It’s safe to say that Nvidia is really competing with itself at this point in time. The current GeForce GTX 680 is pretty much even in performance to AMD’s Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition, but much quieter and uses less power. The GeForce Titan outperforms AMD’s single-GPU flagship by a wide margin, but costs a cool grand, so it’s out of reach of most users.

Enter the GeForce GTX 780. At first blush, it seems like a “Baby Titan”, but that would be inaccurate. Let’s look at the base specs, compared to both the Titan and the GTX 680.

Given that the GTX 780 uses the same GPU chip as the GTX Titan, but with roughly 15% fewer shader cores and half the memory, the GTX 780 offers about 80% of the gaming performance of a Titan, as we’ll see shortly. Take a look at that memory speed, too: 7000 MHz (effective), or 1gpbs faster throughput than the Titan or GTX 680. There’s no lack of memory bandwidth with the GTX 780. However, Nvidia told us that the GTX 780 would only have about a quarter of the double precision floating point performance of Titan. In other words, the GTX 780 will be a great gaming card, but won’t come close to Titan for high end GPU compute.

Digging a little deeper into the features of the GTX 780 card itself, Nvidia’s made some interesting design decisions in the reference design. The cooling subsystem is tweaked from Titan to run even quieter. Nvidia accomplished this by managing fan speeds to run closer to a steady state, rather than ramping the fan speeds up and down rapidly.

The GTX 780’s cooling system minimizes noise by keeping the average speed within a narrow band, avoiding fast spin rate ramps.

The GTX 780 will cost substantially less than a Titan, at about $649 for reference grade cards, but that's nearly $200 more than a 2GB GTX 680. However, 4GB GTX 680s still cost nearly $600, so the price differential between a GTX 780 and GTX 680 4GB card isn’t as large, while new new card offers quite a bit more performance. Still, $649 is a pretty steep price for a video card, and it’s partly a result of AMD’s inability to compete on single GPU performance. The lack of competition puts Nvidia in the enviable position of being able to set higher prices than they might have if competition had been stiffer. I included a GTX 680 4GB card for comparison, but it’s likely that performance differences with a 2GB card will be minor.

With this sobering thought in mind, let’s take a look at performance.

Here's a situation that should sound familiar. You're using your computer. An application locks up. You click on the window, anyway, to see if it does anything. The application hangs. It's not responding. Instead of giving up, and walking away, you keep clicking--maybe on that application, maybe elsewhere on the desktop. Click. Click. The longer you wait, the angrier you get. Click click click. Your computer is no longer under your control. Clickclickclickclickclickclickclickclickclick.

The most likely answer to "Why do users click randomly and rapidly when an application hangs?", recently posed to StackExchange, is irrational frustration. After the first couple clicks, we know an application isn't going to respond, so we keep clicking in frustration. It's an expression of powerlessness. The question garnered some interesting answered that actually dig into the psychology of man-machine interaction.

Photo credit: Flickr user juditk via Creative Commons.

"People tend to think of their interface in physical terms," says one response. "You think of a 'window' not a 'rectangle of lights on a matrix'. And so, when an application hangs, people revert to interacting with it in the way they might do with a physical object when it stops working.Shaking things seems to be the way that many people try to 'fix' a physical object that isn't working, and the digital equivalent to this is to beat it with your clicking might."

Another cites the psychology of learned behavior and quotes the book You Are Not So Smart:

"Take, as an example, a pigeon that has been reinforced to peck an electronic button. During its training history, every time the pigeon pecked the button, it will have received a small amount of bird seed as a reinforcer. So, whenever the bird is hungry, it will peck the button to receive food. However, if the button were to be turned off, the hungry pigeon will first try pecking the button just as it has in the past. When no food is forthcoming, the bird will likely try again ... and again, and again. After a period of frantic activity, in which their pecking behavior yields no result, the pigeon's pecking will decrease in frequency."

But the most interesting response focuses on a reaction that's slightly different from repeatedly clicking a mouse. It talks about the escape key, and how it has evolved into a button that means Stop! Abort! Back out! Get me outta here!

