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?!)

In Defence Of: Ray Tracing...

 

I wrote an article, now over 10 years ago, about my disdain for the logical argument equivalent of ingnoring the problem/issue. At that point in time, it was "get over it" and, whatever "it" was, was obviously something that the person in question, uttering those three words, had mentally, internally and socially accepted and moved on. However, there was no leeway or credence that someone else could be still within those early stages of acceptance or denial or that someone might be struggling to, intellectually, come to terms with that new paradigm. Or that they might not even ever accept the concept.

I'm writing this post because of the conversations I've had on youtube and twitter within the last three months. I'm writing these thoughts because of the conversation surrounding, and indeed preceeding, Nvidia's latest imperial SNAFU/FUBAR situation about a focus on a feature they have tied themselves to: ray tracing. And while Nvidia are doing their best to present the worst face of their behaviour, there is an underlying problem with how we review graphics cards. I think this may be quite an unpopular opinion, especially in the blind rallying to reviewers' collective defence - but this is a separate, though related issue that needs to be addressed...

Analyse This: The Potential Performance of RX 6000 series... (RX 6900 XT update)

 

The RX 6900 XT reviews launched, the card launched and I have actual numbers to compare. So this is just going to be a quick update on the performance of this card within my previous analysis...

Next Gen game PC hardware requirements... (Part 3 - the cost of gaming)

So, I've lead my merry dance, trying to analyse the past and extrapolate into the future. Maybe I've helped you and provided information that's useful, maybe I haven't. However, there is one last thing I want to explore: the cost of gaming over the last 10 years and I think that, in this time of huge demand and low/no supply that's an interesting topic...

Analyse This: The Potential of the RX 6000 series... (Part 2)

 

Last time, I looked at the potential performance of the RX 6000 series cards before we knew any firm numbers. Then I went on to briefly look at the confirmation of those suppositions after we got actual benchmark numbers and found the RX 6000 series to be almost linearly scaling at a set frequency with additional DCUs - which is really impressive! This time, I want to look at the place the RX 6700 and 6700 XT have in the market and how that lines up with what people were expecting from them coming into this new generation.