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.

The OpenXR working group - previously known as the Khronos VR Initiative - is creating an open and royalty-free standard for VR and AR applications and devices.

The Problem:
Without a cross-platform standard, VR applications, games and engines must port to each vendors' APIs. In turn, this means that each VR device can only run the apps that have been ported to its SDK. The result is high development costs and confused customers - limiting market growth.

The Solution
The cross-platform VR standard eliminates industry fragmentation by enabling applications to be written once to run on any VR system, and to access VR devices integrated into those VR systems to be used by applications.

LG Electronics has just made one of the most cryptic, devoid-of-any-real-information announcements we've seen in recent years. The company will apparently enter the VR HMD field, and is looking to unveil its first prototype at this year's GDC in San Francisco, CA. LG will make use of Valve's GDC booth to showcase an HMD capable of delivering "a high fidelity, next generation VR experience".

That's about all the information we were given at face value. However, some other tidbits serve to paint a picture on how premature this announcement may have been: LG will purportedly be meeting with developers to "collect feedback and impressions as part of its effort to define the first commercial units". This means that the HMD is likely still in a proof of concept phase, early enough in development to cater to developers' expertise, needs and suggestions, which means it's probably still far removed from retail to be of any real import in the grand scheme of things. However, it Is a confirmed dip from another tech giant in the fully-fledged, high-performance VR HMD game. And judging by the proximity with Valve, we would expect LG's unit to borrow heavily from that company's input and vision for VR.

CyberPower Inc., a global manufacturer of custom gaming PCs, gaming laptops, and performance workstations, today announced the pre-sale of a new series of enthusiastic gaming PCs based on the AMD Ryzen CPU and AM4 platform, which features advanced overclocking and more PCI Express lanes for handling high-bandwidth, immersive computing.

CyberPowerPC Ryzen based gaming PCs come in a multitude of flavors and offerings, including a Virtual Reality-ready system, refreshes to its current award winning Gamer Dragon, as well as high performance machines in the new Gamer Master Series and Hyper Liquid series. All Ryzen equipped systems will be fully customizable.

AMD in a press release today, stated that in its 2017 "Capsaicin Live" event held on the sidelines of the Game Developers Conference, it will reveal "exciting new details surrounding Vega," its next-generation GPU architecture, on which the company is expected to launch its next high-end graphics card. The company is hosting the much talked about "Capsaicin and Cream" launch event on the 28th February, 2017. It is expected to launch its next-generation Ryzen performance desktop processors, and talk some more about its "Vega" GPU architecture. Besides Ryzen and Vega, AMD will showcase some of Summer 2017's most anticipated AAA game launches that take advantage of VR.

2016 saw the launch of multiple new VR platforms vying for consumer, developer and enterprise attention. The Strategy Analytics report "VR Headset Platform Market Share Year End 2016" estimates that over 30 million VR headsets shipped, split between 6 major competing VR platforms in an increasingly fragmented landscape.

David MacQueen, Executive Director of Strategy Analytics' Virtual Reality Ecosystem research program, noted, "2016 certainly was a busy year in VR. Appearing alongside Google Cardboard were new platforms Google Daydream, Samsung Gear VR, Oculus Rift, PlayStation VR and SteamVR, currently served by the HTC Vive device, although more vendors will join this platform in 2017."

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."

NVIDIA today introduced a range of Quadro products, all based on its Pascal architecture, that transform desktop workstations into supercomputers with breakthrough capabilities for professional workflows across many industries. Workflows in design, engineering and other areas are evolving rapidly to meet the exponential growth in data size and complexity that comes with photorealism, virtual reality and deep learning technologies. To tap into these opportunities, the new NVIDIA Quadro Pascal-based lineup provides an enterprise-grade visual computing platform that streamlines design and simulation workflows with up to twice the performance of the previous generation, and ultra-fast memory.

"Professional workflows are now infused with artificial intelligence, virtual reality and photorealism, creating new challenges for our most demanding users," said Bob Pette, vice president of Professional Visualization at NVIDIA. "Our new Quadro lineup provides the graphics and compute performance required to address these challenges. And, by unifying compute and design, the Quadro GP100 transforms the average desktop workstation with the power of a supercomputer."

Unigine's dazzling-looking Superposition benchmark (which was due for a late 2016 launch but still hasn't made the rounds, having an expected release date on Q1 of the current year) won't be coming to your average PC gaming platform of choice: Steam.

Apparently, the absence of the benchmark on Steam isn't a choice made by Unigine itself; instead, the "Superposition" benchmark has effectively been locked from entering Steam's catalog on account of it not being "suitable" for their Greenlight initiative. And this comes on the toes of the benchmark having recently achieved the status of number one application on Greenlight - not an easy thing to do, considering the amount of applications that vie for that spot.

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.

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