UltraMega

OMG RUSH. Rush 2049 was the best game. The stunt mode was so good. I totally forgot about that, it definitely deserves an OP spot in the retro gaming hierarchy. The stunt mode was so much fun. I played it with my GF via emulator at one point just to make sure she knew how good it was, and we both had a blast.

Any fond memories you could share on those games?

So anyway.. My top 5 retro games/game series other than FF games: 1. Armored core 2 on PS2 2. Unreal Tournament 2003, 2004, UT3 3. Tribes Ariel Assault on PS2 4. Halo 1 5. Battlefield 1942 Armored core 2 intro is a straight up banger: Ten-15 years ago I had a 720p projector. Unreal Tournament 3 was a Ps3 game. On pc the code to do split-screen was included but not usable from any menu. Me and my buds played UT3 4-player split screen on that 720p projector using console commands and it was glorious. Some of the most fun I've had gaming IRL. Tribes 2 was a great game on PC. Tribes: Arieal Assault was a version of Tribes 2 that was optimized for PS2. Me and a buddy of mine who later got hooked on drugs and committed suicide would play Tribes on PS2 online via the PS2 network adapter. We would own servers. It was a ton of fun. Halo 1CE, do I really need to explain? My parents had just got divorced and my mom bought us a good enough desktop PC for me to game on while my dad bought me an Xbox. I guess they both wanted to make sure I had something to do. I booted up Halo on Xbox while my dad watched. He has never had any interest in video games, but Halo 1 was so impressive at the time that he was actually interested. My dad was absolute dog * at playing games tho, so coop was not an option BF1942 was my jam. It kicked off a life long addiction to BF games. My grandma bought it for me for Christmas one year. I made sure it was the only thing I asked her for so she wouldn't get me anything else. She complained about being apprehensive buying me a war game, but she did me a huge favor. It kicked off my PC gaming enthusiam and I probably wouldn't be here on EHW without that. What are your top 5 retro games?

Don't let these old farts rile you up over excessively defining "retro". Some of them were probably already halfway in the grave when pong came out Not everyone needs to have the same definition in their mind, we can all discuss retro gaming here, pc, console, or otherwise. Would chess be a retro game?

Do we even know that they are doing it artificially? I would think it's likely the higher end models have higher end parts that would make certain updates irrelevant to the lower end models. If they are gatekeeping updates and/or restricting features that would otherwise be available then yea that would be lame, but it seems more like the author of this article is trying to create dread over nothing.

This article seems a bit misleading. Where is the pay wall? Sounds like there are just some high end models that will get firmware updates for longer than lower end models, which seems pretty normal to me. A pay wall would mean customers have to pay for updates, which is not the case here. I have never updated the firmware on a monitor. Didn't even know that was a thing. Firmware upgrades on my TV, but that has apps built in. Do people need firmware updates for monitors?

Nvidia hits $2 trillion valuation as AI frenzy grips Wall Street (msn.com) Crazy that Nvidia hit 1 trillion less than a year ago, and have doubled since.

Nvidia is selling massive GPUs and NPUs to data centers. They have products that sell for a quarter million each in the data center market. They are also the leader in a market that is growing rapidly. Nvidia H100: This is the chip behind AI's supersonic stock rally (theedgesingapore.com)

AI solves nuclear fusion puzzle for near-limitless clean energy (msn.com)

https://www.techspot.com/news/101985-nvidia-app-launches-beta-nvidia-new-gpu-control.html Took them long enough.

clearly I am the winner of this thread and you all suck at music.

