Scorn, one of the weirdest games we've ever seen, will officially launch on the Xbox Series X and PC in 2021.

After years of development, Ebb Software finally has a release window for their ultra-freaky horror shooter Scorn. The game is pegged to launch sometime in 2021 on Series X/S consoles and PC, complete with 4K 60FPS performance on PC and the Series X. The hallowed FPS would make HR Giger and Beksinski proud, but it's skipping current-gen hardware (Xbox One, PS4) and also won't launch on Sony's next-gen PS5.

To celebrate the announcement, Ebb released a new gameplay trailer showcasing Scorn's fundamental gameplay elements. The core loop is shooter-survival based with puzzles peppered in, all set across one of the most authentically-bizarre backdrops in the games industry today. The gun itself transforms during gameplay and becomes a key while also being able to blast enemies. It's also organic and pulses with a kind of hidden life.

First McDonald's, now Sony is teaming up with famed rapper Travis Scott for a new PS5 ad campaign.

Travis Scott is now a strategic creative partner on the PlayStation brand, and to celebrate, Sony released a new ad that spoofs the old Maxell hi-fidelity commercials from the 1980s. You know the one where the seated man is almost blown away by the awesome audio power blasted out by towering speakers.

Sony didn't elaborate what this partnership will entail, but we should expect some Cactus Jack-branded accessories and content for the PlayStation 5 console. Maybe even a few custom faceplates, controllers, themes, and more. Expect Sony to push a ton of advertisements as it ramps up for the big holiday season centered around the PS5.

Typhoon Studios creative director Alex Hutchinson made some extremely controversial statements regarding streamers. Now the internet has lambasted him, and Google moves away from the dev's words.

According to Alex Hutchinson, who heads up creative direction for Google's Stadia Games and Entertainment branch, content creators should have to pay to stream games. The idea is streamers should have to pay a license fee in order to monetize streams of copywritten games. It's worth noting Hutchinson was creative director of Typhoon Games (who made Journey to the Savage Planet) before the studio was acquired by Google. Here's what Hutchinson said:

"Streamers worried about getting their content pulled because they used music they didn't pay for should be more worried by the fact that they're streaming games they didn't pay for as well. It's all gone as soon as publishers decide to enforce it."

You don't need to be an epidemiologist to be able to tell that the coronavirus situation in the United States is gradually getting worse.

Coronavirus infections in the US. over the last two weeks have increased by 32%, and now we are heading for the cooler months of the year, where it is expected to get a whole lot tougher. Public health experts are expecting surges as Americans begin to head indoors to escape the cold. As people head indoors, the transmission risk for the virus increases exponentially, hence experts expecting surges.

In a recent interview with NBC's Meet The Press, Dr. Osterholm, the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota said that the next 6 - 12 weeks "are going to be the darkest of the entire pandemic." At the moment, the new daily coronavirus cases in the US are sitting at around 60,000, Dr. Osterholm believes this number could increase to a much larger 67,000 to 75,000 cases. For more information on this story, check out this link here.

The new PUBG update for consoles is here giving Xbox One X and PlayStation 4 Pro owners a higher FPS gaming experience.

PUBG's new Console Update 9.1 has a nifty new 'Framerate Priority mode' that lifts the frame rate cap all the way up to 60FPS, and the resolution to 1080p. We could expect the new Framerate Priority mode pushing 1080p 60FPS on the base line consoles in the future, too.

"The Framerate Priority setting has some exciting changes this time around. The frame cap is now lifted to 60 FPS and the screen resolution will be set to 1920 x 1080 to increase framerates. The new Framerate Priority is available on Xbox One X and the PlayStation 4 Pro, and we are investigating ways to bring the lifted frame cap to other console devices as well. Stay tuned".

PNY is getting into the PCIe 4.0 SSD game. Today, the company revealed the XLR8 CS3040, a new line of high-speed M.2 NVMe Gen 4 x4 SSDs with up to 2TB of storage capacity and 5,600MB/s read speeds.

PNY's new XRL8 CS3040 SSDs support the latest NVMe Gen 4.0 protocol, enabling extreme data access speeds far faster than previously possible. PNY's new drives can deliver sequential reads up to 5,600MB/s and write data at up to 4,300MB/s. That's significantly faster than PCIe 3.0 drives are capable of.

PNY said the XLR8 CS3040 drives would be available in 500GB, 1TB, and 2TB variants. PNY is also offering each drive with or without a built-in heat sink. The heat sink version includes a 45-gram aluminum heat sink with eight fins for increased thermal dissipation.

