It’s been an interesting week so far with the back-to-back launch of Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 3000 series and Intel’s Tiger Lake CPU architecture launch. Couple both of these new products into a fresh gaming rig, and you’ll be screaming down those League of Legends lanes or rendering 3D graphics faster than you can say “Dang, that’s fast.”
Intel Tiger Lake Launch (for Mobile Platforms)
Let’s start with Intel. Their ’11th generation’ architecture, named “Tiger Lake,” has been rumored and talked about for quite some time now. It’s been hotly anticipated because of the rather plateaued development in speed and power Intel has been on for the past number of years. Don’t get us wrong. They’ve made significant improvements from each release to the next, but not like it used to be or how AMD seems to be progressing these days.
That plateau is about to change though. With Tiger Lake, they have completely redone several features of the CPU to improve not only it’s multi-threaded performance (as has been the focus in the past few years) but also it’s IPC (Instructions Per Clock), which improves the performance of a single thread (one of the most important factors for improving gameplay performance, especially coupled with a great video card).
We’ll save you the Intel spiel and just list off a few of the benefits:
- Higher IPC than previous generation by at least 15%
- Lower power use per performance factor while maintaining high CPU clocks
- Significantly increased cache amounts
- Integrated Thunderbolt 4
- Integrated PCIe Gen 4
- Intel Iris X Graphics (integrated)
- General new design all-around with enhanced power management
What’s important to note here is that we’ve had the first significant IPC gain in generations, which should please gamers when they get their hands on one of these CPUs. Keep in mind though that Intel is starting with 4-core variants in the low and mid-point tiers and are mobile only at this time. Higher powered ‘H-series’ mobile tiers will come either later this year or Q1 of 2021.
Check out Anandtech’s article with more details on the launch.
Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 3000 Series Launch
Arguably the more exciting launch of the week, Nvidia took the wraps off their hotly anticipated new graphics card lineup, the GeForce RTX 3000 Series.
This new series will be the second generation of serious hardware-level raytracing support. Raytracing vastly improves the accuracy and fidelity of lighting and shadows in a game (or any graphical scene). With multiple times the power of this feature than the previous 2000 series generation, games will be able to use raytracing smoothly at 60fps, even in 4K scenarios in some cases.
We can’t emphasize enough how important raytracing continues to be to the quality of gameplay. It’s so significant, that decades ago raytracing was deemed to be the “holy grail” of graphics achievements once realized. Well, here we are.
Other features to enhance your gaming interests include HDMI 2.1 for larger high resolution and FPS monitors (unfortunately DisplayPort 2.0 was not included, we were extremely disappointed about that, though not surprised given DP 2.0 was only recently finalized. Perhaps there’ll be more news on this item in times for next generation news early next year). You’ll also get a hefty increase in video memory, and other classical features that boost graphics performance all-around.
Check out Anandtech’s article with more derails on the launch.
These are exciting times for hardware enthusiasts. We haven’t seen a year this active in perhaps almost a decade now. As new hardware comes out, especially as it overlaps between events and the business, art and tech of the games industry, we’ll be sure to give you the latest details. As always, feel free to also share your thoughts and inform us of any new announcements you feel we should be covering.
