Nethlem

I'm not sure what "downsides" you see to the 10600k? The only real one is a lack of PCIe 4.0 support, which as of right now is kinda irrelevant because neither PCIe 4.0 NVMe nor PCIe 4.0 GPUs, like the new Nvidia 3XXX series, show any real-world advantage for PCIe 4.0 right now.

If past PCIe jumps are anything to go by, then even a card like the 3090 will only have a minor performance impact from the lack of PCIe 4.0, Nvidia does not seem to care at all because all their benchmarks were made on an i9 Intel system on PCIe 3.0.

On the upside the 10600k has a lot more gaming performance than a 3700x, particularly once it's overclocked you can get 10900k performance levels out of it. Which depending on the game can end up making a difference of up to 20 fps to a 3700x, as Zen 2 performance doesn't scale that well when overclocking.

So if gaming is the thing you care about, then the 10600k is right now a very solid choice offering top gaming performance at a rather affordable price if you are able and willing to OC. The more productive tasks you have, the better the 3700x becomes.

There's also the option of going AM4 with a very affordable Zen 2, like a 3600, and hope that Zen 3 will manage to offer something that kicks the gaming performance crown off Intel, and then upgrade to that.

@alistercat said:

@facelessvixen: Thank you for all the information. It has be so helpful. I kept out of the loop on purpose to avoid temptation. What do you think of the i5-10600K? Reading performance reviews it sounds like it gives almost the same game performance as the 10700K but because it's an i5, less performance on work tasks. Since you also use it for video and photoshop, how huge will the difference be between the i5 and i7?

i5-10600K is significantly cheaper than both the 3700X and 10700K which is why I'm suddenly drawn to it.

Edit: Nevermind. There are too many downsides. The Ryzen 7 3700X still looks appealing.

I've settled on these parts. I hate to use Amazon but they're so much cheaper.

I think Dan mentioned it in a Beastcast last year as his favorite VR game at the time, but sadly that's about it.

I recently gave it a try and was massively surprised: It's like a mashup of Beat Saber and Super Hot with some heavy John Wick vibes. Super fun and easy to play, yet hard to master, by now it's pretty much fully replaced Beat Saber as my "go-to" VR game, no small feat!

So if people are looking for a "rhythm shooter in VR", imho this is the one to go for. I've also tried AUDICA, but compared to Pistol Whip it just feels super sterile and not really engaging.

@boozak: There's a bunch of companies out there that sell lenses made to your specs so you can just put those on the ones in your headset.

That way you don't need to wear your glasses but still get a sharp picture, prices start around 45 bucks, which is crappy due to yet additional cost, but imho well worth it for the comfort and improved visuals.

It's also not as "in the way" as I originally imagined it to be. Movement-wise you are not needing much more space than some of the more elaborate Wii remote games.

Sure, you don't see your surroundings, but if whoever you live with is aware of that fact they can give you a proper warning when they need to pass through your playspace.

@casepb: I just found it so surpirising how this turned out to be my favorite, because a lot of the early reviews/let's plays look really rough. I figured I had all my bases covered with the VR humblebundle, and there's some great stuff in there, but none of those really have the "legs" and gameplay variety (movement+shooting) that Sairento VR has.

Tho I played the Steam PC version, apparently the Occulus Quest version is missing a bunch of content and has very jucky visuals.

Beat Saber I also really enjoy, a bit like the Wii Sports of VR in terms of fun and accessiability. Coming to VR now there's so much stuff, it's like getting a new console years into its realse and having to catch up and discover all kinds of cool games and completely new genres.

Just here to share the love for what turned out to be my favorite VR game that apparently nobody cares about.

This is like Ghost in the Shell meets Matrix John Wick, with one of the most awesome movement systems I've seen in VR yet.

You can wallrun while dualblasting with SMGs, transition into a backflip over enemies blasting them with a shotgun, to land in a slide with your katana out, kneecapping everybody you slide past.

And even tho all this fast and insane movement is going on, as a VR newbie, this didn't give me even the slighest bit of motion sickness, while Boneworks is pretty much unplayable for me right now and Payday 2 VR is only playable for very limited time. Nothing like that with this, played for easily an hour without a break or any signs of motion sickness.

It's also one of the few VR games I've seen yet that got some actual legs on it. There's a somewhat deep lootgame hidden in there, as all weapons and equipment can slot several relics of varying rarities, with some rather unique effects among them. These are not permanent and don't get destroyed on removal, so you are free to switch them out and experiment around with different loadouts for the variety of weapons that are unlocked from the beginning.

