UltraMega

It's a good idea. Anyone who has a PC with only one m.2 slot who wants to add a drive and is thinking about a GPU upgrade in the mid-range would surely be interested in this.

Does sound like a board issue. You check the warranty?

After this convo I figured I'd try photomode in Wildlands since I never have before.

I think Wildlands is a lot like Far Cry, but bigger, better, and more tactical. If you like Far Cry but think something a little more serious and grounded in tactics vs pure run and gun would be fun, then you will like Wildlands. It's not too serious, definitely not ARMA or anything, but it's just serious enough to make the tactics feel engaging and rewarding. In my first playthrough on a normal difficulty, I never really used flash bangs or anything like that. On the harder playthroughs, they became almost mandatory. It's also a solid game if you like stealth. It's kind of a spiritual successor to splinter cell in a lot of ways. Not only is Sam Fisher in the game, but if you choose to play missions at night, you can be as stealthy as you want, shoot out all the lights and basically play it as if it were a splinter cell game. Side note, Wildlands and Far Cry 5 are connected. In Wildlands, the mission you do with Sam Fisher involves a "broken arrow" which is a code phrase for a missing nuke. The nuke that goes off at the end of FC5 is that same broken arrow. The Division 2 also makes references to these events, and you can find notes left by Sam Fisher.

Thanks but I think I'm still burned out on AC after Odyssey. I liked Odyssey, but it was a very long game and got really repetitive toward the end. Mirage looks like a step in the right direction, but still too similar to Odyssey. I'm sure someone else here would enjoy it more than I would. If you ever have any interest in Wildlands, it goes on sale for cheap pretty often. I'd say it's the best Ubisoft game I have played. Still has its issues, the driving physics are not great but the open world tactical shooting is second to none. Don't play breakpoint tho, that game is pure trash. I've beat Wildlands twice, and I've been slowly doing a third play through with the hardest difficulty and the hud/spotting elements turned off, and AI teammates turned off as well.

Hmm, maybe they did take a step back after all, which really wouldn't be surprising considering how demanding Wildlands still is today. None of these are photomode. Ubi's Anvil engine has improved, but not by a lot since 2017 at least not in terms of visuals but I think that shows that it was just really good back in 2017. They did definitely improve the sky/clouds but not much else seems to be any different from a pure visual tech level. Infact I'm not sure Ubisoft has released a game visually on par with Wildlands since. Origins and Odyssey definitely had a major visual downgrade compared to Wildlands even though they all use Anvil. Breakpoint is a little bit of an upgrade in some ways, downgrade in others. The Division 1/2 is hard to judge because the setting is so different, and they use Snowdrop. Far Cry 5/6 use Dunia and is definitely not on par visually. AC Mirage does look pretty close though. Maybe the lighting quality is on par and it's just harder to tell since everything is so yellow due to the setting. Either way, there has been an interesting lack of progression since wildlands came out in 2017. Since then 4K became the standard, that may have forced them to scale some things back to hit higher resolutions. Love em or hate em, Ubisoft's tech has been pretty solid for a long time. Their tech sort of all traces back to the original CryEngine, which makes it an interesting look at what CryEngine was capable of becoming in the hands of a bigger and more experiences developer than Crytek was, or ever became. At the same time it feels like they don't often use their tech to the fullest, maybe out of a reluctance to release games that are overly demanding and end up being overly homogenized between PC and console versions.

Kinda interesting seeing these. When I see videos of this game, it makes me think Ubisoft has taken a step back with their lighting model since Ghost Recon Wildlands, which I played a lot of, but looking at these screenshots here it seems to be at least on par. Wildlands was a very demanding game at the time, one could argue it was even too demanding for the hardware at the time. Still pretty demanding today. The lighting in that game always really impressed me. I almost seemed like it was using SVOGI.

Frame pacing issues confirmed.

I don't care if Nvidia releases a bunch of variants, but they really need to get their naming in order. It feels like they are hoping some customers will fall for a bait and switch and never realize they bought something worse than the name may suggest. Beyond their crappy naming, I guess this really just means they still have some low tier 3000 series GPUs they need to get rid of.

Whoops. How embarrassing. It is super lame that they abandon Unreal Tournament. I wonder if the kids playing fortnite these days even know where the Unreal part of Unreal. Engine even comes from.

Now that I've beat the game, it's interesting to visit the sites of Sol.

