Tech We Want In 2018

Technology is ever evolving, and it's an industry that moves fast. While 2017 brought us a slew of new tech toys that include the Xbox One X, Nintendo Switch, and more, there's still a lot of hardware that we want that hasn't hit the market yet. We've compiled a list of components and gadgets that includes advances in displays, VR, AR, GPUs, and more that we hope to release in 2018.

Nvidia recently launched its $3,000 Titan V GPU based on the company's new Volta micro-architecture. The card is capable of delivering 110 teraflops of performance, but it's prohibitively expensive and is designed for data scientists. Hopefully the Titan V paves the way for Volta-based GeForce cards geared towards gamers in 2018. We're hoping that it maintains the Titan V's efficient 12nm manufacturing process along with the newer high-bandwidth memory 2 (HBM2) video RAM. Nvidia claims that Volta is twice as power-efficient as the company's Pascal architecture, so it sounds really promising from a performance perspective.

Companies like Asus, Acer, and Dell have teased HDR monitors in 2017, but there aren't many options out on the market at the moment. HDR OLED gaming monitors, which can provide true black levels with their individually backlit pixels, are non-existent. While you can purchase 4K HDR TVs today, hopefully 2018 brings HDR OLED gaming monitors to the fold. The colors and contrast that they would offer would be a very welcomed option.

We first heard about Oculus' Project Santa Cruz headset when the company revealed it back in 2016. We got a glimpse of a newer prototype in October of this year. While no release date has been set, we're hoping that Oculus releases it in 2018. What makes Project Santa Cruz special is that it's wireless like Samsung's Gear VR, but supports six degrees of positional tracking that the Rift offers. This means you'll effectively be able to lean into virtual objects and get room-scale support without any external trackers.

AMD asserted itself as a true competitor once again in 2017 with the Ryzen family of CPUs. These processors offered unprecedented value and ushered in affordability for eight- and six-core CPUs. But AMD's just getting started; the company is slated to roll out Ryzen 2 in 2018, which will be more efficient with a 12nm manufacturing process. The new chips will use the same socket type (AM4), and should support a wider variety of DDR4 memory speeds and even better overclockability.

Based on AMD's CPU roadmap, we can expect new chips to hit the market by March. When it comes to PC gaming, Ryzen chips offer competent in-game performance while providing plenty of computational overhead for efficient streaming. Video producers get much more for their dollar with Ryzen's multicore processors, making AMD the go-to manufacturer for those on a budget.

Because VR requires a low-latency signal to mitigate motion sickness, all the major VR headsets use cables, which is cumbersome. However, we've seen third-party devices from companies like TPCast, which allow headsets like the Vive to go wireless. There are reports that it interrupts the headset's microphone, however, and initial reports suggest battery life isn't great. What we'd like to see in 2018 is for companies like HTC and Oculus to officially release their own fully-supported attachments that will allow their respective headsets to go wireless.

Intel has been making big moves in the GPU space lately. The company's Iris integrated graphics tech and “Gen” architecture has been relatively strong, but having brought on AMD's former head of the Radeon graphics division, it seems Intel is poised for something big in the graphics space in near future. The company could be trying to get back in the discrete market space after a 20-year hiatus there.

Of course it's too early to say what Intel is up to with much certainty, and what the market would look like with a third major GPU manufacturer in the market. If you speculate based on what Intel is already doing, you may be led to believe that the company might try and significantly bolster graphics in notebooks.

Now that we no longer have to 'wait for Vega,' we can look to how AMD is going to make its next step after setting a strong foundation with its RX Vega 64 and RX Vega 56 GPUs. At the mid-range and budget-level, AMD offers the RX 500-series, which was a simple refresh of its older RX 400-series, but it'd be nice to see a more affordable Vega-architecture card in 2018. Considering that the Vega 56 is $400 MSRP, something cheaper would be much appreciated.

A refresh of the current Vega cards is also a good prospect. Both current models use a lot more power than their Nvidia competitors. Also, an AMD card to stand up to the GTX 1080 Ti seems plausible.

4K displays have become much more affordable in 2017. But while ultra-high definition displays went more mainstream, many PC enthusiasts have opted for high refresh rate monitors, trading in pixel count for higher performance. Refresh rate dictates the number of frames a certain screen can display at any second; high-end 1080p and 1440p monitors will have a 144Hz refresh rate instead of the standard 60Hz. As of now, 4K monitors on the market only reach 60Hz. High refresh rate 4K monitors would be the next step for displays in PC gaming.

However, there's a bit of a catch. To take advantage of the hertz increase, your PC has to be powerful enough to produce those higher framerates. The only GPUs capable of high FPS in 4K are enthusiast-level cards (GTX 1080, RX Vega 64, GTX 1080 Ti), and even these GPUs sometimes struggle to maintain 60 FPS. 4K high refresh monitors would need to come out alongside the next generation GPUs for them to be truly worthwhile.

Considering we got the NES classic in 2016, and the SNES Classic in 2017, it stands to reason that we'll get an N64 Classic in 2018, or at least we hope. While the N64 didn't feature the deepest game library in existence, it produced gems like Super Mario 64, Mario Kart 64, Mario Party, and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. The N64 also suffered from frame rate dips, but if Nintendo could re-release a tiny version of the console that irons out the performance issues so that all of its games would run at a consistent 60 FPS, that would be amazing. It should, of course, also support four controllers. The icing on the cake would be if GoldenEye 64 came with it, though that is admittedly a pipe dream considering the game's rights have changed significantly since it came out in 1997.

When Microsoft initially revealed the HoloLens in 2015, the AR headset showed tremendous potential. It was able to project believable tracked holograms into living rooms without the need for external sensors. This meant you could see a little Minecraft cave etched into a wall or see virtual characters walking around a real house. Unfortunately, the headset has only been sold as dev kits for $3,000. We also haven't heard much from Microsoft about it since. Hopefully 2018 will be the year Microsoft's AR headset makes a resurgence and releases to consumers.