Game Tech News

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Yesterday, AMD’s Vega 56 GPU went on sale — and immediately vanished from the market. Availability was exceptionally brief, possibly only a matter of minutes, and the cards are now sold out at every retailer we’ve checked (Amazon, Best Buy, Newegg). Obviously new stock may trickle out to manufacturers, but snagging a card is going to require lightning-fast reflexes and a good memory for one’s own credit card number. Once again, the likely culprit is cryptocurrency mining; AMD GPUs have been exceedingly difficult to find in-market and NV cards, while easier to locate, aren’t exactly selling for their MSRPs. The cheapest GTX 1070 available at Newegg is $429, with many models pushing into $489+ territory.

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During Gamescom last week, Microsoft showed a significant number of games running on the new Xbox One X (See it on Amazon) hardware. New titles like Forza Motorsport 7 are looking superb on this half-step console, and older releases like Rise of the Tomb Raider are being jazzed up as well. So if what we’ve seen recently is representative of what we’ll get this November 7, will Microsoft’s new console be able to deliver on all of our hopes and dreams?

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Last year, Nintendo launched its great monument to bait-and-switch, the NES Classic Edition. The cutting-edge 30-year-old console packed a reasonable number of classic NES games into a diminutive form factor; then Nintendo slapped an attractive $60 price on the whole shebang. And then, in the face of completely predictable high demand, Nintendo decided to build six of them a week. After a few months, the company decided it had enough money and killed the NES Classic, despite selling more of them in a few months than it had sold Wii U’s in the entire calendar year.

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While the PS4 Pro can’t live up to a high-end PC, it’s an excellent way to give your 4K TV a real workout without spending much. Sure, it retails for 400 bucks, but it’s easy to find refurbs and open-box deals ranging from $350 to $370. Even better, some of the best Pro-enabled games are already quite affordable.

It’s a given that new full-priced games will take advantage of the additional graphical power in the Pro, but there’s a surprisingly wide selection of titles that received excellent post-release Pro patches as well. From relatively small indies to beloved Sony exclusives to third-party best sellers, there’s a lot of high-res enjoyment to be had for $20 or less.

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Nintendo’s third-party developer relations have never been as strong as Sony’s or Microsoft. Some consoles, like the Wii, had a great deal of third-party games, even if the console missed out on many of the most popular franchises that debuted on the Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3. The Wii U’s third-party support was much worse, thanks to low lifetime platform sales.

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When Nvidia or AMD launch a new GPU, there’s a typical rollout pattern. The first cards out the door are reference designs, based on a package Nvidia and AMD provide. Later, companies like MSI, Gigabyte, EVGA, Asus, and PowerColor debut their own custom designs. These custom boards are generally clocked higher, have better, quieter coolers, or may be built on a custom smaller PCB. This time around, however, AMD’s board partners are reportedly having major trouble sourcing GPUs.

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When Atari announced its upcoming “Ataribox” earlier this year, it was a fairly transparent attempt to cash-in on the retro gaming craze that Nintendo kicked off with the NES Classic last fall. There were, however, some concerns about how Atari would make money in the first place, or whether anyone would actually want the platform. Unlike Nintendo, which has always maintained a tight grip on its franchises and properties, rarely making them available for platforms it doesn’t control, Atari has released any number of collections and bundles for various platforms. The initial console reveal was just a video of a faux-wood box, with no information on the platform’s hardware or capabilities.

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In 1989, the first Sierra game I ever played, Space Quest III, shipped on six 5.25-inch double-density, double-sided floppy disks. A hard drive was optional, though copying the game files to the HDD substantially improved performance. The total game install was between 3.5 and 4MB–but that was significant, when a computer from the same time period only had between 10 or 20MB of HDD space.

Fast forward nearly 30 years, and games of today commonly eat dozens of gigabytes per install, dwarfing the sizes that were common as recently as five years ago, at the end of the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 era. To some extent, this is to be expected. As consoles and PCs have become more powerful, they’ve added support for higher resolutions and more detailed graphics. These higher-quality detail levels require higher-quality assets, which means the game installation grows as a result. Increasing the size of a game world or adding additional content also increases total installation size. If a (sadly hypothetical) Skyrim II uses art assets that are four times larger on average than Skyrim’s, and is twice the geographical size, the final game is going to be far larger than its predecessor.

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PC gaming has a plethora of benefits: customizability, high frame rates, an enormous variety, and most notably, low prices. Thankfully, if you’re not looking for brand new releases, it won’t cost you much to stock up on excellent games from every genre under the sun.

