UltraMega

https://www.techspot.com/news/104708-faster-cheaper-ssds-may-coming-samsung-280-layer.html Sounds like a win-win. Good news on prices is rare these days.

One thing I find a bit odd, the ps5 and the pro both have 16GBs of ram, but the pro has about 1.2GBs more ram available for games (some reserved for the OS). If they can have the pro reserve less ram for the OS, why not the base model too?

Both Horizon games are very good games. Definitely something anyone who likes games should check out. God or war was OK. The combat is very stiff and the FOV is narrow with no options to adjust it. I enjoyed it, but I wouldn't recommend it unless it's on sale for dirt cheap. Haven't played Uncharted. I tried Days Gone, but right away I was put off because the driving physics are bad. Seems like driving the motorcycle is a big part of the game, but driving immediately felt very off so I returned the game. Speaking of games thst offer a lot of value, Satisfactory 1.0 just came out. I'll be playing that for a while.

I was sort of expecting the pro to come in at $600, maybe $650 and the base ps4 would get a price cut to $400-$450. That would have felt like a pretty big win.

Also worth noting, the difference in gpu power between the ps4 and ps4 pro was larger than the ps5 and ps5 pro. The ps4 went from targeting 1080p to targeting 4k. Both the ps5 consoles target 4k, one is just better at it. The issue is, without a CPU bump, I don't think this moves the needle on UE5 titles. They're still going to be CPU bound. I don't think the pro will be able to hit 60 fps without fsr frame gen in black myth.

$700 seems too high.

I've never spent more than $800 on a GPU personally, so this doesn't bother me. I just wonder how they plan to compete more effectively in the lower segments. If they can't put real price pressure on Nvidia then I don't see how they will improve their market share.

So there is a second trial starting. Didn't realize there was more than one DOJ case against Google. US government takes Google to court over $31 billion digital ad monopoly, trial starts today https://www.techspot.com/news/104637-doj-antitrust-lawsuit-against-google-digital-ad-monopoly.html

https://techcrunch.com/2024/09/06/google-to-receive-punishment-for-search-monopoly-by-next-august-says-judge/ I hope they are extremely hard on Google. They absolutely deserve to have the book thrown at them as hard as possible.

This is a bit off topic, but speaking about the polarized nature of our media, have you guys heard about this Tenet Media thing? Pretty big news in the context of media being so broken, just to build on what I said earlier before this news came out.

Yea that's true, but I think the previous rumors were based on real things they were testing out. I bet they're still testing it out and if they can get the thermals to work out without being rediculous, they would probably do it.

https://www.guru3d.com/story/nvidia-geforce-rtx-5090-in-final-stages/ I believe it.

Yea this is definitely a sad aspect of our modern media system. Things have gone from click bait as the norm to now rage-baiting. I stumbled onto a video the other day in which a young girl (like too young to have any real intelligence) was talking about the game Concord flopping and being shut down, and she framed it as some kind of win against the "woke mob". She kept saying "the activists" and 'DEI" as if there was some kind of political group that didn't want the game to fail. So annoying. Can't a game or movie come out these days and just be bad on its own merits? But I guess people gotta feed the algorithm, and the algorithm wants hateful politicized drama.

Concord Shutting Down 14 Days After Launch (msn.com) The latest example of a big company chasing a trend without any thought behind it. Supposedly this game was in development for many years, far longer than anyone would expect for a game like this. Had it launched a few years ago while this trend was still trendy, maybe it would have done well, who knows. It's surprising Sony could put out a game that gets so little traction. However, I think just about everyone who heard about this game before it launched expected it to do poorly, but not this poorly.

