Game

Review of five PC gaming hardware, version 2022


How is your year for computer hardware, readers? Pick anything pretty, or are there any old favorites that still work just fine? I am still very satisfied with 4K gaming monitor I got for a very cheap priceand have spent twelve months increasingly believing that tenkeyless keyboards are in fact best keyboard.

That’s just me, though. At the invited macro level, 2022 has become the most transformative year for PC gaming in recent memory. We’ve got it all: long-overdue launches, bitter disappointments, and performance innovations that really have an impact. Also, Valve has created a portable PC. That’s great.

Instead of discussing the peripherals that I like, let’s take a look at the hardware highs, lows, and infrequents throughout 2022. Start with a device that needs no introduction, as I’ve already covered it. talked about it since February.



Forza Horizon 5 is being played on the Steam Deck.

Steam Deck nailing a new way to play PC games

The steam floor Undoubtedly the biggest PC gaming hardware story of 2022. Finally launched at the start of the year after weeks of delays, it has proven itself to be far from blundering – Valve really created a powerful, intelligently designed, and surprisingly versatile tool for playing PC games on the go. And it also disappoints players. While the Deck can only be purchased without a reservation recently, the handheld has been a Steam bestseller for most of 2022.

Like Gabe Newell told me In February, Valve also wanted to keep the PC-friendly openness with Deck. Therefore, it is much more flexible than the Nintendo Switch, or even less locked. fun day. You can easily add support for non-Steam launchers, to play games from your Epic Games Launcher and GOG libraries, and it is possible (although not always recommend) to remove and replace most of the internals with standard screwdrivers.

Mind you, tinkering is optional and at just £349 this is an impressive little thing right out of the box. If you haven’t tried the Steam Deck yet, I heartily recommend borrowing it from someone else, as it’s really a fun experience, especially for the first time. It’s (most) your Steam game, running on handheld! Even the really graphically demanding stuff, floats between your thumbs! Fixes. That surprise eventually cooled down, but only led to a more sustained appreciation, especially the ability to get a library of hundreds of potential games out the door. Or, very often, just to the sofa. Sometimes I want to play games but don’t want to keep sitting up straight in the desk chair I’ve been sitting in all day and the Steam Deck is the perfect choice for that.

Fun facts about the Steam Deck: The framed Steam Deck artwork I gave Liam in unique accessory video, filmed in August, is still on the wall in his office. That Liam, he’s been so good to us.



AI-rendered DLSS 3 frame in Microsoft Flight Simulator, showing a small plane flying over London.

Upgrade up

For many years now, upgraders – like Nvidia DLSS and AMD FSR – provided an ingenious way to speed up PC game performance without resorting to the typical method of cutting down on quality settings. 2022 sees major improvements to both DLSS and FSR, with Intel’s XeSS also establishing itself as another viable platform alternative. Spoofing your screen resolution has never been so good.

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 can blur edges and details in the highest quality upscaling, FSR 2 looks much sharper and more controlled. In other words, more like native rendering, as well as much closer to the high standards previously set by Nvidia’s more sophisticated DLSS (Deep Learning Supersampling). FSR 2.1 and FSR 2.2 have made further improvements to how moving objects will appear, closing the gap between it and the even closer DLSS.

Since FSR works on all modern graphics cards, not just GeForce RTX GPUs, such improvements can be felt by more PC owners. So good for AMD for keeping their upgrader up to standard. However, in terms of rendering tricks really interesting, Nvidia wins again with DLSS 3 and its framing. This uses the AI ​​numerical processing capabilities of the RTX 40 series GPUs, to insert brand new, entirely AI-generated frames between traditionally rendered frames. In addition to the performance benefits that come with the upgrade, you’ll therefore get massive frame rate boosts with almost no hardware cost. A literal game changer, especially in 4K.

There are some restrictions on LSSS 3: it currently only works on the RTX 4080 and RTX 4090, and since the AI-generated frames are essentially invisible to your PC’s rendering, a game has a high frame rate thanks to the framed frames. create won’t work feel smooth controls as if all those frames were displayed. But it does a good job at improving the look and feel of games that wouldn’t run better without it, and Nvidia has said it could consider making DLSS 3 possible on older RTX cards in the future. future.

Interesting upgrade fact: The first game that fully supports the DLSS, FSR and XeSS trio is Death Stranding Director cutafter adding XeSS to the patch on September 28th.



Intel Arc A770 Limited Edition graphics card on stage at Intel Innovation 2022.

