GasBandit
Staff member
Sounds like Volition is circling the drain.
https://www.bluesnews.com/s/184235/volition-layoffs-reported
https://www.bluesnews.com/s/184235/volition-layoffs-reported
Video Game News and Miscellany
- Thread starter figmentPez
- Start date
figmentPez
Staff member
I wanted it...
... Just not at $60; when I know there will be nickel & dime DLC out the wazoo; and the initial release will be buggy; and they broke SR4 by testing out native Steam controller support and never fixed it so I don't know if it works in Agents of Mayhem; and it doesn't have co-op.
I love Volition's open world games. I'd love a new Red Faction Guerrilla. But holy shit they've worked hard to make me never want to buy one of their games at launch.
GasBandit
Staff member
TechSpot rates the best current video cards.
TLDR:
Best Entry Level (<$100): Nvidia GT1030 ($70)
Best Mainstream(<$200): Nvidia GT1050Ti ($150)
Best Mid-range (<$300): Nvidia GTX1060 3gig ($210)
Best High-end (~$400): Nvidia GTX1070 ($420)
Best Enthusiast-grade (~$500): Nvidia GTX1080 ($530-$560)
Best Money-is-no-object: Nvidia GTX1080Ti ($700-$800)
AMD would have done better in their rankings if not for the bitcoin miner fad causing massive price inflation in the GPU market right now, which is affecting AMD more than Nvidia.
TLDR:
Best Entry Level (<$100): Nvidia GT1030 ($70)
Best Mainstream(<$200): Nvidia GT1050Ti ($150)
Best Mid-range (<$300): Nvidia GTX1060 3gig ($210)
Best High-end (~$400): Nvidia GTX1070 ($420)
Best Enthusiast-grade (~$500): Nvidia GTX1080 ($530-$560)
Best Money-is-no-object: Nvidia GTX1080Ti ($700-$800)
AMD would have done better in their rankings if not for the bitcoin miner fad causing massive price inflation in the GPU market right now, which is affecting AMD more than Nvidia.
Bitcoin miner money,gamer money, makes no difference to AMD.
GasBandit
Staff member
As well it shouldn't. But it does affect recommendations that gamers will make to one another
I didn't. It's not that it didn't look good. It just looked like Saints Row IV with a new paint job and a few new bells and whistles. Plus, as Yahtzee pointed out, they carried a LOT of assets over from Saints Row IV, including the Saints' logo.
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I've considered getting a new video card during, say, a Black Friday sale or something similar. Right now, I have an AMD Radeon R9 200 Series. It's served me well but doesn't run games like Witcher 3 at the highest settings. I wouldn't mind seeing what the game looks like maxed out. If I got an Nvidia card instead, though, I don't understand the difference between AMD and Nvidia's numbering systems.
GasBandit
Staff member
Let me introduce you to https://www.videocardbenchmark.net/ .
This site will be your best friend in picking a new video card.
Specifically, the section for "best value."
https://www.videocardbenchmark.net/gpu_value.html
The fact of the matter is there's a lot of overlap between the numbering systems of even the same manufacturer, much less across different manufacturers. A GTX 1050 gives you about the same performance as a GTX 480 and a GTX 570, despite those being cards from 5 or 6 series ago. So it's best to just compare price and power directly.
That said, here's a table that indicates what card models are comperable across the manufacturers.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gpu-hierarchy,4388.html
I don't think the R9 200 series went lower than 270, so you probably have about the equivalent of a GTX 1050. It's still a good entry level card, and you'll be hard pressed to do better for less than $200. You could upgrade to a GTX 1050ti, but you'd be getting about 30% more performance and spending $150. Really, for me, I need to at least double my current performance before I'll think about upgrading.
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So, sounds like I should just hold onto what I have for now. If I went by your 30%/$150 rule, which sounds reasonable to me.
(Heh, you also taught me to the "75% off or under $10, whichever is cheaper" rule, which I often follow)
figmentPez
Staff member
It could long-term. One big knock against AMD for years now is how well games are optimized for AMD (especially at launch), and the fewer gamers are running AMD cards, the less incentive there is for developers to make sure their games run well on AMD.
I feel real good about getting my GTX 960 on sale for under $100 now.
GasBandit
Staff member
Well, I've been breaking it lately (Darn Terrik, Dei and Snuffles
) but yeah, I usually wait until a game is 75% off or $10, whichever happens first (not necessarily which is cheaper).Yeah, I would hold off upgrading for now. My personal rule for video cards is, as I said, never upgrade until I can double my performance for $200. You can adjust that number as you see fit. Generally, though, the less expensive the video card, the less time before it starts to show its age. My 8800 GTX lasted me 7 years, but it cost $550 when it was new. My R9 270x (which might actually be the same card you have now) cost $300 and lasted me about 3, and honestly I'd still probably be using it if the GTX1060 3 gig wasn't such a fantastic deal.