Thx! I took a few more photos: From Wikipedia: So the first jar, or the one on top, is my gfs jar. She started this whole thing because she has a 20 gallon standard fish tank with pea puffers. The puffers like to eat small snails, and you can typically get pest snails from any fish store for free, which we did. My gf originally started a smaller jar just to raise pest snails as food for her fish, but the jar turned out to be kinda interesting on its own so that evolved into a bigger, better jar, and then I made my own jar. Her jar has pest snails. My jar (bottom jar) does not. There is definitely a difference in how much plant growth goes on between the two and the plants grow a lot faster in the snail jar, though they're not all the same type of plants. Both jars are doing well though. Some other differences, her jar used natural sand that we got for free from a rock yard. When we told them we only needed a small amount of sand, they told us to just take it and didn't charge us. A lot of the plants we also go for free, but not all. Some came from our other fish tanks (we have 3). My jar uses a mix of sand and plain old dirt from my backyard. I had never put dirt into a fish setup before, but it works. Each jar cost about $30 to setup. $15 for the jar, and $15 for the light. The rest was pretty much free, aside from the living creatures. Jar one has about 15 cherry shrimp that we are hoping will breed soon, and a dwarf African frog, and snails. My jar has 6-7 cherry shrimp and 2 Otocinclus algae eater fish and nothing else. We got the shrimp on amazon. First time I have ever ordered live shrimp/fish online. Worked out pretty well. Was about half the price compared to getting them at a store. Pics from out 3 fish tanks. We have a 40 gallon, which is my tank that I've had for a long time (although the actual tank itself is new after the recent leak, but the setup is the same as it was before), a 20 gallon which is my gfs tank with the pea puffers and some other fish, and a ten gallon that we only setup recently. We had a spare 10 gallon tank with a light and filter so we just set it up recently as a very basic tank just to grow extra plants that we can move to our other tanks over time. If you like this sort of thing, this is a great youtube channel: tanks for nothin - YouTube ^This channel came out of nowhere, put out 4 awesome videos and got ~10 million views; with a brand new channel and just 4 videos. They're all like a Planet Earth style episode, but about fish tanks.

Just a thought; I actually prefer to get information from written articles. The problem I find is that articles seldom have the goal of just being informative today, and instead they're padded out and time wasting. YouTube often works better, but only because it's quicker and easier to skip through the filler on a video, and there are extensions that help with that for YouTube. If it's a written article, it just takes more energy to go through it to get to the point. Wish that wasn't the case.

Really looking forward to this game. But with that said, seems odd that hardware RT would need to come later on a UE5 title since it's already baked into the engine. Also seems like a strange choice to add multi-player. Stalker games have always been single player. I definitely wouldn't mind a coop mode though. IMO, this game doesn't really need hardware RT. The original games had very dark stencil shadows that really blended well with the art style to create a dark gritty atmosphere. Software Lumen does a good job of replicating that visual feel since it tends to be darker than hardware Lumen. I wonder if using hardware Lumen would technically add to the fidelity of the lighting but diminish the dark gritty vibe by just making everything a bit brighter. I don't see a big need for games like this to use hardware Lumen over software Lumen when most of the game will be outside environments without reflective surfaces. The indoor environments may benefit, but based on what I've seen from trailers, they really nailed the look of the indoor scenes already.

@Slaughtahouse

Sorry, I just pulled that last comment out of my ass. I don't think this game even supports direct storage. That is a weird issue. If I had to guess I'd assume the game is decompressing information differently when it thinks the game is running on an HDD, and therefore it's slower even though it's not actually an HDD.

It's a known issue/deficiency that Direct Storage is slower on PC because PC does not have a dedicated hardware to deal with the decompression, and instead direct storage takes away from the GPU. It's just how it is, performance differences are usually minimal. I was prepared to argue about the camera more - 4K native 30 FPS cap: I can run this at 60FPS with upscaling, and I would not suggest playing Outlaws at 30 FPS. But maybe there are some cinematic camera aspects that infringe naturally on to the player when cinematics are the focus.

I've been thinking of picking this up. I don't expect it to be amazing, but it looks like a fun time none the less. I think it's about the same kind of camera lensing that Hellblade 2 used for 21:9, and IMO it worked well there. We're getting to the point where graphics are getting good enough to look highly cinematic. The camera effects of a cinematic camera are somewhat necessary to really achieve that cinematic experience.

The update is a preview update right now, so unless you do insider previews, you don't have the update yet.

Revisiting some dark and dirty Lorn: I watched 2001 Space Odyssey for the first time recently. I feel that a lot of Lorn is inspired by the film. ^ This is a remastered trailer, from the original film. This movie is available in modern 4K-Original Film Quality.

In a nutshell, the Walstad Method is a way of setting up an aquarium or fish bowl that requires no input or output, and no filtration. The point is to setup a self sufficient environment where the shrimp/fish/frogs/whatever balance out with the plants in a way that is symbiotic. My gf and I setup two Walstad jars with 2 gallon cookie jars from Walmart. We used some wire to make a cradle for the lights, and found LEDs that fit nicely under the lid of the jars. Just another fish side hobby we enjoy.

It will be interesting to see if this applies to other CPUs as well like Zen 3 or older.