The annual technical bonanza CES is another year away, so I thought I’d round up all the important announcements for computer games here in a handy place. The big theme this year was, perhaps not surprisingly, many new games laptops to help more people get things going while working from home, and this was helped to a small extent by the announcement of Nvidia’s RTX 30 Series Switching to Laptops. as well as several new mobile processors from Intel and AMD. However, laptops were not the only big news from CES, so read on below to find our filled highlights of this year’s performance.
The biggest and most exciting announcement that came out of CES this year was probably the arrival of yet another new Nvidia RTX graphics card. The RTX 3060 costs $ 329 and has a massive 12 GB of GDDR6 memory, which is 4 GB more than the RTX 3060 Ti and RTX 3070. A strange decision, to be sure, but one I would like to test in the practice it begins end of February. Whether it will be easier to buy than the rest of Nvidia’s RTX 30 series is someone’s guess, but it’s good to see the more affordable end of the next generation of graphics cards start to appear, no matter how fleeting it may be. is. store shelves.
Another big announcement at Nvidia’s press conference was the even more imminent arrival of RTX 30 series laptops. The first models arrive in late January and early February, and there are plenty of smart laptops from Asus, Acer, Razer, Lenovo, MSI, Gigabyte and more to keep an eye on.
Aside from being a big boost to gaming performance, another welcome trend this year is the launch of several 2560 × 1440 laptops to make the most of Nvidia’s new graphics chips. They also do not stop there, as many of the top 1440p models also all have 165Hz refresh rates. Meanwhile, 1920 × 1080 laptops are also being pushed to 360Hz, giving us more choice than ever before.
AMD focused primarily on the CPU side of their business during their CES speech, announcing not only the world’s first 8-core CPU for ultra-portable laptops, but also their new family Ryzen 5000 HX series chips for laptops. The latter will come in many of the aforementioned RTX 30 laptops, as Intel’s corresponding H-Series Tiger Lake laptops require a little more time in the oven (indeed, the only H-series chips that Intel announced this week, was for ultra-portable laptops, their H35 family, rather than their more traditional H and HK game chips).
However, the downside of AMD’s main reason was the promise that more RDNA 2 GPUs would arrive for both desktops and laptops during the first half of this year. They have not released any specific models or pricing information, but you can see in the photo above that there are two GPUs on the right, indicating that before the end of June we are the successors to some of the existing AMD RX 5000 graphics cards will see. . The fact that one of them is GPUs with one fan means that it will probably be the RX 6500 and RX 6600 instead of RX 6600 and RX 6700, but whatever it is, it will almost certainly be more mainstream cards than AMDs. strong RX 6800 and RX 6800 XT GPUs, and will hopefully bring much-needed competition to Nvidia’s growing family of RTX 3060 cards.
It’s only in the concept stage at the moment, but Razer announced a pretty crazy play chair at CES this year with a expandable 60-inch OLED screen in the back. Codenamed Project Brooklyn, Razer, calls it the ultimate entertainment powerhouse, and I’m actually pretty much on board with it as an idea. It’s definitely a lot more practical and user – friendly than the monstrous Acer Thronos chair, and I’m actually really excited to try it out the right way, whenever it’s in the production stage.
And if that wasn’t enough, Razer is also making a new smart face mask with great Metro 2033 energy. Razer, which has continued to manufacture surgical masks for frontline workers, has already launched a working prototype of Project Hazel and will hopefully be here much sooner than Project Brooklyn.
In addition to a range of new laptops, MSI has announced that they will be making their first SSDs this year, and their initial specifications look pretty nippy. With consecutive read and write speeds hitting 7000MB / s and 6900MB / s respectively, it looks pretty much faster than Samsung’s 980 Pro and WD’s Black SN850, though we won’t know how its random speeds hold until it starts later. the year.
Although Intel did not give us any more details about when their 11th Gen Rocket Lake CPUs will appear this year (all they said is that they are still on track to arrive before the end of March), we received welcome news or they will be backwards compatible with their existing 400 series motherboards. Asus has indeed come out and said that they will release a BIOS update for many of their Z490 and H470 boards to ensure that they still support the 11th generation chips from Intel, which is a huge relief for anyone who has upgraded to one of Intel’s 10th generation comets. Lake CPUs last year.
Indeed, when Intel announced that Rocket Lake was coming with a new 500-series motherboard chipset, I was worried that owners of Comet Lake would be forced to buy a brand new board to take advantage of the new PCIe 4.0 support of Rocket Lake. We’ll have to wait for more confirmation from other motherboard manufacturers to see if this will be the case on all Z490 and H470 boards, but it’s a promising start nonetheless.