Published , by Chris Jarrard
Published , by Chris Jarrard
The selection for the Shacknews Best Hardware of 2020 award went a bit differently than expected. In hindsight, things going unexpectedly is a running theme in 2020, so maybe we should’ve seen this coming. In a year when both Microsoft and Sony launched their next-generation consoles and Apple chose to ditch Intel CPUs in favor of ARM-based solutions for their Macbook lineup, the industry stalwarts seemed to be clear favorites to walk away with this particular award. However, lackluster launches for the aforementioned consoles and some uncertainty surrounding the transition to ARM-enhanced productivity software on the Apple platform has our staff looking in a different direction.
The PC gaming community spent the better part of 2020 waiting for new graphics cards announcements from both NVIDIA and AMD with bated breath. Next-gen consoles had been set to arrive this holiday season and, along with them, a shift towards more demanding software. The impending release of the PC version of Cyberpunk 2077 loomed large and, like Crysis, Half-Life 2, and Quake before it, CD Projekt Red’s RPG inspired a generation of gamers to upgrade their rigs in anticipation.
Video cards using both NVIDIA’s new Ampere architecture and AMD’s RDNA 2 were released in the final quarter of 2020 to glowing reviews. These new cards (especially flagship models) are extremely fast and can deliver uncompromising 4K gaming performance. Actually acquiring one of these cards proved to be tougher than a 2 dollar steak as rampant scalping and consumer disappointment reached mountainous heights. While this may have been enough to disqualify a new GPU in most years, it turns out that the circumstances presented by the year 2020 made it hard to buy just about anything new in the tech world, mobile phones and next-gen consoles included. Therefore, these new video cards get a pass.
While it doesn’t match the performance of the more famous RTX 3080, NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 3060 Ti is arguably the most impressive GPU on the market at this time. If you can snag a card with this GPU at or around MSRP, you can expect performance that beats the venerable GTX 1080 Ti and RTX 2080. This would be unthinkable just a few short months ago and the RTX 3060 Ti does so while sipping the power that its bigger brothers must chug down to keep running.
For gamers still clinging onto GTX 970s, GTX 1070s, RX 480s, and similar cards, the RTX 3060 Ti is an enticing upgrade, bringing along blistering rasterized gaming performance and access to NVIDIA’s wonder DLSS upscaling technology. In games that make use of DLSS, this new GPU can exceed what you’d get from a GTX 1080 Ti by as much as 50% while using one-third the power. In a year where the new consoles are struggling to run last-gen games at 4K 30fps, NVIDIA’s new RTX 3060 Ti can run circles around them for under $400. Not everyone can run out for new $800+ video cards, so we expect the RTX 3060 Ti to have a much bigger impact on PC gaming in the coming year (if they ever become easily attainable).
Check out the other winners from The Shacknews Awards 2020 in our Year of the Games: 2020 article.