There's also leveling, which lets you spent skill points on a bunch of skill trees focused on different fields, I believe respecing is free but I haven't tried that yet.

It's not all only amazing tho, campaign is pretty much just slightly less exciting missions with medicore VA and meh story. The core-loop is grinding missions for loot, there's loot mulitpliers on relics (like magicfind in Diablo), stepping up mission difficulty increases exp and loot rewards, there's also the option to pay with a resource to add extra difficulty modifiers to the mission, which also increase loot quality/quanity.

As such it's very much a loot grinder, but the gameplay being as fun as it is does not make it feel grindy at all, particularly with the freedom of switching weapon loadouts between missions and not being locked into a specific type due to progress.

Enemy variety could also be a bit better, the recolors start to pop up fast and quick, tho after 6 hours of playing I'm not sure I've seen them all. The first "boss" enemy I encountered so far was actually a unique model with unique attacks, so maybe there's way more variety in the higher levels.

So if this sounds like something you would enjoy, don't fear giving it a try, particularly if you like Cyberpunk/Neo Tokyo settings.

This ain't really a surprise.

The allure of "A whole cloud just rendering the game for you!" sounds great in theory, but simply ain't economical in reality.

Just because the hardware is sitting in a server rack doesn't mean that games suddenly become less demanding, but it very likely will mean that several players will end up sharing the same hardware instance because spinning up separate hardware, for each individual player, would simply not be economical for Google.

@bisonhero: If fans actually end up disrupting Blizzcon. Even then: The press on it can easily end up pretty mixed because in the end, this is just another Blizzard event where Blizzard makes the rules of how to behave and has the legal right to expel anybody breaking their house rules.

@clush: There's nothing whataboutist about any of that. Corporate America is blind to the content of the political message, it's allergic to controversial topics in general, of which politics is pretty much the biggest one.

I mean would you be okay if a Russian player would have used the spot-light to advertise for "Crimean independence!"?

I seriously doubt it, similarly, we don't blink twice when other political messages we happen to disagree with get shut down, like homophobic and xenophobic drivel.

But when the message is something parts of the Overton window can agree with, then we suddenly want more nuance in how the topics are filtered out.

This is something that simply doesn't work in reality, you are asking for corporations to develop a moral compass, a consciousness, to be the final judges on what political speech can pass to the public and which one can't. That idea alone is highly problematic.

All that in a time when it's been literally raining money for publishers like Blizz due to peddling gambling mechanics to literal children. Of course, they gonna stick to "When in doubt, better shut it down", taking sides is the last thing they want to do in anything when it could cut into their profits.

Without boycotts that's a very easy calculation for Blizz: Just endure trough the moaning, people will keep playing and paying, while still enjoying access to the Chinese market of over a billion more customers.

Everything else is just a PR problem for them they can throw a couple more of hundreds of millions of $ at.

I wonder where all that outrage was when Blizz was banning competetive Overwatch players for voicing their particular political views?

How about GB community guidelines that actually prohibit political discussions and are usually enforced very strictly?

The thing is: Corporate America does not care about ethics, it cares about profits.

In that context it's mindboggling how many people think they are taking some kind of stand when they declare "I'll be attending Blizzcon to make my voice heard!", you know, a private corporate event. If those people would be serious then they'd be boycotting Blizzcon instead throwing even more money at Blizzard by attending.

Reading past the buzzwordy sounding "negative latency" this sounds very much like trying to apply predictive heuristics to figure out what action a player might perform next, and already buffer that action before the player actually sends the signal to perform it?

So.. pretty much Minority Report but for player actions? Does that mean that playing games on Stadia will train an ML algorithm in the background, just like we are training self-driving cars when solving captchas? And here I thought this whole Stadia thing couldn't get any creepier/dystopian...

Seems like the big flaw with the package is simply the included controllers inability to track behind the back movement.

But apparently, the Vive controllers+Lighthouses can be used with the Odyssey+, get Vive like tracking at room-scale?
That's also a really neat combination because you can basically buy a VR setup piece-meal up to Vive Pro quality at room-scale.

Rift S sounds like it would have way worse picture quality, LCD vs AMOLED, lower resolution and refresh rate compared to the Odyssey+, which seems to be identical in screen hardware to the Vive Pro. Unless I'm missing something about the Rift S except price?

Too bad Samsung doesn't sell the Odyssey+ officially in Europe. Amazon.com delivers to me, but that would make it around 340€ for the Odyssey+ and not even a proper warranty along with it :/