Nvidia claims the 5070 will give 4090 performance. That’s a huge generation uplift if it’s true. Of course, we’ll have to wait for independent benchmarks to confirm that.

The best ray tracing games I’ve seen are applying it to older games, like Quake II or Minecraft.

Scalpers were basically non existent in the 4xxx series. They’re not some boogieman that always raises prices. They work under certain market conditions, conditions which don’t currently exist in the GPU space, and there’s no particular reason to think this generation will be much different than the last.

Maybe on the initial release, but not for long after.

Agreed. They really limit how many enemies you face at once in that game. Any more would be unplayably difficult.

For once, it looks like the answer is that they do see some big checks. From an article someone posted further down the thread:

https://www.theverge.com/2024/7/13/24197477/valve-employs-few-hundred-people-payroll-redacted

Lowest paid department is hardware, with an average of about $430k/employee.

Now, that is an average, and it’s hard to tell from here if a few highly paid employees in each department are throwing that number off.

Interesting. Looks like the hardware people are the lowest paid department.

Which maybe makes sense. They’ve started to see some success there, but not the way Steam or TF2 has.

I haven’t played it, but based on everything I’ve read about it, that alone puts the headline to shame.

That would be the point, yes. Balatro has cards and chips, but chips are just there for keeping points. If Balatro is 18+ for gambling imagery, then so should Solitaire. That would be stupid, so Balatro shouldn’t get it, either.

The Talos Principle.

Right. I feel like they were a self correcting problem all along. They get buried in Sturgeon’s Law and that’s the end of it.

Except for that one guy who tried to copyright claim Steph’s channel. That guy needs something more. Like any kind of consequences at all for false copyright claims.

Plus, if you can get the right model, you can play PS2 and PS1 games on it. That’s a ridiculous library full of hidden gems.

Helps when that Intel “flagship” isn’t worth covering in thermal paste.

I’ve seen very little worth playing on any consoles. Conversely, my problem with the Steam Deck is finding time for all the games I want to play.

deck just fails at new games.

That assumes the PS5 has games worth playing in the first place.

I can’t wait to buy movies from Sony only to have them invalidated a few years from now.

It’s about the same as the inflation-adjusted PS3 price, but here’s the thing: the PS3 had a difficult first couple of years. If not for the Red Ring of Death, Microsoft could have come out ahead that generation. One thing Sony is good at is capitalizing on its competitors’ mistakes, and combined with price reductions on later models, they pulled out a victory. Being >$750 inflation-adjusted dollars at launch wasn’t why it won.

Given the contemporary examples, they weren’t wrong to think so. Everyone was trying to make a console in the 16/32-bit era.

• PC Engine/Turbografx
• Phillips CD-i (only sorta a console)
• Atari Jaguar
• Neo Geo
• Amiga CD

Some of these are better than others–I’m fond of the PC Engine–but none can be called successful. Neo Geo is somewhat of an exception because it was used as arcade hardware. Some others here are the butt of jokes. There’s also a bunch of Japanese consoles around this time that go nowhere, and are little more than fodder for retro gaming YouTube channels.

Sony took a big gamble and won.

And I feel like half of that 20 years was based on FOMO. “I better get the next Assassin’s Creed or I’ll miss out”, and then it’s all the same crap but they still sold a million of them. People do eventually wise up to FOMO.

. . . our goal is not to push any specific agenda

This is the part they’re actually getting at. Not that the fundamental game design is for everyone (which, yes, is what they try and fail at), but rather they’re responding to people who think they’re failing because they put a woman as the protagonist in some game or another.

That’s more of a Japanese company thing than something specific to Nintendo.

Not that it makes it OK, but this is a country that looked at how workers are treated in America and decided the problem was not going hard enough.

Some people really don’t understand layered security.

Too many of them are programmers.

Which, incidentally, would probably past legal muster. You can get pretty close to the source material, and as long as it’s your own custom art, it’s not infringement.

That said, lawyers can send a C&D letter for anything. Doesn’t mean it will hold up in court, but they’re betting the target won’t want to pay that kind of money to fight it.

Also, Iron Bands of Bilarro in DnD 5e, but I’m not sure how far back the history of that item goes. DnD 3.5 had Iron Flask that works kinda the same, but Iron Bands is more similar to a Pokeball.

