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Now is a terrible time for building a PC, but you should absolutely be looking for good deals on used, non-Windows 11 compatible PCs if you’re even remotely technical.
I’ve found 2 different pre-build systems with a chunk of DDR4 and 3080s on the various local marketplaces for cheap (given current RAM/GPU prices).
Windows 11 may not run on them, but with a USB stick, a Bazzite ISO and a little bit of your time you can have a great mid-range PC who’s interface is exactly the same as the upcoming Steam Machine (i.e. it boots up and launches Steam in Big Picture Mode, you never see anything that looks like Linux)
Ya same, decided to stay on AM4 instead of swapping to AM5 (it’ll be cheaper next year, I naively thought) so I grabbed the best AM4 processor and upgraded my RAM to 64GB, tossed in a few more TB of SSDs and planned on a motherboard upgrade next year.
Now I’ll probably buy a side-grade (Steam Frame or maybe Deck) instead of trying to buy into the current generation hardware.
Luckily my job involves local AI (primarily training techs, I’m not a social media propagandist) so the business may find a business need for a graphics card soon. It won’t be mine, but we can hang out off-duty.
The only other headset I tried was the Quest 2, it worked with PCVR via a USB-C connection and has an onboard computer so it can be used completely untethered (at the time you were limited to the Quest2 apps in the Meta store, there was no wireless PCVR but there may be now).
It uses inside out tracking, so you don’t need any special equipment in order to use it. The downside is that it couldn’t track your hands behind your back (was never a problem on anything I played) and sometimes the controller tracking would misjudge the location a tiny bit. None of these were every a problem in any game, the deviation was very slight and fixed itself in under a second usually.
The screen is 120hz, and the resolution is actually higher than the Index, slightly. I could notice the difference in the screen door effect. Better brightness and color made the visual quality better than the Index and the lens setup seemed to mitigate the glow effect much better.
It looks like ebay has the top end 256GB model for under $200. Just make sure you get 1. The ability to send power over the USB-C, like via a powered dock, otherwise the headset runs on battery while plugged into USB and I have little tube batteries and 2 coiled USB-C cables to keep the controllers powered for longer than I could possibly use them (around 30 hours total at full charge), the standard battery lasts around 2 hours (probably less if it is used). I’m not sure that the battery can be replaced but any battery is replaceable if you don’t mind using a soldering gun.
Oh man, you’re going to get to experience it in an even better format. Index is great, 144hz looks amazing and the tracking is perfect. But the resolution is low so you get the ‘screen door effect’ and because of the lens configuration you’re getting first and second order reflections which can cause bright objects to have a glow around them and you don’t have HDR.
There are several applications that let you interact with the computer as if you had monitors. You can make the monitors are as large or small as you want them and placed where you choose. You can also just bind them to your head so they’re always in a fixed position in front of your face. I use the virtual desktop because it’s often less hassle than removing the headset and walking to my desktop. Eventually we’ll have displays with a higher DPI than you can perceive and then you could have your house wallpapered in virtual monitors if you wanted.
Another neat VR-specific thing is an overlay. Much like how Steam has an overlay where you can press a button in any game and access Steam, there are applications that perform a similar task in VR (you designate your overlay application in the Steam VR settings). I’ve been using XSOverlay, you can think of it like a holographic wristwatch/smartphone. There are good examples on YT if you’d like to see it.
In any game, when you have the overlay enabled, if you turn your arm an (adjustable) amount like looking at your watch, the overlay will appear. You can add all kinds of things to the overlay, including capturing specific applications. I often have Signal on my overlay so if I get a message I don’t need my phone or to pause the game and switch to a virtual desktop, I just look at my wrist and a Signal window is attached to it which I can interact with by pointing and clicking with the other controller. I use a SteamInput chord (holding multiple buttons) to activate a speech-to-text application, but you can also use a standard virtual keyboard for input.
It was something that I didn’t even know existed for several months, but it’s a huge QOL upgrade and it only costs $10.
