Starting in the mid-2010’s, streaming has quickly become one of the largest and fastest growing new forms of entertainment. What exactly is video game streaming? It is when people broadcast themselves playing video games with commentary, in either pre-recorded or live streams online. On streaming platforms like Mixer, Twitch, YouTube Gaming etc. you can see how the top players play and have some insight into their thoughts. As streaming has become more popular the platforms for viewers have grown, Twitch itself has more traffic than Netflix and HBO’s online streaming service pulling in 185 million viewers, compared to HBO’s 130 million and Netflix’s 93 million in 2016. With all these viewers top streamers like Ninja, Tfue and Shroud are able to generate large amounts of influence and money. Now let’s take a look at what they do to generate their viewership and why these particular streamers are so popular.

Richard Tyler Blevins aka Ninja is one of the streamers you may have heard of before, and for good reason. His YouTube account has over 22.2 million subscribers as of December 2019, and he has been streaming since 2011 compiling around two billion total views as of December 2019.

Ninja began his career as a professional Halo 3 player in 2009, he played for several organisations before eventually joining Luminosity Gaming in 2017. That year Ninja started to rise to fame with his win at the PUBG Gamescom Invitational Squads. After that win he began streaming Fornite regularly, and his timing could not have been better as Fortnite took off that year. So much so that by September 2017 he had over half a million followers and six months after that he had more than two million. By March 2018 he set the Twitch record for the largest concurrent audience on an individual stream (outside of tournament events) at 635,000 viewers, a record which did not last as he broke it again a month later with 667,000 viewers during his event Ninja Vegas 2018.  2018 continued to be a great year for Ninja as he was the first Esports player featured on the cover of ESPN Magazine, announced a partnership with Red Bull, and released his own record. Additionally he was in the NFL’s “The 100-Year Game”  ad which aired during Super Bowl LIII this year.

Along with all those accolades Blevins is making quite a career out of streaming. He was paid a reported $1 million to promote EA’s Apex Legends on his Twitch and Twitter accounts and he earns over $500,000 a month streaming Fortnite.

While he made a killing on Twitch, he decided to switch to Microsoft’s streaming platform Mixer as of August 1st, 2019. He did this as he felt Twitch was limiting his ability to grow his brand outside of video games. For instance he released a book in August called Get Good: My Ultimate Guide To Gaming published by Penguin Random House. He also was briefly a member of The Masked Singer  on Fox as his wife is a fan of the show.

After all of his streaming success he has also done some quality fundraising for charity. In February 2018, he raised over $110,000 for the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. Then during the first annual Fortnite Battle Royale Esports event he gave away $50,000 in prize money, with $2,500 going to the Alzheimer’s Association. The charitable works roll on as in April 2018 he took part in the #Clips4Kids event, helping to raide over $340,000 for the charity. Additionally his team won the Fortnite Pro-Am event, winning the $1 million prize for the charity of their choice.

Michael Grzesiek aka “Shroud” is a Canadian professional streamer. He began his career as a Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO) player before transitioning to streaming full time.

Prior to streaming he took first in all these events:

ESL ESEA Pro League Season 1 – North America 2015

iBUYPOWER Cup – 2015

ESL Pro League Season 4 – Finals 2016

Americas Minor Championship – Kraków 2017

All of those wins helped him build a viewer base and transition to streaming full time as people want to see the best of the best play. He is now famous for playing PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, Apex Legends, Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 which he streamed on Twitch. He has streamed over 6,000 hours on Twitch with a reach of over 345 million total views. Recently in October 2019 he followed Ninja’s lead and left Twitch for Mixer, most likely for a large pile of cash as his YouTube channel has over 5.3 million subscribers.

As professional streamers become bigger stars it is interesting to see how video games are influencing culture worldwide. Stars like Ninja, Tfue, and Shroud are ambassadors for Esports now and will likely have a large impact on the future of gaming. They can use their influence to create charities and help the world if they manage to stay out of trouble. But most importantly they are here to entertain us and we hope they continue to do so for as long as they choose too.

