Pinoy PlayStation

ASUS Republic of Gamers (ROG) announced that its upcoming 43-inch gaming monitor is the first monitor to receive HDMI 2.1 certification, passing all compatibility and validation tests conducted by leading Allion Labs, Inc - an international company specializing in product testing.

The new ROG monitor is compatible with next-generation consoles, with HDMI 2.1 giving it a full bandwidth of up to 48 Gbps to support 4K UHD (3840 x 2160) visuals at variable refresh rates of up to 120 Hz. Auto Low Latency also enables the game console to control the processing mode of the display, prioritizing low latency or processing quality depending on the content. Allion Labs subjected the monitor to stringent Fixed Rate Link (FRL) tests, including FRL Electrical, FRL Pixel Decoding and FRL Protocol tests, to ensure full compatibility with upcoming HDMI 2.1 devices.

"ROG is the first partner to provide a HDMI 2.1 gaming monitor for certification. As a leading test lab in the world, it's our mission to assure products or services before they are launched. We are thrilled to be part of the success of ROG and this groundbreaking gaming monitor," said Brian Shih, Vice President of Logo & HW Validation Consulting at Allion Labs.

With the impending arrival of next-generation gaming consoles later this year, ROG has an entire series of HDMI 2.1 gaming monitors for the holiday season. These monitors are available in 27-, 32- and 43-inch models.

As one of the world's leading gaming monitor brands, ROG constantly pushes boundaries to provide gamers with the most advanced display technologies for breathtaking gaming visuals. ROG was the first in the world to offer gamers the ROG Swift PG258Q 240 Hz gaming monitor, ROG Swift PG43UQ 4K 144 Hz Digital Stream Compression (DSC) gaming monitor and ROG Swift 360 Hz gaming monitor.

According to Videocardz's sources, NVIDIA is now planning to launch the RTX 3080 20 GB variant sometime in December. We had first heard about the 20GB variant before the Ampere series was announced and it had originally been planned for release just after AMD's Big Navi. This new timeline would represent a delay of about a month or so - assuming AMD goes with a hard launch of their Big Navi series and NVIDIA would not have made such a decision lightly.

NVIDIA RTX 3080 20 GB tentatively launching in Decembe
The NVIDIA RTX 3080 would be based on the PG132 SKU20 and has been in the pipeline for quite some time. While it features the same CUDA Cores (as per leaks) it has twice the amount of memory. Considering the fact that killer apps like Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 already chomp away all the vRAM the 2080 Ti had to offer, 10 GB is going to feel tiny after a year or two. Considering next-gen consoles are already driving games with asset-streaming of large worlds, vRAM is going to start becoming a lot more crucial than before. With AMD launching a card with 16GB of vRAM, NVIDIA had to reply with their own high vRAM card.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), one of the largest semiconductor manufacturers in the world, is reportedly ending its volume discounts. The company is the maker of the currently smallest manufacturing nodes, like 7 nm and 5 nm. For its biggest customers, TSMC used to offer a discount - when you purchase 10s or 100s of thousands of 300 mm (12-inch) wafers per month, the company will give you a deal of a 3% price decrease per wafer, meaning that the customer is taking a higher margin off a product it sells. Many of the customers, like Apple, NVIDIA, and AMD, were a part of this deal.

Today, thanks to a report from the Taiwanese Central News Agency, TSMC is terminating this type of discount. Now, every customer will pay full price for the wafer, without any exceptions. For now, it is unclear what drove that decision at TSMC's headquarters, but the only thing that we could think is that the demand is too high to keep up with the discounts and the margins are possibly lower. What this means for consumers is a possible price increase in products that are manufactured at TSMC's facilities. The consumer market is already at a drought of new PC components like CPUs and GPUs due to high demand and scalping. This could contribute a bit to the issue, however, we do not expect it to be of any major significance.