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Pimax VR Experience gives you control of your headset from inside VR
Pimax recently revealed that it's building a virtual environment called Pimax VR Experience that would allow you to control headset settings and launch VR content without taking the headset off. The software just entered public beta, and if you have a Pimax 5K or 8K headset, you can try it today.
The Pimax VR Experience is a virtual environment that allows you to control the PiTool headset driver settings and launch content from any VR platform from within VR. The software is reminiscent of the SteamVR when you disable the SteamVR home environment.
Pimax VR Experience gives you instant access to many of the headset's settings, such as FOV adjustment, refresh rate, resolution supersampling, and display brightness. It also gives you access to your entire VR content library. Pimax VR Experience taps into SteamVR, Oculus, VivePort and ReVive libraries to bring all your content into one easy-to-access location.
Continue reading: Pimax VR Experience gives you control of your headset from inside VR (full post)
AMD Ryzen 9 5900X: 12C/24T CPU on Zen 3 at up to 5GHz with 150W TDP
AMD is about to unveil its next-gen Zen 3 architecture on October 8, but before then we have some juicy leaks to go over regarding the Ryzen 9 5900X processor.
AMD's new purported Ryzen 9 5900X will be the new flagship 'Vermeer' desktop CPU in the new Zen 3-based Ryzen 5000 range of CPUs. The new Ryzen 9 5900X will reportedly pack 12 cores and 24 threads at up to 5GHz with an IPC improvement of up to 20%.
We should see boost clocks reaching 5GHz from AMD this time around, where we saw them get close with 4.7GHz on the Ryzen 9 3900XT and 4.6GHz on the Ryzen 9 3900X. We are being told to expect a higher TDP, with up to 150W on the Ryzen 9 5900X -- up from the 105W on the Ryzen 9 3900X.
Continue reading: AMD Ryzen 9 5900X: 12C/24T CPU on Zen 3 at up to 5GHz with 150W TDP (full post)
Prep for PlayStation 5 with 1 year of PS Plus for just $30
Picking up a PlayStation 5 this holiday season? You may want to re-up on PlayStation Plus, and now's the perfect time.
CDKeys is currently selling PS Plus subscriptions for just $30, which is about 50% off of MSRP. It's a great value if you're buying a next-gen PS5 this year: Not only do you get the free monthly PS Plus games on PS4, which should be backward compatible with the PS5, but you get access to a pool of some of the best PS4 games ever made with the new PS Plus Collection.
The PS Plus Collection adds lots of value to the subscription for PS5 users. It's a new free add-on to PS Plus that's exclusive to PS5 gamers and includes access to 18 high-profile PS4 games, including Bloodborne, God of War, Monster Hunter World, Final Fantasy XV, Persona 5, and Uncharted 4.
Continue reading: Prep for PlayStation 5 with 1 year of PS Plus for just $30 (full post)
Tekken franchise hits 50 million copies sold, beats Street Fighter
Tekken franchise sales have now beat Street Fighter on all platforms, Bandai Namco confirms.
The Tekken franchise has now sold over 50 million copies worldwide since 1995, Bandai Namco's Katsuhiro Harada recently announced. This number shows Tekken is the king of fighters and beats Street Fighter's total 45 million sales. The Tekken series has had many less releases than Street Fighter, too, with about 14 mainline releases on consoles and PC since inception.
Harada also announced Tekken 7 has sold 6 million copies since its launch in 2017. The fighting game is still going strong and received its latest DLC pack, which includes Kunimitsu and another mystery character, as well as a massive free update that adds in new moves for every fighter.
Continue reading: Tekken franchise hits 50 million copies sold, beats Street Fighter (full post)
Final Fantasy XVI will be a mature game that earns PEGI 18 rating
Final Fantasy XVI's debut trailer showed lots of bloodshed, chaos, and a brutal beheading in front of a child. So it's only natural it's rated mature.
New promo materials show Final Fantasy XVI has been provisionally rated PEGI 18, a rating that's typically reserved for more visceral and violent experiences. The trailer is rife with blood and mayhem, showing beheadings, battlefield slayings, and ends with the phrase "I'll kill you if it's the last thing I do." Obviously it's going to be a mature game.
This will be among the first PEGI 18 rated games since Final Fantasy Type-O HD, another dramatic game in the series.
