Is Twitter Shutting Down and Facebook Going Bankrupt? Who cares, only question is will it be cheap VGA? The year 2023 doesn’t promise to be boring either, we’ve taken a look at what to expect.
It cannot be said that 2022 has been a boring year in the IT sector: going against its multi-year marketing strategy and campaign, Samsung has entered the OLED market, and with a very effective and good entry (the other problem is whether the spring release of the products were delayed by a failed internal debate), more and more people are thinking about Facebook’s Metaverse initiative that – to put it mildly – the time has not come, moreover, this is supported by the wave of scaling and partners walking away from the platform.
Perhaps the biggest storm was stirred up by Elon Musk and the misery of Twitter, which even now brings new twists almost every day. But we could mention the 2022 crypto crash, the failed acquisition of ARM-Nvidia or Intel video cards. In our article, we will now look at which changes we can expect on the PC front and which not.
Displays, PCs, notebooks
As usual, 2023 will begin with the CES fair, where not the devices that can be purchased from tomorrow will be presented, but the products and technologies expected in 3-6 months. The exception may be the new PC platforms, which we plan to test as early as February. These are mainly the new Intel and AMD mobile platforms, more precisely the 13th generation Intel Core and AMD Ryzen 7000 mobile CPUs. Closely related to this is the mobile version of the Nvidia GeForce RTX 40 series, which is badly needed, considering that the GeForce 3000 have dominated this segment for too long (and there is no progress in terms of 3D performance).
In the notebook market, OLED continues to conquer and this type of display will appear in more and more machines, moreover, with an increasingly low premium price. The multifunctional Type-C port will also become commonplace and it will be possible to charge almost all notebooks – and we can only hope that PC makers compete to reduce chargers, for which GaN technology provides a very good foundation.
Desktop PCs aren’t dying
The desktop computer world isn’t going to fail yet, and with the spread of Intel and AMD platforms appearing in the fall, DDR5 memory technology is slowly taking over. This not only means a reduction in price, but also the speed of DDR5 modules will increase significantly, thanks to larger clock signals and tighter times: DDR5-10000 will be available to everyone, of course at an appropriate premium price.
But this will almost be just a minor change, because everyone in the video card market expects a more serious fix. Well, as Nvidia boss Jensen said, we are waiting for him in vain,
there won’t even be a budget video card in 2023.
Sure, you can probably pick up a relatively cheap GT 1030 or RX 6400/6500, but these can’t be called player cards. It would be nice to forget about the GTX 1650 and RTX 20 series once and for all, which may be helped by the fact that there are huge stocks of RTX 30 GPUs in warehouses that Nvidia and the card makers want to throw at us. One of the results of this is already visible: it is the RTX 3060 8 GB, which is not only a good mid-range card with less RAM at a cheaper price, but also a 30% weakened scam (Nvidia also halved the memory bandwidth) with minimal price reduction.
Those who expected from 2022 that Intel would crush the noses of the two GPU giants could be very disappointed at the end of the year: we did not expect such a thing. The lower members of the Arc series have become very weak, and the stronger ones are very expensive and, by the way, rare. It’s also a problem that, despite the iron, the drivers are incredibly bad. This is also evidenced by the fact that it took almost six months after the release to somehow improve the performance of DX9 (it was accelerated by 2 times, but still not enough).
However, some improvement in VGAs is expected. The mid-range RTX 40 promise to be very good and AMD Radeon is not worth giving up either: the 7000 series will not be bad in terms of price and performance, and will also catch up with Nvidia in terms of software extras. Even Intel won’t back down right away, but no one should dream that prices will suddenly drop.
144 fps for Christmas
If you’d rather not wait for new cards to hit you, it might be worth checking out the used market. Many people will throw away their RTX20/30 or Radeon 6000 cards, and if you can get hold of a warranty copy, you can get the gaming iron for a very good price.
If you look at the current lineup, you can already see that the price of the beefier RTX 30s is pleasantly decreasing – owners are looking to get rid of them and switch to RTX 40 models. The 3060 Tis can be had for around HUF 130-150 thousand, the 3070s they ask for HUF 170-200 thousand, but you can get an RTX 3070 Ti for around HUF 200 thousand. The RTX 3080 is still considered very powerful today and you can put it under the tree at Christmas for HUF 230-270 thousand. From there, you just have to stretch a bit and from 320,000 you can join the elite circle of guaranteed RTX 3090 owners.
It’s also worth looking around the world of Radeon, because in many cases you get better 3D performance for less. For example, you can go home with a Radeon RX 6800 for around HUF 190,000, and an RX 6700 XT is priced at HUF 130-150,000. If your budget is more modest, you can get a Radeon RX 6600 for HUF 70-80,000, which will last you well enough in FHD resolution for at least another year or two.
In the next article we will talk about the television market and then the mobile phones, here too the anniversary can bring interesting changes.
