DF Direct Weekly talks CES, NFTs and GPUs

We're back - and perhaps surprisingly, we're not short of tech and gaming news to discuss! While the world - and indeed the DF team - emerges bleary-eyed from the holiday break, the Consumer Electronics Show 2022 managed to offer up a range of interesting topics to discuss, while the whole NFT debate came into sharp focus with a statement from Square-Enix management that the firm would be pursuing the controversial blockchain technology.

Looking at CES, it was something of a curious show, to say the least. On the one-hand, there was actual new product to discuss: AMD revealed the Radeon RX 6500XT and Ryzen 6000 APUs... and we're not entirely sure what to make of them. The APUs certainly look impressive - and it'll be the first time we see RDNA2 graphics tech integrated alongside Zen CPU cores, but AMD itself muddied the waters on the chip's capabilities by comparing a 28W part against a prior generation 15W equivalent. Not surprisingly, the 'gen-on-gen' gains were impressive but fundamentally, the power differential only opens up negative criticism. Similarly, offering performance numbers augmented by FSR upscaling - which rarely impresses at the noted 1080p resolution - only serves to give the impression that the true capabilities of the parts are being unnecessarily obscured.

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