In a capitalist context, sure.

The idea of a socialist society is that there isn’t a burning need to work beyond what’s needed to keep life going. You can focus on art, or writing, or anything else creative. There’s no particular need to legally protect what you create, because you’re doing it for the pure enjoyment of creativity in the first place. Your livelihood isn’t threatened by someone else copying it. If anything, you’re delighted that someone else takes enjoyment from it.

And if someone wanted to feed your art to an AI model, that’s fine, too. Who cares? That machine can’t replace your personal creative drive. This is only a problem now because capitalism forces artists to make money off their art or do something else to make ends meet.

Sony will try to drag this thing out at least one more generation. If that goes like this one–and it has room to actually go worse–then Sony will have to make some hard decisions.

I mean, it’s just DNS with an extra field type.

Unions can organize without the government having any protections. It’s very difficult to organize that way. It’s difficult to organize even with the most union-friendly government imaginable. But either way, it can be done.

Unions in the US have been shot by police at before. Hard to have less government protection than that.

15k rpm fans help, too.

Minishoot Adventures is a twin stick shooter with a 2D Zelda-style map.

Can I get one of them invites?

If you don’t mind an MMO subscription fee, you might try A Tale In the Desert:

https://www.desert-nomad.com/

It’s fairly niche, and it’s been years since I’ve played it, but it seems to still keep an active player base. It’s much more cooperative than most MMOs, with very little PvP. It’s like the whole community is working together to build a civilization.

Nvidia did indeed market it as the first GPU at the time. You can retroactively apply the term, but it didn’t exist before then.

The term GPU wasn’t used yet. It got applied as something of a marketing term to cards that had hardware transform and lighting, and that was indeed the GeForce 256. Before then, they were “3d accelerators”.

You can see this on the Wiki page for the GeForce: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeForce_256#Architecture

GeForce 256 was marketed as “the world’s first ‘GPU’, or Graphics Processing Unit”, a term Nvidia defined at the time as “a single-chip processor with integrated transform, lighting, triangle setup/clipping, and rendering engines that is capable of processing a minimum of 10 million polygons per second”.

So it kinda depends on perspective. If you take Nvidia’s marketing at face value, then the GeForce 256 was, indeed, the first GPU. You could retroactively apply it to earlier 3d accelerators, including the SNES Super FX chip, but none of them used the term at the time.

And it’s a bad one if it applies at all. PC shooters of the time always kinda tried, but it didn’t work. The original Half Life got dinged a few points in original reviews because of a few janky platforming sections.

Even if it’s not the first, I’d say it’s the first that figured out that computers were powerful enough that you can have a gobsmackingly huge factory.

I’d put it at Quake.

Wolf3d is an evolution of Hovertank 3D, which had flat shading for walls, floors, and ceilings. Wolf3d then has textured walls but still flat shading on the floors and ceilings. Some other games came out after Wolf3d that had textures floors and ceilings while id worked on Doom.

Doom not only had textured everything, but also stairs. Trick was, you couldn’t develop a level that had a hallway going over another hallway. Not enough computer horsepower yet to pull that off. This is sometimes called “2.5D”.

Quake brings everything together. Everything’s texture mapped, your levels have true height with things built over other things, and the character models are even fully 3d rendered.

It’s also possible they just didn’t know. LucasArts didn’t push the system all that much in their PR. You’ll see it in some bullet points on the retail boxes, and articles of the time might make a passing reference to it. It was quite a remarkable system for the time and they were very low key about it.

Jurassic Park: Trespasser invented physics engines in fps games as we know it. The game itself was a buggy mess and a financial disaster. The player’s health was shown on the main character’s boob for some damn reason. However, they did have the basics of a very good physics engine, and Valve took a lot of their ideas and incorporated it into Half Life 2.

I dispute the Serious Sam claim. The LucasArts iMUSE system was doing things like that years before. Even among fps games, the first Dark Forces game used it.

Time to start Rule 34’ing a Blooper with a Bullet Bill on principle.

Yes. Server boot times are long. Enterprise level NICs and hard drive controllers do a lot of checking at startup.

Historically, there were Sun servers that could hot swap CPUs. X86 can’t do that, though.