With one last day to go before the new year we wanted to visit a number of really exciting PC gaming related technologies coming up next year as well as hear yourthoughts aboutyou're most anticipated technologies coming in2016. While it can be worth debating whether 2015 has been groundbreaking for PC hardware or not, it was still a fairlyinteresting year for technology and PC gameing in general.In addition to bearing witness to the introduction of someinnovative and refreshingtechnologies this year we've also come to learn of even more thrillingadvancementsto come in 2016. A year that's shaping up to be one of the most excitingfor PC hardware and technology in a very long time.

We'vealready talked aboutthe most notable hardware launches of 2015 and groundbreaking PC gaming related hardware coming in2016 in two separate articles and wedon't really intend to repeat what has already been said there. Instead, we want to hear from youaboutwhat your most anticipated tech isfor next year andtouch on some of the technologies that don'treallyqualify as hardware.

Most Exciting PC Gaming Hardware Coming In2016

There's really a lot to choose from here, from next generation Nvidia Pascal and AMD Arctic Islands GPUs, to Intel's upcoming enthusiast line-up of Broadwell-E processors and mainstream Kaby Lake processors as well as AMD's upcoming Zen FX CPUs. Let's also not forget the new range of higher refresh, color rich HDR monitors that are set to launch next yearenabled by the DisplayPort 1.3 standard. Then we have the three major virtual reality head mounted displays coming up next year from Oculus, HTC and Sony.

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Most Exciting PC Gaming Related Software Advancements Coming In2016

2016 doesn't just pack some amazing hardware launches, there's lots of love for software too. Beginning with low level APIs, including Vulkan finally launching and several DirectX 12 enabled games coming out. In addition to the expected performance gains ,which are projected to be immense, DirectX 12 opens up a whole lot of opportunities to experiment and play around with the cross-vendor multi-GPU feature of the API that has already made its way to Oxide's upcoming Ashes Of The Singularityreal time strategy game and found ot beworking surprisingly well.

Then there'sAMD's recentlyannounced GPUOpen initiative which is set to take on Nvidia's GameWorks by offering developersa robust set of tools and resources to extract the most out of GPUs for both gaming and compute applications.It enablesgamedevelopers tocreate more beautiful, complex andimmersive game worlds. Furthermore, itfacilitates the employment of the powerfulparallel engines inside modernGPUs for computation. All of this will be available next year undera cohesiveand easily accessible opensource umbrella on GitHub.

We also have one very exciting advancement in the visual fidelity of gamesthat's inching ever closer to becoming a reality in 2016 and that's global illumination. We've actually seen GI implemented in video games before, specifically in Dirt Showdown via an AMD implementation in 2012. However due to the performance cost of GI it has seen extremely limited adoption. However, the technology has advanced, and implementations based on voxel ray tracing have shown extremely promising result. Which means that we're finally going to see GI next year outside of the limited scope of racing games.

CryEngine features a built-in voxel based GI engine that's performant and offers a truly spectacular visual improvement. CryEngine'sSVOGI has already been demonstrated in the Alpha version of the upcoming RPG Kingdom Come with veryimpressive visual and performance results.

CryEngine SVOGI Screenshots :

Nvidia also hasa global illumination solution based onVoxel Cone Tracing. It's called VXGI andis part of the GameWorks library and Unreal Engine 4. This GI implementationcomputes all lighting in the scene, including secondary reflections of light of diffuse and specular surfaces which adds this amazing and refreshing punch ofrealismto the environment.

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This brings usto the end of our relatively short list of exciting things coming up in 2016, make sure to cast your vote! If your most anticipated PC gaming related technologyhas not been mentioned, do tell us what it is in the comments section below and if it's popular enough we'lladd it to the polls!