We recently started carrying AMD’s new RX 5700 XT graphics cards and they’ve proven to be extremely popular among the Cutting Edge Gamer community. There are several different versions of the RX 5700 XT, and in this post we will explore the similarities and differences between them in an effort to help those of you readers who are trying to decide which of the RX 5700 XT cards is the right fit for you to lease or purchase.

The most recent addition to our graphics card inventory, the XFX RX 5700 XT THICC II, has earned its place in our GPU lineup. The THICC II boasts a sleek black finish and a dual fan configuration built upon XFX’s acclaimed Ghost Thermal 2.0 design. This design utilizes a 90% larger heat-sink which reduces noise by 35% (fans utilize idle-stop functionality, meaning fans won’t start spinning until the GPU is placed under a heavy load) while also keeping temperature yields low. AMD’s RX 5700 XT GPUs support the PCIe 4.0 interface, and the THICC II follows suit (note that PCIe 4.0 is currently only compatible with a Ryzen 3000 CPU and x570 motherboard). The THICC II utilizes the RDNA architecture that powers AMD’s 7nm GPUs delivering 1.25 performance per clock. The GPU also has 8GB of GDDR6 memory which allows for fast speeds and exceptional 1440p performance.

Performance-wise, the THICC II exceeds its NVIDIA counterpart (the RTX 2060 SUPER) in every way. In fact, the THICC II reaches frame rates that are close to even the RTX 2070 SUPER. The THICC II has a base clock of 1605 MHz and a boost clock of 1905 MHz. Currently, the XFX RX 5700 XT THICC II is available on our website for $50.99/month under our lease-to-own program, and also retails in most places for around $440.

The SAPPHIRE RX 5700 XT PULSE and the SAPPHIRE RX 5700 XT NITRO+ serve as our first batch of RX 5700 XT GPUs made by SAPPHIRE. Both video cards provide great PC gaming performance at a low cost with each having distinct features that set them apart.

The SAPPHIRE RX 5700 XT PULSE comes in a black/red/white color scheme which has a very different look from past SAPPHIRE cards. Like the XFX RX 5700 XT THICC II, the PULSE utilizes a 2-fan design. SAPPHIRE’s Dual-X cooling technology keeps the GPU, memory, and VRM components cool under heavy loads while keeping noise levels low. The PULSE features the new PCIe 4.0 interface and has 8GB of GDDR6 memory. Both the base clock (1670 MHz) and boost clock (1925 MHz) are faster for the PULSE when compared to the THICC II. The PULSE is available for lease on our website for $50.99/month and retails for $420-$430.

The SAPPHIRE RX 5700 XT NITRO+, the first 3-fan RX 5700 XT graphics card that we’ve carried thus far, is quite different from its other 5700 XT peers. The NITRO+ boasts all of the same game-changing features that the aforementioned RX 5700 XT cards have: PCIe 4.0, 7nm manufacturing process, and AMD’s RDNA architecture, but that’s where the similarities end. The NITRO+ has a much higher base clock (1770 MHz) than the THICC II and the PULSE, and its boost clock can reach up to 2010 MHz! To put that into perspective, most of NVIDIA’s 2080 SUPER cards have boost clock speeds that top out around 1900 MHz. The NITRO+’s lightning clock speed is possible thanks to SAPPHIRE’s Trixx Boost software. By slightly lowering resolution, Trixx Boost bumps up SAPPHIRE’s already impressive overclock speeds to unprecedented levels never before seen from AMD cards. That takes us to the best part about the NITRO+, the price. Gamers can get their hands on a NITRO+ for ~$460 or lease one from us for $53.99/month! In my opinion, the SAPPHIRE RX 5700 XT NITRO+ is the best 5700 XT video card, and one of the best GPUs in general, that money can buy.

The first batch of MSI RX 5700 XT cards that we’ve made available are the MSI RX 5700 XT EVOKE OC & the MSI RX 5700 XT MECH OC. Both of the cards have a dual fan design with two distinct aesthetics. The MECH features the TORX Fan 3.0 design which has reduced GPU temperatures by 11%. The MECH has a base clock of 1670 MHz and a boost clock of 1925 MHz. This places the card on par with with the SAPPHIRE RX 5700 XT PULSE performance-wise. Like the other 5700 XT cards, the MECH is built upon AMD’s new RDNA architecture. The MECH retails for ~$420, and you can lease one from us for $50.99/month.

