This is the first time in years where I've skipped all of the game announcement programming. The overlap and compression has gotten so bad they've basically recreated E3, but the information is coming from all sides instead of one place. I find it hard to believe that this behavior actually grows brands which I thought was the point. This strategy seems far more likely to result in fans still being fans and people who just play games maybe catching something on a game news site/socials.

Very sad to hear of his passing. Never a question of where he stood or was coming from.

Condolences to friends and family.

Unsurprising that the developers wouldn't necessarily check to see if AVX2 was being used when the minimum system requirements are AVX2 supporting CPUs. Hopefully it gets fixed for those who play, but I wouldn't blame AH if it didn't.

A few of those 'flopbuster' titles weren't all that bad and in the case of Equilibrium can your movie really flop when it never gets a real release? A few of the movies it would be interesting to see what went wrong like Priest and Gamer as the former had decent source material and the latter just went off the rails in a bad way. Death Race and Doomsday are definitely guilty pleasure titles for me as they're not really good, but fun to watch.

Chronicles of Riddick is 100% what you get when a studio/money people start messing with the movie. They didn't want it to be rated R because it would "limit the audience". Their focus groups also came to the conclusion they had to remove all of the Furya flashbacks because they were "confusing" despite that giving context to his motivation. I'm sure there was more, but that's all I remember from when I dived in to finding out what happened because the movie didn't seem right when I first saw it.

Jivaro wrote on Mar 15, 2025, 02:55:
Thank you folks. It's far too late to return the CPU, but at least I will know why I have to replace it if everything explodes.

Intel extended the warranty on all of them (including OEMs though you might have to go through the OEM if that's the case) so you should be able to get a replacement and might still be able to even if it's a tray CPU.

https://supporttickets.intel.com/s/warrantyinfo

This was an interesting snapshot of the game, and it's a little better than I expected. Their skill modifier system ended up being more interesting than I expected from the initial information. Each point you invest in a skill unlocks another slot to put in a modifier (appears to cap at 12 right now), but some of the modifiers can stack as well so they'd use up multiple slots. Early combat difficulty seems like it's in a good place (I only played melee), but I'm not sure how representative this will actually be as scaling in ARPGs is hard to get right (here's looking at you Diablo 4 which became a joke to play early on in the curve). Curious what pricing will end up looking like for early access.

The performance is in a weird place, but at the same time I expect this with every UE5 game. I didn't bother lowering settings from epic, but I did end up setting DLSS to Quality rather than using DLAA just to even out the minimums (was getting 35-60 fps with DLAA versus 45-70 with DLSS Quality). Still a lot of odd frame pacing and as weird as it may sound breaking containers tended to feel somewhat slow motion so I wonder if they have some physics calculations going for them.

My system: 265K/DDR5-7200/3080 12GB running 3440x1440 and it was installed on a PCIe 4.0 SSD

The Half Elf wrote on Mar 8, 2025, 22:38:

thestryker wrote on Mar 8, 2025, 14:47:
Battlefield has had the best feeling gunplay of any of the big shooters which kept me coming back through almost all of the games (despite how mediocre some have been) after BF3 so it'll be interesting to see if this enhances it or not. I hope this is actually EA getting out of the way and letting devs dev, but also can't help but feel like it's just a long marketing campaign.

Take BF4 and just give it new graphics. And more maps.

Yeah I'd be okay with this as BF4 is my favorite of the series and I know this one is supposed to be another modern military shooter (I'd like to see them go wild with a true futuristic setting like 2142 again).

Battlefield has had the best feeling gunplay of any of the big shooters which kept me coming back through almost all of the games (despite how mediocre some have been) after BF3 so it'll be interesting to see if this enhances it or not. I hope this is actually EA getting out of the way and letting devs dev, but also can't help but feel like it's just a long marketing campaign.

They've said that due to plentiful food in the area the eaglets tend to mess with each other less when the pecking order is established and all get enough food. I checked the cam last night before shutting down the computer and it seemed like the last eaglet was a late night escape because it was around 11 Pacific that they were seen. Checking in on them has been a nice escape from the human shitshow going on.

Simon Says wrote on Mar 5, 2025, 20:02:

thestryker wrote on Mar 5, 2025, 19:50:
Curious what you read/saw with this performance information (IQ is right in line with what I saw). The only comparison of the 4 I saw was by DF and the performance drop from CNN to TF was much larger than FSR 3 to 4.

Watch the video again and pay close attention, you missed something. And if you miss it again, probably means you don't have the prerequisites, meaning you didn't watch or don't remember key points from the DLSS 3 CNN VS DLSS 4 Transformer analysis videos, also from DF and possibly a few others like Hardware Unboxed.