The New York Times magazine wrote about the history of the escape key in 2012; surprisingly, it wasn't originally designed to close out of programs:

Logitech’s series of Bluetooth Easy-Switch Keyboards are the best keyboards to use with most devices, due to the fact that they're a pleasure to type on, are widely loved by reviewers, boast extremely long battery lives, and come in Apple and Microsoft hardware-friendly configurations. They can be paired with up to three different devices at a time and switch back and forth between those paired devices at the push of a button.

Single Use Keyboards Are Lame

A lot of people bite the bullet and buy multiple keyboards to use with the various devices in their lives. They’ll have a keyboard to use with their computer (if they don’t own a laptop,) an external keyboard or a keyboard case to use with their tablet, and maybe one to use with their set top box or HTPC. That kind of thing gets expensive, and wastes money you could be putting towards something awesome.

The smart money’s on owning a keyboard that’s designed to work well with as many of the devices you own as possible.

One of the most interesting messages Google tries to get across in its Chromebook campaign is the idea that the hardware is disposable. If your Chromebook falls into a volcano or gets run over or stolen, you're out the cost of the hardware, but that's it. You don't lose any data, and the crook/volcano god doesn't get access to it either. All you have to do is grab a new Chromebook (or any PC that can run the Chrome browser) log in, and you're back in business.

Photo credit: Alex Washburn/Wired via Creative Commons.

Most of us can't use a Chromebook full-time. We use programs that don't yet run in a web browser, we play games that require local asset files and don't sync to the cloud, and we have a lot of data we need to hold onto--more than will fit onto a few lousy gigabytes of local storage. But we can take a page from the Chromebook, as it were, and make our data resilient and flexible--resilient, so a hardware loss doesn't mean data loss, and flexible, so that we can pick up pretty much any computer with an Internet connection and be able to work. After all, if you lose your Chromebook, you don't need to find another Chromebook to access your data; you just need to log in to your Google Account from anywhere.

In order to get Chromebook-level data security on our "real" computers, we need two things: good backup software, and good syncing software. All of your data deserves to be backed up, but not all of it needs to be immediately accessible. With a good backup, your data is safe, and with a good sync setup, you can have near-instant access to whatever subset of that data you deem worthy. The good news is that this is now really easy.

I'm not just idly pontificating; I just did some spring cleaning, including a clean Windows install on my desktop, and this is how I prepared, backed up, and synced my data.

Note that this guide is written from the perspective of a Windows user, but the main points are valid for Linux and Mac OS X users as well.

Late last week, Intel unveiled some features and performance data for the graphics cores in their upcoming Haswell CPU. Most of the hoopla revolved around Haswell’s graphics performance on laptops, but Intel also disclosed some interesting bits about desktop processors. Before diving into that, it’s worth considering how integrated graphics typically plays out on desktop PCs.

First Puzzle Piece: Performance CPUs Rarely Use IGPs

On the mobile side, most Intel-based laptops currently include their highest end HD 4000 GPU. Laptops are increasingly becoming closed systems, making user upgrades more difficult–and graphics upgrades impossible. So Intel has been fairly smart, integrating its best GPU into all Core class processors. Even Ultrabooks, with their tightly constrained chassis and limited airflow, utilize CPUs with Intel HD 4000 graphics.

People who build PCs tend to be pretty smart about how they’re going to use a system. Building a small, shared living room PC for web access and light office chores? Integrated graphics may be fine, but so is a lower end CPU. Someone who picks up a higher end CPU – a Core i7 3770K, for example – is unlikely to use the integrated GPU. Usually, that system will end up with at least a mid-range graphics card, like a GeForce GTX 660 or AMD Radeon HD 7870.

Intel knows this, and doesn’t really want to spend the die space on putting a higher end integrated GPU into a performance-oriented CPU where the integrated graphics will mostly go unused. A better integrated GPU requires more die space, which increases the overall cost of the processor. That makes sense when you realize that even a relatively low end graphics card, like Nvidia’s GTX 650 or AMD’s HD 7790 substantially outperforms the HD 4000.

