Oculus VR will be announcing the first consumer Rift headset in around 12 hours time, with Futuremark jumping in early to announce VRMark. VRMark is a new benchmark that will test your entire system, both hardware and software, to measure VR performance.

The company explains VRMark as "a VR benchmark that uses a combination of software and hardware to measure VR system performance, latency, and accuracy, the key components in creating convincing and comfortable VR experiences". VRMark is in development right now, with some initial tests to be released to Futuremark's industry partners later this year.

We know that the shift over to 16nm is going to be an incredible one, but AMD is really aiming for some super jumps in power efficiency.

During an interview with Tom's Hardware, AMD said that the move to 16nm FinFET will have a possible 2x energy efficiency improvement over previous generation GPUs. 16nm is going to be a large jump for both NVIDIA and AMD, but we are going to see HBM2 used at the same time. NVIDIA's use of HBM2 will be the first time they will use High Bandwidth Memory, but it'll be AMD's second time, since Fury X will be powered by the next generation RAM.

We've teased that the Radeon R9 490X (which we guess might change now, and possibly to Fury X II) could have up to 1.2TB/sec memory bandwidth (1200GB/sec) up from the 336GB/sec that is found even on the super-fast GeForce GTX 980 Ti.

Valve has updated TweakTown on what to expect for the next couple of months in the ramp up to the launch of Steam Machines, SteamOS, Steam Controller, SteamVR, Steam Box, and everything else Valve-related.

Doug Lombardi, VP of Marketing for Valve, said that the "get it early" offer for the Steam Controller "is available to everyone who pre orders, but only while supplies last. As of this writing, we have sold over 35% of the limited quantity available for early delivery in Oct".

Lombardi added that: "All Steam Machines offer full support for Steam's In Home Streaming, in addition to offering support for native Steam OS games. This means they can transmit and receive In Home Streams, and allow them to play all the games on Steam when paired with Steam PC".

We have been posting AMD Radeon news all week, but as we get closer to the announcement next week, the details become more clear. VideoCardz.com has posted some 3DMark FireStrike results, showing that the Radeon Fury X can keep up with the Titan X from NVIDIA.

As you can see, the Fury X scores 7873 while the Titan X is just a tiny bit better with 7989. The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 980 Ti is only a little bit behind Fury X with 7781, but it's the CrossFire performance that we should be looking at. Two of the HBM-powered Fury X cards in CrossFire push out an incredible 13,925 - but still ultimately lose out to Titan X in SLI with 13,964.

The Radeon Fury X will feature 4GB of High Bandwidth Memory on a 4096-bit memory bus, the first video card to ever be released with HBM. The CrossFire scaling on Fury is is pretty damn good, sitting at around 176% - but most dual GPU setups in synthetic benchmarks always push 150-180% scaling. It'll be interesting to see the CrossFire scaling on more mature drivers, in actual games.

It feels like I'm reporting on the next-gen AMD hardware everyday now, which we pretty much are, but the latest we have on the Radeon Fury X is in the form of some new photos. We have previously reported that Fury X is around 50% faster than the R9 290X, and it beats the Titan X in a single OpenCL benchmark.

The new shots show off the liquid cooling on Fury X, the backplate, and the red LED Radeon logo on the card. In the above shots, we can see the Radeon logo lit up beautifully, and in the second shot, we can see it in more detail. Above the glowing Radeon logo is a dual BIOS switch, so you can overclock until your card fails, and then switch over to the good BIOS.

AMD will reportedly have a 300W TDP on the Radeon Fury X, with the card powered by two 8-pin PCIe power connectors. All of this will arrive in a much smaller card than we've ever received for a flagship GPU. Around the back of the Fury X, we have some tubing coming out of it for its watercooling, as well as a matte black PCB and backplate.

If you haven't upgraded from the Sony PlayStation 3 or Microsoft Xbox 360, you'll still have the opportunity to play Call of Duty: Black Ops 3. The game is expected to launch on November 6.

"However, we know that there are still some fans that haven't made the transition to the new console hardware, which is why we're happy to share that we're working with developers Beenox and Mercenary Technology on Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3," Activision noted in a blog post.

Of course, the PS4 and Xbox One versions of the game will feature campaign, multiplayer and zombie modes, but some features will be unavailable to previous generation console owners - such as the campaign mode will support two-player - not four-player - cooperative play.

President Barack Obama has received a letter from the Information Industry Association and Information Technology Industry Council not to mess with encryption. The US government wants backdoors created so law enforcement can access information when needed, but Silicon Valley companies warned that would also create opportunities for cybercriminals.

"We are opposed to any policy actions or measures that would undermine encryption as an available and effective tool," said the letter. The Information Industry Association represents companies such as Microsoft, Facebook, Google and Apple - with executives from each company previously speaking out against various government interference in security.

The FBI and other agencies support the Obama administration's efforts to help bypass encryption, but in a manner that wouldn't allow hackers and cybercriminals to exploit the encryption backdoor.

The fight against Internet piracy apparently isn't going well for copyright holders, and "legislation is pushing people to steal," said Andrus Ansip, Vice President for the Digital Single Market for the European Commission. Speaking during Midem, Ansip believes providing content across the EU - and educating users about legal options - are two critical steps that must be addressed.

The EU's recently adopted Digital Single Market strategy will hopefully end geo-blocking among EU nations, while consumers can legally purchase more content. The removal of geo-blocking will make it legal for 100 million Europeans to access content they own in other countries - a major development, with Europeans taking more than 270 million cross-border trips that last at least one night.

"Today, we don't have a Digital Single Market in the European Union," Ansip said.

A trailer for the PC Gaming Show being held at E3 2015 has been unleashed, showing off a bunch of the oldeer, but huge fan favorite games from the last two decades.

The YouTube teaser also shows off some AMD hardware being installed, with some Radeon video cards and AMD CPUs being installed into a PC. AMD is sponsoring the show alongside PC Gamer, with special guests including Twitch, Digital Storm, Cliff "CliffyB" Bleszinski, Cloud Imperium Games (the developer behind Star Citizen), Tripwire Interactive, and many more.

The PC Gaming Show kicks off on June 16, 2015 with a livestream being made available on AMD's Twitch channel on the day.

Amazon is building a development team to work on a very ambitious PC game using the latest technology available under its Amazon Game Studios gaming division, securing some of the top talent in the industry.

Amazon Game Studios is hiring staff that have worked on gigantic games like BioShock, Portal, World of Warcraft, Half Life 2, Dota 2, Left 4 Dead, Halo, Infamous, Shadows of Mordor and The Last of Us. Considering the company reportedly signed a licensing deal worth up to $70 million with Crytek, we could see Amazon's game powered by Crytek's latest graphics engine.

The developer is hiring 26 new people, where it needs to fill positions like Senior Game Development Engineer, Tools Engineer, Senior Gameplay Engineer, Lead Visual Effects Artist, Platform Engineer and Senior Graphics Engineer... just to name a few positions.