I had an amazingly difficult time getting in on the mantle beta for developers and I somewhat regret throwing myself at it so hard. I'm still excited to see what other developers do with it, especially a big budget like BF4. From my perspective it's perhaps a bit more work than usual but it's just worth it and it certainly makes more logical sense so even if it's more work it goes much faster actually saving time. Though I don't have the specific need for it myself I see the potential and because it is so much better I'd still develop for it anyway if I had the budget for it. For now even though it's an open API to my knowledge nvidia still doesn't like it or allow it.
CES also started and all the news coming out from there is exciting as always. Though sadly when it comes to some of the more important hardware I care about things are fairly run of the mill. I'd love to hear something truly exciting about processors we're not expecting like more cores, more power, more heat, smaller form factor, etc. I'd love to just hear same performance for lower power.
Though we are finally hearing processors with ddr4 controllers and are supposedly being surprisingly stable in comparison to previous generations launches. MSI apparently finally has a good ITX amd mobo which has me excited even though I know I won't be getting it. They're also releasing ITX form factor graphics cards which is nice if you want more graphics than you'd get from an APU.
Apparently Dell might be first to market with a 4k OLED monitor, which is a little sad but at least it's something instead of nothing. Though from my experience dell monitors don't live as long as other brands and considering we're expecting a shorter lifespan on OLED to begin with this has me a bit worried.
hybrid hard drives are doubling in capacity which sounded nice at first until I found out the SSD space is staying at 8gb and they're just doubling regular HDD space so now we have 4tb regular and 8gb nand when the main complaint I'm sure was how small the SSD side was.
there's all kinds of CES news beyond this which I suggest everyone read. My last really exciting thing that comes to mind is some DSP controlled PSU's which I don't know why I never thought of that before, the basic explanation is that DSP is digital signal processing unit which is a digital controller to increase efficiency which leads to the new 80+ titanium above the 80+ platinum for upwards of 95% efficiency.
I'll probably post about these more next week. so what does everyone think about steam OS? anyone annoyed with it moving to UEFI only so quickly?