Epic Games has just pushed out the new update for Fortnite introducing a bunch of Halloween-themed skins, and so much more. But the more important thing here is the file size on PC has been radically reduced.

Fortnite's new 14.40 patch weighs in at 27GB, but once PC gamers have installed the patch it will reduce the 90-100GB installation size down to a skimp 30GB in comparison. This is actually huge, which will also see PC gamers seeing Fortnite loading in much faster, too.

It doesn't compare to the 250GB ceiling that Call of Duty: Modern Warfare and Warzone on the PC.

Intel has announced that its new DG1 GPU is now shipping, and that it's (hopefully exciting) gaming-focused Intel Xe-HPG DG2 is currently being tested in Intel's own labs.

The new Intel DG1 -- or Iris Xe Max, is Intel's first discrete GPU in over 20 years. If you're an older geek like me you might remember the also much-hyped Intel i740 from the 1990s, well -- now DG1 is the first discrete GPU since then. Intel has also announced its next GPU will be called DG2.

The bigger news here is the new Intel DG2 discrete graphics, which is in alpha silicon form -- but Intel has said they've powered the new DG2 GPU up in their labs. Exciting times going into the end of the year.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) have just unveiled its next-gen LUMI supercomputer, which is powered by AMD's next-gen Zen 3-based EPYC processors and Radeon Instinct GPUs.

The new LUMI supercomputer will find its new home in Kajaani, Finland in 2021 -- and will be using the HPE Cray EX architecture to spin up 550 Petaflops of peak horsepower. The new LUMI supercomputer will be a part of EuroHPC's GPU-accelerated supercomputing platform powered by next-gen AMD CPUs and GPUs.

Forrest Norrod, senior vice president and general manager, data center and embedded systems group, AMD explains:

Facebook may be dealing with a design flaw in its Quest 2 Elite Strap design. Many people are reporting their upgraded head straps are already broken just a week after Facebook started shipping the product.

The new Oculus Quest 2 is getting a lot of attention right now. Tons of people have had their first experience with VR in the last week, game developers are setting incredible sales growth, and Quest 2 is moving faster than Facebook expected.

It's not all sunshine and rainbows surrounding the Quest 2 launch. It appears that some of the people who invested the most into the Quest 2 platform are getting a raw deal. Numerous reports of broken Elite Head Straps have popped up over the last few days. We counted no less than a dozen posts on Reddit in just the past 24 hours.

It looks like we're getting our first look at AMD's upcoming Radeon RX 6800 XT graphics card and its PCB for a custom variant.

We can see this is a prototype board with its GDDR6 modules missing, and the VRMs covered with a ridiculously huge heat sink -- this is far from retail, far from a consumer-focused graphics card. We should expect this to be a custom Radeon RX 6800 XT graphics card (powered by the Navi 21 XT GPU) or the lower-end Navi 21 XL-powered card.

We can see that it requires dual 8-pin PCIe power connectors, with more details arriving in less than a week when AMD reveals its new Radeon RX 6000 series in detail on October 28.

Puget Systems have built a new workstation to test out 4 x NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 graphics cards in a single system, with some impressive performance and eye-boggling power consumption.

NVIDIA's new GeForce RTX 3090 have NVLink support for 2-way multi-GPU goodness, but you can have many more cards if you're using benchmarks and software that don't support SLI technology. There's benchmarks like RedShift, Octane, V-Ray and many other software applications that don't use SLI but will benefit from many GPUs.

The system was built with 4 x GIGABYTE GeForce RTX 3090 TURBO graphics cards, rocking their blower-style coolers and their PCIe power connectors at the end of the card.

Sony reveals what streaming services and media apps will be available on the PS5 at launch.

In a recent PlayStation Blog post, Sony confirms the big apps that'll be ready for the PS5's November 12 launch. Big heavy hitters like HBO Max, Amazon Prime Video, and Hulu are noticeably absent from the list, but Sony says some of these are coming later.

The following apps will be pre-installed on the PlayStation 5's SSD in the new Media section:

Ontario native Shawn Moore is suing EA on behalf of himself and anyone else who purchased lootboxes in 60 of EA's live games from 2008 to the present day.

The new EA lawsuit goes into great length in detailing EA's monetization practices across some of its most popular franchises, from FIFA and Battlefield to Star Wars The Old Republic and even Dragon Age. The suit likens lootboxes to gambling, and affirms EA is taking part in unregulated gambling-like business that's predicated on compulsive habits.

The argument is that EA's lootboxes violate specific gambling laws, namely the Gaming Control Act included in Canada's Criminal Code. There's multiple counts, but the most damning allege EA has no safeguards in place to protect minors from lootbox purchases and engaging in psychological methods to push consumers to buy randomized in-game items.