Intel's next processor line, Haswell, is closing in on a summer release. Like last year's bump from Sandy Bridge to Ivy Bridge, the most exciting upgrade in this new processor line is the integrated GPU, aka Intel's HD Graphics. Competitor AMD blew Intel's first shot at integrated graphics out of the water, but last year's Ivy Bridge GPU was a big step forward for Intel. And this year things are looking even better--Intel's claiming comparable performance to an (obviously low end) discrete GPU, and they've given their new graphics a name to go with its new performance. Meet Iris.

More specifically, Iris Graphics 5100 is Intel's new high-performance integrated GPU. But it's not the only name to learn this processor cycle: There are five different tiers of GPUs, but the bottom three (which all stick with HD 4000-level denotations) will likely be reserved for low-performance systems. Iris Graphics and the second-tier GPU, HD Graphics 5000, are the ones to keep an eye on.

Intel's 3DMark tests show Iris doubling the performance of last year's HD Graphics 4000, but there's a price to be paid for that performance. Ars Technica writes:

"The Iris 5100 is confined to chips with a 28W thermal design power (TDP), which is a fair bit higher than the 17W TDP used by both Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge CPUs. We've talked before about how Intel's TDP ratings (and the newer SDP ratings) are a bit nebulous, but it may be the case that these chips are confined to slightly larger (think 13-inch) Ultrabooks because of power or thermal constraints."

The new HD Graphics 5000, which delivers approximately 1.5 times the performance of last year's chip, will be better suited to laptops with harsher power restrictions. Iris 5100 and HD 5000 are the two chips we'll likely see in most laptops and Ultrabooks in the coming year, but there's also another, even faster Iris GPU with a higher power draw that Intel will offer.

It's taken AMD a few months to plan its counterattack to Nvidia's fastest graphics cards, the dual-GPU GTX 690 and monstrous single GPU GTX Titan. But now that response is here in the form of the Radeon 7990, a dual-GPU card that essentially slaps together two of the (already speedy) 7970GEs, which sell for at least $400 by themselves. AMD's press release proudly proclaimed this was the card EA used to premiere Battlefield 4, and that it's the only one around that can run Crysis 3 and Tomb Raider at 4K resolution.

AMD's hailing the new 7990 as the world's fastest graphics card thanks to its count of 2048 stream processors per GPU, 950MHz core clock, and 6GB of GDDR5 memory clocked at 6GHz. Total, the 7990 is packing about 8.6 billion transistors. None of this comes cheap, of course--the 7990 will launch online in a couple week at $999.

Anandtech has some great analysis of the new card that digs into the advances AMD has made with dual-GPU tech. It's important to note that this technically isn't the first 7990 model to hit the market--ASUS and PowerColor released their own versions before AMD, but it looks like this will be the one to get. Writes Anandtech:

"AMD’s 7990 has an official TDP of just 375W, which although common for official dual-GPU cards, is quite a bit lower than the TDPs of the unofficial 7990s. As the GPU manufacturer AMD has the ability to do finely grained binning that their partners cannot, so while Asus and PowerColor have essentially been putting together cards that really are two 7970s on a single card – right down to the TDP – official 7990s get the advantage of AMD’s binning process, significantly reducing power consumption. The end result is that while an unofficial 7990 would be a 450W+ part, AMD can deliver the same or better performance while consuming much less power, putting the 7990 within the all-important 375W envelope that OEMs and boutique builders look for."

Two other important things to note. One: AMD's new power technology, which they've dubbed ZeroCore, can turn off a slave GPU when not in use. So for your normal day-to-day, the 7990 can shut off one of its GPUs and bring its idle power consumption down to about 20 watts. And that other important thing: AMD is giving away a ton of games with this card.

Your $999 will also buy you copies of BioShock Infinite, Tomb Raider, Crysis 3, Far Cry 3, Far Cry 3 Blood Dragon, Hitman Absolution, Sleeping Dogs and Deus Ex Human Revolution. If spending a grand on a graphics card leaves you too poor to buy anything else for a month, at least you'll have plenty of games to play.

Toshiba is following in the footsteps of Apple's MacBook Pro with Retina and Google's Chromebook PIxel with a new crazy-high-DPI Ultrabook called the KIRAbook. The KIRAbook crams a 2560x1440 pixel resolution--the norm for today's 27-inch monitors--down into a 13.3-inch panel.

