Author: Ryan

Evatech is scoping the latest, greatest, and wackiest products and trends coming out of this year’s Computex. Look at some of the pictures below.

LED displays, RGB and all things bright lights

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Some of the wacky

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Some of the little-bit-more normal

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To help you feel like you’re really there…

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You might have heard about Google’s announcement last week: Stadia. What it promises is without a doubt impressive. However, there’s a long way to go before we’ll be concerned about gamers turning away from full blown gaming PCs in favour of game streaming. In case you’ve missed it, here’s what it is in a nutshell.

What does Stadia promise?

• Almost any device with an internet connection can game
• While watching game footage, click a button to start playing the game and be gaming in about 5 seconds
• 4K (3840×2160, or 4x as much as 1080p) gaming at 60 frames per second (FPS) + HDR
• “State share” allows viewers of Stadia stream to launch to the same save state as the gamer
• Compatible with USB controllers, but Google will also provide their own controller with lower latency
• Subscription based service
• Potential to eventually support 8K gaming at 120 FPS
• Release in 2019

The above means for some very compelling positive points:

• Game practically anywhere, any time
• Launch a game without any downloads, installs, updates
• No specialised hardware necessary

So wait, why isn’t Evatech worried?

It’s no secret that we have made a business out of providing gaming PCs for gamers Australia wide. Google’s Stadia announcement may well eat into our customer base. But here’s why we’re not bothered…

The biggest reason

Google has only laid out plans for launching this year in the US, Canada, and Europe. Australians will have to wait.

Australian Internet

Remember that in Australia most of us struggle for good internet at home via wired solutions. The days of game streaming at 1080p 60FPS over a home ADSL/cable/NBN or a mobile data connection are far off in the future. More on why later in this post.

Furthermore, lately the trend of gamers going for resolutions greater than 1080p and/or more than 60FPS is skyrocketing. You might be thinking “But I can stream Netflix 1080p/4K no worries!” – firstly you’re in the minority. Secondly, almost all movie/TV footage is about 24 FPS. That’s less than half the amount of 60 FPS. Thirdly, streaming a movie or TV show is known data. By that I mean your device can pre-load the next 30 seconds, or few minutes of the video file so that in case your internet connection is patchy, it has a bit of a “buffer” to work with so that you hopefully experience a perfect stream.

A game on the other hand, cannot be pre-loaded. If you decide to jump, shoot, run, or (sadly) die from one second to the next, there are way too many possibilities for Google to pre-load for you, meaning it’s all live, all the time.

But, games on demand!

The games. Although it would be easier to say “the lack of games”, because all we’ve got confirmed so far is Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and Doom Eternal. Interestingly this raises another point. Since Stadia is based on Linux and some specialised hardware. Likening it more to a new breed of console than a regular home PC running Windows 10 and Steam (or whatever other game store). This may offer a new barrier to entry for game developers/publishers, meaning Stadia may not get all the latest and greatest games if there isn’t a large enough player base to warrant the hard work and effort.

What if it has everything I want, and I have great internet?

Input lag & latency

There’s a tiny (mostly negligible) amount of input lag on a gaming PC sat just 30cm away from you as you game. This is the delay between you pressing a button on your keyboard/mouse/controller and the corresponding action appearing on screen. Modern gaming peripherals and hardware do well to almost negate this entirely.

When it comes to pressing a button in your house, the signal going to your PC, your PC sending it to Google via whichever servers it needs to bounce off to reach Google, Stadia’s servers to process your button press and then pass the output (video) back to you again via the same avenues, there’s going to be a noticeable delay. Google says they have worked to minimise it, but those who have tested it are saying it is most certainly there, to the point of it being a deal-breaker. Note that a lot of gamers these days are playing first-person shooters, where reaction timing is everything. More input lag than your competition puts you at an instant up-front disadvantage. Playing games should be fun, not frustrating by design.

