Though it feels like we’re barely past CES, things are already quickly ramping up in the PC hardware industry once again. Kicking off in a bit under two weeks is the 2017 Game Developers Conference, taking place as always in San Francisco. While it isn’t a tradeshow in the consumer sense, the conference traditionally draws out the major PC hardware vendors as part of the developer outreach efforts, and this year is no exception.

GDC event details have been posted for both AMD and NVIDIA, whom it turns out are both holding events on February 28th (the day before the expo part of GDC opens). Neither of the vendors have announced their events through their gaming websites or press releases – bear in mind this is a developers’ conference – but both have sent out invites to developers and other GDC attendees.

AMD: Capsaicin & Cream

The sequel to last year’s Capsaicin event, AMD is once again at GDC to talk to developers at their Capsaicin & Cream event. Last year’s event featured the announcement of the developer-focused Radeon Pro Duo, and a new AMD GPU roadmap. AMD’s event description (posted below) is light on details, but of note it appears that AMD will once again be livestreaming the event at 10:30am Pacific.

This year at GDC, join us on the 28th for our Capsaicin livestream and our Cream developer sessions - insightful and inspiring talks focused on rendering ideas and new paths forward, driven by game industry gurus from multiple companies including Epic and Unity.

The Capsaicin livestream kicks off at 10:30 AM from Ruby Skye, a feature-packed show highlighting the hottest new graphics and VR technologies propelling the games industry forward.

NVIDIA: GeForce GTX Gaming Celebration

Not to be outdone, NVIDIA is hosting an event at GDC as well, which they’re dubbing their GeForce GTX Gaming Celebration. NVIDIA did not have an event in 2016, while in 2015 the company used the event as the backdrop for the SHIELD TV unveiling (with a surprise GTX 980 Ti announcement the next morning). Like AMD, NVIDIA is being similarly mum about their event, but it’s safe to say it’ll involve GeForce…

Come join us for an evening of awesome PC gaming, hardware, tournaments and of course free food, drinks and a few other amazing surprises.

Doors will open at 6:30 PM and the event will start promptly at 7 PM.

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  • A5 - Thursday, February 16, 2017 - link

    It's not like anyone would be surprised by the 1080Ti.
  • doggface - Thursday, February 16, 2017 - link

    Lol. Earlier, people comment that nVidia looks desperate because AMD has an NDA lift on Ryzen, now AMD is desperate because nVidia is announcing the 1080ti. Can you guys possibly imagibe that both companies want to use this trade show to .. I dunno, show off their new stuff. Fanbois... Jeez.
  • webdoctors - Thursday, February 16, 2017 - link

    Why would anyone talk or release a CPU at GDC, let alone a server oriented one? I'd guess both companies would discuss their GPUs. Is there something about Ryzen that says its consumer oriented? The single thread performance is supposedly on par with Intel's and in most PC cases (get the PUN?!) the games are not bottlenecked by the CPU.

    If I'm building a gaming rig, I'd just grab whatever quadcore CPU is selling for around the $200 mark (depending on mobo prices), and put the rest of my money into the GPU.
  • BrokenCrayons - Friday, February 17, 2017 - link

    AMD's Zen is a processor core architecture that will likely be used in both the consumer and server space just like Intel has used its CPU core architecture across a wide range of product segments. Xeons, i3,5,7s, and ULV chips (outside of Atom-based products) are all built around the same processor technologies with varying core counts, clock speeds, and feature sets added or removed as-needed...ECC memory support for example. To date, there's been very few attempts to dedicate a specific core architecture to a market segment. I can think of only a handful of strays off the top of my head including Itanium and maybe DEC's Alpha and IBM's Power-series, that were targeted at professional or server work, but not also at the consumer space.

    Since games still need CPUs to run properly, despite their influence being downplayed in recent years as more emphasis and difference is usually realized via the computer's graphics adapter, they are still very much relevant to video games and game development. If AMD plans to talk about Zen at GDC, it doesn't seem unreasonable at all.
  • Scaredcrow - Tuesday, February 21, 2017 - link

    Okay... so will new releases affect previous models' prices? or is it better to wait completely? I just sold my gpu yesterday

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