Enlarge / This concept points the way to a future Genesis flagship SUV. (credit: Jonathan Gitlin)

NEW YORK—You can always rely on Genesis to bring at least one interesting concept to the New York International Auto Show. This year, the company brought several. At a busy reveal at the brand's Genesis House in Manhattan, it showed us its high-performance ambitions with not one but four bright orange machines, plus one rather famous Belgian racing driver. Then, in a chamber reminiscent of The Barmacide Feast, we got to see the poshest Genesis yet, the brand's take on a big luxury electric vehicle inspired by Korean hospitality.

The Neolum Concept

• 

  The Genesis Neolum has the looks to hold its own next to any Range Rover or Bentley Bentayga. [credit: Jonathan Gitlin ]

Genesis was tight-lipped in the lead-up to Monday night's unveilings, but no one was entirely surprised to see a big electric SUV. Genesis is owned by Hyundai Group, after all, and has access to the E-GMP architecture, a thoroughly up-to-date flexible platform that keeps impressing us. Kia just used E-GMP to great effect to make the EV9, a three-row family SUV. And Hyundai's take on that form factor is due later this year in the production Ioniq 7, so an upmarket model from Genesis seemed obvious.

"The last eight years, it was about finding who we are and then discovering DNA for the Genesis," said SangYup Lee, global design head for Genesis. "Now it's time to expand."

• 

  XFX's take on AMD's Radeon RX 7600 XT. [credit: Andrew Cunningham ]

We don't need a long intro for this one: AMD's new Radeon RX 7600 XT is almost exactly the same as last year's RX 7600, but with a mild bump to the GPU's clock speed and 16GB of memory instead of 8GB. It also costs $329 instead of $269, the current MSRP (and current street price) for the regular RX 7600.

It's a card with a pretty narrow target audience: people who are worried about buying a GPU with 8GB of memory, but who aren't worried enough about future-proofing or RAM requirements to buy a more powerful GPU. It's priced reasonably well, at least—$60 is a lot to pay for extra memory, but $329 was the MSRP for the Radeon RX 6600 back in 2021. If you want more memory in a current-generation card, you generally need to jump into the $450 range (for the 12GB RX 7700 XT or the 16GB RTX 4060 Ti) or beyond.

The fact of the matter is that this is the same silicon we've already seen. The clock speed bumps provide a small across-the-board performance uplift, and the impact of the extra RAM becomes apparent in a few of our tests. But the card doesn't fundamentally alter the AMD-vs.-Nvidia-vs.-Intel dynamic in the $300-ish graphics card market, though it addresses a couple of the regular RX 7600's most glaring weaknesses.

Enlarge / Retro Games' THE400 Mini console. (credit: Retro Games / Benj Edwards)

Last week, UK-based Retro Games, Ltd. announced a mini console version of the Atari 400 home computer, first released in 1979. It's called "THE400 Mini," and it includes HDMI video output, 25 built-in games, a USB version of Atari's famous joystick, and it retails for $120. But this release means something more to me personally because my first computer was an Atari 400—and as any other Atari 8-bit computer fan can tell you, the platform often doesn't get the respect it should. This will be the first time Atari's 8-bit computer line has received a major retro-remake release.

My Atari 400 story goes a little something like this. Around the time I was born in 1981, my dad bought my older brother (then 5 years old) an Atari 400 so he could play games and learn to program. My brother almost immediately found its flat membrane keyboard frustrating and the Atari 410 cassette drive too slow, so my dad ordered an Atari 800 and an Atari 810 disk drive instead. This began our family's golden age of Atari 800 gaming, which I've written about elsewhere.

I've often said if a modern game designer wants to learn how to make games, just dive into the Atari 400/800 game library. There are some priceless gems there you can't find anywhere else, plus others that play best on the platform. OK, I'll name a few: The Seven Cities of Gold, Archon, M.U.L.E., Wizard of Wor, Salmon Run, Star Raiders, The Halley Project, and so much more.

Enlarge / The new Radeon RX 7600 XT mostly just adds extra memory, though clock speeds and power requirements have also increased somewhat. (credit: AMD)

Graphics card buyers seem anxious about buying a GPU with enough memory installed, even in midrange graphics cards that aren't otherwise equipped to play games at super-high resolutions. And while this anxiety tends to be a bit overblown—lots of first- and third-party testing of cards like the GeForce 4060 Ti shows that just a handful of games benefit when all you do is boost GPU memory from 8GB to 16GB—there's still a market for less-expensive GPUs with big pools of memory, whether you're playing games that need it or running compute tasks that benefit from it.

That's the apparent impetus behind AMD's sole GPU announcement from its slate of CES news today: the $329 Radeon RX 7600 XT, a version of last year's $269 RX 7600 with twice as much memory, slightly higher clock speeds, and higher power use to go with it.

The core specifications of the 7600 XT remain the same as the regular 7600: 32 of AMD's compute units (CUs) based on the RDNA3 GPU architecture and the same memory clock speed attached to the same 128-bit memory bus. But RAM has been boosted from 8GB to 16GB, and the GPU's clock speeds have been boosted a little, ensuring that the card runs games a little faster than the regular 7600, even in games that don't care about the extra memory.

Enlarge / Well, at least they got the look of the hardware right.

If you've ever tried plugging an unmodified early generation gaming console into an HDTV, you already know that modern flat screens do a pretty poor job with RF signals that were designed for a completely different CRT display setting. The recently released Atari 2600+ helps fix this specific problem, giving retro gamers a way to get their classic Atari cartridges looking nice and sharp on an HD screen.

Unfortunately, that's about all this bare-bones, $130 hardware does. If you're expecting the kind of modern quality-of-life features you've seen on other retro console revamps in recent years, lower your expectations accordingly here.

A cute curio

Let's start with the physical hardware itself, which earns points for authenticity. At a glance, the 2600+ looks exactly like an Atari 2600 unit you might remember from decades past (albeit a four-switch "CX2600-A" model introduced in 1980, not one of the larger "Sixer" models from the late '70s). The fake wood grain and suitably springy front switches are sure to activate the nostalgia centers deep in the brains of gamers of a certain age. There's even a charming, working switch for flipping from Color to Black and White display, an option that hasn't been relevant to most living room entertainment centers since the Carter administration (at the latest).