2021 PC gaming rant... or How DirectX 12 Ultimate is killing PC gaming to enable console gaming.

 

Come at me, bro!

I'm in an angry mood - so lets start 2021 with a bang! This is going to be a post about what I think is wrong about PC gaming and how we can possibly fix that.

So, buckle-up in your seats and get ready for the whiniest, most annoying post I might ever make! :D

Looking back at 2020 and predictions for 2021...

Happy birthday!

It's almost the end of 2020 and, as is usual for most media outlets, they've done the whole "looking back at the previous year phase" and are now making predictions for this exciting new arbitrarily-defined period!

So, since I've been unusually busy on the blog this year, why not dip my toes into the same pool?

The GPU-market crash of 2022? (Apple are not in the position you think they are...)

I'm a prognosticator, or at least I would like to be. I try and trend aspects of the gaming industry, especially CPU and GPU performance in order to understand where we're going and what we, as consumers, might expect. The important inflection point has past us since the release of the Zen and Navi architectures. However, that doesn't mean we're out of the woods yet.

Next Gen PC gaming requirements (Part 4 - end of year update)

Most outlets at this time of year are looking back at their favourite games of 2020 or the best specific pieces of gaming hardware (e.g. monitors or cases). I haven't played enough games (and more specifically, new games) this year to make the endeavour worth it. I don't own enough different pieces of hardware that I can review any releases within the last ten years, let alone this year! 

What I can do, though, is follow up on the hardware trending articles I put out during this year in an attempt to plot where we've come from in terms of recommended requirements in gaming and where we're heading.

In Defence Of: cores... (and the future of gaming)

The original threadripper didn't have the centralised I/O, hurting performance of non-highly parallelised tasks...

 

There is still a narrative within the industry that is incorrect. Actually, scratch that, there are still two narratives within the industry that are incorrect! The first of these is that higher frequency makes a better gaming experience. The second is that more cores equals a better gaming experience.

You know what? Scratch THAT. There is also a third narrative that is also incorrect: relative processor performance is the most important metric for a better gaming experience.

Let’s get into each of these and why they are all correct whilst being incorrect… (Yeah, I KNOW! Why can’t things be simple?!)