The Windows 8 Ultrabook will be available in touch and non-touch variants and weighs 2.6 pounds, which is impressively light--in fact, it's within spitting distance of the 11-inch MacBook Air's 2.38 pounds. TheNextWeb reports that the KIRAbook will ship with a 256GB SSD, 8GB of RAM and a choice between an i5 and an i7 processor.

Toshiba's press release brags that the Ultrabook's body is constructed from magnesium alloy much stronger than aluminum alloy, and that "a high-capacity Li-Polymer battery is incorporated to let users work unplugged throughout the day." Tests will prove whether the laptop can actually last all day. The KIRAbook is running on Intel's third-generation Core i platform (Ivy Bridge) rather than Haswell, launching later this year, which is expected to deliver major year-over-year improvements to battery life.

The entry-level KIRAbook will cost $1600. Step-up models (upgrading to that i7 processor, adding touch capability) will top out at $2000. Even at $1600, the KIRAbook costs far more than the $1000 price point Intel hoped to maintain for the Ultrabook category. In fact, it's $100 more expensive than Apple's $1500 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina and $300 more than the Chromebook Pixel. Google's laptop offers less bang-for-your-buck, however, with a limited 32GB of storage and runs Chrome OS rather than the more powerful Windows.

It’s been years since I’ve recommended using a sound card in a PC, except for certain niche cases. That doesn’t mean I didn’t use them, just that I didn’t think they were necessary for most users. This stance started with Windows Vista, which is when Microsoft decided to support only software audio, seemingly relegating hardware accelerated Windows sound to the scrapheap of technological history. The ostensible reason was support calls–at one point, Microsoft suggested that over 40% of their support calls for Windows XP were sound card related.

So the sound card faded away, albeit slowly. Creative Labs, the largest manufacturer of sound cards, soldiered on. They were still building their X-Fi cards, but putting a stronger emphasis on OEM deals, speakers, headsets and other gear. Most of the systems I’ve built in recent years lack sound cards, but the current crop of motherboard-integrated codecs aren’t perfect either. Anyone who has struggled with weird audio issues (mostly revolving around Realtek's audio codecs) knows what I mean.

Then I noticed something: the sound card was making a comeback.

It began with Taiwan’s Asustek, well known for its vast array of motherboard products. Asus began shipping a line of cards under the Xonar brand name. While some of the products were low cost cards, most were pretty pricey. I used a Xonar Xense for nearly a year, mostly because it came with a nice Sennheisser analog headset that I still use.

Sound Cards Go Upscale

You can still buy relatively inexpensive sound cards, but the only reason you ever should buy a cheap sound card is if the hardware codec on your motherboard dies. The real reason to buy a discrete sound card today is to improve the overall audio quality. In fact, the new generation of sound cards are designed to appeal to audiophiles, with features like high signal-to-noise ratios, replaceable op-amps and high end DACs (digital-to-analog converters.)

Photo credit: Flickr user psygeist via Creative Commons.

I’ve been testing two high end sound cards, the latest Asus Xonar Essence STX and the new Creative Labs Sound Blaster ZXR. They both have insanely high signal-to-noise ratios. Both claim a 124 dBA S/N ratio, extremely low distortion levels and flat frequency response out beyond the range of human hearing. Asus even supplies a test report inside the box.

Both cards are PCI Express x1 cards that plug into any available PCIe slot. The Asus card requires a dedicated power connector, while the Creative card does not. Here's what I found.

Welcome back, deep divers. Last week, we talked about air and liquid cooling options for your PC. This time we'll dig a little deeper into all-in-one liquid cooling loops, the middle ground between air coolers and fully custom liquid cooling loops.

I mentioned that a good liquid-cooling loop will have better performance than all but the best air coolers, but Tested member Sweetz brings up an excellent point:

The thing about the closed loop coolers is that they have smaller thermal range and nonlinear cooling performance as compared to air coolers. Meaning that at CPU idle, when not stressed, they'll generally produce higher temperatures than competitive air coolers. However, when stressed, they can produce lower temps than the same air coolers that outperformed them at idle - again because they have a different thermal performance curve vs air coolers. You have to get used to this quirk when comparing them to air coolers. Ultimately, I believe lower highs are better than lower lows.

