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IDC, one of the worlds leading data analysis companies, released its latest forecast for the VR headset industry. The firm believes that the market will suffer a 6% depression on VR headset sales in 2020, but sales will rebound hard with an increase of over 45% next year.

IDC's Quarterly Augmented and Virtual Reality Headset Tracker report highlights the AR and VR industries' state. According to IDC, sales of VR headsets are down this year compared to last. Mid-year sales were affected by supply issues brought on by the manufacturing shutdowns earlier this year. Now that we're approaching the tail end of the year, headset sales are likely to increase.

"We're seeing increased interest in VR from both consumer and commercial buyers," said Tom Mainelli, group vice president, Device & Consumer Research at IDC. "However, a confluence of events made for a tough first half of 2020 in terms of headset unit volumes, even as demand increased. We expect a sizeable increase in shipment volume during the second half of this year as production ramps up, and new products launch into the market, and VR should see a return to robust growth in 2021."

We are all now well aware of the major issues retailers across the world, as well as NVIDIA experienced on the launch of its brand new powerhouse GeForce RTX 3080 graphic card.

It crashed retailer websites worldwide, bought sites like Newegg to their knees with more traffic than the morning of Black Friday, and had inventories evaporate in seconds. NVIDIA has now addressed it in a new Q&A on their website.

NVIDIA starts off by saying: "Last week's GeForce RTX 3080 launch was simultaneously the best GPU launch ever and the most frustrating", adding: "The reception to our NVIDIA Ampere architecture GPUs has been off the charts and driven interest to heights we've never previously experienced. A few examples compared to our previous launch - 4 times the unique visitors to our website, 10 times the peak web requests per second, and more than 15 times the out clicks to partner pages".

Last week,Facebook revealed Quest 2, the company's next standalone VR headset. Facebook is betting big on Quest 2, and the company is making an effort to give you a reason to justify the purchase. Not only is Quest 2 an excellent gaming platform, but Infinite Office will also make it a great productivity tool.

Facebook's Infinite Office is not yet available but got a bit of a preview last week at Facebook Connect. VR companies have always touted the productivity benefits of VR, such as group collaboration and the ability to customize your workspace. Productivity tools were on the roadmap for Oculus products, but the global pandemic and the current work-from-home reality that many of us are living accelerated the rollout.

With Infinite Office, you'll be able to use a Quest 2 headset to do your everyday work. The platform offers a multi-window solution that facilitates multitasking. You can have a browser window open next to a document that you're working on, along with a chat window to keep in contact with co-workers.

UltraLeap announced the availability of the Stereo IR 170 hand tracking module for hardware and software developers. The evaluation kit will enable headset makers to design devices with embedded UltraLeap sensor, and for software developers to prepare for that future.

UltraLeap's hand tracking solution is the evolution of the company's Leap Motion hand tracking peripheral. The Stereo IR 170 offers a wider field of view than the Leap Motion sensor (170-degrees x 170 degrees versus 150-degrees x 120-degrees), and it can see your hands at up to 75cm from the sensor.

UltraLeap's new sensor is also more compact and draws less power than the Leap Motion unit, making it suitable fordirect integration into VR and AR devices.

Microsoft just bought Bethesda for $7.5 billion, but that doesn't mean all future games will be Xbox exclusives.

All of Bethesda's games are coming to Xbox Game Pass on Xbox consoles and PC, Microsoft confirms, but PlayStation gamers won't be locked out of future releases. Bethesda plans to honor pre-arranged exclusivity deals with titles like Deathloop and Ghostwire Tokyo on PlayStation 5. Microsoft also confirms that future Bethesda games will be released on other platforms on a title-by-title basis.

When asked about Starfield and other games coming to PlayStation, Xbox's Phil Spencer told Bloomberg: "We'll take other consoles on a case-by-case basis."

Xbox Game Pass subscribers have grown by nearly 50% in just 5 months, showing just how powerful the subscription service is.

