VR is one of the most important buzzwords in tech, not only for current development, but also for what studios and tech insiders deem to be our entertainment future. Oculus, which paved the way for VR with its Rift headset concept (before being snagged by Facebook), is one of the biggest, most recognizable players in this space. Now, after a series of hurdles such as the Oculus-ZeniMax sonata, which saw the former facing payments of $500 million, and Oculus' founder Palmer Luckey abandoning the company, a house of cards is crumbling. Namely, Oculus' VR-driven Story Studio.

NVIDIA is giving away three VR games with bundles of Oculus Rift VR headset, Oculus Touch controller, and qualifying GeForce GTX graphics cards. Game codes to three of the hottest VR titles, "The Unspoken," "SUPERHOT VR," and "Wilson's Heart" will be given away for free when you buy bundles of the Rift VR headset, Touch controller, with GeForce GTX 1060, GTX 1070, GTX 1080, or GTX 1080 Ti graphics cards. The bundles will be sold exclusively through Amazon and Newegg.

On the special promotion pages of these stores, you can match an Oculus Rift headset and Touch controller with an applicable GeForce GTX graphics card of your choice. A typical GeForce GTX 1060 6 GB + Oculus Rift + Touch controller bundle is priced around US $850, a GTX 1070 based bundle around $980, a GTX 1080 based bundle around $1,090, and a GTX 1080 Ti based bundle around $1,300.

ASUS today announced the availability of the VivoPC X, an elegant and compact desktop PC designed for immersive virtual reality (VR) experiences. The VivoPC X is powered by a 7th Generation Intel Core processor with NVIDIA GeForce GTX 10 series graphics, and is fully compatible with the latest VR headsets. Its compact 5-liter chassis can be placed anywhere in the home, and has extensive connectivity features including four USB 3.1 Gen 1 and two USB 2.0 ports for VR peripherals and controllers. The VivoPC X is designed for general consumers who are looking for a VR-ready PC that meets the hardware demands of VR tasks and entertainment.

From April 25 to June 13, users can purchase the Oculus Rift + Touch and ASUS VivoPC X Bundle at select resellers. ASUS, Oculus, and NVIDIA have partnered to bring you a complete package with everything needed to experience an immersive VR experience right out-of-box: an Oculus-Ready Desktop PC, Oculus Headset, and Touch Controller at a discounted price. In addition, users will receive 4 of the latest VR titles for free: Insomniac Games' The Unspoken, Superhot VR, Twisted Pixel's Wilson's Heart, and Oculus' VR Sports Challenge.

Tough breakups aren't easy by definition, and the breakup between legendary programmer John Carmack and former employer ZeniMax has probably been one of the most worded of all. Now, Oculus Chief Technology Officer John Carmack has filed a lawsuit against ZeniMax for $22.5 million, money he claims ZeniMax still owes him from id Softwares' $150 million sale to ZeniMax back in 2009. Carmack says the amount he is filling for is part of the $45 million owed to him for the sale, of which he has already been able to convert 22.5 million (the non-missing half) in ZeniMax shares. However, Carmack says ZeniMax is unlawfully withholding the remaining $22.5 million because of "sour grapes".

Carmack claims ZeniMax is holding back the payment as payback for "a series of allegations regarding claimed violations of Mr. Carmack's Employment Agreement", referencing the Zenimax/Facebook lawsuit over the supposed theft of trade secrets. However, Oculus was recently found not guilty of stealing trade secrets, though the court ordered the company to pay $500 million for copyright infringement, false designation and the violation of Palmer Luckey's NDA. Oculus is appealing the case, calling the prior ruling "legally flawed and factually unwarranted."

One of the things keeping OSVR from becoming a de facto platform for VR is that its software stack, being open source, still hasn't received as much development as Facebook's Oculus or HTC's Vive platforms. However, Sensics, one of the players which has put its stock on the OSVR ecosystem from the beginning, is aiming to gradually change that. Its recent introduction of the Sensics Home Suite brings, in itself, some much-needed quality of life improvements for any VR platform.

After introducing Rift at a less than amenable price-point, consumers with an eye for VR have been left with the slight hope of decreasing product prices over time (I know I have). Now, Oculus has announced a "slash" in the Oculus Rift pricing - though this isn't as much a straight-up price slash as it is a bundle deal. Case in point: Oculus appears to have stopped selling standalone Oculus Rifts.

Before, you had to pony up 600$ for the Oculus package, with an extra $199 cost for the Touch controller package. After Oculus has moved an estimated 200,000 units, apparently the company is willing to entice more users by now selling a complete Oculus Rift + Touch controllers package for the same price as a standalone Oculus Rift would go for - $600. The company also slashed the price of the standalone Touch controllers to $99 (from the $199 they launched at) and dropped the price of the extra Constellation cameras from $79 to $59.