Large radiators do allow lower fan speeds than the entry level models, but the entry level models already allow lower fan speeds than many air coolers in the same price range. Given that air coolers in the same price range is what they'll be shopped against, I'm not sure I see their noise levels vs larger, more expensive water cooling systems as an argument for not buying the entry level models.

Choosing a cooler has a lot to do with your specific case. The all-in-ones with the best performance also have the most radiator area, and they won't necessarily work with every case. If you're building a new computer, of course, you get to choose a case and cooler at the same time, so make sure they're compatible.

Let's dive even deeper into the world of all-in-one coolers and discuss the nuances of radiator placement and airflow.

There's something important you should know about wireless range extenders before you buy one: they're not very good. If there are dead zones in your house where Wi-Fi signals can't reach, there are better ways to improve your coverage than Wi-FI extenders. But if you're set on one, the Netgear WN2500RP is the least bad.

You probably shouldn't buy an extender. The first thing you should try is moving your router to a central location in your house, if possible. Better placement may solve all your problems. If that doesn't work and the router you have is a few years old, I recommend getting a new one like the ASUS RT-N56u or the ASUS RT-N66u, our top picks. I'll explain why, and lay out all the alternatives to a wireless extender that I think will work better for you. After the explanation, if you still decide you need a Wi-Fi Extender, I'll tell you why the Netgear WN2500RP is the one I'd get.

Briefly: The Problem with Wi-Fi Extenders

Wi-Fi extenders (sometimes called wireless repeaters) seem like the obvious choice for helping a wireless router cover an entire house with Internet access. Essentially, they pick up a wireless signal just like your tablet or laptop, then rebroadcast that signal, giving you a second access point to connect to. But there's a big problem with that, which kind of cripples the functionality of extenders. Networking expert Tim Higgins wrote this about extenders on SmallNetBuilder in 2011:

"No matter what they are called or technology they use, repeaters start out with a minimum 50% throughput loss. The reason is that a repeater must receive, then retransmit each packet using the same radio on the same channel and with the same SSID. If the repeater is very efficient, then your loss will be close to 50%. But if it's not, throughput loss can be higher."

Thanks to that 50% loss in bandwidth right off the top, just about all wireless extenders suck.

Thanks to that 50% loss in bandwidth right off the top, just about all wireless extenders suck. But the technology has gotten a little better in the past year. If you have to get a Wi-Fi extender, it should be the $80 Netgear WN2500RP, which has a dual-band 2.4GHz and 5GHz radio. The extender can use one frequency to communicate with a router and another frequency to communicate with client devices, which bypasses that 50% hit to bandwidth.

Even so, a Wi-Fi extender is the last thing you should buy to improve your wireless network. The simple truth is that there are two better alternatives to consider first:

Thunderbolt is about to get much faster. Intel's high-speed USB 3.0 competitor is already the data fastest connection around in consumer computers--it supports 10 Gbps transfers on both input and output--but Intel is ready to bump that up. The company announced the next Thunderbolt spec at the NAB show in Las Vegas on Monday, doubling Thunderbolt's bi-directional data rate to 20 Gbps each way. That means potential throughput of 40 gigabits per second, though real-world transfer speeds are almost always lower than the theoretical maximums. And it's backwards compatible with existing Thunderbolt ports at existing speeds.

Photo credit: Flickr user lemonpixel via Creative Commons

The bad news: products supporting the new Thunderbolt spec won't be released until 2014. In the meantime, Intel plans to release new controllers alongside its upcoming Haswell processors and accompanying chipsets, which will deliver DisplayPort 1.2 support. With DisplayPort 1.2 comes support for 4K monitors.

Maximum PC ran a comparison of Thunderbolt and USB 3.0 back in January and found Thunderbolt to be the performance winner; in one benchmark using four SSDs set in RAID 0, it managed transfers of over 900 megabytes per second--about 7.3 gigabits. For most Thunderbolt users, the speed of the spec isn't a limitation now, since hard drives and solid state drives can only read and write so fast. Anandtech points out that the 20Gbps bandwidth could be enough to make external GPUs with Thunderbolt connectors practical.