Generally, I find that a current gen video card will remain acceptable by my gaming standards for roughly 1 year plus another year for every $100 in the price tag, as a rule of thumb, give or take $50 or so.
That was a pretty darn good deal.I feel real good about getting my GTX 960 on sale for under $100 now.
FTFY
AMD decided to optimize their architecture for GPGPU tasks rather than just making triangles, and right now there's no faster way to turn electricity + a GPU's Gflops into actual money than via Ethereum mining, so at the moment, the invisible hand of the free market has stolen all the AMD cards away from retailers since basically the AMD cards you buy today will directly finance your ability to buy more AMD cards tomorrow.
AMD did try to combat this by selling cards as part of bundled "packs," so that people who were buying them for just the cards themselves would pile up a useless (to them) pile of add-ons. Trouble was, these add-ons weren't as universally desired by gamers as AMD thought.
This is one of the Passmark sites, which are very handy not just for rating GPUs, but also CPU comparison.
The 200 series was really just a rebadged 7000-series with (mostly) software tweaks, but it was still AMD's first GCN-based card (i.e., their first serious GPGPU architecture), and top of the line back in early 2012. My main PC is still using a 7970, which incidentally was the last card that AMD officially supported for WinXP. I'm probably going to be stuck with this setup until the whole cryptocurrency thing dies down enough for gamers, which probably won't be until 2019 the way things are looking now (Supposedly, video cards with 3GB or less RAM will be useless for Ethereum after April of 2018, and surpassing those with 4GB or less RAM after mid-2019).
Personally I like to wait to upgrade until technology hits certain generational points where I know something is revolutionary enough that it's going to be around a while, but I know that means having to dedicate a certain amount of time to be able to know which way the wind is blowing. Plus then I like to wait until the next revision comes out so that the one I really want becomes "last year's model" and goes down in price...
--Patrick
I keep hearing about this crytocurrency thing but I have no idea what people are talking about.
Its main value (I think) is that it is decentralized. If you want more Dollars, you can only get them from America. If you want more Euros, from Europe, etc. But if you want more Bitcoins/Ethereum/etc, you can literally make your own out of math...math done by video cards (or ASICs in the case of Bitcoin these days). Nobody exclusively owns the right to manufacture them, they are out there for anyone to discover, much like discovering a gold nugget (which has value no matter where you take it), hence the term "mining."
--Patrick
That only leaves me more confused.
If you are saying to yourself "why would this have value?" It doesn't, but then paper money doesn't either, not outside of what we say they do. Crypto currency has value because it is a unique piece of mathematical data that takes a long time to create, hence has scarcity and thus can be attributed value among those who wish to use it. Like bottle caps in fallout.
GasBandit
Staff member
In extreme layman's terms, "mining" bitcoins is done by computers working on math to build something called a "blockchain." The blockchain is an encrypted digital ledger that is constantly compared by "miners" against each other, that don't trust each other. Thus, the integrity of the "ledger" is maintained. Encryption of this magnitude takes a lot of computing power to perform, and the decentralized system rewards those who do that work with bitcoin in their "wallet."
The rate at which bitcoins are mined slows down, because of how the math works.
This prevents runaway inflation, and thus there's a limited number of bitcoin out there, the ledger of who has what is constantly reverified against thousands of independent computer records, and thus it can be used as a currency because it is limited.
This means that transactions can also take place without being tracked or controlled by governments. Which is why it is so attractive to less-than-lawful organizations. For example, the Wannacry ransomware insists on being paid in bitcoins to decrypt your computer, because that payment can't be traced.
Well, rather than trying to explain how cryptocurrencies work, let me try to explain what it's doing to the market for computer hardware.
10 People with more/better hardware literally make (as in, generate) more money.
20 This means the people who have the most/best hardware OR who started the earliest are the ones making the most money.
30 To catch up, you basically have to buy more hardware.
40 To combat this, the people who control the specs for the cryptocurrency make it harder to acquire.
50 GOTO 30
Much like any other "rush," it eventually gets to the point where there are too many people to make it worth pursuing except for those who have been with it all along, and so the rush ends as all the "casuals" drop out. It's step 30 there that's making things miserable for people who aren't mining, because the miners are literally using their existing cards to inflate the price of buying new cards. It's a stupid feedback loop, and it doesn't end until the market price of any particular card reaches the point where it finally costs more to buy a card than you earn by using it.
As an example, right now using a Radeon RX Vega 64 will earn you about US$20 per month pure profit per card. So if you have one of those fancy mining rigs that run 8 cards simultaneously, you are earning about $160/month. The trick is to balance the hardware + electric cost to where you still come out ahead long enough to pay off building the rig itself, and after that, it's just gravy.
...also if you live somewhere cold enough, you save money by not having to pay extra for heat.