Earlier this month, Zenimax was awarded $500m when a jury found that VR pioneer Oculus had violated a NDA and illegally used code from the game publisher. That may just be the beginning of the legal ramifications facing Oculus however, as Zenimax has just asked the court to block Oculus from using the code involved in the court case altogether, potentially blocking the sale of a good number of games utilizing the technology of the Oculus VR headset.

Oculus is appealing the case, and calls the prior ruling "legally flawed and factually unwarranted." To their credit, the court did agree that while Oculus had violated a non-disclosure agreement, it did not find that they had committed the larger crime of stealing trade secrets.

It seems Valve is far from concerned about rumors of an underwhelming Virtual Reality headset market. In a recent interview with the head of the game studio, Gabe Newell said his company was still "optimistic" in regards to VR's present state of affairs, and that it's "going in a way that's consistent with our expectations." He also added that Valve was "pretty comfortable with the idea that it will turn out to be a complete failure."

VR Tech sales have come under scrutiny due, in part, to lack of information. Neither Valve nor Oculus' respective marketplaces have produced sales data, leaving speculation to run rampant. To further fuel the fire, leaked figures from late last year suggest only 140,000 HTC Vive headsets had been sold, below market expectations for what is supposed to be the next "big thing."

ZeniMax Media Inc. has been awarded a $500 million settlement in a virtual reality (VR) patent dispute with Facebook-owned Oculus. A jury in Texas found Oculus in violation of VR patents held by ZeniMax. Oculus in 2014 was acquired by Facebook in a $2 billion deal. ZeniMax owns id Software, a pioneering game studio led by John Carmack. ZeniMax alleges that core components of Oculus Rift VR headset were developed by John Carmack, when he was working at a ZeniMax subsidiary, making them ZeniMax' intellectual property. Carmack left ZeniMax to work for Oculus in 2013.

Unigine has announced the impending release of a new benchmark suite, supposedly to be released at the end of 2016 (well, that ship has sailed, but the benchmark Is still coming). It features an interactive VR experience with support for Oculus Rift and HTC Vive. The description, such as it is, reads as so:

"A lone professor performs dangerous experiments in an abandoned classroom, day in and day out. Obsessed with inventions and discoveries beyond the wildest dreams, he strives to prove his ideas.

Once you come to this place in the early morning, you would not meet him there. The eerie thing is a loud bang from the laboratory heard a few moments ago. What was that? You have the only chance to cast some light upon this incident by going deeply into the matter of quantum theory: thorough visual inspection of professor's records and instruments will help to lift the veil on the mystery."

You can check a 4K teaser of the benchmark, after the break.

After putting in work in the OpenGL, WebGL, and most recently, Vulkan APIs, the technology industry consortium Khronos Group is setting its sights on the VR industry and ecosystems. Their aim: to create a "cross-vendor, royalty-free, open standard" for the VR development community. This move is an effort to prevent the VR system from fragmenting itself towards an eventual collapse, considering the multiple engines to create content, platforms to sell that content through, and a few different hardware options with casuistically different requirements and tool-sets. As a result, for a developer to support SteamVR (OpenVR), Oculus (OVR), and OSVR, it has a lot of work to do, since each platform (with its unique runtime) interfaces with the game engine in a different way. Developers must account for the intricacies of each platform during the development process.

NVIDIA has today released their latest GeForce Game Ready drivers, in the form of the 376.19 WHQL release. The new drivers boast support for Oculus Touch launch titles, such as Crytek's "The Climb", Oculus Studios' "Oculus First Contact", Insomniac's "The Unspoken", The Stork Burnt Down's "Home Improvisation: Furniture Sandbox" for all your furbishing-related needs and IKEA doctorate, as well as Escalation Studios' "Please, Don't Touch Anything", along with an estimated 345 other Oculus Touch launch games (in reality, closer to 49 others;I admit, I picked some of the most interesting names). Also, remember that article about the VR bubble bursting?)

Lacking are any additional SLI profiles, though there are some resolved issues specifically on Windows 10: an issue where No Man's Sky with the Foundation Update (1.10) would display severe texture corruption with SLI enabled, G-SYNC flickering issues on notebooks, as well as a notebook G-SYNC pendulum demo issue. For those of you using 3D Vision, there are some updates on that field as well, with four new profiles for Dead Rising 4, Mars 2030, Serious Sam and SuperHot. You can grab the drivers from the NVIDIA page, right here on TPU. Just check the links below the images.DOWNLOAD: NVIDIA GeForce 376.19 WHQL for Windows 10 64-bit | Windows 10 32-bit | Windows 8/7/Vista 64-bit | Windows 8/7/Vista 32-bit

Many research firms' numbers have shown that VR product sales in 2016 have been weaker than originally expected due to both high product costs and lack of content. No-one has yet seen VR's killer app, after all, and I know I'd love to see another Halo-like product to drive awareness on the VR platforms like it did on the original Xbox.

