After the oddity that was its GeForce 419.67 WHQL Creator Ready drivers, NVIDIA launched new GeForce drivers with the same 419.67 version number, but with "Game Ready" branding. It's now clear that Creator Ready is a fork of the GeForce software, released at a slightly lesser frequency, targeting creativity and productivity software that don't quite need Quadro feature-set or certifications. GeForce 419.67 WHQL Game Ready, on the other hand, add day-one optimization for "Battlefield V: Firestorm," a new update that brings the highly addictive Battle Royale gameplay mode to the Battlefield franchise. Optimization is also added or refined for "Anthem," "Shadow of the Tomb Raider," and "Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice." NVIDIA expanded the list of Adaptive Sync monitors that are now capable of G-Sync. Among the bugs fixed are a performance drop noticed in DaVinci Resolve, overexposed brightness and color seen in "Far Cry: New Dawn" with HDR turned on; performance issues with "Total War: Warhammer 2" with AA turned on; artifacts seen in certain Adobe applications; screen corruption when switching display modes with HDR turned on in "Apex Legends," FOV reduction when recording with GeForce Experience; flickering noticed in "Star Citizen" followed by a CTD on "Turing" GPUs, abnormal time taken on GeForce GTX 980 responding to NVAPI calls; TITAN RTX overheating when enabling TCC mode via NVLink; and second monitor flickering with two monitors connected to an RTX 2070

Bethesda has announced that The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind is currently available for free on its launcher. This free offer will only last for one day and once you acquire your free copy, you will be able to keep your game in your library forever. All you have to do in order to acquire your free copy is use the following code in order to redeem the game on Bethesda's launcher.

The Audeze Mobius is supposed to be a gaming headset that will satisfy audiophiles with incredible planar magnetic drivers and 3D positional audio. It has literally every feature but it also costs $400. But if you have the money, this might be the best gaming headset available.

Microsoft Defender ATP for Mac brings the same robust protection from Windows Defender to the Mac platform. Microsoft has created a "cross-platform next-generation protection and endpoint detection and response coverage" heterogeneous solution that will help Microsoft reach its goal of securing users and data wherever they are. Core components of Microsoft's unified endpoint security platform, including the new Threat & Vulnerability Management will now be available for Mac devices. The cloud-delivered, real-time protection antivirus solution is currently in preview.

In a new blog post entitled "Keeping Passwords Secure" Facebook VP Engineering, Security and Privacy Pedro Canahuati explains how the social media giant accidentally stored Facebook user's passwords on internal data storage systems in plain text. Pedro explains how "these passwords were never visible to anyone outside of Facebook and we have found no evidence to date that anyone internally abused or improperly accessed them. We estimate that we will notify hundreds of millions of Facebook Lite users, tens of millions of other Facebook users, and tens of thousands of Instagram users." To keep your account safe, Facebook suggests changing your Facebook and Instagram passwords, pick strong passwords, use a password manager, and enable a security key or two-factor authentication.

Brand new weekly fail compilation of the funniest Fails of the week for March 2019. Selection includes kids getting owned, trick shots gone wrong, home video bloopers, crashes caught on tape, stunts and more outtakes, viral videos and funniest moments caught on camera.

Revealed onstage during the "State of Unreal," Chaos is Unreal Engine's new high-performance physics and destruction system coming in early access to Unreal Engine 4.23. The real-time tech demo is set within the world of Robo Recall. With Chaos, users can achieve cinematic-quality visuals in real time in scenes with massive-scale levels of destruction, with unprecedented artist control over content creation. In addition to the initial feature set, Epic will release demo content for Chaos physics and destruction within the 4.23 window.

A deep learning model developed by NVIDIA Research turns rough doodles into highly realistic scenes using generative adversarial networks (GANs). The tool is like a smart paintbrush, converting segmentation maps into lifelike images

Lifted from the opening keynote of GTC 2019, Jensen Huang presents the newly-created Quake II RTX demo. This walkthrough shows off upgrades to the legendary 1997 game with added real-time ray traced global illumination and reflections, dynamic direct and indirect lighting effects, mimicked physical material light reflection properties, and volumetric lighting effects.

The new Apple AirPods have 50% battery life (talk time) and support "Hey Siri" voice commands to let users quickly change songs, make a call, adjust the volume or get directions. Apple also introduced an optional charging case that can be charged on any Qi-compatible wireless charging pad. The new AirPods are available today with the new wireless charging case for $199, or with the older standard case for $159. The wireless charging case is available separately for $79, for customers with existing AirPods. Apple is also now offering free personalized engraving on AirPods. The new AirPods and case are available online today, and in Apple Stores next week.

The Opera web browser for Android now includes a free VPN service, for securing data over untrusted networks such as public Wi-Fi. Opera for Android version 51 includes the feature, which is activated with a simple toggle, requiring no sign-in nor account. Opera lets users choose from one of several VPN server locations around the world, and does not log user activity. Opera for Android also includes an ad blocker. The new Opera app is available now from the Play Store.

