BioWare and Electronic Arts has announced that Dragon Age: Origins (PS3, PC, Xbox 360) has officially gone gold and is now currently in manufacturing ready for the November 3 launch date across North America.

Who said what? We heard that Rob Taylor, NVIDIA's vice president in charge of content relations, let loose some brash words that would cleave a PC gamer's heart in two. Well, at least we think it would have, if we already didn't consider the idea that game developers need to make money, too. We know that NVIDIA is one of the major players of the PC Gaming Alliance, so why drive the knife to the hilt? Read more to find out what point the rather outspoken VP is trying to drive at.

Hot in the industry today is news that two technological companies have joined forces to package both animations and physics to developer companies. NaturalMotion, responsible for the motion synthesis technology in Grand Theft Auto IV, announced together with NVIDIA, new proud owners of PhysX technology, that they will offer "highly-integrated" solutions for developing games on all current generation gaming platforms, including the PC. Find out how at the full story.

One topic that this year's Nordic Game conference aims to discuss is regarding game development. To this end, Nordic's organizers have unveiled their initial line-up of professional programmers who will be giving talks at the event grounds. Details are available in the full article.

Two promising action games could very well be on their way to the Sony PlayStation 3, as the French PlayStation Magazine featured Codemaster's Damnation and ZeitGuyz' Recoil: Retrograd. They don't ring a bell? Head over to the full article to learn more about these mysterious titles.

If you're conscious about in-game dynamics, namely the physics behind games, then this update is definitely good news. Nvidia, a visual computing technologies company, has just signed an agreement to acquire Ageia Technologies, Inc., a company known for the PhysX software that is widely adopted by games spanning different platforms. Details in the full article.

NVIDIA is most commonly known for its high-quality graphics cards, but they're entering a new arena in 2008: Game development. Employing teams from Germany at the onset, Polish devs Metropolis have now been added to the mix. NVIDIA says that by 2009, they'll have the best-looking FPS in the industry. Head to the full article for more details.

Some hackers have announced that they've discovered a way to access the 3D contexts on the Graphics Processor Unit of the PlayStation 3. If what they say is true, then this will allow homebrew developers to create their own 3D applications for the console. CNLohr posted a video on YouTube of the PlayStation 3 running some code in Linux.

Want to see the video for yourself? Head on over to the full article for more details.

Around a month ago, Bethesda announced a Fallout 3 (Xbox 360, PS3, PC) perk making contest, and 17,000 entries made their way into the Bethesda gaming vaults, hoping to become the next Fallout perk. Well, Bethesda has announced the winner of its Fallout 3 perk making contest, and we can certainly tell you right now... it's not us!

Find out who won after the jump!

Ouch. Biggest news in the techies' Utopia is Epic Games' Mark Rein expounding his predictions that technology on PCs would be throttled, after a showcase of Unreal Engine 3 titles on consoles haven't even come close to pushing the DirectX 10 envelope.

 

After PC gaming (at least in the North American side) had drifted off to a steady decline, game companies have steered their focus into development for the next-generation platforms, such as the Xenon-powered Xbox 360 and the CELL-powered PlayStation 3. But with their physical limitations, consoles can only power so much in a game before plateauing at a certain performance level.

Epic Games' vice president Mark Rein told CVG that the game industry has to "dumb the games down for the consoles," so it's highly unlikely that gamers on PC will see anything pushing the graphical or technological envelope in the near future. In fact, Rein thinks that it most likely that no game would even tap DirectX 10 until the next iteration of consoles.

While Banzai Runners the world over could be "facepalming" in unison, this doesn't present more of a threat to "geeked up" gamers than to, say FutureMark or NVIDIA, whose businesses has been at the brunt of graphical technology advancement since the late 1990s. Sneaking around the Web's most reputable tech forums, we've found that majority of the reactions aren't even concerned with Rein's statements.

It is true that the opinion is worrisome to an extent (essentially, while unproven, it is potentially viable), but it appears that more concern has been emphasized toward creativity, variety and (gasp!) quality games for the PC, rather than always push the frontlines of graphics with first-person shooters, dungeon crawlers or real-time strategy games. Is a revolution at hand? If so, this blogger wants X-COM back (please?).

And as for PC gaming technology being throttled, however, some people believe that Germany, banded together with computer companies worldwide, may have something different to say altogether.