Watch On
With yesterday’s hangover still in the back of their mind, bleary-eyed engineers and product managers sit down to hash out the details and delivery dates for their upcoming products in 2026. The cycle begins again. New hardware is coming, look busy.
Look past the dire news of extended memory shortages through this year and into the next and there are promising products on the horizon. Some quality-of-life improvements for our trusted peripherals, and other major industry trends that dare to shake up the definition of a gaming PC. Yeah, it’s all happening—let’s dive into what’s coming and what I suspect might show up.
TMR key switches
TMR, or Tunnel Magnetoresistance, is a technology that we’re already beginning to see in gaming peripherals. We’ve reviewed a few controllers using TMR sticks, such as the 8BitDo Ultimate 2 Wireless and Gamesir G7 Pro. My guess is we’ll see more gaming keyboards making the most of TMR throughout this year.
TMR is available in gaming keyboards already—MonsGeek have a handful available, among others—but generally you’ll find most offer Hall effect switches. The most frequently cited benefits of TMR are a more consistent response and lower power consumption versus Hall effect, and while I doubt players on existing Hall effect keyboards will notice any difference, that’s never stopped peripheral manufacturers from jumping on a bandwagon before. No, if someone does it, more will follow.
With TMR already making inroads into the market, it makes sense to expect more to follow. From speaking with Wooting, Cherry and Razer about new switch types, I don’t suspect we’ll see this lot switching over anytime soon. Cherry seems quite interested in induction, but is facing financial difficulty, and Razer is head over heels obsessed with optical switches. Wooting prefers long-term support and will stick with Hall effect for the foreseeable future. But there’s usually a moment when keyboard makers can source a new part reliably enough to ramp up production, and that’s when we’ll see greater numbers land in the market. If not from this lot, then someone else.
Valve’s new hardware
One thing we know for certain is that Valve will launch three new products this year. The Steam Machine, Steam Frame, and Steam Controller are all set to arrive in early 2026, which could be any day now. Or, any hour. We could be mere minutes away from their release. But, alas, no—simmer down. I’d be as surprised as anyone if they launched tomorrow—I’ve heard nowt since my visit to Valve at the end of last year, and I think Valve will give people plenty of time to prepare and preorder.
Speaking of which, from my time with all three products, I’m still most excited for the Steam Frame. Powered by an Arm chip, running SteamOS, the latest VR headset from Valve is a big departure from the Valve Index. Hence the name, Steam Frame, not Index 2. Easy inside-out tracking, wireless streaming, and a lightweight design—all things to be excited about whenever this one shows up.
The product that generated the most buzz from Valve’s triple-announcement has to be the Steam Contr—Steam Machine. Yeah, it’s the Steam Machine. Sorry, controller stans. Sidelined again.
With a discrete GPU, company cuboid design, and SteamOS, the Steam Machine is hoping to reignite hopes of Linux gaming in the living room. It looks like a nifty little machine. But as time goes by and memory costs go up, I’m starting to worry more about the Steam Machine’s price tag. If there was any chance of it being surprisingly affordable, surely that’s flown out of the window as RAM (and to a lesser degree, SSD) prices skyrocket. Still, it appears to be a nifty machine, and likely no more affected by RAM prices than any other PC or console on the planet.
And then the Steam Controller. Having only used the original Steam Controller in passing, and not giving myself time to appreciate its greatness (I’m being very diplomatic to the Steam Controller fans here), upon using the new and improved controller for a short while, I’m sold already. It is designed to match the Steam Deck in most ways, with dual trackpads and gyro controls, but it’s more or less a standard controller beneath it all. It also has a clever puck for wireless connectivity and easy charging.
We don’t know when Valve will launch these products this year, only that it plans to. If anything like the launch of the Steam Deck, Valve will offer preorders, potentially with some sort of small deposit, to secure a place in the line. Then it will set about trying to fulfil orders for the remainder of the year. Early preorders meant receiving your Steam Deck months in advance of those that left it later—so best try and get in early if you’re really into any of the above.
Cheaper and/or brighter OLED panels
You can bet on Samsung and LG’s rivalry to keep churning out new OLED panels each year. We received an update about Samsung’s QD-OLED plans at CES 2025, along with catching a glimpse of LG’s enormous OLED panels, and it stands to reason that we’ll hear more along the same lines at this coming CES, which runs through next week.