The controllers releasing in 2013 will lower power usage in addition to supporting DisplayPort 1.2. Ultimately, these changes don't do much to fix Thunderbolt's biggest problem. Adoption in the PC space is meager. Improving the spec and making it cheaper (ie. built into chipsets instead of required third-party controllers) and less power hungry does make it more attractive, at least--by the time the 2014 controller arrives, Mac users may not be the only ones using Thunderbolt.

PC building is a gateway drug. It starts out innocuously enough--picking out components, researching cases, hard drives, video cards, and so forth. And then you find out that you don't have to use the CPU cooler that came with your CPU--that there are aftermarket coolers that can make your CPU run even cooler, so you can overclock it more. And then next thing you know your credit card company is calling you to make sure you really meant to buy $200 worth of MOSFET and southbridge waterblocks from Slovenia.

So what is water cooling? How does it compare to air cooling? Is it even necessary?

Photo credit: Flickr user azwolskiart via Creative Commons

First, let's cover the basics. Electronics turn energy into calculations, and the byproduct is heat. The hotter your processor, the worse it performs--modern CPUs will clock themselves down and finally shut off before they damage themselves, but in the old days it was easy to fry your CPU by running too hot. You can increase the performance of your CPU (and your RAM, and your GPU) by overclocking and overvolting, but that requires more energy, and thus puts out more heat. Basically: the better you cool your components, the better they'll perform and the longer they'll last.

If you recall from thermodynamics lectures, heat likes to equilibrate. So if you put something with the capacity to absorb heat next to something that is hot, and as long as there's some way for heat to transfer between them, the hot thing cools down and the cool thing warms up until they reach equilibrium.

All CPU coolers work in the same basic way: A heatsink, usually made of copper, but sometimes aluminum or nickel, sits atop the CPU's heat spreader (that's the square metal plate on top of your CPU). A thin layer of thermally conductive paste also sits between the CPU heat spreader and the heatsink, to smooth out the microscopic gaps between the two metal surfaces and provide as much heat transfer as possible. On an air cooler, the heatsink has special heat pipes attached within it or on top of it. The pipes themselves are filled with a fluid that vaporizes as it heats up and rises to the end of the heat pipes, which are usually festooned with thin aluminum or copper heat fins. These fins provide as much surface area as possible. A fan (or several) provides a steady stream of cool air over these fins, and as heat transfers from the fins to the air, the air heats up and the fins cool down. The fins cool, the heat pipes cool, the heatsink cools, and presto, the CPU cools.

Photo credit: Flickr user marx0r via Creative Commons

In a liquid cooler, liquid flows through channels carved directly into the top of the heat sink, and is pumped away from the CPU toward a radiator (which actually cools via convection). The radiator has a fan (or several fans) that constantly blow over its fins, heating the air and cooling the fins. The fins cool the radiator, which cools the water, which is constantly circulating through the loop and keeping the CPU cool. Whew.

In our most recent PC build, we emphasized size and acoustics when choosing components, and it turned out that we didn't have to sacrifice performance to build a powerful PC that didn't look like a giant monolith. The Bitfenix Prodigy case we chose was just the right size to house a GeForce GTX Titan, but we know that many builders using Mini-ITX motherboards won't have cases that are as accommodating. For smaller cases, Asus's new GeForce GTX 670 DirectCU Mini is worth looking at, given its extremely small size.

The card is just 6.7 inches long (17cm), which is a full 4 inches shorter than Asus's previous GTX 670 DC2. For comparison, the Titan we used was 10.5 inches long, and the largest videocard I've ever tested was AMD's 6990 dual-GPU card, which was a full foot long. Asus's new GTX 670 Mini still takes up two PCI slots and requires an eight-pin PCI-E power connector, and is clocked at 928MHz with 2GB of GDDR5 ram. GTX 670 class cards are a good sweet spot for high-end gaming PCs, and this is the smallest I've seen one (previous small GPUs topped out at the 660 Ti, like Zotac's 7-inch ZT-60802).

And if you're looking for a small case for a Mini-ITX build, we've got you covered too.

