Random Hardware topics

[Zed Clampet]

Spot on. Intel was failing to deliver when AMD started picking up steam in the CPU space. That's kind of what happened to Nvidia as well, AMD's graphics cards were lackluster and Nvidia saw an oppurtunity to surpass the competition and took it. AMD was mildly disruptive with their great pricing on current gen cards and held down prices a lot longer than Nvidia, so props to them for that. I do wish they'd accelerate the graphics team more, pushing them to at least *try* and surpass Nvidia. It seems like they're comfortable being in second place which is never a great mindset to have.

Nvidia has absolute truckloads, no, BOATloads of money, they could drop their single biggest investment into GPU R&D, but the returns aren't as great as if they put that money into AI R&D.

There was an article about Intel hiring a former AMD GPU architect, so maybe Intel can get seriously into this market. The person who wrote the article lamented that they were probably talking about AI, but as long as they weren't getting loose with the term "GPU" then they should be able to run games. Honestly, though, I find it difficult to blame companies for going after the AI goldrush.

 

[Colif]

most of my video cards were probably Nvidia. I just don't want them now.
Half of my CPU are intel, they just dropped the ball in recent years and even if they come back the next time, I still likely buy AMD CPU next only as I don't need all new motherboard and ram to get it.

wonder how much those will cost.

 

[Colif]

The day after I updated my BIOS last week, Gigabyte released a new one.
Its changes aren't any use to me so I will ignore it until they have a few more updates.
Improve system compatibility for BitLocker when using a dGPU card and LED lighting function. << I don't need that.

The ram price thing is a terrible opportunity for OEM PC makers to benefit from forcing people to buy their PC and stop them making their own. As normally we have a better choice than to throw money away buying a Dell or HP. If the shortage can be made to last a few years, people will get more desperate than they are now.

I hope to just ignore it as I don't need anything new now

Note: GCC - Gigabyte Command Centre.

If I unplug PC and then turn PC on after, all the RGB in my case is rainbow until GCC launches, and loads my normal colours.
If I just turn windows on normally (without unplugging PC at any stage before) the RGB is gold on the GPU and Bottom fans, and rainbow on ram, until GCC launches and loads my normal colours
If I wake it from sleep or hibernate, ram stays rainbow but I blame GCC.

Gold is the colour of all my stuff if GCC is in unsynced mode.
Rainbow is default of most rgb I own.
There are no settings for rgb in the bios so can't be that.

Unplugging shouldn't make any difference, PC should be off regardless.Fast start up isn't on in windows.
I don't have any colour scheme set in windows dynamic lighting, and its set to let GCC override it. GCC also set to not use it.

 

[Colif]

It sucks only one company makes Graphics Cards... players have no choice but to go outside I guess

the sky is falling

BTW, no one at Nvidia has actually said they aren't making any. No idea what the 5090 TI & Titan are... hmm, new cards from Nvidia this year... something feels off

No one has a working crystal ball so we don't know what 2028 brings or when the bubble bursts

unrelated: the segmented display on my Motherboard shows temps even when windows is off, so it clearly gets info from mb sensors and doesn't need software. CPU gets to about 71 at startup

 

[neogunhero]

These companies can't be blamed. They exist to make money, not benefit humanity. AI is where the money is at, even if it isn't making profit. Investors see the speculation and are willing to throw millions and billions at it. The hope is that one day there will be a killer AI app, device, whatever, that everyone will want. They are hoping for the iPhone moment of AI to bring in a new era of tech. The reality is adoption is pretty slow. Once gen AI becomes fully pay to use, it won't be as popular with the Facebook grandmas. Agentic AI is seemingly the big focus now, let our AI do menial tasks for you. Sounds good, but there's still a lot of things people will prefer themselves to do. There hasn't been a single AI feature that people are just dying to use, not like when the iPhone ushered in a huge generational leap for smartphones and singlehandedly made smartphones an absolute must-have device in our daily lives. That is what AI companies are hoping to find one day, but who knows when, or if that will ever happen.

I think this sort of focus is wrong. Instead of looking for that iPhone moment, AI companies should focus more on how it can actually benefit humanity. Health and medicine, statistics, math and science, ancient history research, outer space exploration, this is the stuff AI should be used for. It absolutely is, the companies are making AI for these kinds of fields, but the overall focus seems more about "how can we get customers to pay for this?" rather than "how can we use this technology to benefit humanity in unprecedented ways?".

