Someguyperson

I was waiting a long while for these Super cards last year and I finally pulled the trigger around Black Friday and got a 5070 Ti for ~$840 (MSI Expert specifically, as my case needs flow-through cards). My card doesn't really exist anymore, but the prospect of paying $1280 for the same thing with more RAM is crazy. I was hoping a 5080 Super would be around $1100, but at $1610, I would never pay that. The fact that the 4090 has more RAM & more performance and is 4 years old at this point is pretty much unfathomable. We live in a bizzaro world right now.

Is there any pricing for the US or EU? £1300 is about €1500 or $1700 right now, but you never know with VAT and all that.

Will, if my math is correct, that entire build is in the range of ~2200 EUR, is it not? For twice the cost of a Steam Machine, it better be a lot more performant than one. But you really do pay a price for that.

Also, I'm not sure if that CPU cooler will be enough to handle the heat that CPU could generate. It would be interesting to see how well it copes, particularly in another heatwave with higher ambient temperatures, or if you shove it in a TV console/hutch/cabinet with limited airflow.

What switches are these? Cherry MX Ergo Clear? I prefer a tactile feel, which is why I specifically got a keyboard with Cherry MX Brown switches.

Asha wrote in a previous statement that she "wanted to reduce dependence on 3rd party vendors" and then she went and killed off the team creating the only real competitor to Unreal that was in-house? She's either duplicitous and can't be trusted with a word she says, or she's a complete idiot. It's not good either way. I think Phil Spencer will come out of this looking like a hero that tried to actually do what was best for the whole division, while Asha will continue to look like Satya's puppet and effectively be the death of that entire division.

@ramu-chan That's the thing: Sony is going to push a whole lot of people towards buying a PC instead of a PS6. If you can't play all your old physical games, the cost of needing to rebuild a library on PC might be a whole lot less painful that continuing to deal with Sony and potentially purchasing those games again digitally. A next-gen Steam Machine is poised to really show a lot of competition against $1000+ consoles from Sony & Microsoft.

@otolithe Valve keeps supporting very old games and honors their purchases to this day. In the same announcement as the all-digital news, Sony said they're killing support for the PS3 with absolutely no path forward for many games that are extremely difficult to play or emulate to this day. The lack of competition for stores on the consoles means Sony can lock you in and force you to pay whatever they want if you want to keep using your console to play games that you paid for. It's an anti-consumer mindset, while Valve has a very pro-consumer mindset. Those values permeate all their products and it really shows.

@darthvirgin I would assume that the unlimited time & money would be more for asset quality and general art quality, while the engine itself is more of the algorithms that can push the pixels & triangles. The question seems to be asking more if it looks good because of the art, or because of the tech.

@Granadico As far as I can tell, most of the visual techniques on display can all be done in UE5, but GTA6 is doing so with more performance and with better quality assets than most other titles we see today. The engine would help with the framerate and allow these advanced techniques, while the general look of everything is because of time & money spent of the art.

@MittenFacedLass Yup. Will even listed the US edition at $79.99 in the sub headline of another post today. I'll give him a pass though. I forgot my wallet today, so I definitely sympathize with a little temporary memory loss.

I've used keyboards with Cherry MX Red & Brown switches and to me, the biggest reason why I want a mechanical keyboard is the feel of typing. I want the tactile bump and the better general feel of the mechanical switches. I don't see why I would really want TMR or Hall Effect switches when I've had a keyboard with Cherry Red switches for 16 years and it's been working just fine. The durability of these things is crazy as it is.

All moving objects in that short video have no reflections in the water, so if they're using RT reflections, only all static objects will be in the BVH. It's a bit odd they don't have screen space reflections as a fallback for the objects in motion though. It does indicate that RT reflections are used though.

You guys should run a general poll of DF viewers to see how old their GPU is. I would assume 85%+ of the DF audience has a 2060 or newer GPU (if they're a PC player). A lot of the Steam metrics are thrown off by internet cafes in Asia.

So, pretty bad image quality, lots of temporal instability, lots of RT noise, not that great of an upscale, bad texture quality, relatively low polygon count, but the game has lots of lights? It still really looks like a mobile game. We also don't know what this is technically running on. It's probably a dev kit with a relatively high TDP, which doesn't bode well for smartphones.

I personally didn't think any presentation was a standout this year. They all had a couple good looking titles, some that didn't have enough information, some general things and a lot of cross-platform titles. I would say Nintendo had the presentation with the most games I would actually purchase FWIW, but it definitely wasn't a "banger".

Meanwhile in the US, a 5070 or a 9070 is ~$650, and a 9060 XT is ~$450. When you add in tax to the US prices and convert the currencies, the US prices are within 5% of the UK prices, which should make sense, but that typically isn't the case when it comes to electronics pricing.

"expect them to be expensive, but hopefully cheaper than the $3500 DGX Spark"

I expect them to be as expensive, if not more so. When has Nvidia been charitable on pricing recently? These laptops don't really make any sense to anyone outside of AI researchers who need to run some models locally without an internet connection for some reason. A laptop with a 5070 and a good CPU from AMD or Intel will probably be half the cost of this thing. The CPU performance will probably be better with Intel & AMD as well. I'm not really sure who exactly the market for this is.

