BIOSTAR is proud to announce its latest addition to its line of gaming products with its new VGA for gamers looking for the perfect balance of price and performance with the new BIOSTAR GeForce GTX 1050 Ti. With an MSRP of $159, this card will be the perfect upgrade gift for yourself or a gamer friend. Enjoy gaming to the next level with its new dual-fan cooling for the best performance the GTX 1050 Ti can bring.

Futuremark is working on new game-tests for its 3DMark benchmark suite. One of these is a game test that takes advantage of DirectX 12, but isn't as taxing on the hardware as "Time Spy." Its target hardware is notebook graphics and entry-mainstream graphics cards. It will be to "Time Spy" what "Sky Diver" is to "Fire Strike."

The next, more interesting move by Futuremark is a benchmark that takes advantage of the Vulkan 3D graphics API. The company will release this Vulkan-based benchmark for both Windows and Android platforms. Lastly we've learned that development of the company's VR benchmarks are coming along nicely, and the company hopes to release new VR benchmarks for PC and mobile platforms soon. Futuremark is expected to reveal these new game-tests and benchmarks at its 2017 International CES booth, early January.

NVIDIA today released the GeForce 376.33 WHQL drivers. These drivers come with a number of bug-fixes covering the previous GeForce 376.19 drivers, particularly with its Oculus Touch VR game title-specific optimizations. According to the release notes, these drivers seem to disable SLI support for "Titanfall 2," probably because it's too unstable at the moment. Grab the drivers from the links below.DOWNLOAD: NVIDIA GeForce 376.33 WHQL for Windows 10 64-bit | Windows 10 32-bit | Windows 8/7/Vista 64-bit | Windows 8/7/Vista 32-bit

Renowned games studio Crytek hasn't left the ropes yet - and the situation is again looking dire for the company. After a rough 2014 that saw multiple upcoming games being canceled (with a sequel to the graphical masterpiece Ryse being canned at this time) and employees not getting paid for months at a time, only the sale of franchises and assets (Homefront's IP to Deep Silver, for one), as well as a licensing deal with Amazon for their Crytek engine (worth $70 million), managed to save the company. At the time, employees put the blame on less than solid management decisions towards pushing the company as a free-to-play powerhouse, blaming the management for poor handling of the studio's transition towards that form of monetization. However, efforts to stay afloat seem to have been little more than a small lifeboat for the company.

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 today announced the "Choose your Adventure" bundle. Buyers of new GeForce GTX 1050, GTX 1050 Ti, and GTX 1060 graphics cards will get to choose from one of three available VR indie games. The giveaway also extends to notebooks with mobile variants of the GPUs. The selection includes "Maize," "Redout," and "Raw Data." The offer is applicable to a large selection of markets and participating retailers. Invoices of new applicable products from these retailers will include coupon codes which can be exchanged on NVIDIA's redemption page for game keys.

Other information to surface from WCCFTech's leak on the upcoming Radeon Software Crimson ReLive drivers, is its dual nature, for both consumers and professionals. The Radeon Technologies Group is seemingly on a crusade to bolster AMD's software support recognition with customers, and that naturally extends towards the professional side of the equation as well.

As such, the first immediate feature to be introduced is AMD's Pro Renderer, a physically-based rendering engine that enables production of photorealistic images, with both plugin and native integration support from the big names in professional workflows, such as Autodesk's 3DS Max, Autodesk Maya, and Blender (just to name a few), along with game-engine integration and support through the Unity Engine and Stingray. LiquidVR support is also headed for professionals, enabling professional VR workflows in design, engineering, animation, filmmaking, and VR game engines.

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.

ZOTAC International, a global manufacturer of innovation, is pleased to introduce an entirely new way to experience immersive VR with the ZOTAC VR GO backpack. Since making the impact at Computex 2016 with the first ever mobile VR experience, ZOTAC has improved the design, performance, and endurance of the original backpack.