We don’t see major performance uplifts with the latest panels. At times this year, we’ve not even been sure which generation of QD-OLED we’re staring at, they’re that similar. But the improvements stack up to something notable and somewhat desirable over time.
Take brightness, for example, which was something of a sticking point for the first wave of OLEDs and many thereafter. Far from rivalling a modern backlit screen, OLED panels have been announced with full-screen brightness upwards of 400 nits. Yet gaming monitors aren’t at that level, only just beginning to creep up and over the 300 nit mark. So there’s clear room for improvement.
Contrary to the ongoing RAM pricing fiasco, OLED monitors have been coming down in price. So much so, in fact, we’ve seen 1440p models below the $500 mark for the past couple of months. With that in mind, it tracks that we should continue to see more affordable models in the coming 12 months. At the very least, equitable deals on said 1440p panels. If I dared to be hopeful for just a moment, it’d be great to see 4K OLED panels drop down in price—the higher resolution helps reduce text fringing, which is a bit of a curse when working on an older OLED panel.
Arm-powered PC gaming devices
This is something I’m personally hoping to see more of, and I suspect I’m being incredibly optimistic that we’ll see more than the one I’ve already mentioned in this article: the Steam Frame. Nothing against x86, AMD or Intel—my desktop PC isn’t going Arm-powered anytime soon (probably)—but there’s absolutely room in a modern gamer’s arsenal for a handheld with a low-power Arm chip inside and a longer battery life than any x86 APU can offer.
Low-power is a bit of a misnomer here. After using the Android-powered Ayaneo Pocket DMG over the past few months, I can really see the potential in these sorts of devices explicitly for gaming. Powered by a system-on-chip with lineage through generations of mobile phones, the Pocket DMG is plenty powerful to play games without issue. Not PC games, I might add, but that feels more like a question of software than it does hardware.
Valve has opted for a Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 chip to power the Steam Frame. So we’ll definitely see one Arm/PC gaming device in the near future. There are a few obvious benefits: compatibility with Android games (such as those developed for the Quest), battery life, support for lots of cameras, price, cooling, and, importantly, games developed for Windows and x86 can be played on Arm chips using emulation.
Much like Valve’s push to develop Proton to run games designed for Windows on Linux, for the x86/Arm conversion, it’s using one called FEX. This being a project that Valve has been quietly supporting for many years. Fex powers the Steam Frame’s standalone experience. I played the excellent Ghost Town on the Steam Frame during my visit to Valve—a game developed for Windows and x86 chips but running on the Steam Frame’s integrated GPU despite the emulation overhead. That’s a big step towards Arm-powered devices that break the mold of what we have come to expect.
Valve’s also releasing SteamOS for Arm devices as a part of this push, and games developed for Arm are landing on Steam.
Furthermore, there are more powerful chips on the horizon using Arm. There’s still talk of an Arm-Nvidia-MediaTek collab that would see Nvidia pairing high-performance graphics with off-the-shelf Arm cores. Though this might be waiting on Microsoft to get a grip on Windows on Arm, which is another feather in Arm’s cap if that shows up in the next 12 months.
Similarly, if Qualcomm could crack discrete GPU support, we’d be looking at Arm with a little more positivity for gaming machines. Our concept of x86 equals PC could all change in an instant if someone, anyone, can launch a good product that connects all the dots. And so many are trying. It will take something of a team effort to crack that nut.
Hot new desktop CPUs
There are a couple of opportunities for something exciting here.
AMD has confirmed that Zen 6 is on the way in 2026, which will surely offer performance uplifts for the popular AM5 platform. Moreover, if you already have the motherboard and RAM, you don’t have to buy the latter, making any upgrade much, much, MUCH more affordable.
Likely, some time after the launch of the mainline Zen 6 chips, X3D versions will arrive. Whether these show up this year or next, that’s up to Dr. Su, but for the 9000-series, there was only a few months between them. We reviewed the Ryzen 7 9700X in August, and the Ryzen 7 9800X3D at the start of November. The X3D chips with greater core counts, the 9900X3D and 9950X3D, arrived in January the following year.
So, there’s a good reason to believe Zen 6 will follow a similar pattern. But there is one thing that gives me pause. The Ryzen 7 9850X3D. A rumoured respin of the 9800X3D—or rather, a practically confirmed chip—this is said to have a large clock speed boost over the standard 9800X3D. Why launch that if it’s going to be made more or less redundant by the end of the year?