Stephenson and Gibson are great, I’ve read everything that Stephenson has written and I’m only a few books from finishing Gibson. We’re not quite at Diamond Age levels of tech, but I can see the parallels.
It’s quite the experience, I started with the Index.
Unless Valve releases a new game with the frame I’d recommend trying Half Life: Alyx first, it’s a very AAA-like experience and does a great job at demonstrating all of the capabilities of VR on top of being beautiful.
Once you’ve tried that Beat Sabre is a blast (and quite a bit of exercise). Superhot is probably the best selling VR game, you can live out your Keanu Reeves fantasy of being both John Wick and Neo. The art style ensures that you will have super smooth framerate.
VTOL VR is a flight-sim and a masterful example of creating a game using VR-only controls. It’s for you if you like the idea of a game like DCS but don’t want to spend 80 hours studying a textbook before you can take off (not to mention weapon systems and tactics) and don’t want to spend a bunch of money on specialized control hardware. It is developed by one guy but allows custom maps so the community has created some interesting missions. There’s even 2-seat aircraft (like an attack helicopter, training aircraft and electronics warfare plane).
Iron Rebellion looks like a promising team-based mech game using a similar VR-only control philosophy. It’s in active development and the developers are very responsive to the community (it helps that the VR gaming community is small). It’s hard to tell if it is going to be more Mechwarrior-like or more like Armored Core (though it is leaning towards the former)
Blade and Sorcery and Boneworks/Bonelab are physics playgrounds. Blade and Sorcery is more like a fantasy ARPG while Bonelabs is more sci-fi-esq. Bone* has mod support so there is a lot of user created content (mostly crap, but there are some gems)
VR Chat is pretty self-explanatory. It’s not my thing but it is popular in some demographics.
A Fisherman’s Tale is essentially an escape room that would be impossible to create without VR.
habie147 is a pretty popular creator that focuses on VR, I usually check his videos out before I try a game.
spoiler
There’s also VR porn, if you see your Steam friends playing ‘DeoVR Video Player’ they’re probably looking at sexlikereal porn.
They had too many suits directing the developers to make the game something it wasn’t designed to be.
It was originally going to be like Rust or Ark but with more traditional RPG-style progression. Then they were told to make it a match-based game (like the instanced PvP mode with the bases, I forget the name) and then around 6 months before the scheduled release date they were directed to shift to an MMO.
This destroys all of the balancing of crafting/combat/death/etc and requires a huge amount of PvE content creation and iteration.
There were things that were good about the game. Open world small group PvP was fun, the ability to crouch/go prone to stealth added a fun strategic layer.
I quit while farming for the top tier endgame armor (before they added the item level system) and I had managed to get a high jewelcrafting level so I only had about 3 other people who could even compete on prices… then the duping glitch was discovered and the devs did absolutely nothing about it so the armor that I’d spent around a hundred hours farming was given out to every member of the opposing factions and then the window dragging invulnerability was discovered (so you could stand on capture points and be immune to damage while still capturing the point) and not fixed for weeks and weeks.
By the end the groups that owned everything were the ones that exploited heavily, so I quit.
That isn’t the conspiracy that I mean.
When I wrote my comment, there were about 10 other comments, half of whom were saying things like ‘This is because they’re all getting together to jack up the price and hoarding stock’ complete conspiracy nonsense.
So I was posting to show that: “No, the price increase is expected based on normal market forces. There is no evidence of a conspiracy.”
I believe you’re attributing views to me that I didn’t state.
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I never claimed the price increase itself was “social-media vibes.” My sentence referred to the belief that prices are out-running supply and demand. That belief needs data, not just anecdotal posts.
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I also never said the price rises “weren’t true.” I said the cause is straightforward demand-pull from AI, not conspiracy or hoarding. Prices can rise faster than CPI when demand shifts quickly and supply is inelastic; that’s consistent with the chart I posted.
