TECH OF 2016
A look into the crystal ball with guru
Oh dear. I’ve just looked back at the “Tech of 2015” article I wrote at the start of last year, and it’s a tad embarrassing. It seems my crystal ball was on the fritz when I tried to predict a couple of the major tech trends of 2015 – how was I to know that the Oculus Rift would get pushed to 2016? Or that the Fove VR headset, which looked cool thanks to its built-in eye-tracking feature, would fizzle out to become a second-rate contender in the impending VR wars?
Thankfully it seems that 2016 will finally be the year that Virtual Reality becomes, well, a reality. Three main platforms have emerged as the prime contenders, two of which are PC based. In the PC corner we have Valve/HTC’s Vive platform, along with Facebook’s Oculus Rift. Meanwhile in console land, the PS4 VR looks like it’s going to be extremely expensive, as it comes with an external graphics acceleration box; I’m betting now that the VR kit will actually cost more than the PS4 itself, which will severely limit its uptake.
As for the rest of the PC world, the big news is the introduction of HBM 2.0 (High Bandwidth Memory) on NVIDIA’s and AMD’s graphics products. This overcomes the 4GB limit that version 1 suffered from, which proved to be a bit of an Achilles’ Heel for the Radeon Fury X. Both NVIDIA and AMD are expected to strap this new memory type onto GPUs that carry twice the transistor count of today’s top products, which should bring monumental speed increases. Sadly our CPUs won’t see anywhere near these levels of improvements, unless AMD can finally offer some form of competition to Intel, which is looking highly unlikely.
I’m not sure what else we’ll see, and to be honest, I’m not too fussed – as a longtime believer in VR, this single technology has me more excited about 2016 than any year in the last decade. Whether it’ll prove to be the killer technology that I’m hoping it is, or will fizzle out due to high costs and demanding setup requirements, I just don’t know. Check back with me in 2017 and we’ll know for sure by then…