It’s not true, I saw a different meme on it the other day and looked it up. This came about because some company made an advertisement at Salzburg Airport that looked kind of like a help desk tag for someone that mistakingly flew to Austria instead.

The giveaway here is that it’s Salzburg, not Vienna. International flyers into Austria are almost universally going to end up in Vienna by default. Vienna’s airport sees ~20x the annual passenger count.

Cities Skylines sees a fairly decent improvement going to the 3D cache chips from AMD (17% speedup here for the 5800x3D). Whats your ability to increase the budget to go for a 7800X3D look like? If this is a genre of game you like and you want to hold off as long as possible between upgrades, it might be worth springing the extra. The difference the 3D cache provides in some games is rather extraordinary. City builders, automation, and similar games tend to benefit the most. AAA games tend to benefit the least (some with effectively no gain).

A 7600X should be more than capable of handling the game though. So it’s not a question of need but if it’s worth it to you.

You do not want 4800 CL40 RAM though, that’s too slow. I’d strongly recommend going for 32GB of RAM as well; 16GB can be gobbled up quickly, especially if you want to use mods in Cities Skylines.

Going up even to DDR5-6000 is not much of a price increase. I’d suggest 6000 and something in the range of CL36-CL40. There’s a lot of 32GB kits in those specs in the ~$90 range. I would not build a gaming system today with 16GB of RAM.

I think the point here is that this feature would presumably allow you to just download the map at will. Regardless of what it thinks about reception at either end of your destination.

As I understand it, most disc copies of games today aren’t viable in the first place. Either all of the game data is not on the disc and some needs to be downloaded anyway, or the game copy on the disc is in such a shit state that you wouldn’t want to play that specific copy.

Discs don’t really protect us in the sense of ownership. It’s still reliant on the same backend to enable it in most practical senses.

The future of renewable energy is very promising. It’s easy to miss how fast it can turn around when growth it grows so much year-to-year but starts at a small place. Keep this kind of growth up and the grid will be clean a lot faster than seems possible.

Beyond solar I’m also very hopeful about offshore wind efforts in the US.

We still live in the same society as others. People often adopt the cultures and ideologies of where they end up, or at least move closer to it than they were before. If reddit shifts its userbase to the right — even if the net effect is from “very very left” to “very left” — it will impact the lives of all of us that live in societies with large numbers of people using that site, as it’ll filter down into our politics. Even if we don’t interact with them.

For a long time, the “default” ideology of the internet was on the left. As internet usage has become dominated by a handful of sites owned by megacorporations, there has been a not at all subtle effort to nurture a conservative ideology on those sites. Stuff like reddit holding off on banning the Trump sub for however long or twitter refusing to implement their hate speech detection because it correlated too strongly with conservative politicians (not to mention what Musk has done there). I don’t think this is an accident.

Even for the third party shipper, it’s still Amazon’s choice to contract out or permit shipping via that company.

The actual problem with these reviews is that the review is meant to tell us if the product is good, not the seller. A review of Amazon on the product page for… I don’t know, an electric toothbrush… on Amazon’s storefront doesn’t help me decide if that specific model of electric toothbrush is worth buying.

It’s especially egregious with high end GPUs. Anyone paying >$500 for a GPU is someone that wants to enable ray tracing, let alone at a $1000. I don’t get what AMD is thinking at these price points.

FSR being an open feature is great in many ways but long-term its hardware agnostic approach is harming AMD. They need hardware accelerated upscaling like Nvidia and even Intel. Give it some stupid name similar name (Enhanced FSR or whatever) and make it use the same software hooks so that both versions can run off the same game functions (similar to what Intel did with XeSS).

I agree, it’s just strange from a business perspective too. Obviously the people in charge of AMD feel that this is the correct course of action, but they’ve been losing ground for years and years in the GPU space. At least as an outside observer this approach is not serving them well for GPU. Pricing more aggressively today will hurt their margins temporarily but with such a mindshare dominated market they need to start to grow their marketshare early. They need people to use their shit and realize it’s fine. They did it with CPUs…

GPU prices being affordable is definitely not a priority of AMD’s. They price everything to be barely competitive with the Nvidia equivalent. 10-15% cheaper for comparable raster performance but far worse RT performance and no DLSS.

Which is odd because back when AMD was in a similar performance deficit on the CPU front (Zen 1, Zen+, and Zen 2), AMD had absolutely no qualms or (public) reservations about pricing their CPUs where they needed to be. They were the value kings on that front, which is exactly what they needed to be at the time. They need that with GPUs and just refuse to go there. They follow Nvidia’s pricing lead.

You can look at it too for looking at what causes people to be conservative.

Conservatism at its core psychological roots is fear of change. In a vacuum, people who are well served by the status quo are the ones least likely to want change. The historical adage of people becoming more conservative as they age was basically a result of that: when you’re young you don’t have much to lose from change. As you age you gain the opportunity to buy a house, to get married, to have kids, to get promoted at work and see your income go up significantly, to develop some meaningful job security. And so on. Thus, as people age they gained things, status, accomplishments, all the various life goals being accomplished. Even if change would probably make things better for them, they didn’t want to risk it. Things were OK.

