TECH WILL KEEP EVOLVING, AND SO MUST WE
THIS YEAR is a very special year for PC and PC gaming enthusiasts. There are things on the horizon that are poised to break new ground on the hardware scene. Take, for example, VR. It’s coming out at the consumer level toward the end of the year, and there’s no doubt that things will get interesting. But even more important is what’s coming in the near term.
Microsoft has been grilled in the last year by the community for forgetting its roots, the desktop PC. On several occasions, it’s even said that it would go back to caring about PC gaming, but that hasn’t happened—until now. Enter DirectX 12. Regarded as the savior of gaming on the desktop, DirectX 12 is supposed to bring low-level GPU access to the application layer. This isn’t new, however. AMD’s Mantle driver provides the same benefits and performance. Unfortunately, AMD isn’t pushing Mantle now, and instead is actually encouraging developers to go with DirectX 12.
Beyond performance gains, there’s word on the street that DirectX 12 also allows you to use multiple GPUs from different birth parents. That’s right. ht. Imagine pairing up an AMD card withith an Nvidia card and getting double ble the performance. That seems like a pipedream to us, to be honest. Can you ou say “driver hell?”
On the CPU side, Intel is out withith Broadwell, but by the time you read ad this, Skylake may already be on the market. This is an unusual release schedule for Intel because Broadwell is technically a year late, and Skylake is a “tock” on Intel’s release schedule. However, for us, Skylake is much more exciting than Broadwell. It represents a new architecture with such salivating features as PCI Express 4.0, native SATA Express, and up to 128MB of L4 cache on some models.
The release timeframe for Skylake is interesting, as it aligns closely with the availability of consumer-ready VR products from companies like Valve. Oculus isn’t far off, either, announcing that the consumer version of the Rift will be available in early 2016. Having PCI Express 4.0 means we can expect a host of new GPUs, and a host of new GPUs is perfect for VR. We’re excited.
Speaking of excitement, I’m thrilled to say that www.maximumpc.com has a fresh new look. The way it’s designed is to shine the limelight on the best content— the content we think is most interesting or valuable for you. We’ve come a long way, and now that the site is live, we’re back to doing what we do best: benchmarking the hell out of the latest gear in the ongoing pursuit of PC nirvana.