Game Tales

A red moon is rising over PC gaming - AMD has succeeded in overturning Intel’s market dominance for the month of August 2017 at Germany’s largest e-tailer. While German store Mindfactory is just a small slice of the overall market, it does provide a decent general barometer of where the CPU market is at right now. AMD’s new Ryzen CPUs, including its HEDT Threadripper processors, have seen AMD clamber to its largest market share at the retailer in more than a decade. For the month of August 2017, AMD’s desktop CPUs accounted for 56% of the processors sold at Mindfactory, up from 27.6% when Ryzen first launched back in March. In fact, looking at the data collated by Redditor ‘ ingebor ’, AMD’s market share has continued to grow month on month for the past six months, resulting in this eventual eclipsing of Intel. Things get a little closer when we look at monthly revenue rather than unit sales though, aided by Intel’s generally higher cost per CPU. Again, AMD comes out on top, ...

A discussion on which is the best graphics card is largely futile - the raw performance of a GPU comes down to sheer numbers. The biggest and the most expensive will always be the best, even if it isn’t necessarily the wisest purchase. But what about the graphics cards that proved the most disruptive to the PC gaming industry? Graphics processing legends that offered unparalleled price to performance, shifted tens of millions of units, and heralded in an all-new era of graphics card tech. It’s time to celebrate the graphics card heroes. I’ll proffer a few of my favourites to get things going, but please share some of your favourites down in the comments section below! Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTX An undisputed giant, the GeForce 8800 GTX was arguably the most enduring graphics card ever made. Up until a couple of years ago it was still pretty common to see these in GD builds, roughly a decade after its 2006 launch. The GeForce 8800 GTX was a beast, ushering in DirectX 10 and last...

Intel’s just hosted a behind-the-scenes Facebook live stream, finding some time for a cheeky tease of the release date for its 8th Gen Intel Core Coffee Lake processors. While Gregory Bryant, senior vice president, was having a chat about Intel 8th Gen CPUs, he placed down a coffee cup with the word ‘October’ emblazoned across. Hinting much? Don’t worry, that’s not all. Another Intel employee in the background is also sipping from a cup of coffee with ‘10.2017’ written on it. Either Intel be trolling, or we’re powering towards a next-gen CPU launch next month. My money’s on the latter. Somewhat confusingly, the 8th Gen of Intel Core processors will consist of a mixture of Kaby Lake, Coffee Lake and Cannonlake. This kind of flies in the face of the typical generations we’ve come to expect, splitting the CPUs across architectures and, in the case of Cannonlake, even process nodes. Previously, and CPUs of the same generation would same the same CPU microarchitecture and process nod...