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My first comment was about the aggregate RAM market, not Samsung specifically. The sentence “Memory isn’t expensive because Samsung is greedy …” was meant to rebut all of the conspiratorial comments in the thread, not to build a micro-level model of Samsung’s pricing power. You’re right that an oligopoly can amplify price moves, but that point needs margin data to separate strategic withholding from pure demand-pull. You haven’t provided that data.
If you have evidence that Samsung’s margins have expanded faster than the industry cost curve, I’d like to see it. Those numbers would tell us if the spike is market-clearing or profiteering.
And next time, lead with the data you did find instead of the name-calling; it lands better and actually backs the claim you’re making.
Ok, so who is arguing against that? Certainly not me.
Yes, every company on Earth would charge you $182737854 billion dollars for their product if they could and ever seller on earth would like to buy the product for $0. The market price is the price that both of these two opposing positions agree is fair.
You said:
Memory is high because there is nothing preventing them from charging anything they want above and beyond the cost of manufacture.
It is a requirement of every successful manufacturing business that has ever existed has to charge a price that is above the cost of manufacture. The term for this in academia is profit. If a company does not charge a price above and beyond the cost of manufacture then they’re selling the product for less than it costs to make it and, unless they’re Tesla, then they will eventually go out of business.
I can admit that maybe I did misread you because I assumed that you were trying to make some deeper point, because what you said, if read literally, is that “Memory is high because companies seek profit” which is the most trivially true thing you can say about economics.
So, back to basic economics.
The thing that is preventing a company from charging ‘anything they want’ is the fact that there are other manufacturers (because there isn’t a true monopoly in the RAM market) that are competing in the same market. Nothing is preventing Samnsung from charging $150,000 for a 1GB stick of RAM, but if Micron is selling their 1GB sticks of RAM for $150 then nobody will buy from Samsung.
This a phenomena known as competition prevents Samsung from being able to sell RAM for arbitrary prices. The market sets the price, not any individual company.
I assumed you knew something so basic.
The only way a manufacturer can arbitrarily change the market price is if they are the only manufacturer, aka a monopoly (in which case the $150,000 sticks of RAM are the only ones available on the market) or they are price fixing (and Micron has secretly agreed to sell RAM at $150,000 and no other manufacturers exist).
So if you’re not alleging price fixing then your comment is basically ‘Companies seek to maximize profit’ which is like saying the sky is blue or the sun is hot.
You just threw out an insult and didn’t actually make a point so I’m not sure how to even respond.
It looks like you’re suggesting that RAM should grow only at the pace of inflation and any deviation from that is due to greed? I hope you mean something deeper that I’m just missing your point because I find it hard to believe that you’ve ever taken an economics class if you don’t understand how prices can grow faster than inflation.
If you understood economics you’d know that when the aggregate demand for a hot-ticket good (like RAM) shifts rightward faster than aggregate supply can respond, because of short-run capacity constraints (i.e. Samsung can only manufacture RAM so fast), the market-clearing price must rise beyond the economy-wide inflation rate to re-equilibrate. This demand-pull premium reflects the good’s low short-run price elasticity of demand. Quantity-adjustment is inelastic, so the burden of rationing falls disproportionately on price.
In other words, when an item is in demand the price rises. It can rise faster than inflation because the demand for RAM grows faster than the demand for all of the other goods and services. Since inflation is a measure in the increase in prices across all goods and services, any product that experiences a sudden increase in demand will necessarily see a price rise in excess of inflation.
Yes, that would be true if they had a true monopoly.
However, in an open market when a producer offers their goods for higher than the market rate, another producer can steal their business by simply offering the products at market rate. If Samsung decides to try to price gouge then customers can buy RAM from Micron, the only time that this isn’t possible is if there is more demand than their is supply (i.e. Micron has no stock) in which case, microeconomics tells us that the market price will increase.
It’s more that people want to be outraged and feel self-righteous and also the outrage bots are happy to oblige with deceptively framed stories and social media comment fabrication.