Continue reading: Final Fantasy XVI will be a mature game that earns PEGI 18 rating (full post)
Ring's new security camera is a drone, will fly around your house
Ring has unveiled its new Always Home Cam, a new autonomous drone that will lift up from its dock and fly around your house in case someone breaks in -- recording it all on-the-fly. Check it out:
The new Always Home Cam can be remotely enabled, and fly around your house when you're out and about -- and once it's done it will fly back and float down into its dock to recharge.
Ring will be selling its new Always Home Cam for $249, and will ship it next year. It all seems like it's out of an episode of Black Mirror, with Ring founder and "chief inventor" Jamie Siminoff explaining that the company spent 2 years developing the Always Home Cam saying that it was an "obvious product that was very hard to build".
Continue reading: Ring's new security camera is a drone, will fly around your house (full post)
New leaks give us a first look at Bethesda's new Starfield game
Starfield has been in development for a long time, Todd Howard says, and Bethesda has kept the game mostly under wraps. New supposed leaked screenshots may give us a first glimpse at this mysterious space adventure.
Starfield is Bethesda's first new IP in 25 years and is one of the "big and crazy projects" the studio teased in 2016. Details are sparse. We know it's a singleplayer-only "space epic" and that Bethesda consulted with SpaceX's Elon Musk while making it. It's also had a long dev cycle.
If these new leaked screenshots are accurate, we have our first glimpse at an older 2018 build of Starfield. There's not a whole lot to see; just a third-person view, a basic stamina/HP bar, and an astronaut on the side of a ship--likely our own personal interstellar cruiser. The HUD is pretty interesting though, and shows oxygen levels, distance/elevation, what appears to be a radar, and phases of the moon. It could be fake but the insignia on the astro's shoulder matches the curious Constellation logo on the bottom left of the Starfield teaser trailer.
Continue reading: New leaks give us a first look at Bethesda's new Starfield game (full post)
If these new AMD Big Navi leaks are true, the RTX 3080 will destroy it
The entire GPU market is really out of whack right now, it's kinda unbelievable -- between a mountain of work to get the GeForce RTX 3080 and RTX 3090 reviews up -- while keeping up with all of the rumors from both sides is exhausting for everyone.
Well, now we have yet another Big Navi rumor that seems to paint the card in a not-so-great light. It seems that some pieces of the Big Navi puzzle are coming together with specs on the Navi 21-based Big Navi aka Sienna Cichlid.
Navi 21 will reportedly pack up to 80 compute units (CUs) where we should see 5120 stream processors, with a Navi 21A variant at 2050MHz while there will also reportedly be a Navi 21B at up to 2200MHz. The higher-end Navi 21B at 2200MHz would result in shader performance of around 22.5 TFLOPs -- which means it'll lose in a big way against NVIDIA's new GeForce RTX 3080 which has 29.8 TLFOPs.
Continue reading: If these new AMD Big Navi leaks are true, the RTX 3080 will destroy it (full post)
GeForce RTX 3060 Ti teased with 8GB of GDDR6, launches after RTX 3070
NVIDIA launched the GeForce RTX 3080 just over a week ago now, and the GeForce RTX 3090 a few days ago -- while the GeForce RTX 3070 launches next month, we're now hearing the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti is right behind it.
According to our friends at VideoCardz, the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti is launching soon with 8GB of GDDR6 memory. It will be using the Ampere GA104-200 GPU with 4864 CUDA cores (compared to 5888 CUDA cores on the RTX 3070).
The 8GB of GDDR6 on the GeForce RTX 3060 Ti is reportedly clocked at 14Gbps on a 256-bit memory bus, with 448GB/sec of memory bandwidth. The reference board for the RTX 3060 Ti is at 180W or so, while custom boards are rated at up to 200W.
Continue reading: GeForce RTX 3060 Ti teased with 8GB of GDDR6, launches after RTX 3070 (full post)
GAINWARD's new Steampunk-styled GeForce RTX 30 series cards revealed
GAINWARD has just officially launched its new GeForce RTX 3090 and GeForce RTX 3080 Phantom series graphics cards, with an interesting style that actually looks great.
It seems GAINWARD will have 4 different models of its new RTX 30 series Phantom cards, with the GS (Golden Sample) being the best with the highest GPU boost clocks and highest TDP. They will use the same cooler as the other cards, but feature different PCBs.
All of the new cards will use 3 x 8-pin PCIe power connectors, with the highest-end GAINWARD GeForce RTX 3090 "GS" graphics card rocking a 420W TDP with boost GPU clocks of up to 1845MHz.