All of the above lead towards Google's Daydream View, HTC's Vive, Oculus Rift and Samsung Electronics' Gear VR having all achieved sales that are not even close to previously-set market expectations, with even the current mainstream poster-boy for VR, Sony's PSVR, showing adoption numbers that are as lowly as low can be. Even in their home-field, Japan, a country known for being filled with tech-savvy and tech-crazed customers, only 0.7% of the existing PS4 and PS4 Pro user-base has made the jump for a VR headset.

After announcing earlier this week the impending release of their VR Go backpack, ZOTAC has now made pricing details available: $1999 will net you the ability to strap a PC to your body so you can freely engage with enemies or friends alike in VR environments.

The ZOTAC VR GO can work autonomously for up to two hours, feeding on two Li-ion batteries rated at 95Wh (6600mAh). The batteries can be hot-swapped and charged separately, featuring a DC12V-out for powering the HTC Vive or Oculus Rift. When not in use as a backpack to play virtual reality games, the VR GO can be used like a normal desktop computer: its form-factor allows it to be placed on a desk either vertically or horizontally and all the ports will remain accessible. It isn't very heavy, either, though at 4.95 kilograms, your mileage may vary.

Futuremark, the Finnish software development company best known for its 3DMark benchmarking suite, has just announced the availability of another benchmark suite. Aptly named VRMark, this suite teste your system's ability to run VR games and experiences, since the performance required for VR is much higher than for typical PC games - just consider that the recommended frame-rate for an optimal VR experience stands at 90fps. Run VRMark to see if your PC has what it takes to deliver a great VR experience on the HTC Vive and Oculus Rift. VRMark benchmark tests run on your monitor, no headset required. If your PC passes, it's ready for the two most popular VR systems available today.

AMD today released the WHQL-signed variants of the Radeon Software Crimson Edition version 16.10.1 drivers, which it released earlier this month. Besides optimization for "Gears of War 4" and "Mafia III," and CrossFire profiles for "Shadow Warrior 2," these drivers come with support for the Oculus Asynchronous Spacewarp feature on graphics cards based on the "Polaris 10" silicon (Radeon RX 480, RX 470). Grab the drivers from the links below.

AMD defines Asynchronous Spacewarp as the following.

ASW compares previously rendered frames, detects the motion between them, and extrapolates the position of scene components to create a new synthetic frame. Using this technology, synthetic frames will accurately approximate the fully-rendered frames they're designed to replace.

DOWNLOAD: AMD Radeon Software Crimson Edition 16.10.1 WHQL for Windows 10 64-bit | Windows 10 32-bit | Windows 8.1 64-bit | Windows 8.1 32-bit | Windows 7 64-bit | Windows 7 32-bit

According to TweakTown, AMD may be preparing to bring the fight to the as-of-yet unannounced GTX 1050 Ti with a $10 price-drop on their 1080p price-performance king RX 470 from the current $179, bringing the price down to $169. NVIDIA is purportedly planning to bring the GTX 1050 Ti to market at the $149 price point, with a rated TDP of only 75 W and apparently no need for additional power connectors (at least on reference designs). However, faced with a measly $20 difference from the supposedly higher-performing RX 470 - which could sometimes be up to 30% faster - the battle for the $150 bracket might prove to be an uphill battle for the green camp.

Add to that the latest updates unveiled by Oculus on Oculus Connect 3, with the RX 470 being stamped with the VR-ready approval, as well as the greater availability and lower price of FreeSync monitors (sometimes with as much as four times the number of FreeSync offers versus G-Sync ones), and it really does seem that AMD is poised to offer the best value in its price bracket. Of course, things get muddier if you take into account the current pricing landscape for graphics cards from either manufacturer (where most models are selling upwards of their MSRP).

AMD, CyberPowerPC, and Oculus VR announced a breakthrough Oculus VR-ready gaming desktop priced at just US $499. At the beginning of 2016, you needed to spend a minimum of $949 to build a desktop that meets Oculus VR minimum requirements. Under its hood, is an AMD FX-4350 quad-core processor, Radeon RX 470 4 GB graphics card, 8 GB of dual-channel memory, 1 TB of HDD storage, and a DVD drive. The desktop also includes a keyboard and mouse. The only other piece of hardware you need to spend on is the Oculus Rift HMD itself.

CyberPowerPC is also selling a slightly more premium variant in the Gamer Xtreme VR desktop, priced at just $699. For $200 more, you get an Intel Core i5 "Skylake" quad-core processor, Radeon RX 480 8 GB graphics, pre-installed Windows 10, and WiFi WLAN adapter, besides all that you get with the $499 variant.

