Over the last two years or so we’ve seen a heck of a lot of new technologies arrive with tangible gaming benefits. Some of them have become so integrated into the way we think of hardware that it’s easy to gloss over them, but the likes of 4K, HBM, DDR4, G-Sync, Pascal, Polaris, and more, have all irreversibly changed the PC gaming landscape for the better.
In terms of graphics cards the big two are obviously Pascal and Polaris GPUs from Nvidia and AMD respectively, although this only paints half a picture. GDDR5X memory has been an affordable stop-gap for GTX 1080 owners looking at faster memory, while AMD briefly reigned supreme with the first generation of HBM on its Radeon Fury graphics cards.
Of course no matter what hardware you have, eventually it all comes down to the quality of the games. In recent months we’ve seen games make use of both DirectX 12 and Vulkan graphics APIs to varying degrees of success. Benchmarks of the RX 480 of DOOM running in Vulkan showed staggering gains of 40% over OpenGL. Certainly not something to be sniffed at.
Aside from this, monitors were the other big winners. We’ve seen 4K resolution gain serious ground, HDR is just taking off, and PC gamers are finding adaptive vsync such as FreeSync of G-Sync perhaps the most tempting upgrade of all.
That’s not to forget all the other odds and ends we’ve seen as well, including DDR4 memory, m.2 solid state drives, and of course virtual reality.
Out of all of this amazing new tech though, which is your favourite? Which could you just not live without? Get your votes in and then let us know why below!
