Gaming has been evolving with the development of PC's. With the evolution of PC's, game manufacturers have also been evolving and making games compatible with the hardware. PC manufacturers too tuned their hardware to the requirements of the games. Apart from this, mobile games that are smaller versions of the PC games can be run on a mobile or a tablet and can be played on the go.
Laptops missed out the evolution, except for the high priced laptops meant for gaming, while others were kept out of this rally since they lacked the hardware that was needed by the game to run properly. The integrated GPU's on the Laptops seemed not to work really well with the games that were played, but not now.
According to Gaming Bolt, AMD is out with yet another innovation that seems to address this problem. With the XConnect now available in the market, it will now bring the graphics technology of the desktop to notebooks. XConnect is an external device that can be connected to the notebook via a Thunderbolt3 (USB-C) connectors and cables.
All you need is Radeon Software 16.2.2 (or later), 1x Thunderbolt 3 port, 40Gbps Thunderbolt 3 cable, 10586 build Windows 10 or later, System BIOS ACPI extension for Thunderbolt eGFX, Thunderbolt firmware (NVM) version 1.6 or above and Thunderbolt pass certification. Looking at the above requirements, the 40Gdps cable gives the same speed and feels like an onboard card.
While Techno Buffalo reports that pricing is yet to be announced, here are the graphic cards compatible with XConnect:
1. AMD Radeon R9 Fury
2. AMD Radeon R9 Nano
3. AMD Radeon R9 300 Series
4. AMD Radeon R9 290X
5. AMD Radeon R9 290
6. AMD Radeon R9 280
7. Mobile derivatives of these ASICs
Apart from these Radeon GPUs, products that have Polaris architecture is also said to be compatible with XConnect.