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Today, Intel is unveiling its new Coffee Lake line of desktop CPU cores and its first mainstream desktop response to AMD’s Ryzen architecture since that platform launched in March. That’s not to say we haven’t seen some significant shifts in Intel’s desktop parts–in fact, even before today’s launch, we’ve seen more price drops and feature improvements from Intel in 2017 than at any point since at least 2011.

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When Nintendo’s Switch first launched, it wasn’t immediately clear if the console would post strong initial sales and then fade away, like the Wii U did, or if this would be the system to put Nintendo back on the gaming map. It’s now obvious that the Switch’s early surge was no outlier; the console has already moved over 5 million units and has outsold the PS4 and Xbox One in North America four times in the past six months, according to NPD Group. Clearly, Nintendo’s early issues with its JoyCon controllers or reports that the Switch could warp in certain circumstances have had no impact on the console’s popularity.

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Star Wars: The Force Awakens was a major blockbuster last year, but the film ultimately raised more questions than it answered. We don’t yet know why Luke’s Jedi academy was destroyed, why he later went into self-imposed, exile on Ahch-To, why his nephew Kylo Ren fell to the Dark Side, why Han and Leia were estranged, or the history of the new Emperor stand-in, Supreme Leader Snoke. A new trailer for Episode VIII dropped last night, and while it doesn’t answer all of these questions, it provides some major hints. Also, everyone is going nuts for Chewbacca’s new side-kick, called a Porg.

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Over the last few years, we’ve seen an increasing number of games locking desirable content behind the digital operant conditioning chambers known as “loot boxes.” The basics of how loot boxes work are common to all games that use them. Players are presented with the opportunity to spend real money, in exchange for an in-game box containing one or more items.

From here, the particulars vary. In some games, the boxes are random rewards you unlock with keys you bought with real dollars. Sometimes the boxes are free, but the keys to open them cost money. Some games also offer the opportunity to earn keys and chests by advancing through the title in the traditional fashion, or by completing in-game objectives, while others don’t. In some cases, the items you find inside the chest can have a direct impact on how well you perform in-game, while others are strictly cosmetic and don’t affect gameplay at all.

The other thing loot box games have in common? They’re really starting to piss off the players that encounter them.
It’s not hard to see why. Over the past decade, we’ve seen a steady shift towards new monetization strategies. They initially sold for small amounts of money or were strictly cosmetic in nature. When mobile games took off, those frequently offered the option to purchase an in-game currency with real-world money, with said currency being used to bypass game levels, quickly finish buildings with ridiculously long build times, and to purchase powerful weapons and armor. AAA games adopted some of these features, but they mostly debuted in games that had gone free-to-play. The AAA games that did sell items while charging an up-front fee typically either stuck to cosmetic changes, or offered players enough opportunities to earn the relevant currency that the items in question were always something you could earn within a reasonable period of time.

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Four years in, and there are tens of millions of PlayStation 4s in the wild. Whether you’re using an original model, PS4 Slim, or PS4 Pro, there are likely aspects of your experience that could use some improvement. Want to shorten a particularly long load time? Maybe you’d like to stream gameplay to your bedroom. Heck, you might just be willing to drop a couple hundred bucks on a full-fledged VR setup.

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The Xbox One and PS4 have broadly similar features, but there’s a few areas where Microsoft has beaten Sony: Backwards compatibility with the Xbox 360 and steaming games from an Xbox One to a local PC. But while we’ve known Microsoft was adding backwards compatibility since E3 2015, we haven’t seen much of how that process happened, until now.

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When Microsoft first launched Project Natal — later known as Kinect — it declared that the device would usher in a bold new world of gaming where our bodies would be controllers. Today, the last vestiges of that dream have finally died.

According to Fastcodesign, Microsoft has finally ceased manufacturing the camera after selling more than 35 million of them over the past seven years. Retailers may still have some in stock, but the company won’t be building any more. It’s a little odd to think about, but Kinect may well be the best-selling gaming peripheral that had virtually no long-term impact on gaming. Kinect had an impact in non-gaming research and versions of its sensor are integrated into HoloLens, but the hardware never really caught on. Microsoft’s attempts to patent some decidedly Big Brother functionality right as the Snowden leaks hit was cataclysmically bad branding.

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Yesterday, we talked about the Xbox One’s backwards compatibility mode and how developers inside the company had spent years putting the feature together. Today, we’re talking about the 13 original Xbox games you can now play, along with some enhancements to existing Xbox 360 games that are now available.