People are increasingly becoming wary of large corporations, such as Google & Facebook

There’s been what seems like news story after news story about the world’s largest companies engaging in shady activities. Some result in lawsuits, fines, and some just make people really uncomfortable due to their privacy being exploited. Stadia has raised some valid questions: what about game mods? How long are games available for (if not indefinite)? What if Google decides Stadia isn’t sustainable, and wants to shut down the service as it has with many, many other once-large services?

Internet (again)

It might be hard to think back to a time before the likes of Netflix, Stan, Amazon Prime, etc. Do you remember? Internet speeds for the most part slower than what we have right now, granted. But the max theoretical speeds were usually reached on a daily basis. Since the rise of streaming services like Netflix, Australian Internet Service Providers (ISPs) have struggled to give everyone their maximum connection speeds (sustained), especially during peak times.

Why? Most of the population get home from their day of school, university, or work from about 3pm to 7pm. As more and more people get home, they are able to give their attention to a screen of their choice, and the easiest one is a TV connected to the internet to watch some TV series, or perhaps a movie, or maybe even some YouTube. While that’s on, you might also browse through Facebook, news, or Reddit. That’s fine too – your internet can very likely handle this because the video content is being pre-loaded.

Now remember that this is happening at every other house in your street. The streets connecting your street to main roads. Every house in your suburb. Plus a few of your neighbouring suburbs. For some Australians, that’s the amount of houses that rely on just one internet node/exchange. Somewhere along the line, no matter how close to home, or how far from home, there will be a bottleneck. Too much data to go out and come back in to keep up with, so everyone’s speeds often get slowed down so that everyone is able to maintain some type of connection. This is what most ISPs now refer to as “evening speed”.

Why does any of the above matter?

That’s how life is in today’s world of streaming Netflix, YouTube, etc. Now picture that same scenario, only that maybe 1/4 of those people who would usually stream video are now interested in streaming live games that they are playing. So, 1/4 of the population using 2x (or more) the amount of bandwidth. That’s a significant increase in internet traffic and bandwidth utilisation. Something I just cannot fathom Australian internet infrastructure keeping up with. Let’s also remember Australian internet has pretty tight data caps. 1 hour of Netflix HD (1080p @ 25FPS) will use about 6GB of data. Let’s double that to get to 50 FPS (still 10 short of 60), and that’s 12GB of data an hour. 3 hours of gaming a day, 5 times a week, over the course of a month? 720GB in just game streaming.

Great idea, just… not for everyone

While it will allow people to jump right into games at the drop of a hat (ignoring the internet problem for a moment), it’s not the end of gaming PCs. Competitive gaming will still be done on real physical gaming machines. Ones that cater to professional gamers’ requirement for high refresh rate, low latency, “no excuses” hardware to play their games and earn their living. Anyone serious about gaming will likely stick with real hardware, like we have now.

For what it’s worth, American multinational retail company Walmart is also reportedly looking at game streaming. So there may be more options in the future, with all the same pitfalls we imagine.

Also remember. A gaming PC is more than just for playing games. You can do homework, assignments, research, video editing, office work, etc. Gaming PCs are far from being replaced.

Hopefully that explains things as we see it. And again, this is certainly not coming to Australia at least this year. Even when it does, Australian internet just isn’t cut out for it. So expect a very, very bad time.

Until then, game to your heart’s desire on an Evatech customisable Gaming PC!

AMD’s Radeon Vega VII (or Vega 7) was released about a month ago, with unconfirmed benchmarks quick to follow. Though unconfirmed (due to major stock shortages) the benchmarks all conclude the same performance figures. In terms of pricing, the Vega 7 blows punches with Nvidia’s RTX 2080 with FPS in 1440p and 4K gaming. See below.

RTX is either slightly ahead, or quite a bit ahead in most comparisons, with Vega II ahead in only a few. Considering the Vega is the same price as the RTX 2080, we can’t see any good reason to wait for Vega to be readily available. Not to mention Nvidia’s RTX cards offer DLSS and Ray-Tracing.

Our PCs already have the RTX 2080 available, so don’t wait any longer, customise your own PC today!

Most of you will know about the big online game stores, Steam, Origin, Uplay. Perhaps if you’re into Fortnite, you’ll know of Epic Games.