Microsoft's Game Pass and Game Pass Ultimate subscriptions are so important they've become the center of Xbox. Consoles are just the delivery mechanism for Game Pass, which has in turn become the premiere delivery avenue for games and content. The value-oriented service now has 15 million subscribers, Microsoft confirmed, up nearly 5 million paid users since April 2020.

This growth is tremendous for the Xbox brand. As we've said before, Microsoft doesn't care all that much about hardware sales. It's doubled-down on services using Windows 10 PC-console cross-connectivity and Xbox LIVE as the bedrock for its business. Game Pass is an evolution of that plan, and it's starting to come to fruition.

Bethesda says it's performed its "largest engine overhaul since Oblivion" to ensure its Creation Engine is in tip-top shape for next-gen hardware.

Today Microsoft bought Bethesda parent company ZeniMax Media for $7.5 billion, and acquired the rights to Fallout, Elder Scrolls, Doom, and everything else ZeniMax owned. It's a big, big deal for Xbox and the future of RPGs. Nestled in Todd Howard's announcement post is mention of new engine optimizations for Bethesda Game Studios' two big new games: Starfield and Elder Scrolls 6.

Howard says both Starfield, its new singleplayer interstellar RPG space epic, and The Elder Scrolls VI will be powered by a new-and-improved version of the Creation Engine. This new engine update is specifically optimized for next-gen console hardware, including the Xbox Series X and Series S duo, Howard says.

Microsoft just bought Bethesda Softworks parent company ZeniMax Media for $7.5 billion, and Xbox now owns the rights to Elder Scrolls, Fallout

Microsoft just spent 3x more than it did for Minecraft in 2014 to buy ZeniMax Media, the parent company of the Bethesda Softworks publishing label and Bethesda Game Studios internal development teams. Xbox now owns the 2,300 team at ZeniMax, including all of Bethesda's first-party worldwide studios. And, most of all, Microsoft now owns Fallout, Elder Scrolls, and Doom, along with new franchises like Starfield.

Armed with Microsoft's billions, Bethesda plans to double-down on development of its biggest new games. Xbox's Phil Spencer confirms Bethesda's biggest games are now coming to Game Pass, but there's no word of console exclusivity. This is the single biggest buyout Xbox has ever done and represents decades' worth of value for the cross-platform brand. With Bethesda and Obsidian, Microsoft now has the RPG dream team on its side.

We finally have some gorgeous nudes of the custom GeForce RTX 3090 PCB, with the GIGABYTE GeForce RTX 3090 EAGLE OC caught sunbathing in a new YouTube video.

You can see the new GIGABYTE GeForce RTX 3080 EAGLE OC graphics card and its unique dual 8-pin PCIe power connector design at the end. GIGABYTE is using flat 8-pin connectors with cable extenders, that are to the right of the board.

On the back of the card in the picture below we can see the huge 24GB of GDDR6X that Micron has provide to NVIDIA for its GeForce RTX 3090 graphics card. You can see all of the chips on the front of the board in the pictures above, while the chips on the back of the RTX 3090 PCB can be viewed below.

Every PC gamer loves options when it comes to hardware, and the more options, the better. Now, ROCCAT has unveiled a new line of PC gaming headsets for gamers to feast their eyes upon.

ROCCAT, Turtle Beach's PC gaming brand, has officially unveiled a new line of PC gaming headsets slated to be launched this fall. The new line of gaming headsets is called the ROCCAT Elo Series, and will introduce three brand new headsets; the Elo X Stereo, the Elo 7.1 USB, and the Elo Air. As you can probably imagine, each of the new headsets fit a specific price point, and proportionate to that price point is its quality.

The Elo X Stereo is the light-weight model of three and features a floating metal headband and plush memory foam cushions. It also comes in at the cost of just $49.99 MSRP. Moving on, we have the Elo 7.1 USB, and as the name states, this model comes with 7.1 surround sound, as well as ROCCAT's AIMO intelligent lighting system. The Elo 7.1 comes in at the cost of $69.99 MSRP. Last in the Elo series line is the Elo 7.1 Air, which comes with Turtle Beach's Superhuman Hearing, a 24-hour battery life, and more. The Elo 7.1 Air is priced at $99.99 MSRP.

