New year, new toys
Steam Deck
If Valve do succeed at squeezing fair performance out of Steam’s extensive library, AAA games and all, it’s easy to see the Steam Deck take handheld PCs from no-name-brand curios to something at least approaching the mainstream. It’s exciting and distinct in a way that previous Valve hardware efforts weren’t, and it helps that with prices starting at £349 / $399, it could be a genuine budget PC option at a time when Nvidia and AMD have largely abandoned entry-level hardware.
Intel getting back into dedicated graphics, with a charge into gaming GPUs specifically, could be a Very Big Deal indeed. Besides challenging the settled Nvidia/AMD duopoly, any new supply of graphics cards – in the current climate of endless shortages and borderline insulting price hikes – is going to be a welcome one.
The Arc/Alchemist GPUs will also herald another bit of interesting tech, XeSS: Intel’s answer toNvidia DLSS. Like DLSS, XeSS aims to make your games run smoother by having them render at a lower resolution before upscaling the image to fit your monitor’s native resolution, and has similar machine learning integration too – so it could improve both image quality and performance even further over time. XeSS is also open source, so while it could perform best on Arc GPUs, it will work on AMD and Nvidia cards too…provided XeSS is actually supported by the game in question.
We’ll have to wait and see whether 7000 series’ Zen 3+ architecture can push the performance gains needed to re-overtake Alder Lake, though one thing is for sure: you’ll need a new motherboard for it, as AMD is finally retiring the AM4 socket in favour of AM5. This is better news than it sounds, as it means – at last – the 7000 series chips won’t have those delicate, easily-bent pins on the underside. Hopefully it has a more robust locking mechanism as well – despite it never actually happening, the little sideways slide of the AM4 socket always makes me feel like I’m about to shear off all those pins. Like karate-chopping dried spaghetti.
While we wait for AMD’s new chips, Intel is stillrolling out the rest of its 12th Gen CPU lineup; the initial launch last November covered on a fraction, focusing entirely on overclockable, higher-specced parts. Now you’ll be able to choose from a much wider selection, including Core i3 and more affordable Core i5 models. There’s a new family of 12th Gen laptop chips, too.
The catch? Whereas a big appeal of Alder Lake is how it combines fast P-cores (P for Performance) with smaller E-cores (E for Efficiency), most of the newer desktop chips only feature P-cores. The E-cores, which would otherwise be useful for offloading background tasks while leaving the P-cores free to focus on your games, are often omitted outright. Still, given these chips are meant to be cheaper alternatives to the initial batch, something had to give. And from a gaming standpoint, it probably is better to keep the P-cores intact, as the E-cores are only fully exploited in a minority of heavily multithreaded games.
Intel has also confirmed the launch of three additional motherboard chipsets, granting more lower-cost alternatives to the flagship Z690 chipset that Alder Lake launched with. The H670, B660 and H610 chipsets all lack CPU overclocking support, but that’s a basically non-issue if your CPU is locked anyway. The H670 and B660 chipsets also provide extra PCIe 4.0 lanes and memory overclocking, while all three are equipped for integrated Wi-Fi 6E.
Not that it will change the world or anything, but the Cloud Alpha Wireless is the first gaming headset to make me literally vocalise an “Ooooh” sound when I saw it. And if HyperX’s newest headset can come anywhere close to its purported300 hoursof battery life, it will deserve much more than pantomime mouth noises.
Again, that’sthree hundred hours. A three with two zeroes after it! With most wireless gaming cans you’re lucky to get more than 25, and yet here’s one you could use for hours every day and would still only need to charge once per season. HyperX have said it’s not that much heavier than the wired Cloud Alpha, either: 322g to the original’s 298g.
So far the only downsides appear to be a high price ($200, UK pricing TBC) and a lack of Bluetooth support, as the Cloud Alpha Wireless can only connect to its included Wi-Fi USB dongle. Even so, the near-elimination of the need to worry about charging, while keeping all the benefits of wirelessness, makes this one seriously enticing peripheral. It’s out in February, and I’ll be testing one to see if it’s worthy of ourbest gaming headsetslist.
By that, I don’t just mean faster – the DDR5 that’s launched so far already has data rates that humble DDR4, and its clock frequencies can be overclocked to higher peaks as well. The problem is that DDR5 latency is higher too, which for gaming meansDDR5 is more expensive than DDR4 in exchange for no meaningful performance benefit. Funnily enough, this mirrors the latency problems that early DDR4 kits had when compared to DDR3.
Because of that, there’s little doubt that DDR5 can eventually whittle down that latency delay until it can reliably outperform DDR4, just as the latter did against DDR3. But with any luck that will happen sooner rather than later, or else there’s going to be an awful lot of laptops and pre-built PCs that bet on the wrong memory horse.