Even if you don’t care for Fortnite, there are a collection of other great games available on the Epic Games store. Right now, for example, “The Jackbox Party Pack” is free (until Feb 7th). Highly anticipated titles “Metro Exodus” and “The Division 2” which launch this month and next month respectively. As Epic tries to secure their position as one of the top stores, make sure you check with them as they could have exclusive titles, or better pricing than other stores!

Discord (previously well regarded for being the best platform for free voice and text chats between gamers worldwide) also has a respectable offering of games. Be sure to check with them, too, as pricing differs between all stores.

Battle.net is one of the oldest still going. Giving us the Warcraft series, Starcraft, Diablo, Overwatch, Destiny 2, and Call of Duty. Not much of a range, to be sure, but an undeniable collection of highly regarded games.

As annoying as it may be to have different stores to buy different games from, and at different prices, it creates competition, which should help keep the prices nice and affordable for us gamers, rather than one place having a monopoly and charging whatever they want.

On the other hand, if you want to know what games you can expect to play with your next or current Evatech gaming PC… look no further than our games database which is deeply embedded into our PC builder. If you have already bought one of our PCs, simply re-enter the PC ID into our website to pull up your unique PC page (eg). Then scroll down to the games portion of the page, and you’ll see what games and what settings you can achieve.

Let us know if we are missing any titles you want to see in our game database.

Now that you know what you need to play the most anticipated games of Q1, head on over to our PC builder!

Back in September we had rumours and leaks about Nvidia cards reportedly supporting Variable Refresh Rate (VRR) or essentially G-Sync with FreeSync monitors on some updated drivers. Those reports were quickly put to bed, being called a “bug” and drivers since then have not supported it; business as usual. I was curious, wondering how long until it became official then. And in the last few days we’ve had our dreams become reality… perhaps even VRRR! Variable Refresh Rate Reality? Bad pun.

So far only 12 FreeSync monitors have been given the official “supported” branding by Nvidia out of the 100 they’ve tested with, with more to come. Reportedly even customers with monitors that have “failed” Nvidia’s tests will be able to manually turn VRR on. Whether or not a monitor passes the tests relies on a few criteria. The monitor must not show:

• Blanking
• Pulsing
• Flickering
• Ghosting
• Any other artifacts during VRR gaming

The driver that brings support for all the above will hit January 15th (or 16th since we’re ahead in Australia), so you can try for yourself if you have a FreeSync monitor already.

Moving forward there will be new tiers of G-Sync. From lowest to highest ranking:

• G-Sync Compatible – Adaptive Sync monitors with some limited testing
• G-Sync – Current G-Sync monitors
• G-Sync Ultimate – Current G-Sync HDR monitors

Why now, what took so long?

For those of you who may be wondering why Nvidia didn’t make this change sooner, there are multiple reasons, and they may not all be simply that Nvidia is a “money hungry company”. Instead, consider the following.

• By having full control over G-Sync all this time, requiring Nvidia’s approval before brands could utilise their tech/branding, Nvidia was able to ensure that the monitors advertising Nvidia’s VRR functionality were of a high quality, without the above mentioned flaws that can occur on low-quality displays
• There are quite a lot of low-quality displays that advertise being 120Hz, 144Hz, etc. but do so poorly, even with AMD graphics cards
• With Nvidia’s new approach to VRR, anyone with a capable monitor can now experience adaptive sync. If your monitor is of poor quality, you may witness artifacts during gameplay. Nvidia can stand behind their “told you so” and list of officially supported monitors

With the above points in mind, perhaps we can now see that Nvidia was interested in ensuring a high quality gaming experience for those who didn’t want to spend hours figuring out which displays were of a high enough quality to support issue-free gaming. It was simply a case of “any monitor with the G-Sync functionality is the one I want”. But now, anyone can get in on the VRR life, albeit with differing degrees of quality. No doubt that with time and driver updates the compatibility can and will improve, but for now this is where we’re at. And we’re plenty excited enough!