Welcome back PCWorld fans for another weekly stockpile of all-important PC news! If you watched
the NVIDIA GTC 2021 Keynote and you thought you were watching a real person in a real kitchen,
I have news for you. Also, AMD’s Radeon RX 6600 XT reviews are in and we can finally see how it
holds up. But something no one expected was the 6600 XT’s Ethereum mining performance, which we’ll
touch on here. And to finish things up, Mark Hachman got all handsy with Xbox Cloud Gaming
on the PC. Let’s load right into this news and break these topics down with a little more detail!
Siggraph 2021, the world’s largest conference on computer graphics, has come and gone. And
companies from around the globe came to tout their developments and projects for the visual computing
world. This year, NVIDIA really spent some time showcasing their Omniverse, a collaborative tool
that can be used for large-scale graphical productions, encompassing everything from
presentations to animation. But what was most impressive was Nvidia’s reveal of what it did
during GTC 2021 earlier this year. What made it cool? Well, if you saw this presentation and you
thought you were watching a real Jensen in a real kitchen, then you were just as fooled as I was.
While you were hearing the real Jensen Huang you were not looking at him. He and his kitchen,
as well as all the slides of the presentation, were all done within the NVIDIA Omniverse. It was
presented in what is now quite a mind-bending experiment. Well played NVIDIA, you got me.
NVIDIA wasn’t the only company on the move this week, AMD was also making big moves on
the graphics front. They took aim at the 1080p crowd with the launch of the $379
‘Epic 1080p gaming powerhouse’, the Radeon RX 6600 XT. As far as the overall performance, we saw the
card come within a hair of the last generation RX 5700 XT while sporting the same memory capacity,
but pulling less power. Be sure to read Brad’s full review on PCWorld.com of all the details.
So the most positive thing I could say right now is that based on the price to performance metric,
you're basically getting RX 5700 XT levels of performance for quite a bit better of
a street price. And considering the prices of competition's cards as well as the 5700
XT’s street price being through the roof, then the RX 6600 XT is currently quite attractive.
This could all change, but for now there seems to be stock at MSRP so that’s a good thing!
But that MSRP could be short-lived if miners have anything to do about it. Because it didn’t
take long for word to spread like wildfire about the Radeon RX 6600 XTs mining chops.
I’ll be honest here and admit that I really didn’t expect this thing to be able to pull out any
impressive numbers with its little 128-bit bus, but it does. Reports from Reddit and other places
with Tom’s Hardware show the RX 6600 XT breaking the 30MH/s wall while sipping power at under 75w.
I thought this was far too optimistic, so I attempted to disprove it using my
own PCAT setup. All I did was manage to prove Tom’s Hardware’s numbers correct,
because this ASUS ROG Strix RX 6600 XT I had on hand, once tuned, produced 32MH/s. On top of that,
it was indeed sitting at total card power of 75w - even with the RGB enabled. But these are pretty
low hashers for $400 or more so maybe they’ll stay out of the mines and be available for gamers.
However, if prices don't pan out and miners buy up all the inventory hoping for that 4 month ROI,
then there’s always Cloud Gaming, right? Xbox Cloud Gaming that is. We touched on this in an
earlier news video when it became available, but as of August 9th it opened up to those taking part
in the Windows Insider Program. Our very own Mark Hachman took flight and shared his impressions.
If you want to get all of the details then you’re going to want to follow the
link in the description, but the gist of his experience is that the slower the game’s pacing
and required input response, the better the overall experience will be. I can echo that
sentiment as I’ve found the same to be true when using it myself. Racing games? I’d hard pass on
that. But RPGs or Adventure games felt perfectly at home on the streaming platform for me,
and right now it offers a great opportunity for PC gamers to get
their hands on some Xbox games without the need to upgrade their hardware to do so.
And when you’re done playing a cloud based game, you just log off. Kind of like what I’m
going to do with this video. Luckily neither took up your precious hard drive space. But
unlike Jensen and his kitchen in NVIDIA’s GTC 2021 Keynote, me and my office here are real.
You should be able to sign up for the NVIDIA Omniverse platform for yourself
if you want to dabble with it and create something - or just play Marbles RTX. If epic 1080p gaming
is more your speed and you want to crank up the frames then the RX 6600 XT is on the streets,
thankfully close to MSRPs. As long as the miners don’t decide this is their next darling and buy
them all up at whatever price the retailers decide is best for them. But if they do,
then you have an option to get your game on with Xbox Cloud Gaming on your PC.
That’s it for this week of news from around the PC World,
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