While consoles are hard at work in vying for market share, PC gaming is only occasionally getting love, and AAA titles don't often come by. According to Dean Takahashi, top industry players are teaming up to counter this problem and keep the PC on top as the leading gaming platform. More details await at the full article.

Governments have done it. Politicians have done it. Retailers have done it. And now, even the folks responsible for your PC graphics are doing it.

AMD has recently opened the AMD Dev Central Pavilion on AMD Dev Central Island located within the Second Life metaverse. Its purpose is to extend its Developer Outreach program into a virtual space for meetings, lectures, training courses, and networking opportunities for developers.

Their presence there of course isn't entirely educational. AMD is obviously there to promote themselves to the community, and they're doing that by holding an in-game promotional contest (as folks from the movie-biz have done).

To celebrate the launch of the pavilion, AMD will host a three-month treasure hunt contest with interactive Linden scripting language (LSL) and open source programming challenges. The prize is a Dell Dimension E521 system powered by a dual-core AMD Athlon 64 X2 processor.

Their SL presence also acts as an extension of AMD's Developer Central Site.

With so many entities using their SL presence as extensions of their online services, we're now wondering if in the near future, you won't ever need to log-out from SL ever again.

Allow us for a while to postpone your trip to fantasy land so that we can all get real. You are all aware of companies nVidia, AMD and its subsidiary ATI Technologies, right? Okay for the love of God, the three are major suppliers and manufacturers of GPU. As we all know, we can't get any leveling or questing done if not for these graphics processing units.

Interestingly, nVidia and AMD are currently under fire with the Department of Justice slapping them with a barrage of anti-trust actions. In case you are wondering why, the two were recently accused of conspiracy to take control of the graphics market. Here is what the plaintiffs have to say:

The allegation is the defendants and co-conspirators have engaged in a contract combination, trust or conspiracy, the effect of which was to raise the prices at which they sold graphics processing units and cards to artificially inflated levels.

Executives of the company are also alleged to have had meetings and conversations to discuss pricing of graphics processing units and cards in the U.S.

If these allegations are proven to be correct, then the two are guilty of creating a cartel. The latter are definitely a no-no in a country that is back-boned by democracy and free trade. This is rather weird because not so long ago, the two released a GPU compatible with DirectX 10, the only one in the world.

It's kinda unfair that Blizzard's World of Warcraft is so ***d**n popular, that WidowPC will actually piece together for you a specially-crafted WoW-online gaming PC so you can enjoy in full glory the phenomenon that is WoW. Sigh, some of us here wonder if they plan on extending this kind of special treatment to other games that we like, like EVE Online, or Command and Conquer 3, or Microsoft Flight Simulator.

This WoW rig comes equipped with AMD's Athlon 64 FX OR Dual Core (your pick) on an A8N-E motherboard. Toss in nVidia's GeForce 7600, 11 bays for 5.25" hard drives, up to 4GB of DDR RAM, the Killer NIC ethernet card, and high-def sound that blind people can play to (oky, not in WoW, but WidowPC has an article about the blind playing shooters...).

And you get to pick between two lovely PC casings (the picture we've included), the TU-155 and RX-9, both of which look nothing like an Orc, but who's complaining? With that kind of power under the hood, grinding through Azeroth should be no problem. If you can pony up upwards of US$ 1,495 for the basic package, that is.

But tell you what, WidowPC. Throw in the option to upgrade to one of those sweet G80 mothers, and that's a deal that we'd take (even if you throw in the price differential for the G80). With that kind of power, we can then use the PC for more than World of Warcraft - like Crysis, FSX, C&C3, The Sims...

The Online Game tracking application software developers Xfire hava announced the finalists for the World Of Warcraft Summer Movie Contest which we reported on back in July. In case you missed the initial announcement, this contest involved you being able to make a movie using Blizzard's World of Warcraft and submitting it to Xfire in any one of the four categories: Short Film, Comedy, Music Video/Dance, and Drama/Action. It was held for entrants from the United States, Canada and Europe and winners will get $23,000 worth of prizes from big names such as AMD, XFX, Sennheiser and ZBoard up for grabs.

The deadline for the competition was September 15th 2006, almost a month ago and today marks the day that Xfire announce the finalists. Five outstanding contest finalists were selected from each the above categories and here's your chance to get involved in the competition. Gamers have until Monday, October 23, to select and vote for their favorites using the official website, with the contest winners due to be announced on Thursday, October 26. Stay tuned to QJ's brand new WoW blog for all the latest news on the worlds favourite MMORPG!

Visit: [WoW Summer Movie Contest Website]

If you've just gotten into machinima and you're wallowing in sadness because the doors of stardom is slowly closing down on you as the deadline for World of Warcraft's Summer Movie Contest gets nearer, then this little word from Blizzard and Xfire ought to take you out of your black hole - extended.

You've got two more weeks to polish, or even begin, your machinima masterpieces. You can submit it to any one of the four categories: Short Film, Comedy, Music Video/Dance, and Drama/Action. It is open to entrants from the United States, Canada and Europe. Treat the $23,000 prize from AMD, XFX, Sennheiser and Ideazon, plus a $5,000 enthusiast computer as your muse.

The new deadline for World of Warcraft's Summer Movie Contest is now on September 25. Finalists will be announced the same day; voting begins on October 9 and ends on October 23. Winners will be announced on October 27.

Thanks to Chris Placer for the tip.

At the Austin Game Conference, EVE Online developer CCP yesterday revealed that in order to keep up with the rapid growth rate of their highly successful MMORPG, they have launched the supposedly "largest supercomputer cluster in the history of the gaming industry". The hardware consists of dual-processor 64-bit AMD Opteron-based IBM BladeCenter LS20 blade servers, with additional enhancements made to the cluster's internet backbone.

This cluster manages over 150 million database transactions per day on a 64-bit hardware architecture. Instead of running on regular hard drives, the database servers are using Solid State Disks (SSD), the fastest mass storage devices available today. Having broken the record of 30,000 concurrent users on a server, CCP is looking forward to testing their cluster's capabilities by supporting over 50,000 players simultaneously.

Hilmar Veigar Pétursson, CEO of CCP Games, commented: "Our goal was to implement a scalable solution that could accommodate the influx of new subscribers and gracefully manage the steadily increasing demand put on our infrastructure. IBM provided us with optimized hardware that improved overall game performance and increased capacity, especially during peak server usage timeframes."

EVE Online players will most probably notice no differences when logging on to their favourite game, but it's always great to see MMO technology evolve - with this beast of a machine going at it, you'll realize how big MMO games have become over the years.

MMO fans might have to familiarize themselves with new names of creatures and places. The Beta Testers of Sigil's Vanguard: Saga of Heroes are generous enough to share with us this video taken live from Beta 3. And they don't just want us to watch. They want us to learn.

The video takes place in the Temple of Dailuk. This can be found in the continent of Qalia, in a low to mid-level massive dungeon. The Temple is inhabited by a cult known as The Covenant, together with the Temple Greeters and Xarkrafi. The well-armored creatures the Beta Testers are fighting in the video are The Steward of Xarkrafi and this is prior to the big encounter with Xarkrafi himself.

Sigil Games, developer of VSoH, also wants us to keep in mind that the video was recorded on medium settings at 1280x800, at a home system, an AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800+ (2.4 GHz) with 2 GB of RAM, and an EVGA NVIDIA 7800GTX w/256 MB. The rather unpolished animation with 7-10fps loss can be attributed to this.

Of course, the release version (probably coming out this winter) will not see such problems but instead boasts of graphics, sound, including character and story depth.

Download: [Vanguard Beta 3 Video]