The reason we see that adage breakdown is because we’ve seen the core causes breakdown too. Buying a home five years ago was a struggle compared to how it was historically. Buying a home today costs so much that it makes buying a home five years ago look trivial. Many couples are now intentionally delaying or forgoing becoming parents because children cost so much: just giving birth can cost tens of thousands of dollars, and that’s just to get them to day 1 of existence. Education costs keep going up. Job security is down. Wage increases are seen as something that even the “professional class” has to fight for, requiring a job hop to get a raise instead of getting one as par for the course from staying at an employer.

In light of that breakdown… far fewer people are afraid of the risk of change. The 30-something of today has a lot less at risk from change. Even much of the lower half of the upper middle class of today is far more able to stomach the risk of change.

It’s really not a surprise at all.

Not surprising.

Bioware has spent over a decade chasing mass appeal for their games, to the detriment of what they’re good at. They made that work as they shifted from 2D to 3D to action-3D. That stopped working as they went too far, abandoning their core strengths. Bioware hasn’t had an unmitigated success since… ME2 in 2010? That’s 13 years of them floundering, with the very mitigated successes of ME3 and DA:I early on in that.

That kind of floundering is going to filter down to everyone working there. It’s hard to bounce back from that. They know Dreadwolf needs to hit it out of the park if they hope to continue on. Easy situation to end up in development hell with delay after delay…

Almost certainly still stuck with their fork of gamebryo. On the bright side, the footage I’ve seen of Starfield suggests that they’ve actually gotten around to implementing a better animation system.

I’m not sure on the specifics of how animations work at the engine level (I know there’s stuff about animation rigs, but not much beyond that) but all their games up until now have had the same system of character animations and it consistently looked ancient. Straight from the late 90s levels.

Republicans control the house and the senate is still subject to the filibuster and likely will remain that way until the next time there is 52+ dem senators + dem house + dem president simultaneously.

Consoles still have physical storage as an option, at least partially.

For PC: the vast majority of PCs don’t have a blu ray drive. So that’s a $50-100 expense. Or a 1 TB SSD is under $100. Going with physical media makes no sense here, even ignoring the other glaring problems, like game updates and loading times.

Cost of production of a blu ray disc will be cheap. Packaging and shipping it slightly less cheap. Dealing with a retail store exceptionally less cheap. A digital copy sold will see >95% of revenue kept (first party sales — some amount lost to transaction fees), or ~70% kept (sold on third party digital platforms). A physical sale will see closer to 50%. It’s a huge difference.

I wouldn’t be surprised by that at all either. Which is why I recommended waiting!

Bethesda makes well liked games, yes. But they have a track record of their games coming out as complete buggy messes that need 6-12 months to be in a decent state.

Could be in this case that Microsoft has realized how important this game is to their console efforts and the delays have been an effort to avoid a repeat of Bethesda’s typical. I wouldn’t be too surprised. I’d recommend being wary until the game is out. Waiting won’t hurt anyone.

I’m not convinced. I’m also in the habit of not saying “never” all that often, so I won’t do so here.

That caveat out of the way, I feel this is just non-expert observations of superficial similarities. People that follow this stuff need things to speculate about, to get excited or despondent (or, paradoxically, both) over.

Unless I’m missing something, Apple’s largest acquisition to date was $3b for Beats. That was a purchase that played directly into their core business market: consumer electronics. It tied directly into their history and consumer strength with music and audio. If the purchase went through and ended up being a bad decision, it posed no meaningful danger to Apple’s brand or business.

Disney has none of that. They also have a market cap of ~$160b. Apple would need to pay a large premium to do an acquisition. This would cost them well over $200b, maybe even encroaching on $250b. That’s a high single digit percentage of Apple’s total value, not quite making it to 10%. The risk and the expense would be enormous for them. Not even touching on the unavoidable legal hurdles that they would have to clear, which adds more expense. And to tie it all together, Disney has no serious integration with Apple’s core businesses. Disney is a video, toy, and theme park company, with 50% more employees than Apple.

Not going to say never, but this just doesn’t add up as anything that makes any sense.

I’m sure the professional game developers with decades of experience will be so thankful to hear that. You should inform them right away of how “basic” the fix to their problem really is. I’m sure it’ll be news to them and work right away.

The problem is almost certainly RAM, not computational horsepower. XSS has nearly identical CPU capability to the XSX, so that won’t be the issue. It has a much weaker GPU, but resolutions and effects can be lowered. Where the XSS cannot linearly scale from the XSX is with RAM requirements: it has much less RAM, for anything that is not predominantly using that RAM for VRAM purposes, that cannot be scaled down trivially.

That the issue is showing up with split screen is a strong auger towards the issue being RAM. For split screen the game needs to keep two world-states in memory to handle the characters not being in the exact same place. With enough work they can probably optimize the RAM usage enough to make that work, which is why they still intend to release on XSS/XSX. But they also don’t know when, because that’s a lot of work and not certain.