"The VR GO is an exciting innovation for everyone to finally enjoy VR the way it is meant to be experienced," says Tony Wong, CEO, ZOTAC International. "We want to provide the best of both worlds to our users: Powerful VR in high resolution and fast framerates while enjoying true mobility in a compact, wearable form. The VR GO is the best way to VR."

The folks over at 3dcenter.org have compiled comprehensive historical GPU AIB market share data for our digestion. While we recently reported on Q3'16 and its comparison to the quarter before and the same period last year, this information spans a near 14 year quarter-on-quarter time frame. The compilers have quite helpfully included points of reference along the timeline which highlight the two major GPU manufacturers milestone desktop product line debuts.

It is worth noting that their exact numbers differ slightly to the ones Jon Peddie Research provided as 3dcenter have also cited the work of Mercury Research, which appears more conservative. The figures provided in their own graph split the difference between the two sources to give us a more impartial look at the market.

MSI, world leader in true gaming hardware and expert in building compact and incredibly powerful gaming desktops, is taking it to the next level with the new MSI Trident. Introducing world's smallest VR gaming desktop, extremely compact and with desktop performance levels that fit any gamer's demands.

Trident uses a customized MSI GeForce GTX 1060 gaming graphics card and the latest Intel Core processors to ensure that gamers get a powerful machine. Coupled with MSI's exclusive thermal design, Silent Storm Cooling 2, not only its cooling efficiency is unmatched, it also stays as quiet as an assassin. Besides all power from its hardware goodness on the inside, Trident has a breathtaking case design and RGB Mystic Light to fit in any room at home. It also has more than enough connection ports on the front and backside to let you connect all your game devices. Plug in your portable storage device, gaming headset or keyboard and get into action in an instant! Moreover, two high speed USB ports on the front of Trident are ideal to connect your game controller to as well. Trident redefines the size needed for true PC Gaming and will let gamers bring true gaming desktop performance everywhere.

At its WX call, AMD focused on shifts in creativity from traditional design flows such as Solidworks, Adobe and Autodesk towards game engines as solutions for design visualization (Unreal Engine, Unity, CryEngine, or Autodesk's own Stingray platform), which signal changes in the creator ecosystem. Thanks to globalization, the Internet, and the available wealth of knowledge one can access through it, the line between amateurs and professionals is becoming more and more blurred. Now, those who would once be called amateurs are also using professional tools, and AMD plans to be at the forefront of technologies empowering creators to deliver their vision.

Radeon PRO serves to give creators more flexible and powerful solutions, leveraging open-source resources and centering the ecosystem back on creators and the tools they choose to use, with focused support on VR. As such, AMD is giving them the tools they need, by introducing three new products featuring the Polaris architecture, including 3 year standard + 7 year free extended warranty (including components such as the PCB itself, the PCI-Express slot, and the heatsinks), with AMD taking that extra 7 years as company commitment towards the quality of their products. Those three products are the WX4100, the WX5100, and the WX7100, and have planned, staggered availability throughout November.

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.

NVIDIA has issued a Hotfix driver, version number 375.76, which deals with some issues identified in their previous WHQL driver version, 375.70. Namely, the hotfix drivers fix occasional flickers on high refresh-rate monitors, as well as GIF artifacting.

The hotfix also includes all of the previous updates from NVIDIA's WHQL driver release, such as driver optimization, SLI support (provided the game engine supports multi-GPU), and GeForce Experience optimal settings for Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare, Dishonored 2, and Titanfall 2, and include optimization for "The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Special Edition" and "Obduction VR." Grab the drivers from the links below.DOWNLOAD: NVIDIA GeForce 375.76 Hotfix Driver for Windows 10 64-bit | Windows 10 32-bit | Windows 8/7/Vista 64-bit | Windows 8/7/Vista 32-bit