Update on this: I have decided not to pursue trying to sell PCs on Amazon for now. While it is definitely something I could do, it turned out to be more work than I expected. For example, because the PC I listed has wifi, I had to make sure it was registered/approved by the FCC and it just got to be a lot of work. So while it is doable in the sense that Amazon certainly allows for someone like me to sell PCs on their platform, it doesn't really make sense to do it one PC at a time. If I had 10+ identical PCs I wanted to sell on there, it would make sense then. As for Newegg, there is no way for an individual like me to sell on there. They do not let sole proprietors on their platform, not for any particular reason, I think it just never even occurred to them than any one person would even try so they have no options for it. I still have 2 PCs left. All of the other ones I built and sold were sold for a reasonable profit, and I have not really tried to sell the two I still have. I find that I eventually encounter customers who are interested in buying one, so if I only have one or two at a time I don't really need to try to sell them online. One of the PCs I have left is probably already spoken for, so unless that falls through I really only have one left, and right now that one is loaned out to a customer who needed a working PC to run his nvme drive off of after his laptop failed (waiting on parts), and there is a good chance he decides to keep it and buy it off me after he uses it for a few days. So all and all I would call this whole thing a success. Is it possible to build a PC around the $1000 price range and sell it for a profit from home? Yes, definitely. The hard part is just finding a way to sell them fast enough to make it anything more than a slow side project. I'll be keeping my eye out for a steady way to sell these that doesn't require too much work to make it viable. I think I may actually try getting one or two in a local store eventually and just see if I can strike a deal with the owner of a local business to sell my PCs in their shop. No idea how practical that is, but it seems reasonable to try. This is probably my last real update for this thread. It was a lot of fun, I learned a lot about online selling, gained a deep hatred for Etsy, figured out the logic of having one or two ready to go prebuilt PCs at all times to sell to whoever wants one, and got to build a bunch of nice PCs.

Just wanted to add, I've been trying to find some good info on the technical differences between a GPU and an NPU but it's kind of hard to find a good article or video that explains it in detail. Most of the info I can find about what makes NPUs different from GPUs basically just boils down to "NPUs are much better at AI/Deep learning/Machine Learning tasks". I think a good example would be this: I know from personal experience, you need a GPU about equal or better than a 3080Ti to do Stable Diffusion image generation locally with decent results. That means a big GPU that takes a lot of power and has a huge heatsink. But now there are NPUs that can do the same task even better without the need for a ton of power and heat. There are NPUs that will be able to do things like image generation on a standard smart phone. Another point that comes up a lot is that things that are typically processed in the cloud will be able to be done locally much more often, which will reduce power consumption for data processing in a big way. GPUs and CPUs are good at tasks with clear defined answers. NPUs are good at tasks with no defined answer, where the answer need to be created or generated based on existing data. It's kind of ironic that AI isn't very good at math in the same sense that humans are not very good at math, but it makes sense when you think about it. We are very good at coming up with undefined/creative answers to things but not good at very specific detailed answers. Same is true for NPUs to a certain degree. There was a time when simple 3D graphics were rendered on the CPU, and then GPUs came along and did that much faster. CPUs could still do it, but GPUs can do it better. NPUs are to GPUs as GPUs are to CPUs when it comes to AI/DL/ML tasks. The average user isn't doing anything like that today, but presumably once NPUs are ubiquitous we are all going to be using them for a lot more.

Going forward, pretty much all GPUs and CPUs will have NPUs embedded.

Definitely a bit of overlap between a GPU and an NPU, but not as much as you might think. An NPU can be up to like 10k times better at certain tasks vs a GPU. Just like how a CPU technically can do most of what a GPU can do, just not very well. If AMD GPUs had NPUs or functioned well as NPUs, FSR and DLSS would be of similar quality. It's the NPU that makes the difference.

AMD's NPUs will finally get support from Windows' Task Manager (msn.com) This does not apply to Ryzen 7000 CPUs or 7000 series GPUs because neither have NPUs. I think this just serves to help understand what an NPU is and what the roadmap for their implementation will look like. What is an NPU? | Windows Central Intel unveils Core Ultra, its first chips with NPUs for AI work (engadget.com)

You don't think Nvidia being in their third gen of NPU capable GPUs while AMD has no NPUs in any of their GPUs is something that caught AMD off guard? I'd say it definitely did. I don't think even Nvidia knew how effectively they would be able to leverage the NPUs for gaming at first. I think DLSS 1.0 was Nvidia's attempt to justify the existence of NPUs on their GPUs to customers after the fact, and over time I think DLSS turned out way better than Nvidia expected. Now with DLSS 3 and 3.5, I'm sure AMD feels pretty far behind. I think Sony and Microsoft also feel like they messed up with current gen consoles. If they had put NPUs in the current gen consoles with no other real changes, it would have been a game changer. Hardware wise, they just barely missed the boat on that. Had the consoles launched a year later, they might have had some NPUs. I think everyone selling hardware for graphic that hasn't embedded NPUs yet feels like they're missing out.