Our sister site, IGN, has more details, but Knights of the Old Republic is a particularly good showcase for these improvements. If you’ve never played KOTOR, it’s considered one of the greatest Star Wars games ever made. While it feels primitive in some respects — the UI was clearly designed for much lower monitor resolutions — the plot and characters hold up very well today.

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In spite of a rough start, the current executive team at Microsoft has done a commendable job turning the Xbox One into a respectable platform. With incredible games like Forza Motorsport 7 and Cuphead, and the upcoming release of the Xbox One X (Buy on Amazon for $499.99), this has been a particularly strong year for Redmond. And with the release of new hardware, and the ever-sinking price of the existing units, there are bound to be loads of new users jumping on the Xbox One bandwagon this holiday season.

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Nintendo released an update to its yearly earnings forecast today, substantially increasing the amount of profit it expects to earn through the end of its fiscal year (Nintendo’s fiscal year ends in March, not on December 31).

The Switch has had a dynamite year, outselling the PS4 and Xbox One at multiple points since its debut, and that trend is only set to increase. Nintendo has boosted Switch manufacturing and could beat the Wii U’s entire lifetime sales in just one year.

Nintendo now expects to earn $1.06 billion in profits for its full fiscal year, compared with roughly 576 million in its earlier forecasts, Reuters reports (via Geek.com). Switch shipment figures have been raised from 10 million to 14 million, which puts the console on track to crush the Wii U’s five-year run of 13.56 million units. Thus far, the Switch is thought to have sold a bit more than half its 14 million target, with 7.63 million units shipped as of September 30.

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Microsoft’s Xbox One X drops on Tuesday and it’s easily the strongest console ever built. Its GPU sports higher clocks and additional cores, its CPU is clocked a full 1.3x faster than the old Xbox One, and its unified GDDR5 memory offers vastly more bandwidth (and a much simpler memory architecture) than the Xbox One’s 32MB of cache + quad-channel DDR3 memory design.

Hardware design, however, isn’t the entire story. Because the Xbox One X (Buy on Amazon) maintains full backwards compatibility with the Xbox One, it’s on developers to deliver optimized titles with better experiences that justify the new system’s $500 price tag.

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Yesterday, our own Joel Hruska wrote a post arguing for the merits of the Xbox One X. His premise is rock solid, and the hardware is very impressive, but this line in his article stood out to me: “When I say the Xbox One X is worth buying, that doesn’t mean it makes sense for literally every person right now.” I couldn’t agree more.
There’s a decent number of 4K-loving early adopters out there that will be entirely pleased with the Xbox One X at the $500 price point. I’m not here to yuck anyone’s yum–it’s totally fine if the Xbox One X (Buy on Amazon for $499) makes you happy. However, if you’re unsure whether it’s worth it to buy (or upgrade to) the Xbox One X right now, there are a few conditions and competing products that are worth considering before you make your decision.

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A little over two years ago, AMD announced that it would restructure its high-end GPU development team. This new unit, dubbed the Radeon Technologies Group, would be led by senior vice president Raja Koduri. While RTG was never an independent spin-off or subsidiary, it enjoyed a fair degree of autonomy and concentrated AMD driver development, developer relations, GPU design, and GPU architectures all under the same unit. This was a departure from the previous arrangement, in which AMD has substantially unified its APU, CPU, and GPU teams. RTG, we were told, would be the vehicle AMD needed to deliver a best-in-class part that could compete with anything Nvidia had to offer. Now, Raja has announced he’s leaving AMD (he had been on sabbatical for the past 40 days).

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Hexus obtained a copy of the memo Koduri sent to other members of the RTG group. In it, he thanks his co-workers for their hard work and dedication to a difficult two-year period and specifically mentions both Lisa Su and Mark Papermaster for the trust they extended to him in forming and backing RTG in the first place.

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Microtransactions have been hotly debated since they began debuting in mobile games almost ten years ago. While they’d been used sporadically in various games for years, the rise of mobile games and their extremely low-to-free pricing made them a functional necessity for developers working in Android or iOS. The AAA PC gaming industry quickly took notice of this, and began offering games with microtransaction options. There’s been a great deal of pushback from the community at various points (Dead Space 3 got hosed for it, as did Bethesda and its horse armor), but microtransactions are clearly here to say. Ubisoft just reported that it took in more money in microtransaction sales than it did in game sales for the first time ever.