The PS5's clean, concise, and functionally-layered UI is designed to give players more control over their gaming experiences. The next-gen PlayStation 5 will respect your time.

Sony recently showcased the PlayStation 5's UI and revealed lots of incremental improvements over the PS4. The next-gen UI is a general evolution over the PS4 in nearly every way. The home page has changed into the Control Center, and the interactive square panes are no longer limited to just games and apps.

Instead, the panes are layered kind of like a deck of cards. Each game has its own card stack. The cards allow gamers to do multiple things, from launching the game outright to tracking in-game adventures, or challenges, via the Activities section that unlock specific rewards.

BigBox VR's highly anticipated virtual reality battle royale game, Population: One, is available today on all platforms except PlayStation VR. This could be one of the biggest VR games of the year.

Population: One is a first-person battle royale game exclusively for virtual reality. The game features all the standard battle royale features, such as a bevy of weapons to scavenge, material resources that you need to collect, an open world to explore, and a map that grows smaller and smaller as time goes on. It even supports building structures like you can in Fortnite.

Population: One stands out from other battle royale games, aside from being a virtual reality game, because the combat primarily takes place in elevated positions. Population: One features BigBox VR's Vertical Combat System (VCS), which gives players the ability to reach the highest point of any structure on the map. If you can see it, you can get to it by climbing, flying, or building your way to it.

The Xbox Series X is a well-designed console with a robust cooling solution. Even with special hardware and software, the next-gen system will still get hot when playing demanding games.

According to latest thermal tests from Digital Foundry, the Xbox Series X can reach up to 62C temps when playing Gears 5 in specific sequences. It all depends on how much power is drawn. Thanks to Gears 5's dynamic resolution scaling, the GPU is pushed pretty hard to enable higher-end performance like native 4K with ray-traced visuals with graphics settings that go beyond PC Ultra settings. The more demanding the game is, the more power is drawn, and the more heat is produced.

In order to see how hot the Series X can get, Digital Foundry found a spot in Gears 5 that drew 205W of console power and measured temps with a FLIR camera app during the sequence. Knowing what we know about the Series X's pull-based airflow, the results aren't too surprising. The console pulls air from the bottom to exhaust from the top via a huge 130mm fan.

Gears 5 has been enhanced so much on Xbox Series X that it outperforms PC performance settings.

Gears 5 is among the major first-party games that will push the Series X to its limits. The game is capable of hitting 4K that goes beyond PC ultra settings, complete with ray-traced global illumination effects, higher-end shadows, and native 4K textures. Other optimizations include ultra-fast load times thanks to the PCIe 4.0 SSD, and massively reduced latency in campaign and mulitplayer via the new Dynamic Latency Input mode.

According to tests run by Digital Foundry, Gears 5 utilizes roughly 200W of the Xbox Series X's 315W PSU, accounting for about 63% of max power threshold. This ample power boost is used to push the GPU and other components to higher limits. The result is a PC-level experience from a $500 console.

Acer revealed a new laptop that is sure to pique the interest of sports car fans. The new Porsche Design Acer Book RS features cutting-edge components, including Intel's Evo platform with 11th gen Core processors. And as the name suggests, Porsche, the famous sports car brand, had a hand at designing it.

The new Porsche Design Acer Book RS features an all-metal chassis, a unibody hinge, with a carbon fibre cover. It also includes a 14-inch FHD IPS touchscreen made of antimicrobial Corning Gorilla Glass. The display supports 100% sRGB color and produces 340 nits of brightness.

The Porsche Design Acer Book RS will not crush any gaming records. The system is set up well for productivity, though, with the latest Intel Core processors and NVIDIA GeForce MX350 graphics. Acer Book RS computers come equipped with up to a 1TB of PCIe SSD.

Silicon Motion has just unveiled a new set of SSD controllers built on the PCIe 4.0 NVMe 1.4 SSD standard.

The new Silicon Motion SM2264 built for performance, the SM2267 for mainstream, and SM2267XT for value DRAM-less client SSDs. The new controllers, according to Silicon Motion, were built from the ground up with new hardware features, optimized to squeeze everything it can from the PCIe 4.0 interface.

Silicon Motion's flagship SM2264 SSD controller packs a quad-core ARM R8 processor on the 12nm node, with 4 x PCIe 4.0 lanes with 16Gb/s of bandwidth. It packs 8 NAND channels, with up to 1600MT/s per channel. We're to expect up to 7.4GB/sec (7400MB/sec) reads and up to 6.8GB/sec (6800MB/sec).