efaardvark

I don't pre-order anime, games, or pretty much anything else. Been burned too many times. Companies that offer that sort of deal often seem to care even less about those fans that take them up on the offer than they do about the ones that buy later as regular retail customers. The pre-order culture in the software/gaming world is especially toxic. I don't want to be either a supporter or a victim of that sort of behavior.

Looking at GPU prices & comparing AMD's new "NAVI" (RX5700 series) and Radeon VII to the Nvidia offerings. Gotta say, I'm not too impressed with either company's lineup. At 7nm I was expecting a lot more from Navi, but it clearly didn't deliver. At $700 a Radeon VII is right up there in ludicrous territory with the 2080 too, price wise. I mean, get real. That's simply ridiculous. I would NEVER spend that much for a GPU! Even the RTX 2060/RX5700 level of ~$370 is at the extreme limit of what I'd pay for a GFX card. It is like we've reached the limits of performance per dollar and the only question is how much money you can afford to spend. Seems like a $150-200 for an old RX 580 or a GTX 1665 is a MUCH better value proposition, at least if you haven't bought into the 4k UHD and/or 120FPS gaming nonsense. Heck, compared to a RX580 or a GTX 1665 even my so-old-it-is-discontinued 8GB RX480 isn't looking too bad. It still works plenty fine for my existing games for one thing. Sure I could get better performance if I upgraded, but upgrade to what, and at what cost? I'm getting a passmark score of ~8100 where I am. At a benchmark of 8900 I doubt I'd even notice a difference between my RX480 and a "modern" RX580. I'd simply be throwing away ~$180. ~$350 for a RTX 2060 (assuming you can find it at that price) would lose me 2GB of RAM and still not even come close to doubling the performance. $700(!) for a Radeon VII or a 2080 would finally (barely) get me to twice the benchmark score of my 4-yo, 14nm process card.. at almost 4x the price and twice the heat/power dissipation! Just doesn't seem worth it, even with the architecture changes. I'm not even going to waste time thinking about the 2080ti. That's just the "for people with far more money than sense" option.

This might be the most interesting conversation to come out of E3. For me anyway. A conversation about game and gaming between Todd Howard (Fallout, Elder Scrolls developer/producer at Bethesda Game Studios) and Elon Musk.

Same here. If I did my job like that I wouldn't have my job. This isn't just game companies either. The whole software industry does it, up to and including the OS vendors. (Except maybe some open-source stuff that's actually used by the people who programmed it.) Worse, the "updates" to "fix bugs" are tied to the new feature releases, so if you just want upgrade to fix the bugs - to get the actual functionality that you've already paid for IOW - then they feel justified in charging you more $$$ because of the new features. And of course the new features have their own bugs (and/or force you into other unwanted compromises like paying for otherwise unneeded new hardware), and the cycle repeats. It is an industry-wide scam that preys on clueless, gullible consumers.

Speaking of potato gods, I was pseudo-randomly clicking around the internet a while back for things Minecraft and found this. For some reason it made me think of you people/potatos. 🤣 Carry on....

I too may have some old ones at home I could post. If I can find them. In these days of 10TB single drives the problem is not having enough space to store your files so much as being able to find them when you need them.

Not really that excited about any of the games at E3 tbh. I kind of liked some of the boneworks demos maybe, though that was more an engine demo than an actual game. Frankly, my main interest was the new hardware announcements, especially from AMD, but even there... I mean, Sony didn't even show up. They're not my favorite company, but what about that PS5? Even the hardware AMD announced is going to take a while to reach significant numbers of gamers however, and until it does the games themselves won't really be targeted at it. There was certainly no "killer app" game that would make me run out and buy the new hardware just to play it. Ask me again in a few months.

/me suddenly thinks of potato pancakes for some reason.

Interesting that AMD is making a big deal at E3 about partnering so closely with Google over Stadia. I love what AMD has done with Threadripper. Even though it is somewhat out of my price range at the moment, like all electronics I expect the usual progression down to a level I can reasonably contemplate purchasing at some point, and the specs are already beating existing offerings on every bullet point except single-thread performance. Even there prices on last-gen market offerings are simply not worth it, especially as single-thread becomes less important. If this is what we can look forward to gaming with in a year or two then things are going to get VERY interesting indeed. I especially like AMD's incredible I/O specs. Even "just" a Zeppelin (Ryzen 7) die has a full 32 PCIe lanes connected direct to the CPU (core? chiplet?), with 24 of those reaching the motherboard. Threadripper, with its 4094-pin socket has a full 64 PCIe lane count, and Epyc, AMD's datacenter core, has 128 PCIe lanes! The dual-socket Epyc motherboards I've seen (well, heard of) use 64 of those per CPU to communicate over AMD's (purportedly) ultra-scalable "Infinity Fabric"! Ok, so what? That's an incredible amount of I/O bandwidth connected directly to the CPU(s), that's what. Not exactly a return to the zero wait-states of the early days, but that makes it a lot easier/faster to get data transferred between the CPU and memory. And any GPUs on the same die as well of course. That in turn means things like much lower latency, higher frame rates, higher throughput, and overall less wasted CPU cycles waiting on data. All at much cheaper prices than we're all used to. I'm imagining a rack of Epyc MBs in the datacenter with 8-channel memory and every die having an "internal" GPU core (or two, or 4) and the "extra" PCIe lanes connected to gobs of high speed SSD and 100Gbit+ networks. I'm beginning to see how Stadia might compete with existing PlayStation and Xbox consoles. I'm a bit less convinced about Epyc in the datacenter competing successfully with threadripper on the PC or against a next-gen console at home, but that's a year or so down the road at least. For now, grab your popcorn. It should be interesting to see how things develop, regardless of whether your preference is PCs, mobile, or consoles.