Twitter's new camera function offers an all-new visual interface that makes it faster and easier to share visual content, including photos, videos, and live streaming. The updated app has been rolling out in recent days. A new shortcut takes users directly to the camera by swiping sideways from the main feed. The interface offers standard and live modes. The standard mode has a large capture button that users can tap quickly to take a still, or hold to capture video. Both modes include prompts to add your location and a text comment. There's also a separate prompt to add a description of the visual content for the visually-impaired. The camera function defaults to the phone's rear camera, but supports selfie mode as well

We knew this was coming, especially after Google's teaser from earlier this month. Project Stream was a proof-of-concept in collaboration with Ubisoft, to see whether AAA gaming was possible over the internet. Things were smooth most of the time in our own experience, but there remained questions over how the concept would translate over to a finished product, especially with infrastructure challenges on the client side of things. Google's keynote at GDC just wrapped up, and the main focus was Stadia- the now named cloud gaming service borne out of Project Stream. Stadia is built with instant access in mind. An example demo came in the form of Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed Odyssey, which was used in the public test before. It is integrated with partner YouTube channels such that a trailer for a supported game would have an option to play said game, which would then launch immediately. Stadia is built with support from a wide partner network including AMD, Unity, id Software, and more.

Game streaming usually means support for multiple devices, given the backend hosts the actual game processing itself. Stadia is no different, with support for a variety for products including PCs, phones, tablet, and TVs (smart or otherwise via products such as Google's Chromecast). The current limitation is support for Google's Chrome browser, although Google mentioned that they are working to support other browsers as well. Most controllers as well as the keyboard + mouse combination, and Google is also bringing out a dedicated Stadia controller for those who prefer first-party support. The Stadia controller will come in three color options, is reminiscent of the XBOX controller, and connects via WiFi directly to the game being streamed. It also has a dedicated capture button to share content on YouTube, as well as a Google Assistant button to access the built-in mic for, well, Google Assistant. The backend is no doubt critical here, with Google promising over 7500 nodes around the world to combat latency as best as possible. Each node, or Stadia instance as they are calling it, uses datacenters comprising multiple racks filled with custom hardware developed in collaboration with AMD. The hardware includes a GPU providing 10.7 TFlops compute (based on AMD's Vega microarchitecture, presumably), a custom x86 processor clocked at 2.7 GHz with hyperthreading, and 16 GB of RAM, which all pair together to provide a single node well more powerful than the Sony PS4 Pro or the Microsoft XBOX One X- even combined. But raw numbers mean little if developers can't optimize for it, however, and this will no doubt be a challenge. Google is promising a massive improvement in gameplay experience with Stadia, going from the up to 1080p/60 FPS/stereo sound setup from Project Stream to 4K/60 FPS/HDR/surround sound at launch with Stadia, and further improvements targeting 8K gameplay in the futur

The fact that Nvidia can cram a 545mm^2 GPU into a low-power laptop at all is remarkable, and generally speaking, the RTX chips perform well in their relatively small power envelopes. But as the video points out, be careful if you're in the market for a gaming laptop, as the actual performance level of some RTX GPUs can be difficult to discern. Wonder how screwed must someone feel after upgrading from a GTX 1070 laptop to an RTX 2080 Max-Q one.

Here is the Google GDC gaming announcement.

Today, Apple updated its iMac lineup with 9th generation Intel processors and AMD Vega graphics. The 21.5 inch iMac now sports up to 6 cores, while the 27 inch iMac gets what's presumably a fully enabled 8-core Coffee Lake die. Apple also says they're they're offering "Radeon Pro Vega graphics" in both the 21.5-inch and 27-inch iMacs. The subtext reveals that the smaller iMac has an optional "Vega 20" graphics card, while the larger one features the long-rumored Radeon Pro Vega 48. It's not clear if we'll ever see desktop gaming versions of these Vega GPUs, but some people have already pointed out that smaller Vega GPUs could cut into sales for the recently-launched RX 590.

Unity's award-winning Demo team, the creators of Adam and Book of the Dead, is working on a new short film called The Heretic. It's a real-time cinematic running at 30 fps at 1440p on a consumer-class desktop PC.

Apple today announced a new iPad mini and a new iPad Air, both of which include the A12 Bionic chipset. The new iPad Air upgrades the display from 9.7 inches to 10.5 inches, and it sits beside the current iPad in the lineup, rather than replacing it. There are now four different lines of iPads, with the iPad at the entry level, the iPad Air and mini in the mid-range, and the iPad Pro for premium. Visually, the new iPad mini is identical to the iPad mini 4, which is three and a half years old. That device had an A8 processor, the same that could be found in the iPhone 6. The new iPad mini's A12 Bionic has massive performance improvements, and it also adds support for the Apple Pencil. Presumably, the new iPad Air is a successor to the iPad Air 2, although the branding here really doesn't make a lot of sense. If that's the case though, it's also replacing an A8 processor. While the entry level iPad already supports the Apple Pencil, the new iPad Air has Pencil and Smart Keyboard support, so this is really a valid replacement for the 10.5-inch iPad Pro that came out in mid-2017.

The iPad mini sports a 7.9-inch display with a 2048x1536 resolution for a 326ppi pixel density. It sports an eight-megapixel camera for 1080p video recording, along with a seven-megapixel front camera, with 1080p video recording at 30fps. Of course, it still has Touch ID, rather than the newer Face ID. The new iPad Air is very much the same, except the display is 10.5 inches and 2224x1668, for a 264ppi pixel density. What's particularly interesting about this announcement is that Apple is still holding an event in a week. With its hardware announcements out of the way, it seems that the company is actually going to focus on services, something that's new for Apple. Both devices come in Silver, Space Gray, and Gold, in Wi-Fi only and cellular variants, and 64GB and 256GB configurations. The new iPad mini starts at $399 while the new iPad Air starts at $499.