In the United States, people have continuously poked fun at specific states for having certain levels of intelligence.

Some states get a much worse wrap than others, and through this fun-poking, some stereotypes are generated. The thing about stereotypes, or at least some of them - is that many of them have veins of truth running through them. So, which states are smarter than others? A nationwide ranking of IQ scores combined with SAT and ACT scores has shown us a ranking.

It should be noted that while the results do draw metaphorical lines in the sand between states, no one should genuinely demonize any citizens from states that are "dumber". In every state in the US, there are brilliant people from all walks of life, and everyone should assume that they have something new to learn from someone when they meet them - no matter where they come from.

Sabrent blew the lid off of the storage world back in May 2020 with the introduction of the craziest NVMe SSD on the market: the Sabrent Rocket Q 8TB NVMe SSD.

The drive debuted with a price of $2000 but now you can enjoy a nice 30% off, seeing that $2000 price shaved down to $1400, a savings of $600. With that $600, you could almost get NVIDIA's kick ass new GeForce RTX 3080 -- or it is $600 towards the $1500 required for the beasty 8K ready GeForce RTX 3090 graphics card.

Sabrent provides a huge 3.4GB/sec read speeds and 3GB/sec writes on its Rocket Q 8TB SSD (read our review on the drive here), so you'll be taken care of when it comes to huge speeds. But the 8TB on a single little NVMe SSD is insanity, and perfect to pair with a new Ampere-based GeForce RTX 30 series graphics card.

Sampler Feedback Streaming, one of the most important graphics optimization features in the new Xbox console duo, is also coming to PC.

In a recent press event discussing the new Xbox Series S, Microsoft confirmed Sampler Feedback Streaming is a DirectX 12 Ultimate feature and not exclusive to the next-gen console Velocity Architecture framework. That means these optimizations are also coming to PC, which bodes tremendously well for next-gen CPU, GPU, and SSD hardware.

Sampler Feedback Streaming (SFS) is very technical and focuses mostly on texture data, but the gist is that SFS arms developers with much more control over how and when textures are loaded. Instead of loading an entire mipmap texture, SFS allows devs to load just portions of textures that are seen by the player. This reduces overall memory used, speeds up rendering, and frees up bandwidth on the data pipeline--a pipeline that is already astronomically high on PC thanks to enthusiast SSDs like Sabrent's Rocket Plus that hits up to 7GB/sec speeds and higher-end DDR4 RAM.

Sony Santa Monica is making a new God of War sequel set in the Nordic endtimes of Ragnarok, and it's coming to the PS5 in 2021.

Sony had a nice surprise at the end of the official PlayStation 5 price reveal event: A teaser for God of War Ragnarok, a new game that continues the PS4 exclusive's original story arc. A sequel makes a lot of sense for Sony. The reboot fared extremely well with over 10 million sales as of 2019, and helped drive software sales during a critical post-holiday Q1 period.

While no exact details have been confirmed outside of a 2021 release date, we should expect God of War 2 to release on both PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5. Sony recently confirmed the PS4 will live alongside its next-gen successor until at least 2024. The company also confirmed some of the biggest PS5 games are actually cross-gen titles that'll release on PS4 too, including Spider-Man Miles Morales and Horizon Forbidden West.

The PS5 pre-order situation is a big fiasco for Sony, but the company says it'll iron things out in the coming weeks.

It's nearly impossible to pre-order a PlayStation 5 right now. Without warning, Sony put up a blog post saying pre-orders would begin a day after they revealed the PS5's price. Retailers apparently didn't get the memo and starting accepting pre-orders that night. This all flies in the face of Sony's promise to give gamers advance notice. "We'll let you know when preorder will happen. It's not going to happen with a minute's notice," Sony exec Eric Lempel said in July.

Suffice it to say, hardly anyone got a PS5 pre-order. Sony even had users sign up for the chance to pre-order a PlayStation 5. Not everyone got that chance (including me). Other retailers like Best Buy, Target, Amazon, and Walmart were flooded with pre-order purchases. My own reservation on Amazon isn't guaranteed, and I placed it minutes after they went live.

