AMD’s decision to launch the
Radeon 5500 to OEMs first is
interesting, but it does make
sense when you think about
what that GPU is capable
of. Available in desktop and
mobile trim, it has 1080p
gaming firmly in its sights.
According to the latest Steam
survey, most people game at
that resolution. This leads to
an obvious problem: SurelyI wish PC game developers
would let me do something
with my second monitor.
I’m not talking about
stretching my FOV across
two monitors—that’s what
ultrawide displays are for. No,
I just wish that more games
had an optional feature to take
my second monitor and use
it for in-game information.
It’d be nice to put the mapeveryone who wants to play
at that resolution already has
the hardware to do so, which
is why it’s so popular. Not
much of an upgrade market,
then. But new builds? That
makes sense. The Radeon
5500 GPU will be making its
way to cards from the usual
suspects soon enough, but
until then, an off-the-shelf
PC is the only way to get one.there, for example, or maybe
my inventory. Basically,
anything that’s relegated to
menus or small parts of the
heads-up display. And in any
sort of management sim,
I’d love to have those critical
information pages constantly
displayed next to me instead
of buried in menus. Please,
developers, let me put my
second monitor to good use.ALAN DEXTER
Executive EditorBO MOORE
Hardware LeadGOOGLE STADIA IS A NICE OPTION for a niche
segment of gamers, such as minimalists
who live in tiny homes, or kids whose
parents don’t want the hassle of the
hardware that comes with games. But
that’s all cloud gaming should be, or at
least can be at this point—another option
for consumers. Gaming on local hardware
doesn’t come with all the latency and
packet loss issues that cloud gaming
does, not to mention the fact that if your
Internet provider puts a data cap on your
plan, gaming on Stadia is going to suck up
all your available data, and “hello” overuse
charges or throttling.
Yet I can’t help but feel that Google
is treating Stadia as though it’s going to
change gaming as we know it. In a recent
interview with Edge Magazine, Google’sVP of engineering, Madj Bakar, made a
bold claim that Google thinks “in a year
or two we’ll have games that are running
faster and feel more responsive in the
cloud than they do locally,” and it will be
because Google will have perfected a
type of machine learning that predicts
what button you’ll press before you press
it—theoretically.
I can’t help but be extremely skeptical
of Google’s claims. Fast response times
are a necessity in the middle of an intense
shoot-out or when stringing together a
complicated combo of moves in a fighting
game. How will it predict what I want to say
to another character in a game like Life
is Strange?
You only have to cast your mind back to
a decade ago, and you’ll remember thatmany people were thinking PC gaming was
on the brink of extinction, but look where
we are now. Only a massive restructuring
of the world’s Internet is going to result
in cloud gaming being on the same level
as PC or console gaming—and that’s not
happening any time soon.Nice option, but it’s not a PC. Not even close
Healthy Skepticism
of Google Stadia
New tech is great, but it’s not going to
replace gaming as we know it.JOANNA NELIUS, HARDWARE STAFF WRITER92 MAXIMUMPC DEC 2019 maximumpc.com
in the lab