The MSI RX 5700 XT EVOKE OC is similar in performance to the MECH, but different in design. The card boasts a beautiful champagne gold trim with a carved grill to improve dissipation. ZeroFrozr technology keeps the fan noise down under low loads, and TORX fan 3.0 keeps the GPU temperatures down. The EVOKE has slightly higher clock speeds compared to the MECH with a base clock of 1690 MHZ and a boost clock of 1945 MHz. The EVOKE is slightly more expensive than the MECH, retailing for ~$430, and you can lease on from us for $51.99/month. Choosing between these cards is more about personal aesthetic preference, and both cards will provide smooth 1440p gaming performance.

AMD really hit it out of the park with the RX 5700 XT cards, and gamers are praising them more than any other GPU in recent memory. Whether you decide to go with the THICC II, PULSE, NITRO+, MECH or EVOKE, the RX 5700 XT will certainly elevate your PC gaming experience. If you’re interested in getting your hands on one of these cards, check out or graphics cards leasing program!

NVIDIA released the GeForce RTX 2080 Ti all the way back in September 27, 2018 and since then little has been revealed about what is coming next. Until recently, more and more facts have been revealed lately and we here at Cutting Edge Gamer are happy to share what we have found out. These new chips, dubbed the Ampere line, should be faster (duh), loaded with more VRAM and cheaper. They will follow the current naming convention and be released as the RTX 30XX series, offering a GeForce RTX 3070, a RTX 3080 and a RTX 3080 Ti model as soon as Summer 2020. Now let’s get into how they are going to meet those lofty rumor mill expectations.

These new Ampere NVIDIA chips will offer a statistically huge performance improvement over the RTX 20XX cards as they feature a new more efficient version of ray tracing. The RTX 30xx servies are also rumored to have some big improvements in their rasterization capabilities, which should combine with the ray tracing advancements and enable you to render next generational graphics live in games.

Additionally they are reported to feature more VRAM in each card with the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 and the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 listed at 12GB while the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Ti will boast a beefy 16GB of VRAM. This should help these Ampere cards to push between a 100-200MHz improvement in clock speeds vs the predecessor, especially as they are more efficient due to the expected new 7nm architecture they desperately needed to move to.

This architecture should be manufactured by Samsung using the 7nm EUV process node, which allows the cards to run at under 1.0v but will limit overclocking. Additionally working with Samsung to produce these nodes should drive costs down, a big need after the adversity faced with the release of the last line of RTX 20 series cards.

Here’s to hoping they drop sooner rather than later. We promise to update you guys with FurMarks as soon as we can get our hands on some sweet new Ampere cards. We really cannot wait to see what this new generation is capable of!

The Fornite World Cup Finals were hosted in New York City’s Arthur Ashe Stadium, which seats 22,547 and is coincidentally the same stadium where the 2016 US Open was held. Day one featured two events, the NYC Celebrity Pro-AM and the Creative Finals. Airwaks + RLGRIME beat out the competition taking first place in the celebrity Pro-AM splitting $1 million. Fish Fam consisting of cizzorz, TylerH, Suezhoo and zand took home the $1.345 million prize for the Creative Finals, a trial of five different events based on community creations. On day two Nyhrox and Aqua’s teamwork helped them prevail to be the Duos Winners claiming $3 million. Finally on day three the grand prize went to Kyle ‘Bugha’ Giersdorf, age sixteen, who took home a cool $3 million USD for winning the Solo tournament. In the end each of the competitors left with at least $50,000.

Now let’s take a step back and compare that to the world’s first video game tournament, which occurred on October 19th in 1972 at Stanford University. The tournament featured players competing to win at Spacewar, a simple 2D game which had them fighting gravity and each other until only one winner remained. Many pilots competed and many ships were wrecked, until eventually one champion emerged, Bruce Baumgart. Bruce outmaneuvered all others in the five-man-free-for-all winning the world’s first video game tournament, his grand prize: a year’s subscription of Rolling Stone. Not exactly life-changing. Clearly the world of eSports has taken a huge stride forward between these two tournaments and in this article we will seek to illuminate the path we have taken to get to where we are today.

