Yes, Gamescom 2017 is done already and it would be fair to say that Microsoft took a lot of press time with their Age of Empires IV announcement. This does not mean others were quiet, and indeed we missed what NVIDIA was up to until recently. They held a pre-event show where developers from the most popular games today- PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, Destiny 2, Middle Earth: Shadow of War, and Final Fantasy XV Windows Edition- presented new feature trailers (in 4K, of course) supporting NVIDIA's GameWorks technology.

In addition, there were hands-on sessions available with some other upcoming game releases including Pro Evolution Soccer 2018, Forza Motorsport 7, Need for Speed Payback, Project Cars 2 and the recently released Lawbreakers. These games came with some GameWorks announcements as applicable as well.The developers of the wildly popular PlayerUnknown's BattleGrounds (PUBG) took to the stage to announce support for NVIDIA's ShadowPlay Highlights, which in turn was announced earlier this year. Developer integration of ShadowPlay Highlights is only now taking off, but the addition of PUBG- a game that briefly held the top spot on steam for number of concurrent players- will definitely get it a lot of attention and usage alike.

NVIDIA said, and I quote, "This new NVIDIA technology automatically captures your best PUBG moments. So now, when you get kills, die, win a match, or knockout yourself or your enemies, ShadowPlay Highlights will automatically save a gameplay clip that you can quickly edit before uploading to your favorite sites and services." NVIDIA announced a highlights contest where the prizes include a GeForce GTX 1080 Ti, with more details to be found here. In addition, the latest PUBG patch brought support for HBAO+ as an ambient occlusion technique, and you can find some comparison images with and without at this link.

Destiny 2's Open Beta on PC is live now, and you can take a look at our PC port performance testingif you are so inclined. The results indicate NVIDIA has been hard at work bringing GameWorks support here, and the developers reaffirmed the partnership announcing the return of the Destiny 2 game bundle with the purchase of applicable GeForce GTX 1080 and 1080 Ti cards. In addition, people who redeem this offer now, or even those having done so earlier in June, will also receive three in-game pre-order incentives at the game's launch while supplies last: the Coldheart Exotic Rifle, the Kill Tracker Ghost, and the Salute emote. Finally, Destiny 2 on PC will support HDR, as well as NVIDIA SLI, at launch.

Middle Earth: Shadow of War decided they wanted a piece of the action as well, and NVIDIA announced they are working with Monolith Productions to bring HDR and NVIDIA SLI support for the upcoming PC release. The game will also support NVIDIA Ansel, examples of which are available to view online here.

Square Enix next came up to announce Final Fantasy XV on Windows will support a plethora of NVIDIA GameWorks library visual effects, and features including Ansel, ShadowPlay Highlights and extended GeForce Experience support which was not expanded upon at this time. The GameWorks effects used in the game include NVIDIA Flow, NVIDIA HairWorks, NVIDIA Hybrid Frustum Traced Shadows, NVIDIA Turf Effects, and NVIDIA Voxel Ambient Occlusion. More information on these implementations can be found here.

Developer and game history aside, Konami also participated at the event and announced NVIDIA Ansel support. As with other supporting games, one would thus be able to capture 360° panoramas that can then be viewed in VR, mobile displays or, of course, your desktop. NVIDIA confirmed a game-ready driver is in the works, and provided some Ansel images to take a look at here.With 25 games already supporting, or announced support for, NVIDIA Ansel, the technology itself received a feature update as well called AI Style Transfer. The process involves finding a painting (or any digital image, really), framing the shot in Ansel and then applying the style transfer which in turn uses neural networks to identify the various object classes in both, and applies the style to the shot thus creating a more personalized capture. NVIDIA mentioned that AI Style Transfer was built with processing speed in mind, so you will be able to see the final stylized image during final camera adjustments itself. As an example, NVIDIA used a scene from Ark: Survival Evolved with the results seen above. More details on Ansel with AI Style Transfer will be announced soon.