The tech, and Deck, that defined this year
How was your year for PC hardware, reader? Pick up anything nice, or got any old favourite gear still going strong? I’m still very happy with the4K gaming monitor I got for a pittance, and have spent the past twelve months becoming increasingly convinced that tenkeyless keyboards are, in fact, thebest keyboards.
The Steam Deck nailed a new way to play PC games
AsGabe Newell told mein February, Valve were also keen to maintain a PC-appropriate openness with the Deck. As such, it’s drastically more versatile than the like of the Nintendo Switch, or even the less locked-downPlaydate. You can quite easily add support for non-Steam launchers, toplay games from your Epic Games Launcherand GOG libraries, and it’s possible (thoughnot always advised) to remove and replace a good chunk of the internals using standard screwdrivers.
Tinkering is optional, mind, and for as little as £349 this is an impressive little thing right out of the box. If you’ve yet to try the Steam Deck, I heartily recommend borrowing someone else’s, as it really is quite the experience, especially the first time. It’s (most of) your Steam games, running on a handheld! Even the really graphically demanding ones, floating about between your thumbs! Corrr. Eventually that amazement cools, but only to a more sustainable appreciation, specifically for the ability to take a library of potentially hundreds of games out the door. Or, very often, just to the sofa. Sometimes I’ll want to play games but not to continue sitting bolt upright in the desk chair I’ve been in all day, and the Steam Deck is perfect for that.
Fun Steam Deck fact:The framed Steam Deck artwork I gave to Liam in ourunusual accessories video, filmed in August, is still on the wall of his office. That Liam, he’s too nice for us.
AMD actually launched three new versions of FSR (FidelityFX Super Resolution) this year.FSR 2.0, now simply named FSR 2, made the biggest leap in quality. Compared to FSR 1.0, which could blur edges and details on its highest upscaling quality mode, FSR 2 looked much sharper and controlled. Much more like native rendering, in other words, as well as much closer to the high standards previously set by Nvidia’s more sophisticated DLSS (Deep Learning Super-Sampling). FSR 2.1 and FSR 2.2 made further improvements to how objects in motion would appear, narrowing the gap between it and DLSS even tigher.
Since FSR works on all modern graphics cards, not just GeForce RTX GPUs, such improvements are likely to be felt by a much broader range of PC owners. Good on AMD, then, for keeping their upscaler up to standard. However, in terms of making a rendering trickactually exciting, Nvidia won again with DLSS 3 and its frame generation feature. This uses the AI number-crunching prowess of RTX 40 series GPUs, to insert whole new, entirely AI-generated frames between the traditionally rendered ones. In addition to the performance gains that come with upscaling, you’re therefore getting a gigantic framerate boost at nearly no hardware cost. A literal game-changer, especially at 4K.
There are some limitations toDLSS 3: it currently only works on the RTX 4080 and RTX 4090, and because AI-generated frames are essentially invisible to your PC’s rendering pipeline, a game that owes its high framerate to generated frames won’tfeelas smooth to control as if all those frames were rendered out. But it performs well at enhancing the look of games that wouldn’t run any better without it anyway, and Nvidia have said they could look into making DLSS 3 possible on older RTX cards in the future.
Fun upscaling fact:The first game to support the full trifecta of DLSS, FSR and XeSS wasDeath Stranding Directors Cut, upon adding XeSS in a patch on September 28.
Their chances of shattering the Nvidia-AMD duopoly? Low. Our pals atDigital Foundry(Intel never sent us the cards, sob) found that the Arc A770 and Arc A750 are decent, affordable 1080p/light 1440p contenders. But! They suffer from low DirectX 9 and 11 performance while needingResizeable BARsupport to function well at all. Not so much a triumphant return as shuffling into a party two hours late.
Still, an underwhelming launch doesn’t necessarily snuff out its own significance. For the first time in generations, someone other than Nvidia or AMD has gaming GPUs on sale – that’s a big deal what. And this generation, originally codenamed Arc Alchemist, represents only the first of four planned architectures, with early whispers suggesting the following Arc Battlemage could be far more ambitious.
There’s also a sense that sometimes, when hardware is as long in the making as Arc Alchemist was, just getting it out the door can be an achievement in itself. There were definitely moments this year when I started doubting if these graphics cards would ever truly see the light of day, and while neither the Arc A770 and Arc A750 are GPUs I’d buy myself, as long as there’s enough potential in them I don’t mind being proved wrong.
It’s the PC hardware circle of life: graphics cards and CPUs get faster, games become more demanding of those components, they become faster in response, repeat until we fly into the sun.
Some games are getting very hungry for memory too.Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered,Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales,Icarus, andReturnalall list 32GB of RAM for their highest recommended specs, as didStar Wars Jedi: Fallen Orderbefore later revising it down to 16GB. Having that much DDR4, let along pricier DDR5, is a big ask when most PC owners are still on 16GB. Per the most recentSteam hardware survey, fewer than 16% of respondents have 32GB of RAM or more.
Fun system requirements fact:There is nothing fun about system requirements.
Imagine it. Almost an entire GPU generation lost to the lunacy of price gouging, with a historically shitty combination of parts shortages, unwelcome interest from cryptocurrency barons, and reseller greed making it nearly impossible to get a fair trade. Close to two years later, the market finally stabilises, just in time for new cards to release – and they all cost hundreds of pounds/dollars more than their predecessors did, on their makers’ say-so.