NVIDIA today released its latest GeForce Drivers. Version 375.70 WHQL Game Ready drivers come just in time for the week's big AAA game releases, "Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare," the hotly anticipated "Dishonored 2," and "Titanfall 2." These include driver optimization, SLI support (provided the game engine supports multi-GPU), and GeForce Experience optimal settings. The drivers also include optimization for "The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Special Edition" and "Obduction VR." Grab the drivers from the links below.DOWNLOAD: NVIDIA GeForce 375.70 WHQL for Windows 10 64-bit | Windows 10 32-bit | Windows 8/7/Vista 64-bit | Windows 8/7/Vista 32-bit

Not every tech company achieves a ten-year lifespan, and Macau-based ZOTAC is sure celebrating that milestone - though with hardware, not fireworks. All in all, five new products were announced in the company's Hong Kong celebration. These range from a liquid-cooled, GTX 1080 graphics card in partnership with Thermaltake; a limited edition HB SLI bridge; a special edition PCIe SSD; a water-cooled Mini PC; and finally, an upgraded VR Go backpack.

AMD is making inroads to the world's second largest film industry, the Indian film industry. Speaking at the 2016 Mumbai Film Festival held last week, the company announced that it is working with Arka Mediaworks, a big-budget production house, to shoot its next blockbuster movie, "Baahubali 2: The Conclusion" in 360-degree VR. Although the primary version of the film is shot in some of the largest 2D production formats, each scene in the film is additionally produced in 360° VR. AMD is separately pushing for VR in Indian cinemas, so the VR experience of "Baahubali 2: The Conclusion" could be exhibited to the masses.

At the heart of this endeavor is a 360° camera rig custom-built by AMD, called the BB360. The rig combines two dozen ultra high-resolution cameras feeding to a workstation with production hardware and VR mastering software made by AMD. The company claims that the BB360 is the most advanced VR camera rig ever built, and makes its production debut with "Baahubali 2: The Conclusion," due for spring 2017.

Razer, the leading lifestyle brand for gamers, today announced the new 17-inch Razer Blade Pro. Completely redesigned from ground up, the system is made specifically for enthusiasts and power users who want desktop performance but don't want to sacrifice portability. Packed with more power than ever before possible in a notebook under an inch thick, Razer's latest system is capable of handling virtually any task, anytime, anywhere.

The new Razer Blade Pro features the latest Intel Core i7 quad-core processor and next-generation NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 GPU. It is the most powerful system ever built by Razer and the thinnest notebook available with a GTX 1080. Other highlights on the new Razer Blade Pro include Thunderbolt 3 for advanced connectivity options, 32 GB of DDR4 dual-channel memory, up to 2 TB of PCI M.2 SSD in RAID 0 storage and a built-in SD card reader.

AMD today released a new beta update to their Radeon Software Crimson Edition. Version 16.10.2 Beta features driver support for upcoming games like "Battlefield 1", "Sid Meier's Civilization VI", "Titanfall 2", "Serious Sam VR Early Access", as well as "Eagle Flight VR". Also included is a new AMD CrossFire profile for "Sid Meyer's Civilization VI" under DX11, and Battlefield 1 AMD CrossFire profile updates for the game's launch.

The release notes also list some fixed issues, namely:

• Fan speed may sometimes remain elevated on select Radeon RX 400 series graphics products even when an application has been exited;
• Eyefinity group settings may not be retained after driver upgrade when using AMD CrssFire configurations;
• Gears of War 4 may experience an application hang when using select high resolution and quality configurations i some specific game maps;
• DirectX 12 content may be unable to launch on some older CPUs that do not support "popcnt" instruction.

DOWNLOAD: AMD Radeon Software Crimson Edition 16.10.2 Beta 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

AMD today outlined powerful new solutions to two of the largest issues facing professional VR content creators today: how to create compelling VR content that approaches cinematic fidelity, and how to maximize that content's viewership. In the opening keynote at VR on the Lot, a two-day summit bringing together the top players in media, entertainment and technology, AMD detailed innovative Radeon Pro technologies designed to fuel the creation of real-time photorealistic VR content, and announced collaborations to facilitate the distribution of premium VR content to out-of-home experiences around the world.

