Game On: AMD advantage, Rethinking PC gaming
Building a gaming PC or a gaming rig is often a tedious task, one that requires constant tinkering and careful management as players try their best to eke out every last bit of performance possible.
Published Date - 28 November 2022, 12:45 AM
By Aditya Deshbandhu
Building a gaming PC or a gaming rig is often a tedious task, one that requires constant tinkering and careful management as players try their best to eke out every last bit of performance possible.
Players who build such setups are often considered to be an ilk of purists who like their gaming unfettered and unoptimised and often bandy about terms like ‘overclocked’ and ‘liquid-cooled’.
For over the last 15 years I have had the opportunity to belong to this select group as I have carefully built my setups and juggled issues like heat dissipation alongside power consumption to try and build efficient machines that can pack a punch when required. Increasingly this task has gotten tougher as components have continued to get pricier and hungrier for power. A combination that got so concerning that I have recently mooted stepping away from building gaming CPUs.
And just when I was about to give up – enter AMD with their Advantage approach to gaming desktops.
Early November saw the company announce its next generation of RDNA3 graphics cards and as most industry watchers were focused on their pricing strategy, the promise of 4K gaming, or the support of the forthcoming Display Port 2.1, what went under the radar was their announcement of an “Advantage programme” for PCs.
A programme that they claim could offer benefits similar to their same-named programme in the laptop domain. I understand this development as a potential transformative change that could change how the custom gaming rigs are built and provide a method to the madness (if it works the way AMD envisions it).
Let me elaborate – Historically building gaming rigs is all about power, heat management, and judicious spending of money. How much power can one buy, how much cooling do these parts need and can one afford all these parts? I have often seen friends buy less powerful parts because they couldn’t afford liquid cooling or end up overheating their setups and damaging them.
AMD wishes to take the trial and error out of this process by controlling the parts and the cooling that goes in. In other words, you aren’t building from scratch as much as picking a desktop from a pre-configured list, just like you would do for laptops but in this new system you get hardware that is tested, optimised and what AMD hopes can punch beyond its weight because of the synergy in its parts. AMD is chasing a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts here, something, that has never been possible in PC gaming before.
AMD’s advantage programme promises a standardisation that it hopes can offer an intangible boost which is made possible by the use of architecture and parts it can control. I find this move a logical next step for AMD as it has consistently moved towards efficient performance and looked beyond peak clock speed numbers.
Will it work though, is a bigger question that only time can answer because the intangible needs to be worth the added premium.
A tricky juncture to be on though, as Valve’s experiment with steam machines is evidence. AMD though looks keen and if assembled machines offer us better value who are we as gamers to refuse?