To understand how truly far eSports has come, we must go back to the birth of computerized gaming in the 1950’s. Not surprisingly, the first game for PC was a copy of an already existing game. Dubbed “XOX” it was created by Alexander Shafto Douglas, a computer scientist working on his PhD at Cambridge, who programmed a PC to play “Tic-Tac-Toe”. While extremely simple this game allowed humans and machines to compete for the first time ever and served as a small step forward in the history of video games. 

Then in 1958, a big shift occurred when we received the world’s first ever multiplayer game, “Tennis for Two”. This game allowed players to simulate, you guessed it, a game of tennis. Using an early version of today’s joystick, players could hit a virtual ball across a virtual net until one player emerged victorious. Definitely not the best game of all time, but it was a start. Most importantly it allowed players to compete against one another, the basis for any eSport popular today. 

After the commercial success of “Tennis for Two” the video game industry continued to grow quickly. In 1962 Spacewar was released, and even with its simple concept the game was a huge hit. In fact, it even made the New York Times list of top ten games of all time in 2007. As discussed earlier, this game placed its players in separate spaceships in 2D space with a limited supply of fuel and ammo. The opponents would then battle to the death all while fighting the gravitational field of the nearby planet. Ten years after its release Spacewar was the first game to host a competitive tournament, and as mentioned above Bruce Baumgart won, ushering in a new era of competitive gaming.

As the 1960’s rolled on into the 1970’s interest in video games continued to grow. Amusement halls across the country became arcades, and home consoles were born. People flocked to arcades to play the newest hit games like Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, and Space Invaders and arcades became a popular American pastime. Even more so when, in 1979, people could immortalize themselves in the new permanent highscore lists on both Asteroids and Starfire. Additionally when the “Magnavox Odyssey” came out in 1972 you could now directly hook up a console to your TV at home and game for hours.

In the 1980’s video game tournaments took off with an influx of investment from gaming companies. Atari kicked this off by hosting the world’s first national video game tournament in 1980. The “Space Invaders Championships” featured 10,000 gamers competing to win a version of “Asteroids”. William Salvador Heineman was crowned the winner on October 10th 1980, becoming the first ever winner of a national video game competition. eSports continued to grow as early leaders in the industry like Walter Day emerged. He founded both “Twin Galaxies National Scoreboard (TGNS)” and “U.S. National Video Team”, the first professional gaming team in the world. TGNS helped to grow gaming by keeping a national scoreboard which only the best could hope to land on and the team gave hope to people that gaming could one day become a profession like any other.

Next in the 1990’s Nintendo jumped on the eSports bandwagon, organizing the “Nintendo World Championships” in the USA which pitted competitors against each other in Nintendo’s best games. The Finals occurred December 7th–9th, 1990  with three World Champion titles given out to Jeff Hansen winner in the 11 and under category, Thor Aackerlund winner of the 12–17 category, and Robert Whiteman who won the 18 and older category. Not only was the tournament more competitive the prizes were better as each winner was awarded with a new 1990 Geo Metro Convertible, a $10,000 U.S. savings bond, a 40″ Rear-projection television, and a gold painted Mario trophy.

These console based companies helped push us in the right direction but it became clear soon their time was almost up. Why? Because later into the 1990’s more people gained access to the internet and increasing innovations continued to drive down the price of PC hardware resulting in a PC boom. Players flocked to PC where they could compete online with friends in games like Doom, Quake, and Counter-Strike all from the comfort of their own home. As these games and their player bases quickly grew PC gaming started being approached more professionally and the the first leagues were formed. For example, the Electronic Sports League which was founded in 1998 and the Korean e-Sports Association in 2000.

In the following years video game tournaments continued their assent to where they are today. In 2000, the first World Cyber Games were held in Seoul, South Korea. Next came the 2003 Electronic Sports World Cup in Poitiers, France. Then the Cyberathlete Professional League(CPL) World Tour in 2005, the first million dollar tournament, which was a huge success. The CPL finale was even live broadcast by MTV, marking eSports emergence into the mainstream. As these tournaments grew and spawned more tournaments around the world, eSports entertainment value grew rapidly. Now, as more and more people compete to be the best at their favorite game, the industry continues to expand. Whether your game of choice is Halo, Counter-Strike, or Fortnite, you can compete for entry into these tournaments with the professionals and win extremely large cash prizes for playing video games. Isn’t it crazy how things can change?