Continue reading: GAINWARD's new Steampunk-styled GeForce RTX 30 series cards revealed (full post)
Newegg is shipping EVGA GeForce RTX 3080 unboxed, with physical damage
I don't know how I'd feel if I opened up the box to my newly-ordered, highly-anticipated EVGA GeForce RTX 3080 graphics card from Newegg to see it in the box, out of its retail packaging.
But this is what some gamers are experiencing, with Reddit posts showing that some people have been getting their new EVGA GeForce RTX 3080 graphics card from Newegg and it was in a box, but out of its retail packaging.
Not just that, but some of the cards were even physically damaged.
Continue reading: Newegg is shipping EVGA GeForce RTX 3080 unboxed, with physical damage (full post)
EVGA GeForce RTX 3090 KINGPIN overclocked to 2.58GHz on LN2 cooling
EVGA's upcoming GeForce RTX 3090 KINGPIN graphics card has been used Vince "KINGPIN" Lucido himself to utterly destroy the 3DMark Park Royal world record.
The new EVGA GeForce RTX 3090 KINGPIN graphics card will be using what looks to be the same (but I'm sure upgraded) cooler -- but the legendary OC specialist himself Vince 'Kingpin' Lucido used LN2 cooling to push the RTX 3090 KINGPIN graphics card to a huge 2.58GHz.
The previous record for 3DMark Port Royal and its Hall of Fame was from 'vmanuelgm' with a score of 14674, but KINGPIN blew that out of the water with 16673 and the LN2 cooled RTX 3090 KINGPIN graphics card. He used an Intel Core i9-10900KF processor alongside the RTX 3090 KINGPIN on LN2 cooling.
Continue reading: EVGA GeForce RTX 3090 KINGPIN overclocked to 2.58GHz on LN2 cooling (full post)
Black Ops Cold War: uncapped FPS, DirectX 12, FOV slider on PC
Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War will have all the staples of a marquee AAA PC game: uncapped frame rates, VRR for high-refresh displays, FOV sliders, and ray-tracing support for RTX video cards.
One big change for Cold War is how the engine now runs on DirectX 12, which enables all kinds of new optimizations via the DX12 Ultimate APIs like Sampler Feedback Streaming (devs have more control how data is streamed to GPU), and accelerated DirectStorage APIs that power NVIDIA's new ultra-fast RTX IO data technology.
"The biggest change is that the Black Ops engine now runs on DirectX 12. This has led to a huge improvement in terms of performance and latency reduction. For players that prioritize immersive gameplay, we have a great partnership with NVIDIA to bring ray traced effects, performance-accelerating deep learning super-sampling, and Reflex latency optimization technology," Beenox UI/UX director Marc-Alexandre Milot said in a recent video.
Continue reading: Black Ops Cold War: uncapped FPS, DirectX 12, FOV slider on PC (full post)
Capcom will 'do their best' to bring Resident Evil 8 to PS4, Xbox One
Resident Evil VIIIage might not be next-gen exclusive after all, and Capcom says it's working on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One console versions too.
Resident Evil VIII is being developed from the ground up for next-gen PS5 and Xbox Series X hardware and will flex the new capabilities of the new-and-improved RE Engine. There's just one potential issue with this plan: It restricts game sales to platforms that haven't really matured and skips the PS4's 110 million install base, and the Xbox One's 50 million+ base.
Apparently Capcom wants to remedy this and now says RE8 could drop on current-gen systems too.
Continue reading: Capcom will 'do their best' to bring Resident Evil 8 to PS4, Xbox One (full post)
HoloLens 2 gets automatic eye-calibration in latest Insider Preview
The latest version of Microsoft's Insider Preview for HoloLens enables a feature that makes sharing HoloLens 2 much simpler. The headset can now calibrate your eye position automatically and in the background.
HoloLens 2 produces impressive holographic images that allow you to compute in 3D space, but the magic only works when you calibrate the headset for your specific eye position. The existing method for calibration requires going through a manual process that takes many steps and a few minutes. It's not exactly easy to share the headset with other users.
The latest Insider Preview for HoloLens adds a new feature for HoloLens 2 called Auto Eye Position (AEP), which eliminates the friction that comes with sharing a HoloLens 2 headset. With AEP enabled, users no longer go through a manual calibration process. When you put the headset on and begin to use it, AEP works in the background to automatically align the holographic output with your eye position.