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Earlier this week, Intel confirmed it would work with AMD to develop a new GPU for use in its NUC (Next Unit of Computing) systems. The news sent waves through the tech community, both because it had been previously rumored (and specifically denied), by Intel and because it’s the first such collaborative product effort between AMD and Intel in… well, basically ever. The two companies may work together in joint efforts to write standards or as members of other tech organizations, but they haven’t jointly announced collaborative products in decades.

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Most of the mechanical keyboards marketed as “gaming” boards don’t have many features that make them demonstrably better for gaming. That’s not the case with the Wooting One, an intriguing mechanical keyboard that was launched on Kickstarter earlier this year. It looks like a fairly standard keyboard, but the switches are an entirely new design that feature optical analog input–it’s not just on or off like other switches.

The Wooting One gives you more control over movement in games, similar to the analog stick on a controller, but with the added precision of a mouse. You might see a real advantage in certain titles. However, not all games play nicely with analog switches.

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Update: Multiple readers have written to suggest this could be a surge related to PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds opening in China. If so, it would be an extraordinary event — I can’t recall a single time when one title so overwhelmingly tilted Steam results in a given direction. But as multiple readers have observed, PUBG is now pulling in 2x to as much as 5x more players than the current second-place game, depending on when you check the data.

If this hypothesis is accurate, Steam’s current data set cannot be reconciled with Steam’s previous data set. The figures reported for dramatically decreased market share for AMD, as well as the surge in Windows 7, are not inaccurate relative to the number of systems running Steam. But they cannot be compared with the previous survey results and do not represent a falloff of AMD sales, Windows 10 market share, VR headset sales, or a sea change in quad-core CPU shipments.

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Update: There are reports that EA “compensated” for slashing the price of heroes by slashing how many credits you can earn in the single-player campaign and in Arcade Mode. Which… I mean, really, EA? Really? Is there an attached limb you won’t blow off?

Original Story Below:
EA has been playing defense on Star Wars Battlefront II for nearly a week. While early coverage of the game was positive, highlighting deeper multiplayer and a genuine single-player story, things have changed in the run-up to launch. Players were extremely unhappy to discover that it could take 40 hours to unlock heroes, and EA’s initial response to this absolutely didn’t help.

While the company has slashed the cost of major heroes, follow-up stories have detailed how the loot crate system is fundamentally a play-to-win gambit, in which players who spend real-world money will have huge advantages over those who don’t. Now, Belgium is investigating the loot crate situation and EA’s attempts to do damage control via a Reddit AMA appear to have backfired.

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When Microsoft announced its refreshed Surface Book 2 last week, it was quite clear about how it wanted to position the product. “This is a desktop,” Panos Panay, Microsoft’s corporate VP of devices, declared. “For many, this is likely the most performant desktop they have ever seen.” Apparently Panay was working with a different definition of “performant” than the rest of us, however, because the Surface Book 2’s true stand-out feature this time around isn’t the hinge, upgraded GPU, or its generally high performance: It’s that Microsoft’s latest and greatest literally can’t game on AC power without draining the battery.

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I’ve demoed a lot of smartphone-based, augmented reality (AR) headsets, and while they’ve always seemed to have potential, nothing about them was very compelling. Lenovo and Disney are working to change that this holiday season with a well-thought-out game based on Star Wars, called Jedi Challenges. There are quite a few cute AR games now, but most of them rely just on your phone’s display, so they’re hardly immersive. Star Wars: Jedi Challenges ($199.99) (See it on BestBuy.com) goes quite a bit beyond that.

Leveraging Disney’s expertise in entertainment, and Lenovo’s inexpensive-but-clever Mirage AR headset, the game does a good job of making you believe you are interacting with holographic objects. The crowning touch, though, is the AR light saber. You control it by using a physical light saber handle, modeled after the ones in the movies. The cameras built-in to Lenovo’s Mirage AR headset track it and provide the deadly beam of energy Star Wars fans have come to know and love.

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For the past few years, AMD has worked on a new generation of external GPU technology that would use Thunderbolt 3 and offer a better experience. This push got a major boost when Apple announced back in June that the MacBook Pro line would support this functionality. eGPU support is still being built into macOS High Sierra, but it’s now in a sufficient state for testing.

