For those of us who main PC as our primary platform, we're in an interesting spot for vidya.
- Next generation consoles are a stone throw away. While it'll take some time before titles are built exclusively for them, the mass market ceiling being raised opens up opportunities for developers push multiplatform titles harder. And in turn gives more opportunities for PCs to be pushed to their limits.
- Ray tracing is no longer a pipe dream. Next generation consoles will support ray tracing to some extent, and NVidia is first to the market with hardware level support on PC. As glorious as ray tracing is, even with a 2080 Ti it comes with a hefty performance cost, and the tech is still in early adopter phase. The incentive to jump in early is there, but so too is the temptation to wait for the next run of RT cards that'll ideally be more proficient at doing the job.
- Resolution and framerate. 4K is more on offer than ever before, but still comes with a hefty performance cost. High end cards from NVidia and AMD are getting much better at handling 4K workloads, but this also calls into question of framerate; are you a 60fps or 120+fps kinda person? Aforementioned ray tracing skewers the situation further. For the first time in a long time PC builds have cutting edge, emergent, framerate crippling technology to play with. There is no perfect system, as a 4K RT platform at ~60fps is out of the question. Builders now must set their own standard of which rendering peak they prefer; resolution, ray tracing, or framerate?
- Games. It's still early days, but they're finally happening. Aforementioned cross gen titles for next gen systems will hopefully raise the ceiling in asset quality even higher for PC builds, but ray tracing is already here. It's available in Metro and Battlefield, it'll be used in DOOM and Wolfenstein later this year, and next year both Bloodlines 2 and Cyberpunk have confirmed RT support. For those who want the best looking version possible of multiplatform games, the pressure to upgrade is now.
So what's your plans? Where do your sit with CPU and GPUs? Did you early adopt, and are you planning to upgrade again in the near future? Are you waiting, and if so when and what for?
- Next generation consoles are a stone throw away. While it'll take some time before titles are built exclusively for them, the mass market ceiling being raised opens up opportunities for developers push multiplatform titles harder. And in turn gives more opportunities for PCs to be pushed to their limits.
- Ray tracing is no longer a pipe dream. Next generation consoles will support ray tracing to some extent, and NVidia is first to the market with hardware level support on PC. As glorious as ray tracing is, even with a 2080 Ti it comes with a hefty performance cost, and the tech is still in early adopter phase. The incentive to jump in early is there, but so too is the temptation to wait for the next run of RT cards that'll ideally be more proficient at doing the job.
- Resolution and framerate. 4K is more on offer than ever before, but still comes with a hefty performance cost. High end cards from NVidia and AMD are getting much better at handling 4K workloads, but this also calls into question of framerate; are you a 60fps or 120+fps kinda person? Aforementioned ray tracing skewers the situation further. For the first time in a long time PC builds have cutting edge, emergent, framerate crippling technology to play with. There is no perfect system, as a 4K RT platform at ~60fps is out of the question. Builders now must set their own standard of which rendering peak they prefer; resolution, ray tracing, or framerate?
- Games. It's still early days, but they're finally happening. Aforementioned cross gen titles for next gen systems will hopefully raise the ceiling in asset quality even higher for PC builds, but ray tracing is already here. It's available in Metro and Battlefield, it'll be used in DOOM and Wolfenstein later this year, and next year both Bloodlines 2 and Cyberpunk have confirmed RT support. For those who want the best looking version possible of multiplatform games, the pressure to upgrade is now.
So what's your plans? Where do your sit with CPU and GPUs? Did you early adopt, and are you planning to upgrade again in the near future? Are you waiting, and if so when and what for?
