UltraMega

Just saw a 1TB NVME 3500MB/s PCIe4 drive for $35 on newegg. And prices are expected to drop more over the coming months.

I could see them basically taking the OneDrive/365 approach and greatly expanding on it to include more features that would usually only be offered in the local OS. I could imagine being able to sign-in to your Microsoft account and access some kind of virtual PC from anywhere that allows you to sign in. I don't see them taking anything away from the local OS though, only adding more options. I think they are well aware the market would respond badly to an OS that was gimped for the sake of cloud functionality.

You might be right, but just to be nitpicky; 2077 can leverage a lot of threads, but it's still designed to run on PS4. I don't think it's any more or less relevant that the other games on the list; a lot more GPU heavy but pretty standard on the CPU load. I want to see how games that just wouldn't run smoothly on 8 threads do with more threads vs more cache if/when there ever are any. Even if more cache wins out, I suspect the gap will close somewhat.

NVIDIA RTX 4060 Ti 16GB Set to Release on July 18th, AIB-Exclusive Model (guru3d.com)

Windows 12 rumored to arrive in fall 2024 with a floating taskbar and a focus on AI WWW.TECHSPOT.COM We've heard plenty of rumors about Windows 12 this year. While Microsoft has yet to officially confirm it is in the works, there have been several hints... I'd imagine Windows 12 will still work the same way Windows does now, just with the addition of more cloud and AI stuff but I don't see Microsoft forcing anyone to use cloud based options if they don't want to.

Awesome, if only this could happen in the US where I live but it's probably more likely that some lobbyists would push through some new laws protecting loot boxes here. IMO, any time loot boxes can in anyway at all be bought or sold for real money, and/or if they offer a competitive advantage in a multiplayer game at all, that makes it a form of gambling and should thus be regulated similarly.

Interesting numbers. Though they didn't have a 5800x in their testing, the numbers make it pretty clear that this CPU would beat a 5800x most of the time which is interesting because it shows a clear favor for more cache over more cores. Given that consoles are 16 threads and don't have a lot of cache, I'd expect there to be more games that would favor more threads more of the time and perhaps there is actually some room to be critical of Gamers Nexus's typical stack of benchmarks. Most of these games are a bit old now, and I don't think a single game in their tests is a current gen game, meaning not designed to run on a PS4. Every game they've tested with the exception of Counter Strike and Stellaris are games that run on PS4. I suspect if they tested more games that were not designed to run on older machines the overall results would look a bit different. To be fair though, there are very few games still today that are designed only for current gen hardware. Because of the limited testing stack used, I think all that can be said for sure based on the gamers nexus video is that CPUs with more cache do better for older games that don't demand 16 threads than a 16 thread CPU does.

I got the game for free with my GPU, otherwise I would have waited for a sale too for sure. There are a lot of games with budgets like that for sure, but The Last of Us is a linear single player game that definitely does not reinvent the wheel at all, but rather focuses on fine detail and cinematic quality. The budget isn't going towards building some new tech or a big open world, it's aimed squarely at making the game feel very movie-like and it does a great job of that. The gameplay reminds me of games like A Plagues Tale or Hitman or any game where you spend a lot of time behind cover due to limited combat options, but it's in a completely different league when it comes to story-telling. My overall thoughts on the game are a little mixed so far. On one hand, because it does absolutely nothing new gameplay wise and is just a very standard stealth-action game, it can feel a little boring and basic at times. On the other hand, it's so detailed and cinematic that it not only makes up for the basic gameplay but makes it more understandable in the sense that rather than trying to do anything unique, the game takes well established gameplay loops and perfects them. Like, yes it's a basic stealth-action game and there are many like it, but it's probably the best game of its kind.

Yea, no one is saying you can't get one for a normal price but the fact that the price ranges from ~$1000-~$1700 for different 4080 models is pretty whack.

GF is gone visiting family for a while. Bass turned up to 11.

I started playing The Last Of Us on PC. I've never played it before, so it's all new to me. Gameplay is pretty basic but the way the action plays out is very visceral. Enemies are usually pretty easy to deal with, but still very menacing just because of the way they look and sound. The subtle way the game makes you care about the girl is interesting too; for a while she just seems like a tag along that doesn't add anything to the game, then at one point The main character and her get jumped by some thugs, and they are trying to take the girl, presumably to rape and kill her. From then on in the game, every time I had the option to use stealth or brute force, I made sure to use force just to kill as many baddies as possible. After that she starts helping and it kinda turns into a co-op single player game. Moves the goal post forward for blurring the line between cinematic games and cinema. Makes sense too, with the recent leaks from the Xbox/FTC case we now know that Sony is spending upwards of 200 million on games like this which puts it right there in high budget movie territory. Runs well on my PC. Playing at max minus a few shadow settings turned down from ultra to high, 4K with FSR2 set to quality. I do get dips below 60 but that seems to have to do with how the game loads in the map and is currently unavoidable, but it only goes down to like 55fps at the lowest so not a huge deal. Mostly a solid 60.

