Oof, the 7900 XTX only barely edges out the 4080 in raster performance by 2% at 1440p and 4% at 4K according to TPU. I was expecting a larger margin honestly.

And don’t even get me started on the XT. 15% less performance for 10% less price? And this is at the high end where extra performance is supposed to be at a premium. Even at $799 the XT would have been meh. Should have been $699.

It’s still the better value if you’re not big on RT, and it has some appeal since it shipped with DP 2.1, USB-C Display out, and AV1 encode support. But it sounded like it was going to also be faster than the 4080, not just slightly cheaper and only a few % faster.

@dave
At least, they took one lesson from the Nvidia launch.

@dave
Also, is it me, or do we live in an actual gaming clown show?
If ai understand it, almost all games are still on the level of last gen consoles, that can be matched by even Steam Deck at this point, so when it comes to gaming, these cards shouldn't be needed for another 6 years.

@LukeAlmighty @dave It's not just you. The GPU arms race was driven for years by cryptocurrency, not PC gaming. Like you said, the Steam Deck is now the default PC configuration in the minds of developers who like money, so most of this stuff won't be useful for games for many years.

@caekislove @LukeAlmighty A quick google search says they’ve sold “over a million” units. While you can call that a success for a mobile PC and argue that devs will make sure they have a Deck-compatible configuration, if we’re talking consoles that’s peanuts. The Wii U was considered a commercial failure and that still sold 13 million units.

@caekislove @LukeAlmighty The switch is probably the closest console “competitor” and that has sold almost 115 million.

@LukeAlmighty @dave @LukeAlmighty @caekislove nintendo is an established product that has earned the trust of its customers for decades. steam and nintendo should probably be gauged on different metrics. every time ive been an early adopter of some new tech brand it always bit me in the ass so i would expect it to take some time for steam to become competitve.

@PapaPole @dave @LukeAlmighty It's kinda sad that the gold standard for gaming hardware in the year of our lord twenty twenty two is glorified cellphone hardware. 😢

@caekislove @PapaPole @dave
I think it's good.
While I am not a big fan of "e-wase" argument, it is good to take things slow for a few years. It's not like new games are worth the investment anyway, and less demanding graphics might allow some more creative projects to grab the attention.

All the best games ran on total dog shit software so going from 128KB of RAM on the SNES, which had Mario Kart and Donkey Kong Country, games worth playing today, to 16GB of RAM on the PS5 is underwhelming. I’m not sure we need a 125,000-fold increase in RAM to render the blue hair on the mulatto transbian’s head but that’s just me.

@NEETzsche @PapaPole @caekislove @dave
The physics in Star Wars the force unleached was breathtaking. That is what I call next gen. I do not call 3 more hairs in God of War's beard a detail worth mentioning.

15 years ago btw.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7K5euAe6l8w
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6o6YVLmOs74

I don’t want to say “all the cool shit has already been done,” but I think that like the rest of the West, vidya is going through the opposite of a cultural renaissance. Nobody wants to do anything new, and every new kid on the block just wants to make a “game” that’s really just a vehicle for “telling a story” about being a depressed, anxious trans youth, with the “gameplay” part just being an excuse for navel-gazing.

@NEETzsche @PapaPole @LukeAlmighty @caekislove @dave
Game creation is much more accessible than it was once. Without the gatekeeping, many bad ideas or "the current thing" games can get to some kind of completion. We just have to reward good ideas. It's overload in this just like with most things in modern society. Too much choice, hard to curate things due to complexity, lots of mediocrity.

I guess in leveling the playing field a bit we have made the ever present mediocrity more visible. Could be an incentive to raise the bar.

@corfiot I don't think removing the gatekeeping and lowering the bar to entry is why no new games of note are being created. Quite the opposite, I think it allows for those talented people who would normally be obstructed by bullshit to enter where they might not. I think the issue actually is fundamental to the culture. The issue is not the systems in place to create things, the issue is the population. People today on aggregate suck more than they did in the past, at least in terms of their talent for creative output.

And I think a lot of that has to do with the reality that people don't live real lives anymore. In the 20th century it was normal for people to leave their parents home and find themselves in real danger, to make serious moral choices that actually redeem or destroy themselves or others, experience pain and pleasure that is brought on by real external experience and so on. Now it is only normal for people to leave their parents home to be in some kind of highly controlled institution like a university or a job, they don't get to make any serious choices to prevent them from making the "wrong" ones, and only experience pleasure from drugs and pain from socially contrived punishment.

In other words, people today are more controlled than they ever were in the past, and that is very much the case with young people. Young people are being systematically denied the opportunity to venture forth and write their own destiny, and as a consequence of this none of them have a real source of inspiration for art. It's all abstract to young people today in a way that it wasn't in previous generations. And you can tell when someone hasn't really lived it. And really, what have zoomers lived aside from charge they phone, xanny bars, and egirls? And whose fault is that? (Not theirs, actually)

They can't make a game about street racing because none of them actually do any street racing. So if they try to make a game about street racing it's going to come off as dumb and contrived because it will be. They will never break bad and become a Jesse Pinkman. They will never get into a bar brawl over a tarted up woman. They will never get into a car chase with the police. They will never fire a round in anger, and most won't ever fire a round at all.

@PapaPole @LukeAlmighty @caekislove @dave

@NEETzsche @PapaPole @LukeAlmighty @caekislove @dave @corfiot Many of those whom write the scripts of the media we consume are, even to the most privileged of us, are extremely pampered and boring lot. "It's very hard to write what you know" when the most traumatic experience you've experience was when you lost your iphone.

Also their uncomfortable urge to inject {current year} political issues into everything, that age badly after a year because they're also shit that people heard about on Twitter as opposed to experiencing IRL; and then they go about it in a preachy manner. Even if it's something you'd experience IRL (healthcare, debt), they go about handling it in the worst manner somehow.

Postal 2's humor still holds up well because on top of mocking stuff people would in the 2000s (terrorist attacks, the people protesting video games for being violent), there's shit like waiting in line forever to cash a check and the fact that everyone has gone crazy and is trying to kill each other for no reason.