With so much brand new, high-performance gaming-oriented tech hitting the market – both recently and imminently – it’s time to take a look at what the next-gen gaming set-up looks like. Here are some cutting-edge components and peripherals that will simultaneously improve your performance, boost reliability and enhance your general gaming experience:
1. GPU
Though we’re starting with PC-focused components, both of the major gaming-oriented graphics processor brands, Nvidia and AMD, recently announced the latest evolutions of their GPU technologies. While console players won’t immediately benefit, versions of these latest technologies are in their current consoles and will be in the next-gen consoles too.
Nvidia recently announced its RTX 4080 graphics cards which will appear on desktop PCs in November. These have a new architecture codenamed Ada Lovelace which provides new streaming processors (that offer double the performance of predecessors), 4th-Gen Tensor cores (for doubled AI performance) and 3rd-Gen RT cores for doubled Ray-Tracing performance. This all means that games will look even better, render even faster and use less power when doing so.
Not to be outdone, AMD is also about to launch its 7000-series GPUs. Details are still a little sketchy, but these new cards, based on RDNA 3 architecture, should also be launching in November and offer a significant performance boost over the previous generation while doubling the performance per Watt.
The improved efficiency makes for less cooling noise and more portability... which is great if gaming is your thing.
2. NVMe SSD
There are few things more annoying to gamers than waiting for levels to load, waiting for additional parts of levels (that you’re already in!) to load and arriving in a multiplayer game only to find that your enemies have a head start and your loading delay has immediately put you on the back foot. All too often, the culprit for slow loading is the hard drive which can act as a digital bottleneck on even the fastest computers and consoles.
The good news is that a brand-new generation of speedy storage is hitting the market: Samsung’s 990 PRO, which is designed especially for gamers and demanding designers. These new solid-state hard drives utilise the latest, fastest PCIe 4.0 NVMe architecture to reduce data bottlenecks between the storage and the computer. They also use Samsung’s own highly regarded VNAND chips and its own, proprietary controller which sees random write performance increase by up to 55% over the 980 PRO while using half the power (1). To keep things even more reliable, Samsung adds a special nickel coating, a heat spreader and its Dynamic Thermal Guard technology to keep things cool and running smoothly.
Having every key component made by the same manufacturer provides even more peace of mind with regard to performance and reliability.
3. Monitor
It’s all well and good to have speedy components inside your computer and console, but it’s all for nothing if your gaming interaction and immersion is ruined by choosing the wrong monitor. The perfect next-gen gaming set-up demands a monitor with a 4K UHD resolution, a fast refresh rate plus a speedy pixel response time to keep everything looking buttery smooth. You also want features to tailor a game’s display according to its genre: whether that’s choosing an outlook that mimics a racing car cockpit, tuning contrast performance to stop enemies jumping out of shadows and highlights, or utilising so much on-screen real estate that you can see your enemies coming before they can see you.
Once again, Samsung has you covered. The Odyssey line-up provides all of this across screen sizes ranging from 27-inches to, gulp... 55-inches via its new Odyssey Ark personal gaming theatre! The Odyssey gaming monitors, from the Neo G8 to the Odyssey Ark, have each got all the inputs that you’d want for a PC or console, while the new Odyssey G6 gaming monitor with Smart TV features a 1000R-rated curve to boot. As if that’s not enough, the Odyssey Ark and G6 gaming monitors also feature built-in speakers. Why does this matter? Well, take the Odyssey Ark for example. Its speakers are situated behind the screen to help you locate and identify the source of sounds within your game, giving you an instant edge when it comes to determining the direction of your enemies. No matter what level, you’ll find your perfect gaming monitor companion in the Odyssey range.
4. Processor and RAM
Why mention these together? Just as we’ve got used to Intel’s 12th-Gen processors delivering increasingly staggering performance with less power, the company’s 13th-Gen processors are about to land. Packed with more cores and higher clock speeds, these processors promise to offer 15% single-core performance boosts and up to a 41% increase to multi-threaded performance!
Of course, Intel isn’t the only game in town. AMD recently launched its new Ryzen 9 7950X and 7900X processors and these work with DDR5. They’re incredibly fast and it will be interesting to see if Intel’s new offerings can beat them.
Conclusion
While much of the above primarily helps PC gamers (because PCs are the sum of their component parts), console gamers can still benefit from both SSDs (which can increase the storage capacity and performance) and gaming monitors which offer immersive gaming experience.
But, whatever your platform of preference, there’s never been a better time to be a gamer. The raft of new technology hitting the market means you can upgrade everything or be selective and pick something that will give you the biggest, personalised bang-for-buck boost.
To find out more about Samsung’s new 990 PRO SSD and the new Odyssey Gaming Monitor range, visit www.samsung.com/au/monitors/odyssey-gaming-monitor and www.samsung.com/au/memory-storage.
1 Sequential and random write performance measurements are based on IOmeter1.1.0. Performance may vary based on SSD’s firmware version, system hardware, configuration and other factors. Test system configuration: AMD Ryzen 7 5800X 8-Core Processor CPU@3.80GHz, DDR4 3600MHz 16GBx2 (PC4-25600 Overclock), Windows 10 Pro 64bit, ASRock-X570 Taichi.