Some thoughts on some of this recent video generation stuff after learning a bit more about it: AI being able to generate these kinds of videos has some implications that go beyond just impressive generation capabilities. It means the AI has a pretty good understanding of the real world and 3D space. The same understanding of the real world that allows AI to make pretty realistic looking videos also means it understands things like physics. The ability for the AI to understand physics in this case is an emergent property, meaning it's something the developers didn't set out to do, but happened as a result of training the data to understand the world. Having an AI that understands the world well enough to generate these videos has a lot of implications. There are more and more rumors and conspiracy theories about OpenAI either already having AGI, or something very close. When I think about what kind of other things an AI with such a deep understanding of the world could potentially be capable of, it starts to seem like AGI rumors could have some merit. When I try to take things at face value and assume OpenAI doesn't have any big secrets about AGI, the first thing that comes to mind is the 7 trillion figure. Maybe OpenAI isn't realistically anywhere near AGI right now, but they could easily have a very clear path to get there. Perhaps 7 trillion is what Sam Altman thinks it will take to get to AGI. Or perhaps 7 trillion is what he thinks it will take to make AGI accessible in mass and AGI is actually much closer on a small scale. There is so much information to take in with this stuff. I wonder how a person living through the industrial revolution would have felt if instead of happening over roughly a century, it happened much faster. For example, the steam engine was invented in 1712. It took another 50 years for the design to be improved upon to a point where it could be used for a wide range of applications. Steam engine powered trains were not invented until 1804, so it took almost a century to go from steam engines to the first steam train. I'd imagine if you were living through that ear, the progress would have been almost imperceptible in people's general lives. ChatGPT-1 was created near the end of 2018, and I don't think anyone would argue that the advancements from conception to now have been anything short of 'very impressive' at the very least. We are somewhere between the point in which steam engines were invented and mostly used just to pump water out of mines and the point in which it becomes widespread and thus kicks off an industrial revolution, but it's not going to take centuries, or even close.

OpenAI reveals Sora, a very high quality AI video generator.

Just a little context on the 7 trillion figure; AI is estimated to bring in some 800 billion per year in the short term, and that number is only going to go up so with that in mind, 7 trillion seems a lot more reasonable.

Demo: :CoPilot, please respond to this thread. This took all of a few clicks on my side bar, in which I asked copilot to respond to this thread as me. I hope this serves as an absorbable point. I know it's not as annoying as I am yet, but they're working on it.

It might break the world. Sam Altman has been seeking this investment from all sorts of international invertors. All the biggest tech companies and governments are involved. Hopefully, that level of collaboration will provide a level of safety.

Report: Sam Altman seeking trillions for AI chip fabrication from UAE, others | Ars Technica I've seen these headlines floating around for a few days. It took me a while to wrap my head around it since at face value it almost seems satirical. 7 trillion is 10% of global GDP. It seems hypothetical, but he's serious. The running theory is the only way to justify this kind of investment is if something that will fundamentally shift society is behind it.

I maintain that currently supported consoles should be expmpt from a ten year rule of thumb. Ps4 is just not a retro console by any measure, yet.

I agree with Axipher that it's harder to pin down for PC. I don't think you can just go by when an OS stopped being supported in reference to a game because the hardware may still be supported on the most recent OS, and the OS can just be updated to more recent versions for free. That's why I think it makes more sense to just have a timeframe in mind for PC games. I think 10 years is fine, even though that would awkwardly make GTAV a retro game. Technically though, it is a PS3 game. It would also make Star Citizen PTU a retro game. 15 years is also reasonable though. If you're just talking about PC hardware though, I would say anything that can't run on a currently supported OS is retro, and since windows 10 is still supported that means you would have to go back pretty far for retro PC hardware. On the other hard, I would also gladly say something like a Q6600 is retro now, and that can run windows 10, so there is a bit of a grey area.