Thanks Pio. I'm definitely not trying to offend anyone here. Tim Sweeny already divested from his partnership with Meta over Oculus, so this news shouldn't be that surprising. I think Sweeny's statements are also sort of incomplete. I appreciate his leadership in taking blame for this upon himself as his own miscalculation, but I've got to imagine Covid and global inflation are a big part of it too, and no one could have predicted that. More than that, I think Sweeney really under-estimated Valve's willingness to reassess it's fees for game devs/publishers. Ever since Steam changed it's fee structure, the arguments over steam vs epic and how devs get paid has gone completely silent. Epic also has a big Chinese investment and.. well.. that's an increasingly awkward situation to be in. I'm sure all of the people being laid-off are great people, and I wish the best for them. Epic's misstep in no way reflects on those individuals. The bottom line here is that this paints an interesting picture for Epic's future. Where will they go from here? Will they keep pushing the Epic Store or is this the beginning of the end in that front?

Just a note, I was getting bad frame pacing issues on the preview driver in normal gameplay without any of the new features enabled. Had to use DDU to completely remove the driver and clean install the latest stable driver to resolve it. I'd imagine these pacing issues probably also dampened the FSR3/AFMF experience.

I'm not badmouthing anyone. I think the metaverse is a massively over-hyped idea compared to the money that's been invested in it, and the tiny user base of the metaverse itself and inability to gain any traction is tangible evidence of that sentiment. The profitability of a business has nothing to do with it being OK or not to criticize them, but if it did then I would be well justified to criticize Epic here.

https://www.gamespot.com/articles/epic-games-cuts-almost-900-jobs-in-video-game-industrys-latest-mass-layoff/1100-6518049/ You can't read an article about a company failing to meet its financial goals and mentioning the Metaverse as part of their business plan and not roll your eyes. It also seems short sided to think Fortnite would stay popular for so long given how competitive the gaming industry is, and when its core audience has no income. Epic did do one thing though, they got Valve to lower their prices for devs/publishers and a lot of the ones that had left Steam like EA and Ubisoft came back as a result. Thanks Epic for making Steam even better.

CP2077 doesn't support it, but that doesn't mean you can't try it anyway. It will still work as in the effect is enabled, but that doesn't mean it works well. AFMF is a neat but sort of impractical trick. FSR3 is very different, and vastly better.

Did you try Forspoken? It has a free demo on steam, and the demo was also updated to support FSR3. Works way different and better Than AFMF. I dusted off my 1440p 144hz monitor and tried AFMF is starfield as well, and there it was actually OK. I probably wouldn't use it normally, but it was decent. If you wanna see how this is really supposed to look tho, gotta download the Forspoken demo.

I tried it in CP2077 and it does work. It seems like if the FPS is too low or the screen moves around too quickly it basically stops working. Not a surprise since frame gen isn't really for low FPS scenarios. Using path tracing and FSR ultra performance mode + AFMF, FPS can get up to 60 but there is so much post rendering stuff going on that it looks like an acid trip.

I'm sure what the difference is, there must be some advantage to doing it at the game level vs the driver level, but no idea of the technical aspects. I'd imagine it just has less artifacts when optimized for the game speficially. The fact that AMD is making this avaliable at the driver level is huge. A rare win for AMD over Nvidia. It's possible to try the AFMF right now via AMD Software: Adrenalin Edition Preview Driver for AMD Fluid Motion Frames Release Notes | AMD

AMD FSR 3 Update: Forspoken and Immortals of Aveum to Receive Frame Generation Technology Today WWW.GURU3D.COM AMD's announcement indicates that the first FSR 3 game updates will be deployed on Friday for Aveum and... Interesting choice to do a surprise launch like this. Excited to see how effective it is! Edit: I tried it in Forspoken (free demo on Steam). It definitely works. I did it on my 60hz screen with vsync unlocked, so not an ideal, but otherwise it worked exactly as expected. Basically doubled the FPS. Felt about the same as any other game would with vsync off. I did notice some small visual artifacts, but they looked similar to what I've seen in videos of DLSS 3 artifacts. All and all, well worth the trade off between FPS and visual quality.

I don't think B550 boards have any thermal issues like X470 did, generally speaking.

This white case is way bigger than I expected...

Be sure to run disk check if your disks show up from the new OS environment.

That is an interesting question that I'm not sure there is a consistent answer to. Usually what I do in this situation is unplug all the drives and then install windows to a spare ssd that I keep laying around for this purpose. From there, if windows installs and works normally on the spare ssd, I would plug the other drives back in, boot off the spare ssd, and inspect the drives from the new windows installation. SSDs are cheap now, if you don't have a spare just grab a $30 500GB ssd off Amazon and use that, if you don't want to be forced to reformat right away.

$50 per person for 30 minutes, damn. Even if there was one near-by, I wouldn't pay that much. That's crazy.