Gaming Technology

Gaming technology covers the consoles, PCs, engines and platforms games actually run on. Sony's PlayStation, Microsoft's Xbox and Nintendo's Switch remain the three console platforms; NVIDIA and AMD GPUs, plus cloud-streaming services, decide how demanding a game can look. Studios build on engines such as Unreal Engine and Unity rather than writing graphics code from scratch, so an engine update can ripple across hundreds of titles at once. Cross-platform play, VR headsets and esports broadcast infrastructure have all pushed gaming beyond a single living-room device. Gamescom in Cologne is the industry's largest public trade fair for this hardware-and-software pipeline, where publishers and hardware makers show what ships next.