NVIDIA and AMD Announce New Graphics Cards

Today we’ll be talking about the new Xbox Game Pass games for January, the release schedule for new games coming in January and February, Death Stranding is coming to the PC, and NVIDIA and AMD announce new graphics cards at CES 2022.   Support DGNS at patreon.com/dgns   https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2022/01/04/coming-soon-to-xbox-game-pass-january-2022/ The first games of 2022 have […]

Today we’ll be talking about the new Xbox Game Pass games for January, the release schedule for new games coming in January and February, Death Stranding is coming to the PC, and NVIDIA and AMD announce new graphics cards at CES 2022.

Support DGNS at patreon.com/dgns

https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2022/01/04/coming-soon-to-xbox-game-pass-january-2022/

The first games of 2022 have been announced for Xbox Game Pass. Available as of yesterday are Gorogoa, Olijia, and The Pedestrian all available on console, PC, and cloud. Notably Mass Effect Legendary Edition will be available tomorrow, January 6th, for Console and PC and Outer Wilds will also be available tomorrow for Cloud, Console, and PC. Embr will also be available for Cloud, Console, and PC tomorrow. January 13th will see the release of Spelunker 2 and The Anacrusis for console and pc. The Anacrusis is a four-player co-op first person shooter “set aboard a massive starship stranded at the edge of explored space. And don’t forget on January 15th these titles will be leaving the service:

Desperados III (Cloud, Console, and PC)
Ghost of a Tale (PC)
Kingdom Hearts III (Console)
Mount & Blade: Warband (Cloud, Console, and PC)
Pandemic (Console and PC)
Yiik: A Postmodern RPG (PC)

Of course Microsoft offers 20% off any titles that leave GamePass with your member discount.

https://www.gamesradar.com/video-game-release-dates/

Lets talk about new games coming for January and February. For January we will see the free to play version of PUBG: Batlegrounds to PC, PS4, Xbox One, and Google Stadia hitting on January 12th. God of War will be released for the PC on January 14th. Rainbow Six Extraction comes out PC, PS5, Xbox Series X, PS4, and Xbox One on January 20th. On January 28th Pokemon Legends: Arceus for the Switch and Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection for the PS5 will be released. But the month that all gamers around the world are looking forward to and fearing for their free time is February. Dying Light 2 hits the PC, PS5, Xbox Series X, PS4, and Xbox One on February 4th to start the month off. Sifu will be out for the PC, PS4, and PS5 February 8th. Then February 18th Horizon Forbidden West will be out for the PS5 and PS4. Destiny 2: The Witch Queen will be out February 22nd. And probably the biggest release of the month, and possibly the year, Elden Ring will be out on February 25th for the PC, PS5, Xbox Series X, PS4, and Xbox One. As far as hardware releases the Steam Deck will be out in February, though no specific day/date have been announced.

https://www.videogameschronicle.com/news/death-stranding-directors-cut-is-officially-coming-to-pc-in-spring-2022/

Tom Ivan with VGC reports that Death Stranding Director’s Cut will be out for the PC in spring 2022. It will be made available on Steam and the Epic Games Store. 505 games will be publishing the title on PC. The game will utilize Intel’s XeSS graphics technology. The director’s cut of the title, which first came to the PS5, includes new combat mechanics, upgraded melee attacks, and a new Maser gun and mounted machine guns.

https://www.ign.com/articles/nvidia-rtx-3090-ti-announced-ces-2022

https://www.ign.com/articles/nvidia-rtx-3050-gpu-announced-release-date-price

https://www.pcgamer.com/amd-rx-6500-xt-announcement/

So AMD and NVIDIA have announced a few new graphics cards for PC gamers at this years CES.

First up is the very high end NVIDIA RTX 3090 Ti. While no pricing or release dates were announced The Verge notes it will include 40 teraflops of GPU, which will equate to an 11 percent faster performance over the current RTX 3090’s 36 teraflops. It will also have 24GB of GDDR6X and the same amount of VRAM as the RTX 3090, which has 26GB of VRAM. Though the 3090 Ti will have faster VRAM running at 21Gbps versus the standard 3090 running at 19.5Gbps. This is expected to be NVIDIA’s new flagship card, so good luck finding one.
As far as an entry level card from NVIDIA the newly announced RTX 3050 will now slot into that spot. The RTX 3050 will effectively replace the aging GTX 1650 at the entry level graphics card. The card will feature 8GB of GDDR6 memory, and will support DLSS and hardware accelerated ray tracing. The RTX 2050 will be available January 27th at a retail price of $269, though it remains to be seen how quickly bots and scalpers will effect the actual cost of these cards.
Lastly AMD has announced a competitor to the RTX 3050, the AMD RX 6500 XT graphics card which will be made available January 19th. At $199 this is a budget friendly card, but expect prices from partner manufacturers to be a little higher, depending on demand, etc. Specs weren’t readily made available besides a 2.6GHz Game Clock. PC Gamer’s Dave James says, “with 16 compute units and a pretty miserly 16MB of Infinity Cache. That translates into 1,024 RDNA 2 cores, half the cores of the RX 6600 XT, and a fair chunk down on the straight RX 6600, too.” The memory is suppose to be 4GB GDDR6, which is still pretty low even for 1080p gaming. So this is a very budget friendly card. The lack of any specs or performance comparisons next to current cards so close to launch is not a good sign, and my expectation is this will be a good card for those looking to build a budget friendly gaming PC that is also used for productivity but might see the occasional use for older first person shooters, action games, and top down games like Star Dew Valley, strategy games, and the like.