"The future is already here. It's just not very evenly distributed." - Sci-fi author William Gibson

This quote from Gibson--which he said in a 1999 NPR interview, though not for the first time--endures in popularity because it implies two exciting ideas. One, that with our Internet and our smartphones and scientific advances, we're living in a "future" sci-fi authors imagined in the 1980s. Two, that the future is a nebulous concept, rather than a sudden moment in time, that pops up in different parts of the world based on wealth and other socioeconomic factors. Even as the future as crept forward in fits and bursts, one of its most enduring icons--virtual reality--has stubbornly remained in the realm of fiction.

Until now. The Oculus Rift has arrived.

Oculus VR's head-mounted display fits into the first part Gibson's paradigm. It's a technology driven by sci-fi fantasies like Tron and The Matrix and Star Trek: The Next Generation, but in reality, head-mounted displays have been impossibly expensive and, in consumer models, pretty crappy, until the Oculus Rift. It's the right time for high-resolution displays and low-latency technology to deliver virtual reality into our present "future." But the Oculus Rift--and VR in general--also fit into the second part of that paradigm: Virtual reality is complicated, and it will be a long, long time until it's evenly distributed.

If there's anyone who knows exactly what it will take to overcome VR's complex challenges and hurry along its development, it's Michael Abrash. Abrash programmed Quake alongside John Carmack and has worked on games and graphics programming at Microsoft and other tech companies for more than 20 years. He's spent the past two years at Valve researching wearable computing. This is his thing. And at this year's Game Developer's Conference, Abrash talked to a packed room about why virtual reality is hard and where it's headed in the next few years.

In fact, Abrash and Carmack have both spoken and written extensively about VR in the past year; Carmack demonstrated an early Oculus Rift prototype running Doom 3 at E3 2012, and a few months back Abrash wrote a fascinating dive into the challenge of latency in virtual reality. In his 25 minute GDC talk, Abrash delved even further into the challenges and complexities of both VR and AR. By the end of Abrash's talk, it would be easy to look at the long list of deeply technical challenges he referenced as insurmountable obstacles. But he's a technical guy. These are problems to solve, and he's giddy to solve them. So let's get technical for a bit.

Anti-aliasing isn't always there for us when we need it. Jaggies are the enemy, and PC gaming typically arms us with a few ways to beat them back, smoothing out those harsh lines and minimizing that unsightly simmer. But sometimes even minimal anti-aliasing hits performance hard. Sometimes AA options can cause graphical glitches; temporal anti-aliasing offers clean lines in exchange for unsightly ghosting. And, worst of all, some games don't offer anti-aliasing options at all. There are often ways to force anti-aliasing in games, but there's another solution: Downsampling.

It's a simple concept. Downsampling involves running a game at a custom resolution higher than the native output resolution of your monitor. For example, if your monitor outputs a 1920x1080 image, downsampling would require telling a game to run at, say, 2560x1440. That's a total increase of 1.6 million pixels! When that 2560x1440 image is rescaled, or downsampled, to 1080p, the extra pixels help smooth out those jagged edges and produces a sharper, cleaner picture.

Image Credit: Kasra Korki

Downsampling is performance intensive, of course. A guide on Guru 3D elaborates that "the performance impact will be proportional to the increase in resolution or total number of pixels; however, graphics card memory may also need to be considered." The upside, though, is that downsampling "should provide image quality comparable to full screen antialiasing but with far less compatibility issues and in many cases higher performance." And if your graphics card is especially powerful, you can combine anti-aliasing with downsampling for even better image quality.

Downsampling PC games starts with setting up a custom resolution through an Nvidia or AMD control panel. Finding the right resolution--high enough to improve image quality, but not too high for the GPU to handle--takes some tweaking. The type of monitor you have, the bandwidth of the cable used to connect to it (DVI, DisplayPort, etc.), and your graphics card drivers can all affect how well downsampling will work on your machine. That all sounds like bad news, but the good news is better: finding out if you can downsample will only take about 10 minutes, and the resulting custom resolution should work in just about any PC game you play.

Image Credit: Kasra Korki

We've worked up separate guides to downsampling for AMD and Nvidia graphics cards and thrown in some additional links to longer walkthroughs and more information on different types of anti-aliasing. If you're inspired by some of the amazing screenshots downsampling enables, give it a shot.