Nvidia didn't raise the prices, the manufacturers did; Asus, Zotac, etc.

There are a lot of 4080s at $1200, the cheapest one on Newegg is $1140, but for some reason there are also a bunch that are ~$1500 and there seems to be no obvious reason why. Maybe they just figure anyone who buys a 4080 is not a smart buyer so might as well charge more.

Using a detector the size of a galaxy, astronomers detect gravitational waves from supermassive black hole pairs PHYS.ORG When black holes and other enormously massive, dense objects whirl around one another, they send out ripples in space... About 100 years ago, Einstein theorized about the existence of gravitational waves. A few years back physicists detected gravitational waves for the first time ever with a huge underground laser called LIGO, but that detector can only detect very high frequency waves which are rare. To detect normal waves, a massive detector is needed. Similar to how scientists used telescopes from around the world to create an earth sized array capable of imaging black holes, they have used similar methods here by using pulsars to create a giant gravitational wave detector. Now it will be possible to map the universe in a whole new way, using gravitational waves. This is a huge breakthrough for astrophysics.

I was watching an episode of Law and Order: SVU season 1 the other day which is like 20+ years old now. There is a character in that show named Munch who is a total conspiracy enthusiast. In an episode I saw recently, Munch is complaining about laptops and says something like: "What's with all these laptops?! Laptops, laptops everywhere! There's a laptop conspiracy to get us to all use laptops!" That's how people who think AI is overhyped right now sound to me. AI is nothing short of a planet changing technology that we are at the very beginning of. On a purely financial level, financial experts believe AI will increase the global GDP by 14% over the next 7 years. If that turns out to be even half true, Nvidia is undervalued right now, as the strongest leader in this space and one of only three potentially serious players. Sources: Impact of AI on US GDP 2030 | Statista AI and the Economy: Innovation Policy and the Economy: Vol 19 (uchicago.edu) Modeling the global economic impact of AI | McKinsey

AMD Ryzen 5 5600X3D launching exclusively at Micro Center on July 7th for $229 | Windows Central WWW.WINDOWSCENTRAL.COM You can only get AMD'S Ryzen 5 5600X3D at Micro Center. Budget king?

ASUS Dual GeForce RTX 4060 OC review - Final words and conclusion (guru3d.com) 25% cheaper than the 4060Ti and 25% slower. Equally disappointing.

Nice, good job. Drivers are so stable these days, it hardly ever occurs to me to try older ones anymore.

Did you try another GPU or PSU? Did you try one ram stick at a time? Bios update?

Probably not an ssd tbh but if you can test two different drives without having more than one plugged in at a time you can definitively rule that out. What else have you tried?

Are you able to try a different ssd?

IDK what the SSD was doing exactly, as far as I know there were no other obvious symptoms. Maybe it had a bad sector that its own self checking didn't detect. Did you try running prime95 and Furmark at the same time? Does the GPU stay at 100% usage?

I've got my current sig rig, a 3700X PC, and a 2500K PC. If I can add anything, point me in the right direction.

YouTube wants to bring online gaming to its video platform WWW.TECHSPOT.COM Stadia is dead, but cloud gaming lives on. Google closed its belated gaming service five months ago, but the company is seemingly still willing to bet on... In one sense, this would make a lot of sense, a lot more than trying to get devs to port to Linux just for a tiny streaming service. This sounds like what Google wanted to do conceptually from the beginning, but for some reason they pivoted to making their own Linux consoles a separate service instead (Stadia). Microsoft was smart to tie their streaming service to game pass as an ad-on instead of making it the main feature because there just isn't enough interest in game streaming right now to easily justify making it anything more than an ad-on. Now it seems like Google is wising up and is going to try the same strategy by adding the option to YouTube. YouTube obviously has a much wider reach that Xbox or PlayStation, so if they manage to make this work effectively, they have a really good shot at creating a strong foothold in the market... but this is Google so feels highly likely that they will mess this up. Time will tell.

Microsoft claims to have achieved first milestone in creating a reliable and practical quantum computer PHYS.ORG A team of researchers at Microsoft Quantum has reportedly achieved a first milestone toward creating a reliable... I like to think of myself as pretty scientifically literate but this stuff might as well be in another language. Still neat tho.