well we promised it it was sponsored by lg and see sonic and it was here at ltx
we're actually tearing down right now but this is part two where we're gonna
be showing you guys 2015 the big upgrade
2016 gpu die shrink finally 2017 we skipped a generation
2018 intel gets scared in 2019 of course
amd strikes back we'll be going through the gaming experience of all these rigs
and how they changed over the years right after the intro
the first part of the series was basically a story of amd struggling to
keep up with a surging intel and then near the end intel kinda slowing down
and i think you're gonna find that that slowdown is gonna be a big pattern for
part two let's start then with 2015. the
year the apple watch was finally released after being announced eight
months prior the paris climate accord was finally negotiated and windows 10
was finally released with much acclaim from those who hated windows 8. there's
no start menu there's no place to it's a lot of finales but there's more to come
because we're finally getting some momentum back in the pc space thanks to
two major cpu releases the first of course is our skylake processor so we've
got a 6700k processor cooled by an october nhd15
and what a freaking overclocking and performance combination those two
skylake brought major improvements like their dmi 3.0 interface for much faster
connectivity to things like nvme storage as well as high speed networking on the
100 series chipsets and as the talk
counterpart to the seldom used broadwell architecture skylake saw some relatively
significant performance optimizations as well and it also included for the first
time ddr4 support yes my friends ddr4
made it to the consumer space it also came with the release of the geforce gtx
980 ti which gave us a very significant
performance boost that would hold up for quite some time at the time of release
it was the most powerful and the largest non-titan gpu in the consumer space and
it's much larger frame buffer and comparable gaming performance so the
radeon fury x made it the better choice in the long run at just shy of 2100
i think we'll see a significant improvement in raw performance if not
performance per dollar over our 2014 year to say nothing of the ui
improvements of windows 10. to sweeten the deal this year also was the year
that gta 5 finally hit pcs fallout 4
launched and of course we can't forget metal gear solid 5 the phantom pain
overall it was a pretty amazing year for pc gamers it's funny to me that our list
of amazing games for that year was so full of amazing games witcher 3 didn't
even make it in it was a huge year this thing on hardware from that era
it looks freaking awesome you've got like the cloth effects
in geralt's clothing there it actually really looks like wet leather yeah the
reflections off the sword are actually somewhat believable if i had a camera
behind it like that yep it actually plays off the light like that and the
textures have aged really well as well the road looks fantastic the character
modeling is great now the facial animations i don't think
have stood the test of time quite as well they weren't that great at the time
either to be honest can lightning strike again in 2016
yes and also no on the other hand there were a lot of high profile releases this
year like battlefield 1 titanfall 2
dishonored 2 and overwatch but on the hardware side
not really here we see the elusive skylake in its natural
habitat wallowing in its own self grandeur not really caring about
anything going on around it in other words we didn't get a new cpu
this year we do pick up a larger nvme ssd this time around though allowing us
to do away with the hard drive for the last time in this series the gtx 1080
turns out not to be a major performance improvement over last year but pascal's
improved efficiency lets us get the same or better performance as last year at a
lower price and thermal output bringing us back down to just over eighteen
hundred dollars as i'm sure you've guessed by now windows 10 is here to
stay but there's a certain shadow rising over this build
these guys with the shields are kicking my ass doom was a beautiful game doom is
a totally awesome game like look at the reflections the grit and dirt in the
environment careful attention to the animations of all of this like you can
tell it's the kind of game that they just gave so many cares about this game
has really aged well yeah and it runs
like a champ too on pretty much any hardware oh come on see i can't even
blame the computer for that that was the problem you were getting frames too quickly
thanks i appreciate the confidence
it's really a shame shadow of the tomb raider didn't come out in 2017 because
that would have made for a great segue but there were quite a few good ones
like sonic maniacs destiny 2 cuphead
shadow of war and we can't of course forget pubg and fortnite this was also
the year of amd's big comeback with ryzen though early teething issues did
make for os scheduler and memory compatibility problems that made ryzen a
little bit more difficult for us to recommend than the performance numbers
might have at first suggested intel would remain on top for gaming
performance with kaby lake as the final step in their process architecture
optimization paradigm that killed tick-tock which they then also
immediately killed by releasing coffee lake which was characterized mostly by
the extra course that they stopped into it though core clocks and memory speeds
did also increase in practice this meant that the core i7 8700k was the winner so
our build for this year runs it coupled with 16 gigs of ddr4 memory the pricing
of which ballooned this year we also went with a tangibly faster gpu
this time around we got the gtx 1080 ti which at the time of release performed
on par with the titan x pascal pricing
didn't increase by more than we were accustomed to though bringing us just
shy of 2100 now it's funny that this is the one pc
that has had update issues that have made it so that we actually can't run a
game for this segment of the video because with pubg and fortnite coming
out this year this was the year of the
always online experience and i'm not just talking like you know checking in
