"As the holiday season approaches, things have yet to pick up for the video game industry as sales fell for the sixth month in a row in September. Research group NPD reports that, in the month of September, sales of video game software, hardware and accessories fell 8 percent to $1.2 billion. Game hardware was hit the hardest, with sales falling 19 percent to $383 million.

"Intel reported that third-quarter revenue exceeded $11 billion for the first time, up 18 percent year-over-year to $11.1 billion. The company reported operating income of $4.1 billion, net income of $3.0 billion and earnings per share of 52 cents." | more

"Tuesday Samsung announced that it had begun mass-producing the industry's first 3-bit-per-cell, 64 Gb (8 GB) MLC NAND flash chip using 20-nm-class processing. The news follows Samsung's introduction of 32 Gb (4 GB) 3-bit NAND flash using 30-nm-class processing last November, and the company's 32 Gb MLC NAND using 20-nm-class processing unleashed in April." | more

"Wondering if your favorite game wants more CPU or GPU muscle? We tested 20 different titles using a GeForce GTX 460 and a Core i5 processor (one of our favorite configs) in order to figure out where a solid mainstream machine gets hung up." | more

"According to WD, the new 3 TB drive will be part of the company's My Book Essential line of external drives consisting of both dual USB 3.0/2.0 and cheaper USB 2.0-only models. The dual-interface 3.0/2.0 models will offer a choice of 3 TB, 2 TB and 1 TB capacities, whereas the USB 2.0-only models will offer capacities of 2 TB, 1.5 TB, 1 TB, 750 GB, 640 GB, and 500 GB." | more

"In addition to the possible release date, Monday also brought new Duke Nukem Forever video footage from a live demo conducted at the Firstlook gaming convention in Amsterdam. The demo shows Duke taking a rather lengthy leak, playing with the bathroom faucets, drawing and erasing on a marker board, grabbing the Devastator and "duking" it out with a Cycloid Emperor in a football stadium again, and more.

"AMD hasn't officially announced anything with regards to the next generation Radeon HD series. We know it's coming, but there's no official word on models, specifications or clock speeds yet. What we do have are potential leaks and the speculation that comes with all of that. This chart has been leaked from two different sources showing the performance leap that will come from the Radeon HD 6700 "Barts" series.

"Gamers on Linux are used to there being a limited choice of 3D APIs. OpenGL is an excellent cross-platform solution, but a lot of development these days are on Direct3D – which is from Microsoft and obviously not on Mac OS X or Linux. Well, not on Linux until this week. Luca Barbieri made a commit with news of native Direct3D 10/11 support into Gallium, with an eventual goal of running Windows games in Wine." | more

Another questionable idea from Intel this year. How long before someone hacks the codes and everyone upgrades extra power for free?

Anti-aliasing can now be enabled for StarCraft II.