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UAE PC gamers: You make the most with what you have

Are you building the best machine you can? Rohma Sadaqat looks at the processing state of play

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Rohma Sadaqat

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Published: Sun 11 Apr 2021, 6:39 PM

Last updated: Sun 11 Apr 2021, 6:41 PM

PC GAMERS ARE a passionate bunch when it comes to upgrades.

We research meticulously for days before making a decision on what goes into our beloved machines. There are prices to compare, performance notes to mull over, and early reviews to watch out for. Our gaming journeys are structured around having the right equipment, at the right time, for the ultimate experience.


Which is why we have been left rather vexed at the current situation with GPUs across the globe. Looking back at 2020 and what it meant for the PC building community, it is fair to say that the situation was not pretty. Nvidia’s highly anticipated RTX 3080, 3070, 3060 Ti and 3090 were hard enough to find, and harder still to buy.

Back in January this year, Nvidia’s CFO, Collette Kress, admitted that the GPU supply shortage wouldn’t be ending anytime soon. “Supply does remain tight at this time,” she said. “We expect the overall channel inventories, meaning the inventories that are with our AIC partners, as well as in our e-tail and retail channels, will likely remain lean throughout Q1.”


Similarly, AMD’s RX 6800 and 6800 XT sold out almost immediately once sales were open. The demand far outweighed supply and, as a result, we saw prices jumping by almost three times the original MSRP. Scalpers continue to be a problem, and with the cryptocurrency boom that we are witnessing right now – at the time of this writing, Bitcoin once again punched through the $60,000 mark – the situation is only going to get worse.

However, there are some positive signs to look forward to. TSMC, which had already announced that it will be setting aside $28 billion this year to tackle the global shortage of advanced chips, said that it will more than triple this investment to $100 billion over the next three years to expand its chip fabrication capacity. Both AMD and Nvidia can breathe a small sigh of relief.

In addition, there is finally some news from Intel. After some relentless teasing about its return to the gaming hardware battleground, we may have our very first look at the Intel DG2 GPUs. In a recent leak, detailed by Moore’s Law Is Dead on YouTube, we got some of our very first in-depth look at Intel’s upcoming Xe-HPG DG2 gaming GPUs. The new graphics card is built with TSMC’s N6 6nm node, and will be manufactured on TSMC silicon. It also seems to support support ray-tracing, which would make it a direct competitor against Nvidia’s flagship GeForce RTX 2000 and 3000 series as well as AMD’s current Radeon RX 6000 series graphics. A launch date is expected later this year, but prices for the units remain elusive.

Lastly, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang will be returning once again to host the GTC 2021 keynote from his kitchen. The event is set to take place April 12, 8:30 am PST. While the event is mostly focused on the latest in AI, data center, graphics, accelerated computing, and intelligent networking, there might be some talk about what we can expect in the last quarter of this year and beyond.


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