A mighty year
Ends with a bang
Well, it’s decision time – if you were holding out to hear about whether Intel’s 13th Gen should be your next upgrade, that is. Last month was AMD’s moment in the spotlight, and now the Labs have been churning through the 13900K and 13600K and generating numbers, and more importantly – opinions in Chris’ opinionated head.
I just love this game. Even if you’re not on the cusp of upgrading it’s so fascinating to watch on as the battle rages, and new capabilities and performance becomes real. We’ll certainly be looking closely at other chips in the new Ryzen 7000 and 13th Gen families in upcoming issues of APC.
And then there’s the Nvidia RTX 4090. Holy smokes, this thing. Never have we seen such a massive generational uplift, it’s truly astonishing. This beast is a monster for raw rasterisation performance, and on top of that pure brute force power, it ushers in the miracle that is DLSS 3. This is the real deal, not a ‘take it with a grain of salt’ feature. Frame generation can double your FPS or more. It’s beyond belief – except it’s real. Unlike previous new techs that need dev support – and only saw lukewarm take-up, we expect game devs to rapidly embrace DLSS 3 and quickly add support for new and many existing games.
Of course, if nobody buys a 4090 then it’s all for nought, and if the next 12 months means a market flooded with bargain-priced 3000 series cards, DLSS 3 support may slow a little. But it’ll get there, it’s too good to be ignored. And yes, these things are ridiculously expensive. There’s no getting away from that. Almost $4k for a graphics card… crikey.
As we close this issue the new AMD Radeon RDNA 3 cards will be coming in the door, so perhaps AMD can do some pricing magic that will force some sanity into Nvidia’s strategy. Come on Red, save us again. Please. And this time deliver performance that evens up the contest, and maybe has some trickery that is as impressive as DLSS 3.
This game! So exciting.
“And then there’s the Nvidia RTX 4090. Holy smokes, this thing. Never have we seen such a massive generational uplift, it’s truly astonishing.”