Stranger things have happened; it’s not totally unlike AMD to launch a product then make it largely irrelevant with something better in a short timeframe (the Radeon VII was replaced by the RX 5700 XT in half a year). But in combination with huge costs for RAM, and dips in motherboard sales as wholesale platform upgrades are made far less affordable, pushing some processors into 2027 might make more sense this year than most.
There are even rumours of a Zen 5 chip with dual-3D V-Cache chiplets on the way, though I’m less convinced by that one. Especially as AMD has said the benefits of such a config wouldn’t be so great for gaming, even if technically possible.
But what we do know is that those X3D chips really fly off the shelves, and there might be some outside forces acting on AMD to help push their launch along.
Now we’re onto Intel’s plans. Firstly, a quick mention of Panther Lake, the company’s next mobile chip. This is almost ready to launch. There are a variety of chips on the way; the most exciting for gamers comes with 12 Xe-cores. That’s four more than Lunar Lake and a newer architecture, too. Though it’s not Celestial, the architecture intended to power the next generation of discrete gaming cards from Intel, we can at least hope for some decent laptop and handheld PC performance out of these mobile chips.
The main event is Nova Lake. These desktop chips are said to be arriving sometime around the end of this year, into the next. From previous Intel launches, we know the company’s playbook. Usually, it launches a vanguard of high-performance gaming chips, the K-series, before unleashing the rest of the lineup the following year. So, our best guess still puts some Nova Lake chips arriving in 2027, but only if those aforementioned market forces don’t meddle too much.
I wouldn’t blame you for largely ignoring Nova Lake for the most part. Especially after what was a disappointing launch in Arrow Lake. However, there are some promising signs for Nova Lake. Firstly, Intel is confident that it will get back to a leadership position with Nova Lake and across the board on desktop. Intel would say that, and whether that materialises is another thing entirely, but it’s hardly throwing in the towel.
Secondly, Intel is rumoured (only rumours) to be stacking heaps of extra cache vertically onto its next-gen processors. In a similar concept to AMD’s X3D chips, which use 3D V-Cache, this is in the hopes of massively improving gaming performance. One such rumour pegs a future Nova Lake chip with 52 cores and 288 MB of cache. Yoinks, Scoob.
Though with a new LGA 1954 socket seemingly on the way, I still think people will side with AMD’s long-lasting AM5 socket for the foreseeable, and that’s probably something Intel needs to think about with coming generations. Good news is, rumours also suggest Intel’s extending socket support, too, but I’ll believe it when I see it.
But, hey, that’s a couple of chip generations actually worth paying attention to right there. Most of the exciting stuff is likely to land towards the end of the year, however.
Split spacebars
Don’t shout at me, keyboard fans, I know that split spacebars aren’t anything new. However, they aren’t common in the gaming keyboard market. After my recent run-in with a rarified split spacebar on a gaming keyboard, I’m willing to bet we’ll see a few more show up soon enough.
That’s because Wooting, the ever-popular competitive keyboard designer, has just added the option for a split spacebar to its latest Wooting 60HE v2. I also have the Wooting 60HE v2 with the split spacebar, and boy, it’s excellent.
Where a singular spacebar would usually land, Wooting has instead adopted two shorter spacebar keys. The left-side key is slightly longer than the right, but it’s not something you notice as you type. In theory, both halves of the spacebar land exactly where a user is most likely to tap on a single spacebar, so if you want to pretend like it’s a unitary spacebar, you can. But you’d be missing the point.
The two keys offer flexibility to reprogram each half to your liking—though you probably want to keep one as space. The two halves are smaller than your standard spacebar, which allows room in between for an additional programmable key. This is, out of the box, another way to access the Function key, but you can change it to do whatever you like, depending on the context.
For a compact keyboard, it’s something pretty special. Keeping one half of the spacebar as the space key—in my case, I naturally hit the right spacebar most often—and then programming the left half to do something else in the company’s software, the Wootility, is a gamechanger.
Since I spend most of my time typing, I have the left space bar as the delete key, which is missing from the compact 60% layout. However, since it’s easy to switch between gaming and typing profiles, you can change the half of the spacebar least used while you’re gaming to offer some other easily accessible macro. A quick melee macro that’s impossible to miss, or a crouch key. Wooting also suggested to me you could stick one of its upcoming knobs between the two halves for something completely different—no jokes, please.
A simple hardware tweak made good by excellent software—I can see this sorta functionality taking off in the long run.
Best PC gaming kit 2026
