PCGH News: Showdown between the graphics accelerators AMD and Nvidia, Diablo Immortal, Ryzen 7000

Diablo Immortal

Successful new edition or soulless pay-to-win title? Blizzard’s mobile spin-off from the Diablo series was released last week with Diablo Immortal, which also appeared in open beta for PC at the same time. Meanwhile, as the Metacritic user score shows, the title arouses little enthusiasm among most players and, at 0.6, is almost the lowest for Blizzard.

Interestingly, the Opinions of the gaming press and the player clearly apart. With only eight expert reviews submitted, Diablo Immortal for iOS and Android still has a value of 79 points. The reason for the miserable performance among users is most likely due to the intensity of the microtransactions in the game. These brought out the pay-to-win aspect in the free-to-play title and with it the criticism of Blizzard. According to reports, for example from the Youtube channel “Bellular News”, players should invest more than 100,000 euros in Diablo Immortal to fully upgrade their character. Almost a bargain!

RTX 4000

With the upcoming graphics cards from AMD and Nvidia, there should be a significant leap in performance. Both companies will exchange blows with the Geforce RTX 4000 and Radeon RX 7000 graphics cards by the end of the year, relying on both new manufacturing processes and new architectures.

But it is said that there should not only be a performance gain through improved architectures and processes, but also through a significantly increased energy consumption. The Geforce RTX 3090 Ti, with its new power connector and 450-watt TDP, is often seen as a precursor to the even more hungry RTX 4000 models, which are rumored to draw up to 600 watts. According to the well-known leaker @kopite7kimi, not only the consumption of the flagships, but also that of the weaker models should increase significantly. Specifically, he recently claimed that the new Geforce RTX 4060 will require even more energy than an RTX 3070. For comparison: The RTX 3060 has a TDP of 170 watts, the RTX 3070 of 220 watts. Since the release of the Geforce RTX 4060 is still a long way off, @kopite7kimi’s claim cannot be verified at the moment. However, if the Geforce RTX 4060 actually consumes more than 220 watts, some players will probably have to upgrade their old power supplies.

EU standard for charging cables

Finally – standard plug for everyone! There was a long struggle, but now it’s official: the EU has a uniform standard for charging cables. USB Type-C is the long favored winner. “Huh?! almost every smartphone already has USB-C?!” some of you will now be asking yourselves. Nearly! A company run by indomitable Californians won’t stop resisting the one-size-fits-all plug. You all know what brand of fruit we’re talking about. They will have to bow to that in the future. Because from 2024 there will be a uniform charging standard in the EU for mobile devices and that is USB Type C. Admittedly, Parliament still has to agree, but this is considered a mere formality. The requirement had been apparent for a long time; As a result, it is also obvious that the rumors about USB Type C with the iPhone from 2023 are correct, because Apple will probably introduce it in autumn 2023 and also sell it in 2024. But not only smartphones are affected, but a whole range of mobile devices that can be charged. Tablets, cameras, headphones, portable loudspeakers, computer peripherals – the whole portfolio of modern, portable little helpers that are looking for connection.

AMD Ryzen 7000

AMD used its Financial Day to provide an outlook on upcoming products. This also included Ryzen 7000 once again. This time it became more specific for the CPUs under the code name Raphael: AMD marketing promises 8 to 10 percent more IPC performance and 35 percent more overall performance for the Zen 4 architecture. As usual, such values ​​as with the consumption of a vehicle are determined under ideal conditions. If you include the reason corrective, you can roughly see where the journey should go. It is also very interesting: With up to 170 or 241 watts TDP, the maximum power consumption increases significantly, but ultimately you want to achieve more than 25 percent more performance per watt. Since most computing tasks do not require 100 percent CPU performance, practical values ​​should remain affordable even with rising energy costs. If you want, you always have the option of eco mode. On the other hand, if you want to query the maximum performance – with boosts up to 5.5 GHz on up to 16 cores – you also have to invest.