Intel graphics cards are out of steam hell

The Intel arc The GPU family spent most of 2022 missing its own release windows. It’s not like Intel has changed tack, repeatedly claiming that its long-awaited desktop gaming graphics will be ready soon, before falling silent again in a thread worthy of any any of Covent Garden’s street performers. It wasn’t until the fall that the flagship Arc A770 and Arc A750 became real plastic and silicone sheets that you can touch, feel and install to your PC.

Their chance to break the Nvidia-AMD monopoly? Short. our friends at Digital foundry (Intel never sent us the card, sobs) found the Arc A770 and Arc A750 to be affordable, lightweight 1080p/1440p contenders. But! They experience low DirectX 9 and 11 performance when they should The BAR is resizable support to function well at all. Coming home with joy isn’t as much as squeezing into a party two hours late.

However, an impressive debut does not necessarily lose its meaning. For the first time in generations, someone other than Nvidia or AMD is selling a gaming GPU – that’s a big deal. And this generation, originally codenamed Arc Alchemist, represents only the first of four planned architectures, with initial whispers suggesting the next Arc Battlemage could have much more ambitious.

There’s also the feeling that sometimes, when hardware is in production for as long as the Arc Alchemist, getting it out the door can be an achievement. There have certainly been times this year when I started to doubt whether these graphics cards will ever really see the light of day, and while neither the Arc A770 nor the Arc A750 are GPUs at all, I would buy them myself, as long as they have enough potential. don’t be afraid to be proven wrong.

Interesting facts about Intel graphics cards that have actually been abandoned: A supposed functional prototype of Intel’s Larabee GPU, a canceled desktop card design in 2006, sold on eBay this year for €4650. That’s about £4053, $4933 or two RTX 4090s with change.



Spiey web-zips into a building in Marvel's Spider-Man Remastered.

Big game requires big system requirements

That’s the lifecycle of PC hardware: graphics cards and CPUs get faster, games become more demanding on those components, their responses become faster, repeat until we fly into the sun.

However, the PC system requirements start to increase in 2022 at a faster rate than I remember, especially for AAA fare. The minimum spec starts to ditch familiar old names like the GTX 970 and move on to entirely new generations of hardware, with the GTX 1060 – currently the second most used graphics card by Steam users – listed as the minimum for games like Elen’s ring and Ghostwire: Tokyo. Upcoming Silent Hill 2 remake even claims the GTX 1080, which costs around £550 when new, as one of its minimum spec GPUs. Others? AMD’s Radeon RX 5700, an upper mid-range card less than four years old.

Some games are also very memory hungry. Marvel’s Spider-Man Remastered, Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales, Icarusand to return They all list 32GB of RAM to their highest recommended specs, as well as Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Command before modifying it down to 16GB. Having so many DDR4, not to mention more expensive DDR5, is a big question when most PC owners still use 16GB. According to the most recent steam hardware surveyless than 16% of respondents have 32GB of RAM or more.

Again, you would expect both the minimum and the recommended specs to go up in time, though, to keep as many games playable for as many people as possible. , I expect this rate of change to slow down in 2023.

Interesting system requirements fact: There is nothing interesting about system requirements.



The AMD Radeon RX 7900 XT and Radeon RX 7900 XTX graphics cards are preceded by the much larger RTX 4080.

Graphics card prices recovered, then went bad again

Imagine it. Nearly an entire generation of GPUs has been lost to the madness of price cuts, with a historically bad combination of component shortages, unwanted interest from crypto moguls, and Reseller’s greed makes fair dealing almost impossible. Almost two years later, the market is finally stabilizing, just in time for the new cards to be released – and all of them are hundreds of pounds/dollar more expensive than the previous cards, according to the manufacturer. .

Except you don’t have to imagine, because that’s exactly what happened at the end of 2022. RTX4080 launched for £1269 / $1199, almost double the starting price of the RTX 3080, while RTX4090 was and still is an intangible concept rather than a serious buy option at £1679 / $1599. And those are the starting prices – expect even more dire prices on partner versions. AMD got a little less crazy, released Radeon RX 7900 XT from £900 / $899 and Radeon RX 7900 XTX from £1000 / $999, but they are still just two, with no more affordable alternatives currently announced to use the same RDNA 3 architecture.

Having only two defenses for this is not pointless. First, these ingredients are much more potent than the ingredients they replace. Second, the cost of some parts has increased for reasons unrelated to simple extortion. But these bullish timings are not only insensitive, as we’ve only just come out of the big storm of 2020, but they also bode well for the typical affordable variants that most owners have. PC owners will wait. Is the £750 RTX 4060 an attractive upgrade? Almost certainly not.

Interesting facts about GPU GPU coins: By far the cheapest graphics cards to launch in 2022 are Intel’s Arc Alchemist models. Hmm. Maybe I was too hard on them a few parts back? Probably. I will think about it in 2023.

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