hughj

All the social media backlash to Pratt has made me turn a corner and now I actually wish it were Pratt doing the role in a properly terrible live-action followup to the '93 film. At this point I have to imagine whatever VO performance he offers is going to be extra safe and as pandering as possible, as any liberties taken will be under a microscope and draw ire.

I'm not convinced they were ever terribly relevant. Even in the pre-internet era you had the option of renting games and trying them out yourself before buying them. In the internet era (say, 1995+) you had a mixture of shareware, demos, piracy, word-of-mouth, buy+refund, and now live streaming to assess games. The increasingly long tail of post-release patches and games-as-a-service also make static moment-in-time reviews nearly obsolete, and in the PC-landscape that's kind of been the status quo since the late 90s.

The Marvel IP doesn't really do anything for me if it's not drawing from the 60s-80s era stuff that I'm familiar with, so this feels like a game made for a demographic that I've aged out of.

The copy of EQ2 that I bought after leaving SWG is actually still unopened on a shelf because my group ended up backtracking on trying it.

I've never suffered through a game because of friends, but I've definitely wasted money on purchases of games because of friends where I tried it once or twice and never again. CoD4, Borderlands 2, Payday 2, L4D.

Apparently the SSD is connected via m.2 (as opposed to being soldered), which is a huge deal for maintaining this hardware long-term. Granted it's not intended to be easily user-replaceable, but it still means you could in theory buy the cheapest SKU and upgrade to an m.2 NVME in the future.

Nvidia has no SoC that would be suitable for this because they don't have an x86 license. An Nvidia device would mean pairing a discrete Nvidia GPU with an AMD/Intel CPU, and that might hurt the cost, thermals, and battery life in a prohibitive way.

Yeah, it's related to a subset of the API of the XSX/S storage stack ("Velocity Architecture").

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zolAIEH0n1c

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0sMmt-rSzQ

On a slight tangent:

With Windows 11 and this device launching around the same time frame it's going to be interesting for the coming few years of PC games. Between Windows 11's restrictive CPU requirements (HVCI), and now an official Valve device running Linux, we're likely looking at a sizable fragmentation of the Steam userbase in terms of OS.

Right now Steam survey shows Win10-64bit at 90% of users, (Win7 at 5%, the the rest making up the other 5%). By this time next year it's going to be maybe... 65% Win10, 25% Win11, 5% Win7, 5% Linux? With DirectStorage being a Windows11-only API, I really have to wonder what sort of adoption that's going to see from developers.

I'm especially curious about the quality and throw of the triggers. As much as I'd like to use the Steam controller for certain driving games, the triggers on it are hard to accept if you're used to XBone/series triggers.

I think as long as FSR doesn't have a temporal component it's unlikely to see it upscale a very low resolution to a higher one. Strictly speaking, the 'super' in super-sampling and super-resolution has always implied some form of additional sampling taking place in order to improve the resolving power beyond what's achieved from single discrete samples. DLSS gets its extra sub-samples temporally, so even very information-starved low resolutions can see a lot of improvement.

FSR is feasible for 1440p -> 2160p as there's minimal missing information aside from slightly smoother edges and fine-grained texture detail/noise, whereas going from something like 800x500 to 1280x800 means the missing information is much more significant and can't be reliably inferred.