This year’s virtual trade show will be a monthlong infusion of new core PC tech, likely front-loaded into the first week. Here’s everything we know plus what we can guess.
Memorial Day weekend is typically one of our favorites throughout the tech year here at PCMag, but not for the expectation of a quiet, lazy-hazy, long-needed reporting break. Far from it. It’s time to skip sleep and chug caffeine, and, in less fraught years, the joy of major jet lag as we fly off to the other side of the world from our NYC headquarters to Taipei. The last Monday in May is the traditional press-event and major launch day of the Computex trade show, held (almost) every year in sprawling fashion across the Taiwanese capital. The large time difference versus US time, however, really means the action begins in earnest a little earlier in the weekend, and the key reveals often happen in the middle of the night for folks in the States. This year, like 2020 did on a grand scale, has again put a crimp in Computex’s master plan. Last year’s in-person Computex show was first delayed to September 2020, then cancelled outright. Here in 2021, TAITRA, the Computex organizing body, professed early hope and plans that the in-person show would resume, but the fierce resurgence of COVID-19 in some geographies, and the attendant travel restrictions, prevailed. Taiwan has weathered COVID-19 well, but international travel remains a tricky prospect. The show has been made all-virtual, and will run not for the traditional single first week in June but for the full month of June, officially from May 31 to June 30 on a virtual platform dubbed #COMPUTEXVirtual. The show will be front-loaded with the big stuff early on, though, with heavy hitters AMD, ARM, Intel, and Nvidia planning their big keynotes right at the start. What emerges at Computex, typically, is what sets the tech table for years to come. Of course, the traditional show vibe is products and green-shoots of technology that will show up years down the road in retail products, so this show can be tougher than most to predict. But some shapes are starting to emerge from the mist that has cloaked PC tech due to more than a year, now, devoid of in-person demos and the onsite encounters that make trade shows like Computex so vital. We won’t be in Taipei, but here are the highlights of what we expect to see. The World’s Worst-Kept Secret: New GeForce RTX Cards First, you’d guess it based on tradition: Of course we should eventually see amped-up “Ti” versions of popular GeForce RTX 30-Series “Ampere” cards a year or so after their debut. That’s the way Nvidia rolls, after all. And sure, GeForce RTX cards have been harder to buy for the last six to nine months than Beanie Babies or Cabbage Patch dolls at their peaks. But upticked versions of Nvidia’s most rarified and sought-after cards still seemed inevitable. (After all, we got a GeForce RTX 3060 Ti at the very end of 2020.) Then, it became a poorly kept secret: Images of ostensible GeForce RTX 3080 Ti cards from MSI on palettes emerged. RTX 3080 Ti card incoming? (Image: Lok Lok, via Facebook) Then on May 26, Nvidia semi-spilled its own beans: a teaser video of what looks like liquid metal and the corner of a traditional GeForce Founders Edition card box (?) from the official GeForce Twitter account… Note that several Nvidia Computex keynotes are on the docket. Our expectations around any cool consumer stuff zeroed in on the one dubbed “The Transformational Power of Accelerated Computing, from Gaming to the Enterprise Data Center.” (It is the first one, pending for June 1 at 1 a.m. ET in the US, and the afternoon of the same day in Taipei.) We’d bank on at least one card hitting the street: the much-exposed GeForce RTX 3080 Ti, based on all the rumors. We’d also expect it to be unobtanium soon after it launches, whenever that is. But maybe a high enough price will help it last a few minutes longer on sale at the outset than its RTX 30-Series siblings have! Anything else? Fair game.
