I have been writing about video games full time for nearly seven years now, and I don't know if I've ever experienced a month like this past one before. Not to complain about playing and reviewing games for a living, but wow this has been intense. I started with 30 hours of Horizon Zero Dawn in a week in order to write that review. Then, my Switch arrived, and I sunk about 80 hours in Zelda: Breath of the Wild, which I wasn't reviewing, but wanted to play and write about constantly all the same since it's arguably one of the best games ever made. And I only put that game down when my review copy of Mass Effect: Andromeda showed up, and to hit that embargo, I put in 60 hours in six days.

When it comes to performance, most people think that Radeon graphics cards hold an edge over Nvidia's GeForce army in DirectX 12 games on account of the dedicated asynchronous shaders lurking inside AMD's hardware. That's never been the universal truth that some people think it is--async compute is just one, not-always-utilized feature of DX12--and today Nvidia's busting the myth even more with a driver update designed to supercharge GeForce performance in DirectX 12 games. "By refining the code in our own driver, and working side-by-side with game developers, Nvidia has delivered performance increases by an average of 16% across DirectX 12 titles," senior PR manager Brian Burke said in a press release. The stated performance increases in Hitman and Rise of the Tomb Raider are the sort of massive leaps you'd normally see by upgrading your graphics card, say, from the GeForce GTX 1080 to the ferocious new GTX 1080 Ti. Speaking of which, the DirectX 12 improvements were present in the review drivers Nvidia sent to the press for GTX 1080 Ti testing.

Bolivia may be one of the cocaine capitals of the world – but don't you dare call it a narco state. The Bolivian government complained to France after a French video game publisher, Ubisoft, developed a game that highly offended the South American nation. The popular game, "Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Wildlands," revolves around a Mexican drug cartel that controls Bolivia and has turned the country into a violent narco-state. The game is set to be officially launched next week, but the game's beta version has already been downloaded by 6.8 million users. Bolivian Interior Minister Carlos Romero said the Andean nation delivered a letter to the French ambassador earlier this week and asked French officials to intervene.

Ghost Recon: Wildlands comes out next week. I know, I almost forgot about it too. But if an open world filled with guns, high-speed chases and sniping over huge distances in Bolivia is more your speed than robotic dinosaurs or some random game with a princess, you might be interested to know what Wildlands has in store after launch. You know, for when you've long since finished its campaign and dominated the competition on the packed-in multiplayer maps. First up: there's a season pass because this is a modern video game being released by a major publisher.

On tap are at least four previously announced games, but there could be some room to address the future of "Assassin's Creed." The Ubisoft E3 2016 live stream begins at 1 p.m. PDT (4 p.m. EDT). After a rocky 2015 that saw the slumping sales of "Assassin's Creed" and the modest start to "Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege," 2016 has been a massive success for Ubisoft. "Far Cry Primal" was a surprise hit, but it's hard to have any video game conversation without talking about "The Division," which had the biggest first week for a new game franchise, with 330 million in sales. Despite a rough patch of glitches and cheating, there's a dedicated audience for the third-person shooter.