Here's the official YouTube video of the full CitizenCon presentation:

Here's me playing Star Citizen in 4K 60 fps:

I also frequent gaming forums like IGN, GameSpot and NeoGAF. Do you know that GameSpot has a subforum named System Wars? It's even the most frequented one there. One would think this has to be a very successful game, System Wars sounds very similar to Star Wars, so could be a space game. But when you enter that forum you notice very fast that other systems are at war there. There fight modern gaming crusaders under the banner of gaming systems. PlayStation is killing the Xbox, and Xbox is slaughtering the PC. Nintendo they don't even take seriously anymore.

IGN is not much different and NeoGAF is more the place of the backstabby passive-aggressive diplomat type that hopes to lure the enemy over to his side with a well informed opinion.

What are the weapons of these modern crusaders, the system warriors. Metascores, game previews and technical analysis a la Digital Foundry. And of course a lot of name calling, which former Microsoft man Adam Orth can say a word or two about. The words toxicity and troll are often associated with these system war arenas. The word fun is not often used there, could it be that you can't fight with something that you don't have?

Let me now come to the professional game reviewers, and I call most of them that way because they are paid for that. Do they turn which way the wind blows? Bam, I started with the hammer.

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Just so it happened that, regardless of bad Metascore, some Xbox One gamers picked up Ryse, and surprise surprise, it was fun. Mind you, many first simply didn't dare to write fun, but used adjectives like guilty pleasure and mindless fun to not get flamed. Some admitted completing the game multiple times in contrast to some games that got glowing reviews. On the higher difficulties the game also required strategy to survive. And surprise, the combat system was more realistic than other so called hack and slash games a la God of War, and even the Dark Souls combat looks somewhat crude in execution when you compare it.

Luckily many more gamers dared not to listen to reviews and discovered that Ryse is a lot of fun. Simply poking at the Amazon game reviews you see that people have a lot of fun with the game and the game is very popular among the gamers who bought it at the Xbox One digital store. Some gamers ask themselves what were the reviewers smoking when they played Ryse, or if they even played it at all.

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Should professional game critics ask themselves if they have fun gaming? Should you play video games because well it's a habit, who needs fun? Everyone has to answer these questions for himself. I know that if I want the mystery of new games to return I should stop looking for reviews, previews, yes even stop peeking at the final scores. And fun is not what I'll find in gaming forums, well sometimes it can be fun, but for the wrong reasons.

More at: www.onlivespot.com/2014/03/have-professional-reviewers.html

Did I mention Linux? Isn't SteamOS based on a Linux distro? It's not hard to guess what's coming now. Yeah, NVIDIA is working on SteamOS consoles, with the most powerful of them packing the 16 Denver cores toting Maxwell beast, the ultimate NVIDIA console SoC. The color scheme of NVIDIA's consoles is pretty much guaranteed to be black and green. The name of the new consoles is not yet decided, I don't think they will be called Shield, or will they?

Not only that, NVIDIA intends their SteamOS consoles to be reference platforms for other manufacturers who want to get into the console business the cheap way, just like the NVIDIA Tegra Note 7 and the NVIDIA Shield.

So just what is the 16 Denver cores toting Maxwell beast capable of? My source told me one number, 1 Million draw calls in DirectX 11 and OpenGL 4.4. Just for reference, AMD claims that their upcoming low-level API Mantle will be able to issue up to 150,000 draw calls. Presumably NVIDIA's new hardware beast will be able to obliterate AMD's Mantle API, and this with no code changes required by game developers as it will all be done in hardware.

You ask yourself what game developer would need so many draw calls? This is the maximum number of draw calls that the 16 Denver cores enable, but they can be used for much more. NVIDIA is working on integrating the Denver CPU cores into their GameWorks code library that game developers can integrate freely into their games. They are porting the library to OpenGL and SteamOS.

So what can NVIDIA's new GameWorks library with Denver support do for game developers? For instance realistic physicalization of the whole game world or parts of it with the flick of a switch, including fluids, gases and particles. Advanced ray tracing algorithms. Advanced AI. Advanced data compression algorithms. Advanced adaptable LOD generation and tessellation. Advanced global illumination. Advanced streaming of assets for open world games. Sound processing on the level of AMD's TrueAudio, but programmable. The list goes on and on.

More info is at: www.onlivespot.com/2014/01/nvidia-maxwell-steamos-machine-with-up.html

From the very same Digital Foundry article: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-vs-ryse-son-of-rome

Ryse also makes heavy use of high-quality bokeh depth-of-field, variable film grain and both object and camera-based motion blur - all of which contribute to its film-like presentation while simultaneously enhancing the fluidity of its variable frame-rate. The end result is a stable image that is arguably cleaner and more pleasing to the eye than any other title available on Xbox One, including native 1080p titles such as Forza Motorsport 5.

Some passable quality screenshots of Ryse that show the amazing lighting and anti-aliasing. It's really approaching CG movie quality.

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All cutscenes of Ryse put together as an epic swords and sandals movie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-e1MQnh3V0

The game looks unbelievable on an HDTV, yes it really is the first game that occasionally looks like a movie even during realtime gameplay. Looks like we are coming close to the fulfillment of the age old fantasy of gamers that games will look like movies.

I won't bother with posting screenshots and videos, saving the Sony fanboys from getting a boner from the horribly compressed YouTube videos and pictures;) Even the screenshots on Digital Foundry don't do the game justice, not even remotely, I guess they are from a compressed video. I guess with games like Ryse which have so much intricate detail, we really need lossless video and picture capture, even the high bitrate encodes from Gamersyde and Digital Foundry don't even remotely do the game justice.

Yeah, as Digital Foundry summarized at the end, if you really want a taste of what we can expect from the next generation of consoles, Ryse towers over the rest.

Even the screenshots on Digital Foundry don't do the game justice, not even remotely, I guess they are from a compressed video. The game looks unbelievable on an HDTV, yes it really is the first game that occasionally looks like a movie.

I guess with games like Ryse which have so much intricate detail, we really need lossless video and picture capture.

Well, you can always see it from a different angle. What if people really like the game and don't want others to miss out on it because the reviewers were simply in a rush and scored it badly.

If you really want to make a fair comparison you would have to include native quality pictures from Ryse. I guess the pictures from Ryse are from gameplay video captured from the Xbox One or even from Youtube videos as you can't take pictures on the Xbox One. The pictures look horribly compressed and don't even come close to how Ryse really looks on an HDTV.