Even crazier, eSports is poised to have an even bigger year in 2020. The sport has fully emerged into public view, with huge cash tournaments and streaming deals on platforms like Twitch and Youtube. eSports is even headed to the Olympics, as it will be added to the 2024 program. Additionally, they were to be included in the 2018 Asian Games! In the coming years you can expect to see even more players and games. It is an exciting time for eSports and we can’t wait to see what comes next!

Last week, NVIDIA shook up the PC gaming world once again with the announcement of its brand new line of graphics cards – the RTX SUPER series. Due to hit shelves a mere nine months after the launch of the massively successful Geforce 20-series, the RTX SUPER GPUs arrive boasting high performance, sleek design, and low cost. In this article, I will discuss what sets the SUPER cards apart from the rest of the field.

You might be wondering what kind of performance boost a RTX SUPER graphics card will give you vs a regular RTX GPU. The answer, in short, is a big boost. Referencing the chart below depicting some recent scores from FurMark tests we ran, let’s take a look at the performance between the RTX 2060 SUPER and the original RTX 2060.

The RTX 2060 SUPER is an upgrade over the RTX 2060 in seemingly every specification category including processing cores (2,176 vs 1,920), base clock (1,470 MHz vs 1,365 MHz), video memory (8GB vs 6GB), memory interface (256-bit vs 192-bit), and more. In fact, the RTX 2060 SUPER shares many similarities performance/spec-wise with the original RTX 2070 and scores closely. Similarly, the RTX 2070 SUPER is on par (slightly lower performance) with the original RTX 2080. In addition to the performance boost, the SUPER GPUs all run NVIDIA’s Turing architecture which means that they’ll all be capable or real-time ray tracing and support other advanced gaming features like NVIDIA adaptive shading, mesh shading, deep learning super sampling, and more.

While the RTX 2080 Ti still reigns king over the growing field of PC gaming GPUs, the RTX SUPER series cards serve to fill in the gaps between the current tiers of performance. If you’re looking to get a little more out of your current GPU, upgrading to a SUPER series graphics card could provide you with a significant boost.

When AMD announced its new NAVI 5700 GPUs, it seemed like they were in a real position to secure the low-mid level pricing tier of graphics cards. Within days, NVIDIA announced the pricing for the RTX SUPER cards and all of a sudden, AMD was worried. In fact, the pricing on these new SUPER GPUs was so competitive for the performance that AMD had to lower the prices on their new NAVI cards. So what will it cost you to get your hands on one of the new SUPER cards?

Available July 9th, pricing for the RTX 2060 SUPER starts at $399.99 (vs $349.99 for the regular 2060), and the RTX 2070 SUPER starts at $499.99. Later in the month on July 23rd, the RTX 2080 SUPER will be available starting at $699.99. That means that you can get a RTX 2070 SUPER and a RTX 2080 SUPER for the same price as their regular RTX counterparts!

So how do the NVIDIA SUPER cards compare to the AMD RX 5700 cards? We already discussed price (and the fact that AMD had to lower their pricing to compete NVIDIA’s own aggressive pricing model) in which AMD has a slight edge over NVIDIA, but is the performance worth the price?

Taking a look back at the graph of FurMark scores we referenced earlier, we can see that the RX 5700 outperforms the 2060, and that for the same price of $399.99, the RX 5700 XT outperforms the RTX 2060 SUPER. So if you’re looking for a card in that $300-$400 range, the AMD cards are very nice pickups if your looking to buy or finance a graphics card with solid performance. However, if you take a the leap and spend that extra $100, the RTX 2070 SUPER provides a significant performance leap over both AMD cards. If we go to the RTX 2080 SUPER tier, none of the other cards even come close.

In conclusion, the NVIDIA RTX SUPER series cards package considerable PC gaming performance at a reasonable cost. If you’re one of our members who recently leased a RTX 2060, 2070, or 2080 – don’t worry – we’ll have the SUPERS soon and you can always upgrade at any time!