NVIDIA Announces GeForce GTX 1060: Starting at $249, Available July 19th

NVIIDA Ansel, Simultaneous Multi-Projection, & VR Funhouse Status Updates

Along with today’s news about the GeForce GTX 1060 launch, NVIDIA is also offering updated news on a few of their technologies and related software projects.

We’ll start with Ansel, NVIDIA’s 360 degree high-resolution screenshot composition and capture technology. After initially announcing it alongside the GTX 1080 as part of their Pascal technology briefing, the company is announcing that it will finally be shipping in select games this month, with the first of those shipping today. The first two games to get Ansel-enabled will be DICE’s Mirror’s Edge: Catalyst and CD Projekt Red’s The Witcher 3. Ansel support for Mirror’s Edge is launching today (or as NVIDIA’s press release puts it, “immediate availability”), meanwhile The Witcher 3 will get support added later this month.

As the tech requires vendors to integrate it into games and game engines on a case-by-case basis, this is a gradual rollout, but one NVIDIA is hoping to accelerate over time. The company has already lined up a half dozen additional games that will support the technology, including Unreal Tournament and No Man’s Sky, but they are not announcing an availability date at this time.

Meanwhile, in a more general status update on their Simultaneous Multi-Projection technology, NVIDIA is announcing that they have lined up both Unity and Epic Games to add support for the technology to their respective Unity and Unreal Engine 4 game engines. To that end the company is also confirming that over 30 games are now in development to implement the technology, including Epic’s Unreal Tournament.

Besides being a marquee feature of the Pascal architecture, simultaneous multi-projection is seen by NVIDIA as a key element in establishing a lead in the VR market. Though the full benefits of the technology remain to be seen, any potential performance advantage would be in their favor, and we should expect to see it significantly promoted alongside the GTX 1060, which will be NVIIDA’s entry-level VR card. Of course as developers need to implement the technology first, which is why for NVIDIA is it so important to get developers on-board and to make sure potential customers are aware.

Finally, speaking of VR, NVIDIA is also announcing that their big tech demo for Pascal, VR Funhouse, will be shipping this month. Unveiled alongside Ansel and SMP at the Pascal launch, VR Funhouse is built on Unreal Engine 4 and is meant to serve as a testbed for NVIDIA’s latest GameWorks/VRWorks technologies, including SMP and VRWorks Audio. The tech demo will be released on Steam later this month and will support the GTX 1060 and above. Though Pascal owners will want to take note that as this is a VR demo, it will require a VR headset – specifically, the HTC Vive – in order to use it.

Meanwhile NVIDIA has also confirmed that the source code to VR Funhouse will be opened up to developers. Though the primarily goal here is to allow developers to add additional attractions/modules to the tech demo, more broadly speaking it’s another means to help encourage developer adoption of GameWorks/VRWorks, giving developers a starting point for using the various technologies in NVIDIA’s libraries.