I didn't miss anything from the DF video, but apparently you sure did. They literally say that FSR 4 is ~8% worse performance than FSR3, ~20% worse than DLSS CNN and ~5% worse than DLSS TF. They also stated (not to mention if you just watch the video which has the frame rates listed) that there's a significant performance cost to using TF over CNN.

Overall the 9070 XT seems like the best video card release since Ampere/RDNA 2 and those were ruined by the market. Hopefully there will be enough availability to show the $600 promise become reality. I do think the 9070 is a good card, but really needs to be a $500 part. Hopefully there will end up being some options below that coming.

Simon Says wrote on Mar 5, 2025, 13:01:
- FSR 3 to FSR 4 performance cost about the same as going from DLSS3 CNN to DLSS4 transformer.
- FSR 4 still vastly inferior to DLSS4 transformer, especially considering you can run performance mode on the later easily at both 1440p and 4k whereas FSR 4 is still in DLSS 3 CNN territory image quality wise at that setting.

Curious what you read/saw with this performance information (IQ is right in line with what I saw). The only comparison of the 4 I saw was by DF and the performance drop from CNN to TF was much larger than FSR 3 to 4. They were also testing with a 5070 Ti in Ratchet and Clank which performs somewhere in the range of 10-15% higher than the 9070 XT at native. So while FSR4 performance matching DLSS TF isn't great it's not as bad as it might seem.

I suspect the 9070 will be slightly faster than the 5070 while carrying the same price. This means the 9070 XT should be quite a bit faster and at $50 more makes the $550 price point video cards an awful buy. The way nvidia has been milking the market I would like to not buy from them when it comes to upgrade time. It won't be this generation, but I suspect next generation is when I'll seriously consider it (have a 3080 12GB and am looking for double performance at around the same price ~$800 or less) so I'm really hoping AMD is successful at gaining market share. I'd happily consider Intel as well, but it doesn't seem like they'll be competing at quite high enough performance for a while (I'd love for them to pull a rabbit out of a hat and prove me wrong).

The Titans expansion was good, but really felt more like a mission type DLC than a proper expansion. Looking forward to there being whole new systems to play in and a new ship ought to be rather interesting.

Hard to take seriously an article when the author opens lamenting not being able to run Indy on their former high end machine when the 20 series launched late 2018.

Played a bit earlier today and am enjoying it, so far it feels like an expanded version of the first game. I'm not real deep into it yet, but I also really enjoyed Airborne Kingdom so the bar for my enjoyment is fairly low.

It's not actually the "graphics" per se that are driving up the costs to make games (though things like mocap on everything definitely drive up price). Pretty much all of the real problems come down to bad management. The article mentions Fortnite, but I'd be surprised if that wasn't one of the highest cost to develop games of all time. Epic, like most other big companies, throws bodies at the content problem so you end up with huge development teams to hit timelines.

Anthem is one of the greatest examples of bad management where they kept iterating and throwing out ideas so the game had maybe 12 months of actual development time spent on the final product despite it taking years to get to that point.

Focus seems like something left for the AA space and indie developers these days. I think that's why so many folks who like playing games in general (as opposed to say playing cod with friends and that's it type of thing) gravitate towards that space. Outside of Horizon Forbidden West I think everything I played a lot of/finished came from indie/AA.

There's an interesting note which I look forward to seeing some results on:

Optimized threading system to improve performance by up to 33% on Intel Arrow Lake based CPUs.

I'm guessing this likely has something to do with ARL not having HT, but I don't have the game installed and never played it on my new system so couldn't say anything first hand one way or the other.

The problem seems to stem from how few of the released UE5 titles with issues ever end up on solid footing. There's definitely something about it that is causing developers problems. Even the games without many technical problems tend to have very real performance issues like Remnant 2 did on launch.

At the end of the day it seems most likely to be a developer time issue than anything else. Of course this is something large portions of the industry don't care about and will keep churning out games that aren't ready.

Burrito of Peace wrote on Nov 14, 2024, 12:20:
What I have yet to find is a good airflow case that doesn't have glass or RGB bullshit but does have USB-C on the front. I'd prefer a cube case but I guess those went out of style so I'm on the hunt for a mid-tower.

If you're against a glass side panel then your choices are very limited. The Antec Performance 1 Silent is the only one I can think of off the top of my head (unless you want to spend $800 on the Silverstone Alta D1). Dual chamber cases (and Thermaltake's "Tower" series) are the closest you can get to the cube style but they always feature a lot of glass.

edit: There's also a Fractal North with mesh side panel, but that makes cooling worse.

Prez wrote on Nov 5, 2024, 14:57:
If it isn't Sportsball (though with much higher stakes) why did she die? We had one of your sportsball team members in the White House, right? It's almost as if we are long past the point for any of it to make a difference...

She had the misfortune of living in a red state with draconian state laws the feds can't arbitrarily override. You seem to be playing "both sides are the same" which is just bullshit assholes tell themselves to feel better about being a piece of shit.