9to5 Mac took a Mantiz Venus MZ-02 chassis for a spin to find out what kind of performance upgrade Mac users might expect from adopting a high-end GPU. The results are early — hardware isn’t properly identified, and the author may have made a mistake in his hardware configurations, given that he tested Rocket League with vertical sync enabled. While that’s a reasonable option when it comes to how you personally prefer to handle V-sync, it permanently caps performance of any solution at the maximum refresh rate of the monitor. If your GPU can push 500fps and you lock your frame rate to 60Hz, 60fps is all you’re going to get.

But, with that caveat in place, we can at least say the RX Vega 64 retains enough of its raw performance to smash through what the MacBook Pro 13-inch is capable of delivering. Unigine Heaven isn’t a great test these days — it’s old and synthetic — but it does show a MacBook Pro 13-inch barely breaking 10fps on its own compared with a smooth 65fps for the Vega 64.

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Again, early driver support and imperfect hardware detection makes it clear that it’s still early days to be running out to bet on eGPU performance in Apple systems, but the long-term trend is positive. The chassis in question is expensive, at $400, but includes a power supply, can charge the MacBook Pro while gaming, and has SSD mounting brackets, USB 3.0 and gigabit Ethernet support, and a 550W power supply.

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There are a lot of ways that EA could deal with its Battlefront 2 program. The company could announce it was redesigning the progression system so that early players didn’t have a huge advantage over those who bought the game later. It could bring its microtransaction ideas back, but use them for cosmetic upgrades that don’t affect gameplay. But being EA, it decided to double down on the worst aspects of game design. And now it’s defending that decision, claiming that it only wanted to respect Star Wars canon. Here’s EA’s CFO, Blake Jorgensen, speaking at the 21st Credit Suisse technology conference:
“The one thing we’re very focused on and they’re extremely focused on is not violating the canon of Star Wars,” Jorgensen said, as reported by GamesIndustry.biz. “It’s an amazing brand that’s been built over many, many years. So if you did a bunch of cosmetic things, you might start to violate the canon. Darth Vader in white probably doesn’t make sense, versus in black. Not to mention you probably don’t want Darth Vader in pink. No offense to pink, but I don’t think that’s right in the canon.”

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Nintendo has been famously reluctant to allow its classic games to run on anyone else’s platform, but it’s making an exception in China. Nvidia is teaming up with Nintendo to launch the Shield Android TV box in China with an assortment of games from the Wii and Gamecube. Don’t hold your breath for these games to launch in other markets, though.

Nvidia has put together multiple partnerships to bring games like Borderlands and Doom 3 to the Shield, but the Chinese launch is all about Nintendo. The Shield is the only Android TV device with any kind of market share right now. It retails for around $200 in the US, and ships with a remote control and a game controller. Inside is a powerful Nvidia Tegra X1 chip that can decode 4K HDR video and run console-quality games. This is the same chip powering the Switch, so this partnership was probably a no-brainer.

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Digital gaming giant Valve has announced that some 18 months after adding the ability to buy games on Steam with Bitcoin, it will no longer accept BTC as a method of payment. The original decision to accept the cryptocurrency was never seen as a make-or-break affair for Bitcoin’s acceptance as legal tender, but Steam’s dominance of PC digital game distribution and the overlap between PC game enthusiasts and BTC users made it a high-profile win back in 2016. (To be clear, we’re not saying that there’s a high degree of overlap between gamers and cryptocurrency enthusiasts, so much as we’re arguing BTC is probably more popular with gamers than it is with, say, suburban Atlanta retirees.)

There are several reasons why Valve has stopped supporting BTC. First, the fees required to process transactions on the Bitcoin network have jumped, up to as high as $20, compared with just 20 cents when Valve began accepting the cryptocurrency. Second, the volatility surrounding Bitcoin has become a significant concern. The currency’s value has skyrocketed since the beginning of the year, but it’s also become much more volatile. Third — and this is an issue we’ve discussed when talking about Bitcoin’s several forks since August 1 — it can take a long time to process transactions on the network.

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Forza Motorsport 7If you have a high-end gaming PC or a brand new

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CupheadCounter-intuitively, the most enjoyable part of Cuphead is how the developers were able to make it look nothing at all like a video game. Meticulously hand-drawn to emulate the aesthetic of early 20th century cartoons, this unforgiving shooter-platformer is an absolute joy to view. With dead-on approximations of a different medium in a distant era, even those of us who rarely play games are taken in by the execution of this standout indie title. While we don't need a flood of cartoon-themed shooters, the industry would definitely benefit if more games pushed the envelope of what 2D games could look like.

