cards. Fewer still expected it to be faster than a GTX 980, a card that launched at £430/$550 and still sells for a hefty £320/$400 today.

We've got AMD to thank. Its aggressively priced RX 480—which offers excellent 1080p and VR-ready performance for a mere £180/$200—brought the budget fight to Nvidia in a segment where its competitor has traditionally struggled. If you want the fastest, buy Nvidia; if you want the best value, buy AMD. The GTX 1060 changes that. For the first time in a long time, Nvidia has a mainstream graphics card that can compete on price and performance with AMD.

The GTX 1060 is (mostly) faster than the GTX 980; it runs cool and quiet with a light 120W TDP; and best of all the GTX 1060 costs £240/$250. Yes, that's more expensive than the GTX 960's launch price, continuing Nvidia's tradition of jacking up prices this generation. And yes, AMD's RX 480 is a wee bit cheaper. But with around a 15 percent boost in performance on average for a 10 percent jump in price over the comparable 8GB RX 480, it's good value, and it overclocks like a champ with very little effort.

Featuring brand new gameplay footage captured on PC (AMD), Mark takes Adam Jensen on his first mission into the heart of the aug ghetto Golem City. (video link)

I've spent the last hour hunting down an elusive black market ID syndicate in the heart of Prague, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided's sprawling city hub. In the aftermath of a devastating worldwide attack, for which augmented humans were responsible, security is tight. Perhaps overly so. Manhandled by a prejudiced police department and endlessly scanned and monitored by robotic drones, augs have been shunned by society, forced into ghettos where resentment runs rampant, and violence becomes the answer. And so, even under the employment of Task Force 29 (an Interpol-led anti-terrorist group), super-aug Adam Jensen can't charm his way past a protected police post. He needs that ID, and I'm going to help him.

Which, when I stop and think about it, is odd, because that wasn't the reason Jensen was in Prague in the first place. Earlier, he'd fought his way through a sandstorm in Dubai, gunning down augmented terrorists on the hunt for weapons, before being caught out by an unfortunate explosion. The convenient result (for the developers in charge of player progression at least) was that Jensen's augmentations stopped working, and the only man who could fix them was a doctor living in Prague. That's the thing about Deus Ex: no matter how hard you try to stick to the mission, no matter how much you want to reveal the next snippet of the story, it's there, pushing and prodding you into one of its many side quests.

Love it or hate it, Pokémon Go is bringing out the best in people. There are the impromptu meet ups, organised walks of thousands, and the general feeling that, yes, humanity isn't so bad, which is quite the feat given the a torturous few weeks we've had in the UK. Unfortunately, like any video game (AR or otherwise), unscrupulous players have entered the Pokémon Go fold, and they've figured out some (admittedly clever) ways of cheating the game out of Pokémon, without even having to walk around to do so.

The first method is actually a way to get Pokémon Go up and running on a PC. The technique, created by YouTuber Travis D, involves installing the Android phone emulator BlueStacks, and then rooting that virtual device in order to install an app that spoofs the reported GPS location. From there, you can play the game just like you can on an Android or iOS phone, without the need to go outside at all. The solution isn't perfect given that you have to tab out every time you want to change your GPS location, and there are random crashes. That's not to mention that, thanks to GPS spoofing, you can effectively take over Pokémon gyms and find Pokémon that would otherwise be inaccessible, thus screwing over those who actually put in the hard work and walk around for miles.

There was a similar cheat unveiled on Twitch earlier this week, dubbed the Pokémon Go Cheat Tool, which involved downloading a modified version of the Android app APK that allowed you to change location at will. In the stream, which has now been removed, the player was able to catch numerous Pokémon without leaving his seat. The streamer also claimed that the hack would allow Pokémon Go players to collect items and level up their Pokémon without having to grind or use in-app purchases.

British carmaker Jaguar Land Rover will launch a fleet of more than 100 autonomous and semi-autonomous vehicles on UK roads by 2020. Dubbed Connected and Autonomous Vehicle (CAV) technologies, the vehicles will cruise along 41 miles of roads near Coventry and Solihull beginning later this year, with the first stage testing tech that allows cars to communicate directly with each other, and with infrastructure like signs and traffic lights.

While the company hasn't revealed all the tech inside the new test vehicles, it did detail a few of the key technologies. First is the "Roadwork Assist" feature, which uses a front-facing 3D camera to scan the road for for cones and barriers. In a regular car, this would chart a course around the obstruction, and provide steering assistance. In an autonomous car, it could be used to navigate a way through roadworks without any human intervention at all.

The "Safe Pullaway" feature uses another camera to monitor the area in front of the vehicle, the idea being to prevent the driver (or computer) from being overeager with the accelerator and bumping the car in front before it's had a chance to pull away. If the system detects that the car in front isn't moving, it swiftly applies the brakes.

Nvidia has unveiled the GTX 1060, the most affordable member of its Pascal-based graphics card lineup yet. Starting at $250 (UK price TBC, but likely £220), Nvidia claims the GTX 1060 is faster than a GTX 980—a card that costs upwards of $400 (£380)—and features a power-sipping TDP of just 120W. It'll be released worldwide on July 19.

While the full technical details behind the GTX 1060 aren't available just yet, Nvidia has revealed that the card is based on a new GP106 chip, not a binned version of the the GP104 chip used in the GTX 1080 and GTX 1070. The GTX 1060 sports 1280 CUDA cores, 6GB of GDDR5 memory running at 8GHz (only a 6GB version will be available), and a boost clock of 1.7GHz that Nvidia claims is easily overclocked to 2GHz and beyond. Power supply is via a single 6-pin connector.

Like the GTX 1080 and GTX 1070, the GTX 1060 will be available from manufacturers like Asus, Zotac, and Gigabyte, as well as directly from Nvidia in Founders Edition form at a higher $299 (~£260) price. The extra $50 buys a dual-FET power supply, as well as a similar blower-style cooler to the more expensive Pascal cards, albeit one made out of plastic rather than metal.

Pokémon Go, the augmented reality game that lets you capture virtual Pokémon in real world locations, has launched on Android and iOS. For now, it's only available in Japan, Australia, or New Zealand, but a worldwide release is expected within the next few days.

If you're an Android user, you can download Pokémon Go wherever you are in the world thanks to the APK being uploaded to APK Mirror. As long as you've allowed your phone to accept side-loaded apps (to do so, head to the security settings on your device and enable "unknown sources" or similar), you're good to go.

Developed by Ingress creator Niantic Labs—which was previously part of Google—Pokémon Go is a free-to-play game where players are tasked with capturing Pokémon hidden out in the real world. It uses a device's GPS and camera to display Pokémon on a map, and players must then explore their local area to capture different breeds.