The Hardware that will Power the Gaming Industry

Article By : Matthew Burgess

As Computex 2019 comes to a close, we take a look at the latest advances from Intel, Nvidia and AMD that will impact the gaming industry.

This year's Computex kicked off with Lisa Su, President and CEO of AMD, giving her first opening keynote at Computex. In a speech which Lisa expressed AMD’s’ love for gamers’ numerous times, I’m sure gamers will love AMD after seeing the latest announcements.

Firstly, AMD have announced the new 7nm “Zen 2” CPU core that will be powering the next generation AMD Ryzen and EPYC processors it has up to 15% estimated instructions per clock (IPC) uplift over the predecessor “Zen” architecture. The “Zen 2” core also includes significant design improvements including larger cache sizes and a redesigned floating-point engine.

AMD Ryzen Computex

Continuing its mission to displace Intel’s stranglehold on the gaming CPU market, AMD has also announced the 3rd Gen Ryzen desktop processor. With the 3rd Gen AMD Ryzen desktop processor family, AMD introduced a new category of Ryzen 9 desktop processor with the flagship 12 core/24 thread Ryzen 9 3900X. Pushing the high-performance envelope for socket AM4 by offering leadership performance, the family is rounded out with 8 core Ryzen 7 models and 6 core Ryzen 5 models.

AMD also introduced a new X570 chipset for socket AM4, supporting the world’s first PCIe 4.0 readiness, which exhibited 42% faster storage performance than PCIe 3.09. This will be of great interest to PC enthusiasts as the X570 chipset doubles the bandwidth for motherboards allowing greater flexibility when building custom systems.

AMD Radeon Computex

We were provided with a sneak peek at AMD’s latest Radeon RX 5000-Series Navi Graphics Cards. During the keynote, Dr. Su showcased one of the new AMD Radeon RX 5700-series graphics cards in a head-to-head comparison with a RTX 2070 card running a Strange Brigade gameplay demo, beating the competition and delivering an incredible – 100 FPS gaming.

RTX or Bust

Despite announcing new game titles Wolfenstein, Quake II, Sword and Fairy 7, which will support Nvidia’s ray tracing RTX GPUs, Nvidia’s focus seemed to be on the creators rather than gamers.

In a tour of their Taipei office, Nvidia showed EETimes Asia their new creators platform called Nvidia Studio. Nvidia aims to boost the capabilities of the world’s 40 million online and studio-based content creators by leveraging the performance of RTX GPUs and the NVIDIA Studio Stack of specialized SDKs and dedicated Studio Drivers. The RTX GPUs accelerate content creation from video editing to 3D rendering, with performance up to 7x faster than that of the MacBook Pro.

Nvidia Studio

MacBook Pro comparison with a Nvidia Studio Gigabyte Aero laptop

Headlining the platform, 17 RTX Studio laptops were announced at Computex from seven of the world’s leading PC manufacturers. The laptops feature the new Quadro RTX 5000, 4000 and 3000 GPUs, as well as GeForce RTX 2080, 2070 and 2060 GPUs. Quadro RTX 5000-based laptops include 16GB of graphics memory, the largest available in a laptop, enabling advanced multi-app creative workflows and use of large 3D models that are otherwise not possible on the go.

When the RTX 20 series was first announced Nvidia may have inadvertently created a ‘wait and see’ generation of GPUs as gamers baulked at the price tag and took to social media to criticise the ‘Holy Grail’ of graphics. But Jason Paul, general manager of Gaming Software and Virtual Reality at NVIDIA is bullish about the impact RTX Studio laptops will have on creators. When asked about the adoption of ray tracing GPUs, Jason explained to EETimes Asia that people were divided into two camps when the RTX 20 series was first announced.

“Gamers were uncertain, but creators immediately bought in as they could see the benefit of real-time 3D modelling.” Jason believes that Nvidia Studio will lend credibility to what is still a new technology but hints that we should keep an eye on E3 for more announcements.

Intel target CPU excellence for Gamers, Creators and Professionals

There was an array of announcements from Intel this year to sate the appetite, from gamers to professionals, Intel had something for everyone. Intel made several disclosures, including the announcement of the special edition 9th Gen Intel Core i9-9900KS processor, which has been fine-tuned to deliver 5 GHz all-core turbo, making the world’s best gaming desktop processor even better.

For the first time, the company also showed the new Intel Performance Maximizer (IPM), an automated overclocking tool that brings overclocking to the masses by making it easy to dynamically and reliably custom-tune unlocked 9th Gen Intel Core desktop processors based upon their individual performance DNA. IPM will be free and is part of the Intel Adaptix Technologies toolkit, a collection of advanced software technology tools that helps OEMs and consumers maximize platform-level performance and experience. The toolkit also includes Intel Dynamic Tuning Technology, Intel Extreme Tuning Utility and Intel Graphics Command Center.

Intel also launched 14 new 9th Gen Intel Core vPro processors for high-performance mobile (H-series) and desktop (S-series) PCs, the highest performing business processors. Intel Core i9 vPro processors – with up to 8 cores and 16 threads reaching up to 5 GHz on desktop and up to 4.8 GHz on mobile. Plus, Intel announced that the new Intel Core X-series family of processors for premium creators will come this fall. These processors will bring frequency improvements, increased memory speed and updated Intel Turbo Boost Max Technology 3.0.

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