AMD came to us a few weeks ago to offer us an "exclusive" that would involve its previewing of the new RX Vega before its official launch that is approaching quickly. HardOCP pioneered experiential gameplay testing in the world of GPU reviews, and what is showcased here today is very much experiential testing. In fact, that is all we are documenting here today is gamers' experiences. AMD explained what it was offering and gave us a timeline in which HardOCP's coverage could be online before similar showcases done at a Hungary event, and at PDXLan last weekend. At these events, AMD allowed attendees to play on an RX Vega FreeSync system and a GTX 1080 (non-TI) G-Sync systems, and after the event AMD announced which system was which.

While I did like the idea overall, I turned down our "exclusive" timeline, as I wanted to take a bit of time and do the gameplay testing a bit differently. Given that Dallas was for a long time the center of the First Person Shooter gaming universe, you do not have to reach out far to find folks that have a lot of experience when it comes to twitch gaming and FPS gaming in general. So instead of taking the exclusive, I took the time to plan and get some of these folks in for gameplay testing. Our list includes a whole host of ESPorts professionals (long before it was called "ESports"), one formerly of id Software, gaming journalists, and a few "kids" that I know are all hardcore computer gamers. I did however leave my own children out of the mix. So we ended up with what I think is a very good group to judge gaming performance. All of our gameplay testers are still active gamers and quite frankly spend a lot of money on new computer hardware.