CORSAIR, a world leader in high-performance gaming peripherals and enthusiast components, has released two new comprehensive kits in its Hydro X Series line of custom cooling parts: the CORSAIR XH305i RGB and XH303i RGB Custom Cooling Kits. Making custom cooling accessible even to beginners, these kits come with everything you need to build a stunning hardline loop for your PC, complete with an RGB CPU water block, single 360 mm radiator, three RGB fans, PMMA clear hardline tubing, a hardline cutting/bending kit, fittings and adapters, and coolant.

The XH305i RGB Kit features an XD5 RGB Pump/Reservoir Combo, while the XH303i RGB Kit offers an XD3 RGB Pump/Reservoir Combo to drive compact custom cooling loops. Vibrant RGB lighting built into the XC7 CPU water block, Pump/Reservoir Combo, and RGB fans is controlled by an included CORSAIR iCUE Commander PRO Controller and CORSAIR iCUE software.

Here at HTC Vive, we have long partnered with Qualcomm Technologies to bring amazing immersive mobile experiences to consumers and businesses. Throughout our history of making smartphones at HTC to creating VR headsets like Focus Plus, we leverage the latest and greatest processing power from Qualcomm Snapdragon mobile platform. Today we're furthering our commitment through an agreement to pre-integrate and optimize Vive's WAVE development platform for devices powered by Snapdragon including the Snapdragon 855, Snapdragon 865, Snapdragon XR1, and Snapdragon XR2 Platforms.

Starting now, the Vive Wave runtime will be made available to all Snapdragon customers on these chipsets. In addition, HTC engineers will offer testing and support for new deployments of the Wave platform as part of the agreement.

XRSPACE, the company pioneering the next generation of social reality, has today announced the launch of the world's first social VR platform designed for mass market users, combined with the first 5G mobile VR headset, delivering on the promise of a true social VR experience for all.

XRSPACE aims to create the social reality of the future - a world where people can interact both physically and virtually in a way that is contextual, familiar, immersive, interactive and personal. At a time when face-to-face interaction is restricted due to social distancing measures, XRSPACE is aiming to bring people together in a virtual world that is powered by cutting edge XR, AI, and computer vision technology, creating a new experience through 5G which is meaningful, anytime, anywhere.

Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., a subsidiary of Qualcomm Incorporated, today at Augmented World Expo (AWE), celebrates the milestone of partnering with global operators, smartphone OEMs and XR viewer manufacturers to deliver XR viewers to consumers and enterprises within the next year. Since Qualcomm Technologies' device category introduction of XR viewers tethered to 5G smartphones, fifteen global operators including China Mobile, China Telecom, China Unicom, Deutsche Telekom, EE, KDDI, KT, LG Uplus, NTT DOCOMO, Orange, SK Telecom, SoftBank, Telefonica, Verizon and Vodafone have shared plans to sample and commercialize XR viewers to provide immersive, never-before-experiences over 5G.

Lightweight, head-worn devices that connect to a smartphone powered by Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 or 865 Mobile Platforms, XR viewers are glasses tethered to a 5G-enabled smartphone via USB-C cable. XR viewers unlock a new generation of immersive experiences using 5G-enabled smartphones that provide high bandwidth and low latency which is essential for high-quality XR. Consumers' favorite smartphone applications can become augmented reality (AR) experiences in front of their eyes or workplace meetings can be revolutionized through holographic telepresence with virtual collaboration platforms, as XR and 5G come together to transform how the world connects, communicates and consumes content.

Power up your XR displays and 5G devices because NVIDIA is taking streaming to the next level. With the announcement today of the NVIDIA CloudXR 1.0 software development kit, we're bringing major advancements to streaming augmented reality, mixed reality and virtual reality content — collectively known as XR — over 5G, Wi-Fi and other high-performance networks.

With the NVIDIA CloudXR platform, any end device — including head-mounted displays (HMDs) and connected Windows and Android devices — can become a high-fidelity XR display capable of showcasing professional-quality graphics. CloudXR is built on NVIDIA RTX GPUs and the CloudXR SDK to allow streaming of immersive AR, MR or VR experiences from anywhere, whether from the data center, cloud or at the edge. And with NVIDIA GPU virtualization software, CloudXR scales efficiently allowing multiple users or tenants to securely share GPU resources.

Today, The Khronos Group, an open consortium of industry-leading companies creating advanced interoperability standards, publicly releases the OpenCL 3.0 Provisional Specifications. OpenCL 3.0 realigns the OpenCL roadmap to enable developer-requested functionality to be broadly deployed by hardware vendors, and it significantly increases deployment flexibility by empowering conformant OpenCL implementations to focus on functionality relevant to their target markets. OpenCL 3.0 also integrates subgroup functionality into the core specification, ships with a new OpenCL C 3.0 language specification, uses a new unified specification format, and introduces extensions for asynchronous data copies to enable a new class of embedded processors. The provisional OpenCL 3.0 specifications enable the developer community to provide feedback on GitHub before the specifications and conformance tests are finalized.