Continue reading: HoloLens 2 gets automatic eye-calibration in latest Insider Preview (full post)
Development of Pimax Sword motion controller nearly complete
Pimax VR this week released more details about its long-awaited Sword motion controllers, including pictures of the most recent pre-production sample. The company said that it is entering the "final development stage," and the team is working 7-days a week to complete the project.
The wait for the Pimax Sword controllers has been long. Pimax promised these controllers to Kickstarter backers three years ago, but the company put their development on the back burner while it focused on building its ultrawide VR headset lineup.
In the latest update about the Sword controllers, Pimax sheds light on a few of the controllers' technical details. Each Pimax Sword controller will include a status indicator light strip along the front edge. The Sword controllers have a sensor halo that resembles a fencing sword's hilt, hence the name for the controllers. Pimax said the controllers offer full 360-degree tracking coverage with no dead coverage angles thanks to 26 embedded tracking sensors.
Continue reading: Development of Pimax Sword motion controller nearly complete (full post)
Mass Effect remaster trilogy delayed into 2021 due to ME1 issues
The upcoming three-game Mass Effect remastered trilogy has been delayed to 2021, sources tell VentureBeat's Jeff Grubb.
EA and BioWare plan to re-release the entire original Mass Effect trilogy as a remastered collection for current-gen systems, complete with all DLC (a rare move). While EA has yet to reveal the trilogy, sources have been rumbling about it throughout 2020, hinting at a release sometime this year to help commemorate BioWare's 25th anniversary. Apparently that won't happen.
Sources now say both the reveal and release of the Mass Effect trilogy has been delayed to 2021. Earlier reports said BioWare was to originally announce the three-game collection on November 7 during N7 Day.
Continue reading: Mass Effect remaster trilogy delayed into 2021 due to ME1 issues (full post)
Sony-owned Funimation anime streaming is free with Xbox Game Pass
UPDATE: Microsoft has finally announced the Funimation promo:
Sony owns Funimation, but apparently that hasn't stopped a big digital deal with its main competitor.
Xbox Game Pass is so powerful that even Sony wants to ride the wave. According to reports from Comic Book, Sony-owned Funimation is offering two months of its Premium Plus all-you-can-play anime streaming service free for Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscribers. The promotion is to be part of the Xbox Game Pass Perks rewards system, which has included promos like free Spotify premium subscriptions in the past.
Continue reading: Sony-owned Funimation anime streaming is free with Xbox Game Pass (full post)
Xbox avoids Apple's anti-game streaming rule with remote play
Microsoft gets around Apple's clandestine anti-game streaming policies by enabling remote play in the Xbox iOS app.
Back in 2019, Microsoft said Xbox owners would be able to turn their consoles into game streaming servers. The new Xbox mobile app made that promise a reality. Gamers can now use their Xbox One consoles to stream games to their phones across wireless networks. This includes iPhones, a platform that's been notoriously cut off from Microsoft's ambitious Project xCloud streaming service.
Sony has implemented remote play for years now and this is technically nothing new for the industry or for console gaming. It's still a clever little trick that allows Xbox gamers access to titles on-the-go, but you still have to own an Xbox console (and games) in order to play Xbox games on your iOS devices.
Continue reading: Xbox avoids Apple's anti-game streaming rule with remote play (full post)
EA mimics Game Pass with new content-drives-retention plan
EA reveals the full scope of its new Star Wars Squadrons starfighter, confirming it's a live service game with rotating seasonal rankings, level ups, and in-game unlockables with multiple currencies.
Star Wars Squadrons is one of EA's most interesting new games. It's a live game that's not monetized. Let that sink in for a minute: EA, a company who makes billions every year from live service monetization, is making a live service game with online elements without any microtransactions. This is somewhat transformative for EA and could be a stepping stone for future games.
So what makes Squadrons unique? It has online PVP and PVE play, it's sold for $40, and has a massive webwork of unlockables, customizations, and a rotating seasonal ranking system. It even has daily challenges. Again, it's not monetized. The game is specifically designed to be massively replayable and has tons of unlocks, cosmetic customizations, and a myriad of earned currencies and XP. These things typically are made to promote engagement monetization; engagement grows as more people play, which spins the flywheel of mTX earnings.
Continue reading: EA mimics Game Pass with new content-drives-retention plan (full post)






