I could be wrong, and there is some evidence that Samsung is doing something shady. I think I’d know about it if it were public because I work in an office that manages large investments so news like a massive company manipulating prices would show up in the various information services that we use.
I mean, the claim that they’re exploiting a situation is unfounded by evidence.
Anybody who is even remotely paying attention could tell you that RAM, GPU and Storage prices will increase.
If you think the prices are increasing faster than supply and demand then I presume that is based on some data and not just social media vibes. I’d be happy to look at any evidence that may exist.
People being angry, even in large numbers, doesn’t make them correct. If you just glance at politics you’ll find that it’s very easy to make a lot of people very angry about something that isn’t true.
The comments in here are starting to look like Reddit with the conspiracy nonsense.
Memory isn’t expensive because Samsung is greedy or because they’re secretly stockpiling product. It’s because AI uses a lot of memory and so people are buying a lot of memory and it takes time for the manufacturers to increase supply to meet demand. This is 100s level economics
From: https://courses.byui.edu/econ_150/econ_150_old_site/lesson_03.htm
I agree with all of that. The 5 million goal was a bad design, in other extraction shooters the week/days leading up to the wipe is always full of people doing crazy things with gear that’s getting deleted anyway. Having to save every piece of equipment until the very end just feels bad.
I’d like to see more gear along the lines of the Hullbreaker. Items that are specifically for fighting the ARC and, because of their properties are less useful against players, they could give you ‘gamebreaking’ abilities/damage/etc without worrying about the weapons being used to dominate PvP.
Then maybe some kind of frontline PvE ARC raid with species of ARC that are more dangerous than the ones in the plains/foothills.
Ohhh, those are UEFI cheats. This is the reason that kernel anti-cheat games require Secure Boot.
You can, when Secure Boot is disabled, use the UEFI to load a driver that can perform DMA actions prior to loading the Windows kernel. A user could then run an innocuous piece of software that would communicate with the driver and send the data to the USB device which would run the cheat software and do the mouse manipulation (and you would configure the devices from the gaming PC over the same USB interface). e: This could technically be detected because there is still software running on the user’s PC that the anti-cheat software could detect and a USB device that could, if the firmware is not properly flashed to a firmware pretending to be something innocuous (typically a NIC or Audio device).
This let anybody willing to install a UEFI driver of unknown origin have access to DMA without needing to buy an expensive card. This is only possible on any game that doesn’t mandate Windows 11 and Secure Boot (though there was a recent exploit discovered with some motherboards [CVE-2025-11901, CVE-2025-14302, CVE-2025-14303 and CVE-2025-14304] that allowed an attacker to obtain DMA access prior to the IOMMU being properly initialized (which would restrict DMA access).
This would allow an attacker to run software on a second PC that would use this lapse to inject a hacked UEFI driver via a hardware DMA device, then you could just send the memory data over USB to a second cheating device.
The class of hacks that use trained object detection networks (like YOLO) can be run on lightweight(-ish) hardware. It still needs to be able to run the object recognition loop quickly, the faster your hardware the less latency you will experience but it can work on Raspberry Pi.
In order to get ESP/wallhacks, you need to be able to read the game memory on the gaming PC. While there are software ways to do this, they are all detectable (assuming they’re using Secure Boot to prevent UEFI cheats). The most reliable way is to use Direct Memory Access hardware to read the system memory via hardware without going through the operating system, which means that not even the kernel anticheats can see when this is happening.
If you’re going to use ESP, you also need to be able to see the information. You could run a second monitor, but the preferred way is to use a fuser which merges two video streams, one from the game from the gaming PC and another from the PC rendering the ESP data (bounding boxes).
Then you need some kind of hardware to receive the mouse input and pretend to be a mouse to the gaming PC. This can be something like a Raspberry Pi, but a product called Kmbox is purpose designed for it.