"In creating Radeon Pro, we sought to address the industry's biggest problems, and for many creators, there's none bigger than cinematic VR content," said Roy Taylor, corporate VP and head of alliances, content and VR, Radeon Technologies Group, AMD. "Bringing your creative vision to life can be a demanding and laborious process and working in VR, those demands are exponentially multiplied. Through extraordinary Radeon Pro hardware and software, we're helping alleviate the technical burdens of creativity, empowering artists to focus on telling their story, and through our efforts in location-based entertainment, giving them new opportunities to share their work with the world."

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).

Peripherals major Logitech announced that it has acquired gaming peripherals maker Saitek from MadCatz. Logitech paid MadCatz USD $13 million in cash for the acquisition. Ujesh Desai, head of Logitech's gaming peripherals brand Logitech G, said that the acquisition should augment the kind of gaming peripherals Saitek specializes in - joysticks for flight-simulators, and customized racing wheels for motorsport sims.

Desai also hinted that Logitech G could make a big move in the VR gaming space, not necessarily with HMDs, but with other related input devices. Over the past few years, Saitek's product line has been increasingly game title-specific, by tapping into specific markets (eg: the Flight Simulator community). Logitech G, on the other hand, makes gaming input devices for the masses. Logitech could tap into Saitek to create input devices for VR games that are highly game-specific.

Sony today announced an addition to its PlayStation family of entertainment systems, with the new PlayStation 4 Pro (PS4 Pro). The PS4 Pro isn't meant to succeed the PS4, and is still a "current generation" console, in that all of its games are compatible with the PS4, and there won't be PS4 Pro-exclusive games. What sets it apart is higher-resolution game rendering that looks best on 4K Ultra HD TVs. This doesn't necessarily mean that the games are being rendered at 3840 x 2160 pixels. They could be rendered at resolutions higher than 1080p, and using just the right upscaling algorithms, made to look significantly better than 1080p. Another key visual component is hardware HDR. The PS4 Pro falls in line with Sony's big push for 4K HDR TVs this holiday shopping season.

Under the hood, the PlayStation 4 Pro features an all new semi-custom SoC designed by Sony and AMD. The CPU component sticks to the "Jaguar/Puma" architecture, with 8 cores, but features higher CPU clock speeds. The 8 GB GDDR5 memory is said to run at higher clocks, too, and is bolstered by new lossless memory compression tech by AMD. The GPU component is where the action is. The GPU features over double the shading power of the PS4, and is based on the "Polaris" GPU architecture. The PS4 Pro also ships with a bigger 1 TB hard drive. There is seamless interplayability between PS4 and PS4 Pro. PS4 games you already own are being added with higher-resolution content meant for PS4 Pro. The console also has the muscle for PS-VR. For those still holding on to 1080p HDTVs, the PS4 Pro rewards with higher visual detail, more geometric complexity, and better effects, at that resolution. The PS4 Pro starts at $399.

Acer today unveiled its new Predator 21 X gaming laptop, the world's first curved screen notebook, a series of monitors with the latest eye-tracking technology and GPU updates to the Predator 15/17 series notebooks. This announcement at IFA 2016 reinforces Acer's commitment to premium gaming with a focus on expanding the number of high-performance Predator devices available to discerning enthusiasts around the world.

The Predator 21 X takes the flagship spot in Acer's gaming notebook series and is advanced beyond anything on the market today. It's the world's first notebook to offer a curved 21-inch IPS display (2560 x 1080), and when combined with wide-angle viewing, it delivers a truly immersive gaming experience. To bring gameplay immersion to the next level, the notebook also integrates Tobii eye-tracking technology for a new method of control that's more intuitive and natural. Built-in eye-tracking hardware (infrared sensors and software) unlocks a completely new facet in gaming. By tracking a gamer's eye with software, the notebook introduces new interactions like aiming, identifying enemies and taking cover simply by gazing at objects on the screen. Eye tracking also enhances the experience by providing infinite views whilst navigating treacherous paths and roads in a game.