This Month in PC Gaming

Meltdown & Spectre Vulnerabilities

Intel have now released micro-code updates to patch Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities in CPU's launched in the past five years.

Going forward Intel will also be implementing hardware fixes to the upcoming Cascade Lake and 8th Generation Intel Core processors expected to ship in the second half of 2018, building the protections into the hardware may mitigate some of the performance impacts seen with software patches.

Responsive RBG Lighting with Corsair iCUE

Corsair partners up with Ubisoft for Far Cry 5 to bring a new layer of immersion through their RGB products. New software scheduled to release on 27th March, will enable dynamic lighting adjustments from your Corsair RGB products synced up with various in-game interactions.

Additionally, Corsair are bundling a copy of Far Cry 5 with select CORSAIR RGB product purchases from the CORSAIR webstore of more than $150 between March 23rd and April 30th.

Logitech LightSync

Logitech have recently unveiled LightSync, programmable colour and lighting effects which can also be synchronized with in-game action.

DirectX Ray Tracing

Microsoft announce DirectX Raytracing (DXR), a new feature of DirectX12 that will take us one step closer to fully realistic 3D effects. The current technique for mapping a 3D image on a 2D plane is known as rasterization, which is focused on rendering what can be seen on screen. This can run into complications when off screen objects such as shadows, lighting or reflections have an effect on an object on screen. For now, developers have had to cheat their way around this with level design tricks and other techniques. Raytracing however, involves modelling rays of light bounced around a scene which allows current rendering techniques such as Screen Space Reflections to occur and appear more natural.

Initially it is expected that existing rendering techniques such as SSR and global illumination will make use of the new API to improve image quality, though in the future raytracing could replace rasterization as the default method for creating 3D worlds.

Check out the tech demo below from 3DMark creators, Futuremark to see DirectX Raytracing in action and how it is used to improve the quality and accuracy of real-time reflections.

Raytracing can run on existing hardware so you won't need to upgrade to experience the benefits just yet. AMD are already on board and willing to show the benefits of DXR. NVIDIA also announced NVIDIA RTX, a raytracing technology running on NVIDIA Volta architecture GPU's to deliver more lifelike images. Check out the demonstration of RTX real-time raytracing running in Unreal Engine 4 below.

Vive Price Drop

HTC have announced that the Vive Pro Head Mounted Display will be available for $799 with global preorders starting now. The Vive Pro comes with a higher resolution display and built in headphones with a redesigned head-strap for greater comfort. The Vive Pro is compatible with the base stations and controllers from the original HTC Vive, though they are not included in $799 package.

Additionally, the current Vive kit has been reduced to $499.