Microsoft Thursday released the DirectX 12 Ultimate logo. This is not a new API with any new features, but rather a differentiator for graphics cards and game consoles that support four key modern features of DirectX 12. This helps consumers recognize the newer and upcoming GPUs, and tell them apart from some older DirectX 12 capable GPUs that were released in the mid-2010s. For a GPU to be eligible for the DirectX 12 Ultimate logo, it must feature hardware acceleration for ray-tracing with the DXR API; must support Mesh Shaders, Variable Rate Shading (VRS), and Sampler Feedback (all of the four). The upcoming Xbox Series X console features this logo by default. Microsoft made it absolutely clear that the DirectX 12 Ultimate logo isn't meant as a compatibility barrier, and that these games will work on older hardware, too.

As it stands, the "Navi"-based Radeon RX 5000 series are "obsolete", just like some Turing cards from the GeForce GTX 16-series. At this time, the only shipping product which features the logo is NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 20-series and the TITAN RTX, as they support all the above features.

NVIDIA today introduced the Quadro RTX 4000 graphics card - the company's first midrange professional GPU powered by the NVIDIA Turing architecture and the NVIDIA RTX platform. Unveiled at the annual Autodesk University Conference in Las Vegas, the Quadro RTX 4000 puts real-time ray tracing within reach of a wider range of developers, designers and artists worldwide.

Professionals from the manufacturing, architecture, engineering and media creation industries witnessed a seismic shift in computer graphics with the launch of Turing in August. The field's greatest leap since the invention of the CUDA GPU in 2006, Turing features new RT Cores to accelerate ray tracing and next-gen Tensor Cores for AI inferencing which, together for the first time, make real-time ray tracing possible.

NVIDIA released its first GeForce software suite since Windows 10 October 2018 went official. The new GeForce 416.16 WHQL drivers add full support for the new operating system, including WDDM 2.5, and DirectX Ray-Tracing (DXR), which are essential for NVIDIA RTX to work. The drivers also add SLI profiles for a large number of games, including "Battlefield V," "Basingstroke," "Divinity: Original Sin II," "Immortal: Unchained," "Jurassic World Evolution," "Phoenix Point," and "Seven: The Days Long Gone." 3DVision profiles are added for "The Elder Scrolls: Online."

A small number of bugs are also fixed with this release. "Pascal" GPUs running "Quake HD remix" no longer experience black square glitches. Temporal AA sharp drops in performance with GeForce GTX 1060 running "Rainbow 6: Siege" has been fixed. Driver errors on TITAN Xp when waking up from S4 sleep have been fixed. Lastly, an issue found with "Turing" GPUs not exposing Netflix 4K mode to displays connected over USB-C, has been fixed. Grab the driver from the link below.DOWNLOAD: NVIDIA GeForce 416.16 WHQL

The change-log follows.

EK Water Blocks, the Slovenia-based premium computer liquid cooling gear manufacturer is excited to announce the expansion of the S Kit lineup. Following the recent release of EK-CoolStream SE 140 and EK-CoolStream SE 280 slim radiators, two new kits will also be joining the webshop. Slim Series kits or in short S Kits are a great choice for beginners at liquid cooling and people doing builds with limited radiator space.

EK-KIT S140 and EK-KIT S280 beside the super compatible thin EK-CoolStream SE radiator that they use will also be very suitable for low noise scenarios. As we know, slim radiators benefit from low-speed fans more than the thick ones, and the 140mm fan format only adds additional cooling surface.

The Video Electronics Standards Association (VESA) has recently announced plans to form a special working group within its ecosystem, whose mission will be to develop standards for XR (eXtended Reality) products and development. XR envelops both VR (Virtual Reality) and AR (Augmented Reality), and VESA has apparently had enough of differing vendor implementations. According to VESA, "the lack of standardization is causing compatibility issues between products from different vendors, as well as increasing the complexity and cost of development, ownership and replacement. Lack of compatibility can also create confusion for end users and impede broader acceptance of AR/VR products."

Considering the XR market's value is expected to hit roughly $162 billion dollars by 2020, we can certainly see how "compatibility issues" and "lower acceptance of AR/VR products" could affect what is looking to be an extremely lucrative market. Let's just gloss over the fact (slightly paradoxical, actually) that we're now looking at two different XR standards groups, VESA's newly-announced initiative, and Khrono's OpenXR.

ARM processors have been making forays into hitherto shallow markets, with it's technology and processor architectures winning an ever increasing amount of design wins. Most recently, Microsoft itself announced a platform meant to use ARM processors in a server environment. Now, ARM has put forward its plans towards achieving a grand total of 100 billion chips shipped in the 2017-2021 time frame.

To put that goal in perspective, ARM is looking to ship as many ARM-powered processors in this 2017-2021 time frame as it did between 1991 and 2017. This is no easy task - at least if ARM were to stay in its known markets, where it has already achieved almost total saturation. The plan: to widen the appeal of its processor design, with big bets in the AI, Automotive, XR (which encompasses the Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, and Mixed Reality markets), leveraged by what ARM does best: hyper-efficient processors.