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NVIDIA announced the 16nm Pascal GTX 1080 and GTX 1070 GPUs. The $599 GTX 1080 will be more powerful than Titan X, GTX 980 Ti, or two GTX 980s. Neither card uses High Bandwidth Memory like the top Pascal GPU, Tesla P100. Intel's Broadwell-E flagship enthusiast CPU, the Core i7-6950X, is expected to have 10 cores. AMD Zen mainstream desktop CPUs could have 6-8 cores. The architecture has moved from Bulldozer's Clustered Multithreading to Simultaneous Multithreading, which is closer to Intel's design and has two threads per core. Zen desktop CPUs will be released before laptop CPUs. There could be a 16 core APU in 2017. AMD's 14 or 16nm Polaris GPUs will apparently be cheaper and cooler, rather than trying to compete with the GTX 1080's performance. The Radeon R9 490 could cost $300. The Polaris GPUs will not have High Bandwidth Memory, which will instead be added to 2017 Vega GPUs as successors to the Fury series. Sony could launch a "PS4K" console using an AMD Polaris GPU and faster Jaguar CPU capable of playing the current PS4 games in 2160p instead of 1080p. It could also boost frame rates for the PSVR.

Nvidia has announced the upcoming launch of its RTX 2080 Ti ($1000-$1200, September 20), RTX 2080 ($700-800, September 20), and RTX 2070 ($500-600, October) GPUs. You didn't read that wrong, the 'R' is for Ray tracing. The key feature they are touting is real-time ray tracing using "dedicated" ray tracing (RT) cores. The tensor cores for machine learning are also used to help ray tracing by denoising. Here is an example of how that can work: Nvidia's keynote presentation at Gamescom 2018 included a demo of the Eidos Montreal game Shadows of the Tomb Raider, using the real-time ray tracing technique, highlighting improvements made to shadows. Earlier in the year, Microsoft announced a DirectX Raytracing API. Similar improvements are being made to Vulkan. There are a lot of questions raised here. How and when will AMD respond, for example? But most importantly, could/will a hybrid ray tracing technique ever be applied to TDM?

Hey there, This is a poll — Easy enough, give me the card on which you most often play TDM. I'm also interested to know about older/Intel/laptop/S3 stuff that plays it reasonably well. This helps me to figure out if we can use high quality compressed normalmaps everywhere, or we need to try cater for legacy stuff. Thanks!