with the server you know to make sure that you're authenticated or whatever
else i'm talking you absolutely need to be online to experience this game in any
way shape or form so uh
yeah this was the experience
2018 was an interesting year for pc gaming first because of the games like
shadow of tomb raider battlefield v octopath traveler and far cry 5 and
second because ryzen's second gen showed that not only did amd mean business
intel had to rush their timetables to counter them after unsuccessfully
arguing that gamers didn't need eight cores as a result yet more cores were
packed into the same package substantially increasing thermal output
or reducing core clocks in practice still the core i7 9700k remains the
better choice for raw gaming performance so we'll grab one of those and pair it
with essentially the same platform as the previous year even the z390 chipset
isn't a big advancement over z370 and our gpu is the same gtx 1080 ti too at
least we get eight cores for our twenty one hundred dollars this is such a leap
forward and visuals compared to any of the highlight games we talked about for
the previous year like look at these soft shadows soft shadows became a thing
starting in around 2015 but it really started to make its way into the mainstream around
this time well the thing was that with reasonably high end or even mid-range
hardware which means that it's easier for game developers to target it you
could actually run it without giving up so much performance that the game was
basically unplayable yeah i remember trying to the different soft shadow
techniques that gta 5 shipped with and never really settling on anything in
particular because they all had their problems facial animations are amazing
like look at that so much detail you can really tell the way that the light is
hitting the skin subsurface scattering yeah beautiful it's a thing that took a
long time to actually get right which brings us to 2019 the current year where
we've again got a lot of high profile games hitting our ssds apex legends
sakiro metro exodus with more to look
forward to in the back half but if 2018 gave us eight core cpus
how many will 2019 give us it turns out the answer is up to 16
thanks well pretty much exclusively to amd and unlike previous years where
amd's ryzen cpus were pretty darn okay
for gaming amd took a big step forward
with ryze and third gen coming up on par with intel and even surpassing them in
many cases at the top end of their third gen lineup
so welcome back to the high-end amd your ryzen 7 3700x is powering our final
build here because your 16 core isn't out and also we were targeting the
around 2 000 price point which
well say a lot of our budget was taken up by our graphics card because over the
last couple of years we have really seen a spike in how much of your budget the
gpu makers nvidia in particular expect
you to spend on your graphics card so we did go with a geforce rtx 2080 ti for
that ray tracing goodness in the handful of games that do support it but it will
probably be several years before we'll really be getting the most out of that
feature it's not like we have a choice because you can't run out and buy a 1000
series graphics card so there you go pretty much suck it up our
price for this build is 2600
were you just waiting to load the whole time yeah i've been trying you can tell
the animations are tied to the ping do you think it's fair to say that we've
kind of come to a point where game developers are less concerned about
making it look better for the sake of looking better and are really focused on
gameplay right now and sucking in the player yeah and you know what that's a great
thing because while great graphics are great
obviously at a certain point they're good enough and at that point you can sink so much
more time and effort into actually developing the other aspects of your
game but this is the thing like with engines like unreal engine people can
just plop in assets and focus on building their game some of the games
that were supposed to have rtx support when the cars launched did finally get
it but it's only applicable to a certain type of game like i loved running rtx on
in shadow of the tomb raider but it's not the kind of thing that i would actually ever turn on in a game like
battlefield 5 where you're trying to kill other players and you really really
need those fps so really the main story of the last five years from a hardware
standpoint has been a return to competition i mean amd and intel have
gone back and forth since the 386 days
but part one of our series here didn't involve a lot of back and forth whereas
part two really has seen amd come back to competition and even to prominence so
let's take a look at how things changed starting with this half of the decade
and when we expand these charts to include the rest of the builds going
back to 2009 we can clearly see the leveling off of cpu performance gains
from 2011 through 2015. this period of stagnation particularly from 2012 to
2014 when gpus were also stuck at 28
nanometer is a stark reminder of the importance of competition in tech and
the pattern of sudden loss and a surprise return to innovation is rare in
any market let alone one that impacts our everyday lives like this one so even
if you're not a gamer i think the last couple of years are an indication that
the future keeps getting brighter so here's to another 10 years of pc gaming
minus tech tips and what the heck another 10 builds anthony 10 years from
now you know what 20 29 10 more builds
why not why not builds are fun i mean especially if lg
and seasonic will show up to sponsor it again so all of our builds were powered
by sea sonic power supplies if you want a trustworthy power supply we can't say
enough good things about them and of course all of our rigs all of our gaming
experiences are running on lg's ultra-wide gaming monitors which provide
an incredibly immersive gaming experience but of course i think i've
said a lot about those over the years so guys just check out the link in the
video description to check them out and to learn more
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