The full hardware kit is probably around $300-400 (not counting the PC/Pi) and then you have to buy/subscribe to the software that actually runs the cheats.
It is cheaper now, but a full DMA setup costs about as much as an entry-level PC and you need a second PC to run all of the cheats.
What he’s demonstrating, using image recognition, is pretty cheap and probably even more undetectable but you ‘only’ get aimbotting and there is a bit of latency due to the neural network processing step. DMA cheats gives you aimbotting and all of the ESP info instantly.
This is true, online games have always been full of aimbotters and cheaters.
If they seemed less plentiful it’s because of the Admin:Player ratios. Back in the day, the game company didn’t host the servers they just provided you with a server executable and instructions. So any servers that you played on were paid for by a person or group and that person or group usually moderated them pretty actively.
It wouldn’t be unusual to play on a server where 2/3rds of the players had the ability to kickban cheaters. Now, you’re lucky if a human admin ever sees a single match that you’ve played.
Zero chance of this becoming a real product. This is more like StuffMadeHere on YT, just making wildly impractical stuff that is still interesting.
You don’t need a motorized pad, you can just run your video output and mouse through an external PC which does the image recognition and target acquisition then edits the mouse’s input stream to insert the proper movement in order to hit the target, afterwards it’s passed to the clean PC with the cheating PC pretending to be a mouse.
This is basically what all of the hardware cheat products do that don’t use DMA access to read memory from the clean PC.
It’s funny that you think these things are operating on napkin math. I guess it takes tens of thousands of GPUs and months of compute time to work out some napkin math.
You’re confusing a lot of things and it sounds like when you say ‘AI’ you mean ‘ChatGPT’ or generative LLM/Diffusion models. Because those large models are the only ones that use a large amount of computer resources. That doesn’t represent the entirety of neural network based machine learning (AI)
My phone uses an LLM for spellcheck, it even runs fine tuning (the thing that you’re referring to that requires ‘tens of thousands of GPUs’) on the phone processor. Writing and training text recognition AI from scratch is literally an exercise for Computer Science students to do on their personal computer. AI running object detection models runs on tiny microprocessors inside of doorbells.
My response was that you cannot eliminate AI because the algorithms that are required to build it are already known by millions of experts who can re-create it from scratch.
All of these years of AI research resulted in some napkin math that we were missing all along
As much as you’re trying to be sarcastic. Yes, that is correct.
This is not unusual in science, here’s some other napkin formulas that required years, decades and centuries to discover.
E=MC2 – Years of knowledge and research to discover how mass and energy were related
√-1 = i – 1800 years is how long it took for this to be accepted
F = ma – Newton’s force equation
eiπ + 1 = 0 – Euler’s Identity
E = hf – Plank’s discovery describing how photon energy links to frequency.
etcetc.
What does ‘AI dying’ even look like to you? If you were the dictator of Earth, how would you eliminate the knowledge from the minds of millions of experts across the world?
It’s not just math or if it is, we don’t understand the math. Math is deterministic. These models are not deterministic, an input does not always produce the same output and you can’t feed a response backwards through a model to produce the query. We struggle to make even remotely predictable changes to a model when it does something we don’t like.
Once again you’re confusing topics and also definitions. Determinism, interpretability and explainability are different things.
Neural networks are completely deterministic. A given input will always return the same output.
You’re probably referring to the trick that the LLM chatbots use where they take the output of the the model, which is a list of tokens with a score of which is most likely, and randomly select a token from that list before feeding it back into the model. This is a chatbot trick, it doesn’t happen in the model.
No machine learning model uses randomness during inference. Often people pass in random noise so the output varies, but if you pass in the same random noise then you get the same output.
‘We don’t know how it works’ isn’t exactly true. There’s a lot of work in this field (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explainable_artificial_intelligence) and there’s nothing fundamentally unknowable about these systems.
The AI industry can die like any other.
Yes, like I said, ‘The AI industry’ that produced generative LLMs and diffusion models is what you’re upset about, you’re upset that capitalists are using AI to fire workers and destroy jobs.
