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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 interstellar new singleplayer 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.

"With each new console cycle, we evolved together. From bringing mods to consoles" with Fallout 4, now over a billion downloads, to the latest technologies fueling Xbox Series X/S. These new systems are optimized for the vast worlds we love to create, with generational leaps not just in graphics, but CPU and data streaming as well. It's led to our largest engine overhaul since Oblivion, with all new technologies powering our first new IP in 25 years, Starfield, as well as The Elder Scrolls VI," Howard said in the post.

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.

You can buy Sabrents huge Rocket Q 8TB NVMe SSD here on Amazon.

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.