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AMD’s Navi has been of interest to AMD fans since it first popped up on roadmaps, with hints of a next-generation memory subsystem and a “scalability” option that might be similar to the modular GPU designs that Nvidia is supposedly considering for its own products. First, the hints. As Hot Hardware reports, some driver notes for a Linux driver update back in July that were recently discovered reported:
[WARNING]: Should use –pci when using create_asic_from_script()
new_chip.gfx10.mmSUPER_SECRET => 0x12345670
new_chip.gfx10.mmSUPER_SECRET.enable[0:0]
GFX10 is a Navi reference, and there are plenty of other hints to ongoing Navi work at AMD, from a job opening for a senior ASIC design and layout engineer (Shanghai, China) to various statements from AMD that it’s working on 7nm ramps already (the remarks date to May of this year). A Navi tape-out now or in the next few months would clear the way for a professional product introduction late next summer or fall, with consumer cards arriving a few months later.

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As 2017 coasts to an end, we ExtremeTech writers have spent a good chunk of our time this month looking back at what we enjoyed most. We all have our own specialties and tech predilections, but pretty much everybody here enjoys video games. Some of us focus on new releases to stay on the cutting edge, others are still working their way through their back logs, but we can all use this opportunity to commiserate about our time spent exploring virtual worlds.

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Live streaming has become a wildly popular pastime and revenue stream in the last few years. So popular, in fact, both Amazon and Microsoft acquired streaming empires while Google expanded into the market with YouTube. And while there are some high profile streamers who bring in some serious cash, this massive rise in streaming is built on the backs of average users who stream and watch just for fun.

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Microsoft revealed the future of gaming in in November of 2010 and it was called the Kinect. This motion-tracking camera accessory for the Xbox 360 was supposed to usher in an era of controlling games with your body, but that never happened. Its newest consoles need an adapter for the Kinect, but you won’t find that anymore. After being out of stock for several months, the Xbox One Kinect adapter has officially been discontinued by Microsoft. Even if you pick up the discontinued Kinect camera, good luck making it work with a new console.

According to Microsoft, it decided to discontinue the Xbox One’s Kinect adapter in order to spend time and resources developing more highly requested accessories for the console. This doesn’t exactly come as a surprise, though. Kinect didn’t have long-term appeal for gamers or developers. The Windows version of Kinect was discontinued in 2015, and Microsoft killed the Xbox 360 Kinect in 2016. The Xbox One version died just a few months ago, but it’s still in stock at most retailers.

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At CES 2018, Nvidia announced a new line of gaming monitors designed to round up and deliver every single high-end feature you can buy in a monitor or television today. The company’s new BFGD monitors — the acronym stands for Big Format Game Display, obviously, and not the kind of profanity-fueled phrase that might lead one to label such a display a “BFGD Screen” — are serious business, as the saying goes.

All of the partner displays from Acer, Asus, and HP are 65-inch panels that support up to 120Hz refresh rates and HDR with up to 1,000 nits of brightness. The devices also integrate an Nvidia Shield, which Nvidia says will deliver Netflix, Amazon Video, and YouTube at 4K, plus Nvidia GameStream, and Android games and apps.

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Samsung is throwing its hat into the GDDR6 ring and joining Micron in ramping the new memory technology for upcoming GPU products. It’s not a surprising move, but it does suggest that GDDR6 will be more widely adopted than its predecessor, GDDR5X.

Samsung is touting the new memory as being built on a 10nm* process at double the density of its previous RAM. 16Gbit chips means scaling up to 2GB of RAM per GDDR6 chip. This also clears the way for much higher amounts of RAM onboard GPUs over time, though I doubt we’ll see many 24GB GPUs in the near future. Even advanced 4K titles with HDR and other bells and whistles don’t push that kind of envelope (for now).

One potential advantage of the GDDR6 push is that we should finally see 2GB cards dropping off the map this generation. With Intel now fielding 4GB GPUs on its Radeon-integrated hardware, hopefully we’ll see a shift to larger RAM buffers across the board.
Samsung is claiming its GDDR6 can scale up to 72GB/s per channel (18Gbps per pin), which is more than twice as fast as the old GDDR5 standard and its 8Gbps performance. This ignores GDDR5X, of course, but since Samsung never built that type of RAM it can get away with skipping it as a point of comparison. Early GPUs are likely to opt for lower-clocked RAM, but a 72GB/s channel transfer rate is impressive, implying that a 256-bit GPU could hit 576GB/s of memory bandwidth. The next generation of midrange cards from AMD and Nvidia should be potent competitors for this reason alone.

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