Technology - Google News

Google won't let you buy movies and TV shows from the Play app starting in May - The Verge

Posted: 23 Mar 2022 12:42 PM PDT

Google will no longer sell movies and TV shows from the Google Play app starting in May, the company announced (via Ars Technica). Instead, you'll be able to get movies and shows from the Google TV app.

"On Google TV, you will find the same experience you are used to on Google Play Movies & TV with the latest new releases, rentals, deals, and great recommendations for you," according to a company support page. Content you have already purchased will be available in the Google TV app, and you can use Play credit / gift cards to buy things there if you need.

Ultimately, this doesn't seem like too dramatic of a shift. However, this change and Google's decision to shut down Google Play Music in favor of YouTube Music could both indicate that Google is lessening its reliance on the Play brand as its storefront for digital goods. Google Play will still be your destination if you want to buy apps, games, and books — at least for now.

Apple also fractures sales of its content across different apps. Apps are in the App Store, music is in iTunes, movies and TV shows are in the Apple TV app, and books are in Apple Books.

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Forspoken dev says one-second game loads are now a tentative reality on PC - The Verge

Posted: 23 Mar 2022 06:10 PM PDT

Last Monday, Microsoft declared that DirectStorage would usher in "a new era of fast load times and detailed worlds in PC games." And while that now seems a little too grandiose, the developer of upcoming tech showcase game Forspoken now claims that one-second load times are legitimately in reach.

Speaking at a GDC 2022 presentation about the tech embedded in the PC version of the game, Luminous Productions technical director Teppei Ono says that the Square Enix title will actually load some scenes in one second flat, provided your Windows 11 PC has a NVMe SSD capable of over 5,000MB/sec reads.

That one-second load time is not the case for every scene, and he didn't actually show us any scenes load in that amount of time — instead, we saw cutscene and gameplay examples where Forspoken took 1.9 seconds, 1.7 seconds, and 2.2 seconds to get us there, thanks to the way DirectStorage offloads the streaming of graphical assets from the CPU to the GPU.

You might be wondering if that's substantially faster than games run without DirectStorage, and Ono admits the answer is actually no, not yet: while you'll definitely see a huge speed boost from an SSD over the magnetic spinning platters of a hard drive, and from an NVMe SSD over a slower SATA-based drive, the current implementation of DirectStorage in Forspoken is only removing one of the big I/O bottlenecks — others exist on the CPU.

And if you've been hoping that DirectStorage will bring enhanced performance with regular spinning hard drives, the answer is not yet: "HDDs are not delivering the anticipated result due to hardware performance limitations," says Ono.

But, says Ono, "I/O is no longer a bottleneck for loading times" — the data transfer speeds of DirectStorage are clearly faster for SSDs, and they could improve it in future if they figure out other CPU bottlenecks and take full advantage of GPU asset decompression.

Generally, he says, most PC games don't take anywhere near as much advantage of speedy NVMe SSD as Forspoken, claiming that most games have loading times of over 10 seconds. In my experience, the fastest load times I've seen were on Final Fantasy VII Remake Intergrade on a PS5, which can take just 10 seconds from the time you leave the PS5's home screen to the time you can move your character, four to five times faster than on PS4. It's not clear if Forspoken is counting from app launch to playable gameplay or not.

With Forspoken, Ono says they're using other techniques to speed up load times as well, such as loading the game in advance while you're on the title screen.

AMD also revealed today that Forspoken will support FidelityFX Super Resolution 2.0 temporal upscaling for higher effective resolutions or faster framerates, which the team says took less than a week to integrate into the game.

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