...no, I am not suggesting you start mining.
--Patrick
10 People with more/better hardware literally make (as in, generate) more money.
20 This means the people who have the most/best hardware OR who started the earliest are the ones making the most money.
30 To catch up, you basically have to buy more hardware.
40 To combat this, the people who control the specs for the cryptocurrency make it harder to acquire.
50 GOTO 30
Much like any other "rush," it eventually gets to the point where there are too many people to make it worth pursuing except for those who have been with it all along, and so the rush ends as all the "casuals" drop out. It's step 30 there that's making things miserable for people who aren't mining, because the miners are literally using their existing cards to inflate the price of buying new cards. It's a stupid feedback loop, and it doesn't end until the market price of any particular card reaches the point where it finally costs more to buy a card than you earn by using it.
As an example, right now using a Radeon RX Vega 64 will earn you about US$20 per month pure profit per card. So if you have one of those fancy mining rigs that run 8 cards simultaneously, you are earning about $160/month. The trick is to balance the hardware + electric cost to where you still come out ahead long enough to pay off building the rig itself, and after that, it's just gravy.
...also if you live somewhere cold enough, you save money by not having to pay extra for heat.
...no, I am not suggesting you start mining.
--Patrick
This is why the most successful bitcoin farms are almost universally done on the down-low using someone else's juice and AC. It's not exactly hard to sneak a rig or two into your company if you work IT and basically tell anyone who asks "Don't touch it or the entire system goes down".
figmentPez
Staff member
Has anyone figured out how to make a cryptocurrency with mining that actually does something productive? Like, folding @ home except you're not just helping medical research, you're mining currency too? Or is there just no possible overlap in the math between something that's both productive, but also verifiably has the qualities needed to be a cryptocurrency?
Well the entire idea is based off of the Seti@Home crowd-sourcing thing that started in the 90's (which basically created the idea of the torrent too), which actually DOES do good by crowd-sourcing excess computer time into something that allows people to assist the SETI program in analyzing the massive amounts of data they collect in their pursuit of intelligent alien life. The problem here is that folks who have massive amounts of data to analyze and massive amounts of money don't overlap much, so any... benevolent organization looking to take advantage of something like this doesn't really have the backing needed to reward people for it or they'd just be hiring out people to analyze the data.
It also creates the problem that suddenly 100k people are competing for the 100k that used to constitute a single data analyst's salary.
Yes, this could totally be done.
However, once you attach a monetary reward to the amount of work done, people will optimize their clients to maximize the amount of money generated...and the first step to that will be to strip out all of the "productive" code that is competing with the money generating routine(s).
--Patrick
Adding a confirmation step would stop that, but it would also make people wonder if you were just going to take the data and run. On the other hand, without it, you have no assurance that the data is correct and properly decoded until it's in your hands.
figmentPez
Staff member
But, if it were working like any other cryptocurrency, it wouldn't be backed by any capital, unless I'm misunderstanding where the value behind a Bitcoin comes from. It's not like when you're mining a Bitcoin you're actually extracting money from an account somewhere, or am I misunderstanding?
That would assume that the money generating routine and the actual work were two different things. That's what I was asking, if someone found a way to make the money generating routine actually produce useful data at the same time. It wouldn't necessarily even have to be charitable data. I mean, right now whatever numbers produced by coin mining are merely proof that you mined a coin, but what if the proof that you mined the coin had value as the answer to some mathematical problem as well?
That's the thing, though. These "coins" are the answer to some mathematical problem. That's why they have value. They possess unique mathematical properties that make them ideal for blockchain processing, and as such are used for just that purpose.
I can see why you would desire some way to fuse the value to some other form of data, but I don't think that could be done in a way that couldn't be deconstructed and therefore optimized purely to capitalize on the money-making aspect.
--Patrick
No, you're right. I fucked up there. Again though, I would argue that the coin's "value" is derived from the fact that I can exchange it for dollars and not anything else (outside of very few stores that accept bitcoin). If I couldn't, it wouldn't have a fluctuating value. Therefore, bitcoin is defacto backed by other currencies in the way that dollars used to be backed by gold. If it wasn't, the value of the cryptocurrencies would be stable and not fueled by speculation.
Ash, you need to read this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiat_money
It has value, just like any other money, because we believe it does, and/or you can exchange it for something you want. If that's other currency fine. If it's a material good, fine. Hell, even the Gold Standard assumes Gold itself has value.
figmentPez
Staff member
If anyone wants a pretty detailed look at how accurate the SNES Mini's emulation is:
GasBandit
Staff member
Word is, in-game ads started appearing for people in China.
http://www.pcgamer.com/pubg-hit-with-stream-of-negative-reviews-following-chinese-in-game-ads/
http://www.pcgamer.com/pubg-hit-with-stream-of-negative-reviews-following-chinese-in-game-ads/