@Pesky_wabbit I most certainly have noticed on my 42" LG C3. The green & red on the sides of a yellow folder against a white background are extremely distracting to me ever since I set the monitor up. I would say most people with an eye for the big DF visual issues would easily be able to pick it out.

It's worth noting here that the RGB stripe alignment is only an issue because Microsoft is lazy/incompetent and won't update Windows to accommodate different subpixel layouts. Basically every OLED Android phone has a different subpixel layout, but Android had features built-in that allow proper text rendering.

@1040STF I have a similar situation as you. My Elite 2 works just fine, although I don't use it as much as my Switch Joy-Cons. Even then, it took something like 4 years of use before I got drift on my Switch 1 Joy-Cons.

You forgot to include a link to the website: https://www.buildcores.com/

Looking at it briefly, the compatibility isn't 100% there. I could use my Alta G1M, but the GPU compatibility was very off. If you're making an SFF build, you'll have to do it the old fashioned way of pouring over dimensions and figuring everything out manually.

I see this as a fantastic CPU for database applications and custom workloads that can really utilize all that cache on each cluster of CPU dies. Which is to say, this is more of a Threadripper like product than a consumer grade one, and I think the price is appropriate for that.

I think this looks really interesting, but I don't personally care for gyro controls. I feel it's very unergonomic and kind of locks you into holding the controller very precisely which is very bad for your joints over extended sessions.

I also find it a little odd that that was the main focus of the article and not how the controller feels, how the touchpads work, how it feels to play various games with this, or a whole lot more info. I hope you guys do a follow-up or two here.

To me, it's a bit too limiting at this time. You're locked into a more limited selection of motherboards & cases. I'm a huge fan of Silverstone and all their weird & wonderful cases, but most of them don't support this standard. I've noticed that mATX boards are a lot less common than they used to be, so you're kind of locked into a particular build.

If you're new to all this, that might actually be helpful. But, as a very experienced PC builder, these constraints don't appeal to me that much. You'll have to take my Alta G1M out of my cold, dead hands or come up with something much nicer or crazier for me to move to something else.

When the hardware is basically the same, the main differentiating factor is the software, which we obviously won't know about until it comes out.

The only way Microsoft could make an actually meaningful big splash in the hardware space is to develop their own custom hardware, but Microsoft is starting to run far away from hardware acros their businesses. Microsoft is really only interested in software, which makes sense. Their name is MicroSOFT not MicroHARD. Everything really comes down to the software ultimately over there.

I would say that's all extremely charitable of you to say all that Rich. In terms of, "re-engaging with the community and trying to re-establish the core identity of the brand and what it actually stands for" I would hope that's what the new management is trying to do there, but I feel if they wanted to really take that direction, why is the press release a bunch of garbage corporate words that have nothing of value attached to them? Why not even a simple, "We hear you and we understand. I'll try to make the best possible Xbox for you, than fans."? If she actually cared she would say as much.

Not only that, but when you look at her background, it's 100% on the software side of things with basically no experience on the hardware side at all. Satya obviously made this decision and it clearly shows that Microsoft wants to go hard into software much more so than the hardware side of things. After all, they're MicroSOFT not MicroHARD. I wouldn't be surprised at all if it turns out that Asus is the one actually putting the Xbox SoC in a console and sell it, much like how they produce the ROG Ally X. With Phil & Panos gone, I fully expect the hardware side of things to fall by the wayside.

@AlexBattaglia Of course! My email is my username at Gmail.

Great article Alex! I am also 35, but unlike you, I got my herniated disk 11 years ago (L5/S1). I had a microdiscectamy to cut out the part of the disc that was sticking out and I don't think I could have gone on much longer without it. But, if cortisone shots and better posture solves it, that's great for you. I just recommend trying to go through all the steps in the process more quickly than not. If you need surgery, it's way better to get it sooner than it is to live like that, have the problem get bigger, and then have a surgery that isn't as effective as it could be.

I also HIGHLY recommend going to an office furniture surplus store and getting a Herman Miller Aeron chair with the lumbar support bar and the tilt limiter. When my old Aeron broke, I tried to use another chair and it was so painful that within 14 hours, I spend $1000 on a brand new chair and I still think it was one of the quickest & best purchases I have ever made. It's not cheap, but if you have back issues, you need it. Do I need to spend $1000 on a GPU? Absolutely not. Will I pay $1000 for a chair at the drop of a hat now? Absolutely yes, 100% of the time.

Good luck!

6 GB of VRAM required for that AI assistant feature is absolutely crazy. That only allows 10 GB on a 16 GB card (which probably won't work too well for most resolutions), or the 4090 & 5090, which simply aren't attainable for the vast majority of people. That sounds like a feature they were going to advertise alongside the 50 Super cards with VRAM to spare, but it's not meant to be I guess.

If I had a second hardware vote, it would have been the Analogue 3D, but it's great to see how positively the Switch 2 is being received by normal people. Too many reviewers complain that the Switch 2 isn't exciting or good enough, but the people say otherwise.

The most anticipated selection is also pretty funny. There's GTA6 and some scrubs (by comparison).

Rich, what do you prefer? People paying 15% more on a monthly basis, or knowing you have a set amount of money upfront without monthly churn (which I imagine to be fairly low in general)?

I'm eagerly awaiting some DF performance testing of this thing, but not as much as I'm eagerly awaiting my Analog 3D to FINALLY ship to me.