You’re not upset that we’ve discovered the ability to create universal approximation functions or use machines to learn from data.
You’re mad at capitalism, not AI.
Using your logic, anyone and everyone can build nukes, they’re just math and physics and the materials (like GPUs and Power) are easy to come by. We can’t erase the knowledge so let’s all sit back and enjoy the fallout.
This isn’t an argument, this is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_absurdum
I said you can’t eliminate the knowledge of AI from society since anyone with a laptop can train one from scratch and the knowledge to do so is available to everyone. The knowledge for making nuclear weapons was also not eliminated despite being far more dangerous and widely condemned.
Also, irrelevant to my point but, in what world are the materials to make nuclear weapons easy to come by?
but AI is a threat even without capitalism. So far they’re making life more expensive in multiple ways for all of us with no real benefit for their existence.
No real benefit? Once again, you seem to be talking about generative AI. That’s a product, created by capitalists, using AI. It isn’t the entirety of the AI field, it isn’t even the field with the most AI workers.
AI is used in science and has facilitated incredible discoveries already.
AlphaFold revolutionized structural biology by predicting the shape of every known protein which has massively accelerated drug discovery. I’m not sure if you’re aware but there are now TWO AIDS vaccines in human trials and the researchers use machine-learning models to mine clinical data in order to spot patterns in immune responses leading promising therapies.
AI is being used to plan, execute and interpret lab work, this is a tedious and laborious task that requires a highly trained person, typically a grad student. This isn’t something that you can scale up 100x or 1000x because you can’t magic 1000 graduate students into existence. Now you can use AI to do the tedious work and a grad student can now run multiple times are labs which are at the heart of almost every scientific discovery.
Diagnostic AI, which is more objectively more accurate than human experts, is used to annotate diagnostic images in order to indicate to a doctor areas to examine. This results in lower error rates and earlier detection than human-only review.
It’s discovered new plasma physics which are key for having working fusion power. (https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2505725122)
So, while you may not think these are worth the downsides, it’s disingenuous to say that there has been no benefit.
People should keep bitching about AI until it either dies or finds an entirely new business model based on not being pieces of shit.
How can AI die? What does that even mean?
It’s math. You can write the algorithms on a napkin from memory. It cannot ‘die’. You’re tilting at windmills, there’s nothing to kill.
You’re mad at the people who are using the productivity gains resulting from this new technology and eliminating jobs for people.
That isn’t an AI problem. The same thing happens every time there is a new productivity saving device. It doesn’t result in the workers earning more money from increased productivity, it results in a huge amount of people getting fired so profits can go up.
You’re not mad at AI, you’re mad at capitalism but it sounds like you lack the perspective to understand that.
I’m not even sure what you mean by equivalent. Is an airplane equivalent to aerospace engineering? They’re two different things.
AI models, the neural network ones, are essentially just a bunch of tensor multiplication. Tensors are a fundamental part of linear algebra and I hope I don’t have to keep explaining the joke.
The point is that no amount of being angry and toxic on the Internet will make AI disappear.
In addition, what most people are complaining about (the exploitative way that AI is being used) is not an AI problem, it is a capitalism problem. So, not only is the rage and anger useless but it is pointed at the wrong target.
End of Feb (the 26th?), these sales seem to be to promote the launch of Part 3.
I played the 2nd one with a friend for a few hours last night. I appreciate the humor, the music selection is above average, the movement feels good and every time we died it was due to us being dumb. No bugs (playing on Linux, with GE-Proton10-27), runs great on maximum settings.
We were having an easy time by going on a murder spree, then we noticed that the game gives you rank medals for speed, avoiding kills and avoiding detection so we started playing to maximize the end-score. Those constraints make the puzzles a bit harder and I can see wanting to run a level multiple times in order to get it right.
Overall, it’s a fun experience, does the stealth thing competently and the graphics/music/animations/dialog is good.