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?
Thats just me, though.
Weve had it all: long overdue launches, bitter disappointments, and genuinely impactful performance innovations.
Also, Valve made a handheld PC.
Starting with one that needs no introduction, as Ive already been banging on about it since February.
And its gone down a treat with players, too.
AsGabe Newell told mein February, Valve were also keen to maintain a PC-appropriate openness with the Deck.
Its (most of) your Steam games, running on a handheld!
Even the really graphically demanding ones, floating about between your thumbs!
Or, very often, just to the sofa.
That Liam, hes too nice for us.
Faking your monitors resolution has never looked so good.
Good on AMD, then, for keeping their upscaler up to standard.
A literal game-changer, especially at 4K.
Their chances of shattering the Nvidia-AMD duopoly?
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 doesnt necessarily snuff out its own significance.
Thats about 4053, $4933, or two RTX 4090s with change.
AMDs Radeon RX 5700, an upper-mid-tier card thats less than four years old.
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.
Graphics card prices recovered, then became awful again on purpose
Imagine it.
Except you dont have to imagine, because thats exactly what happened late in 2022.
And those were the starting prices expect even more devastating price tags on partner versions.
There are only two defences for this that aren’t nonsense.
One, these components are much more powerful than the ones they replace.
Two, the costs of certain parts have increased for reasons unrelated to simple moneygrubbing.
Is an RTX 4060 that costs 750 going to be a compelling upgrade?
Maybe I was too hard on them a few sections back?
Ill think about it in 2023.