AMD released its latest version of the Radeon Software Crimson Edition drivers. Version 16.4.1 comes with optimization for "Quantum Break," with up to 35 percent higher performance seen a machine running the Radeon R9 Fury X, compared to the previous 16.3.2 drivers. It also provides software support for the two hottest VR headsets - Oculus Rift and HTC Vive. The drivers also address a bug seen on "Hitman" (2016), which cases the game to flicker when shadow quality is bumped up to "high," in DirectX 11 mode. Most importantly, the drivers fix a frame-rate capping issues noticed on some DirectX 12 applications.DOWNLOAD: AMD Radeon Software Crimson Edition 16.4.1 for Windows 10/8.1/7 64-bit | Windows 10/8.1/7 32-bit

AMD announced today at the 2016 Game Developer Conference that the company will underscore its dominance of the global virtual reality systems market. It revealed new advances in hardware and software to further the reach of VR, and unveiled its new GPU certified program that simplifies adoption of VR technology for consumers and content creators.

"AMD continues to be a driving force in virtual reality," said Raja Koduri, senior vice president and chief architect, Radeon Technologies Group, AMD. "We're bringing the technology to more people around the world through our efforts to expand the VR ecosystem with VR i-Cafés in China, new Oculus Rift and HTC Vive headsets, and a wide variety of content partners in gaming, entertainment, education, science, medicine, journalism and several other exciting fields."

AMD is also making VR more easily accessible to consumers and content creators with its GPU certified program featuring the new "Radeon VR Ready Premium" and "Radeon VR Ready Creator" tiers. Its forthcoming Polaris GPUs and award-winning AMD LiquidVR technology will simultaneously advance groundbreaking VR-optimized graphics.

AMD today announced it is helping colleges and universities create dedicated virtual reality (VR) labs as Crytek's exclusive technology partner in their VR First initiative. The VR First initiative provides colleges and universities a ready-made VR solution for developers, students and researchers. AMD will equip the labs with its new Radeon Pro Duo graphics cards featuring LiquidVR SDK, the world's fastest and most powerful VR creator platform, capable of both creating and consuming VR content. AMD will provide its LiquidVR Software Developer Kit (SDK) as part of the GPUOpen initiative.

Virtual reality has the potential to revolutionize how people experience the digital world with implications for gaming, entertainment, education, medicine, journalism and numerous other fields. The ultimate goal is to equip a new generation of developers who will create amazing and compelling experiences for users worldwide. AMD and Crytek share a commitment to seeding grassroots VR development.

"We're on the cusp of an immersive computing era enabled by GPUs and game engines," said Raja Koduri, senior vice president and chief architect, Radeon Technologies Group, AMD. "We need a new generation of developers whose educational foundation includes mastery of game engines and GPU programming. We're dedicated to nurturing that future, and see the collaboration with Crytek and the VR First initiative as a key step in realizing the goal of expanding immersive experiences outlined in our VR Ready Programs."

In this episode of TechPowerUp News, AMD's upcoming new-generation Graphics CoreNext architecture codenamed "Polaris," and the big Oculus Rift pre-order.

Oculus, makers of the popular Oculus Rift VR HMD, announced that it will open the gates for pre-orders for its upcoming Rift CV1 HMD on the 6th of January, 2016, at 08:00 Pacific Time. You'll be able to take it for a spin right out of the box, on the bundled games Lucky's Tale, and EVE: Valkyrie, two games built almost entirely around VR, by leveraging the Oculus SDK.

2016 is shaping up to be the year VR takes off in a big scale, with consumer electronics giants planning to launch their VR headsets; game developers building their games around major VR SDKs, and graphics hardware companies like AMD and NVIDIA making major moves in the VR industry. AMD is sitting on a treasure-chest of IP with its LiquidVR technology, while NVIDIA recently announced a VR-ready certification program.

In this episode of TechPowerUp News, we talk about the spectacular Surface Book, one of the most talked about products launched at the unexpectedly awesome Surface launch event; plus get our take on the brand new Oculus VR-ready gaming desktops co-designed by AMD and Dell.

AMD today announced a collaboration with Oculus and Dell to equip Oculus Ready PCs with AMD Radeon GPUs, starting at $999 USD. The powerful PCs are designed to deliver stunning gaming performance and enable spectacular VR experiences for consumers around the world by leveraging AMD VR leadership with LiquidVR and Graphics Core Next architecture.

"It's an exciting time to be at the heart of all things Virtual Reality," said Roy Taylor, corporate vice president, Alliances and Content, AMD. "I'm confident that with Dell and Alienware, we can enable a wide audience of PC users with extraordinary VR capabilities powered by AMD Radeon GPUs."