This weekend has been totally filled with leaked benchmarks on NVIDIA's new GeForce RTX 3090 graphics card -- where we first had leaked benchmark scores on the RTX 3090, more leaked benchmark scores on the RTX 3090, but now it's time for gaming performance on the RTX 3090.

The gaming performance numbers for the GeForce RTX 3090 are coming from the same source: TecLab, with VideoCardz picking it up. The Chinese TechLab team are using an Intel Core i9-10900K processor with DDR4 memory clocked at 4133MHz.

As for the gaming performance, VideoCardz has a handy chart that I've embedded below that shows we can expect an average of 10% more performance over the already ridiculously fast GeForce RTX 3080.

We all know that the hype and demand for NVIDIA's new GeForce RTX 3080 has been huge, crashing retailer websites across the world from Scan Computers in the UK to PCCG here in Australia, and it even pushed Newegg to their knees in the US, too.

But just how huge was the demand for Newegg? According to a new tweet from the company, the demand was so huge that they experienced "more traffic than the morning of Black Friday". They added that "limited inventory sold out in 5 minutes" and that "bot protection was in place, orders were human".

NVIDIA apologized a few days ago for the insane demand and instant sell-out of pretty much global GeForce RTX 3080 graphics cards in moments. Scalpers took advantage of the situation, buying cards -- while bots were trying to secure cards as well -- gobbling up supply, leaving gamers without cards.

Developers are once again praising the PS5's development architecture, saying it's extremely easy to transition between generations.

Streamlining the transition from PS4 to PS5 is the most important thing Sony can do, and it actually solved that issue a while back. The PS5 has not only been built from the ground up to play, support, and boost PS4 games on a logical level, but it's x86 architecture is also extremely similar to the PS4's. This means devs can easily carry their PS4 games over to PS5 for cross-gen play and ramp up resolution and technical features accordingly. Cross-gen will remain extremely important until 2024, Sony says.

That's not it, though; devs who use engines built around the PS4 architecture can also scale those titles over to PS5 much more easily than before. This streamlining and efficiency is also made possible by upgrades in engine environments like Unreal Engine 5, which is being optimized specifically for next-gen consoles like the PS5.

The PS5's SSD can theoretically shrink file sizes by virtue of its data-streaming efficiency and elimination of seek times, but launch PS5 games will still be pretty big.

New product listings for Spider-Man Miles Morales and Demon's Souls confirms PS5's launch games will still be pretty sizable. The PS5's SSD clocks in at 825GB, which translates to roughly 768GB of usable space. That's less with the OS installed, and shrinks even more with the inclusion of Astro's Playroom, which comes pre-installed on every PS5.

Spider-Man Miles Morales Ultimate Edition, for example, clocks in at 105GB and takes up roughly 14% of the available 756GB of SSD space. This edition includes both Miles Morales and the original Spider-Man remastered. The next-gen Miles Morales spin-off clocks in at 50GB on its own, which is roughly 6.5% of the SSD space. It's also worth noting Miles Morales is coming to the PS4 as well, so it's not a true next-gen exclusive that's fully built from the ground up for the PS5's SSD.

AMD is hard at work on its next-gen Zen 3 architecture, something we're going to be hearing about real soon -- like, on October 8 soon. But for now, we have some leaks.

In a new tweet from software engineer Patrick Shur, we have some new information on AMD's new Zen 3-based CPU family which will reportedly be called the Ryzen 5000 series. Most were expecting the Ryzen 4000 series (which is already inside of laptops) but it seems AMD could leave the Ryzen 4000 nomenclature for its Renoir FP6 (mobile) and Renoir AM4 (desktop) series.

Shur tweeted that we are to expect the flagship Ryzen 9 5900X as a 12-core, 24-thread CPU while the Ryzen 7 5800X is an 8-core, 16-thread design. Better yet, these new samples are reportedly hitting a huge 4.9GHz which should give Intel a run for its money with its 10th gen Core CPUs.