NVIDIA announced this morning their new Shield Tablet and Shield Controller. The new Shield Tablet is a $299 Android tablet that's great for gaming and is mighty powerful with using the Tegra K1 SoC.

With being powered by the Tegra K1, the CPU and graphics performance is mighty powerful for the tablet with its Kepler-based GPU and four Cortex-A15 processor cores. The Shield Tablet has an 8-inch, 1920 x 1200 display and the WiFi version with 16GB of storage is going to sell for $299 USD.

I’m a begrudging Linux user, specifically Ubuntu. It’s the result of being too cheap to buy software like Photoshop and too ethical to just steal it like everybody else. As a result I get to enjoy all the benefits of free software, including the attempts to develop the “perfect” portable console, like the DragonBox Pyra.

The history of Linux in gaming is quite poor, but this year so many changes happened in this area that we might be able to review top commercial video games very soon. By commercial I mean those created by most significant gaming companies like Ubisoft or Bethesda, and not indie video games. Even though real gaming in Linux based operating systems got a boost this year, emulators were everywhere to be found, for most known video game consoles.

A new beta update to Duke Nukem 3D: Megaton Edition is now out.

The Duke Nukem 3D: Megaton Edition game is a modest feature and graphics re-make of the Duke Nukem 3D: Atomic Edition, Duke It Out In D.C., Duke Caribbean: Life's a Beach, and Duke: Nuclear Winter titles. The Windows version has been out for a while on Steam while the Linux version is still evolving.

Valve pushed down the SteamOS update 123 to their Alchemist Beta channel this week.

Besides pulling in updated upstream packages from the Debian 7.6 base, there's a fix for situations where applying updates would require multiple reboots. Additionally, the SteamOS Compositor has been fixed for addressing corruption on the first time a overlay or notification is rendered to the screen. Most of the package updates in alchemist_beta 123 involve security fixes and/or minor upstream package updates.

OpenMW 0.31 implements a large number of game features from saving fog of war state to implementing murder crime to follower fast travel. When it comes to bug fixes, there's over 135 reported bug-fixes.

When it comes to gaming, Linux has taken major steps forward. What once was a deserted island for gamers has now become a growing arena for both gaming fans as well as game developers. With each passing week, we see more and more gaming franchises debuting on this platform. Thanks to the massive investment of Steam in Linux, you can now have a full-fledged gaming experience without booting up your Windows installation.

The company announced today that it is acquiring RakNet, which specializes in a software-development engine for connecting games across an online network. RakNet, which is also the name of the technology, enables studios to quickly add voice chat, network patching, and secure connections to their products. Oculus VR, which is building its Oculus Rift virtual-reality headset, notes that thousands of indie developers and major companies like Everquest developer Sony Online Entertainment and Minecraft studio Mojang licensed the tech for their games. Oculus isn’t just purchasing RakNet, it is also making it open source, which means other developers can see the code, add to it, and use it for free.

“We’ve known Kevin Jenkins, founder of Jenkins Software and lead engineer on RakNet, for years, and we’ve used RakNet internally at Oculus for various networked systems and tools,” reads a blog on Oculus VR’s website. “After working with Kevin for a few months, we were all excited by the idea of open-sourcing RakNet to the community.”

The Deepin Desktop Environment is written using Google's Go language and makes use of heavy HTML5. DDE also uses Compiz as its compositing window manager. As in the past some desktop environments / window managers have impaired the full-screen Linux gaming performance, I ran some simple Linux gaming benchmarks on Sunday to see if the Deepin 2014 performance differed at all from upstream Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. Ubuntu 14.04 was tested with the stock Unity 7.2 desktop using Compiz, GNOME Shell 3.10.4, and Xfce 4.10 all from the stock Trusty Tahr archive.

There is no questioning the power of Unreal Engine 4, but Linux users so far had nothing official to test this awesome engine.

However, the wait is finally over, as Epic’s Unreal Engine 4 has officially received its first batch of demos for the users of Linux.

The demos introduced to the operating system include the Elemental Demo, Effects Cave Demo, Realistic Rendering Demo, Reflections Subway Demo, Mobile Temple Demo, Sci-Fi Hallway Demo, Stylized Demo and Blueprint Examples Demo.

Also: Crytek In Trouble, Could Be Bad News For Homefront On Linux