 

[Zed Clampet]

It doesn't matter if Intel's 56-core Nova Lake is a power-hungry monster

because games barely use any CPU cores.

www.pcgamer.com

Welcome to the era where any game is inconsequential to your CPU.

You don't have to worry about the theoretical max power of Intel's new chips because there are no games that could use anywhere near that level of processing power. Your GPU will be out of breath and 90 degrees, and the CPU won't even be breaking a sweat.

 

[Colif]

True, as I won't be buying one.

Mainly as I intend to use current Motherboard for as long as possible. I don't need 56 cores, I will be happy enough with 12. Intel don't use hyperthreading any more as they don't need it, AMD still will so thats 24 threads.

Most games will be designed to run with probably 8 to 12 cores as thats likely what the new consoles will have so all the extra cores won't be used in games anyway, Both new consoles based on AM6/RDNA5 so AMD knows what they are getting.

We see which is better at gaming in time.

I can live without having best gaming CPU, I already lost that title. There are two CPU already better than mine.
AMD is cheaper in long run as can use same MB for many CPU. Intel its a new board every time.

Intel will have to sell ram packs with mb's to get any for their customers whenever its released. I realise they use a different ram type but supply will still be an issue.

 

[neogunhero]

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4dacjty4cYE


Long interview, but some very interesting points made. Crimson Desert will use the full suite of AMD FSR Redstone tech:

1. FSR Upscaling — resolution restoration using AI.
2. FSR Frame Generation — updated ML frame generation.
3. FSR Ray Regeneration — neural network ray restoration (analogous to Ray Reconstruction from NVIDIA).
4. FSR Radiance Caching — lighting caching to speed up ray tracing.

(from en.gamegpu.com)


Very excited to put all of that to use. I haven't played a game with native FSR 4 support yet. A few games that have FSR 3.1 can be force-upgraded to 4 using the Adrenaline software. Oblivion Remastered had massive performance uplifts when I forced it to the latest version of FSR and frame-gen, so I'm happy that my most anticipated game at the moment will have it built in natively.

 

[Zed Clampet]

True, as I won't be buying one.

Mainly as I intend to use current Motherboard for as long as possible. I don't need 56 cores, I will be happy enough with 12. Intel don't use hyperthreading any more as they don't need it, AMD still will so thats 24 threads.

Most games will be designed to run with probably 8 to 12 cores as thats likely what the new consoles will have so all the extra cores won't be used in games anyway, Both new consoles based on AM6/RDNA5 so AMD knows what they are getting.

We see which is better at gaming in time.

I can live without having best gaming CPU, I already lost that title. There are two CPU already better than mine.
AMD is cheaper in long run as can use same MB for many CPU. Intel its a new board every time.

Intel will have to sell ram packs with mb's to get any for their customers whenever its released. I realise they use a different ram type but supply will still be an issue.

This is true. I was just wildly paraphrasing the PCG article. The reality is that most games still have a single thread that does most of the heavy lifting and then offload a few things to a few other cores. If that one core can't handle everything, you get your CPU bottleneck. These massive Intel CPUs are for running simulations, heavy compiling, training LLMs, etc.

@neogunhero do you have the monthly Humble Choice sub? Pifanjr doesn't want any games, Colif ignores me, Zloth owns everything, and I don't want to try to give games away on the main thread now that we have to friend each other to send keys...

 

[Colif]

This is not a GPU

These massive Intel CPUs are for running simulations, heavy compiling, training LLMs, etc.

Oh... maybe I spend 60k and get these guys to make this again:

That CPU is cheap here, only 20k

AMD Threadripper PRO 9995WX Workstation Processor | Scorptec Computers

AMD Threadripper PRO 9995WX (Base: 2.5GHz Boost: 5.4GHz / 480MB Cache / sTR5 / 96 Cores / 192 Threads / 350 Watt / Without Heatsink/Fan). Fast Australia-wide delivery | Scorptec Computers

www.scorptec.com.au

@neogunhero sad thing about that game is if we had bought our GPU now, we would get that game for free as its part of an offer for AMD GPU purchasers this month. Or at least, it is in USA. No idea if I would have got it.

 

[neogunhero]

@neogunhero do you have the monthly Humble Choice sub? Pifanjr doesn't want any games, Colif ignores me, Zloth owns everything, and I don't want to try to give games away on the main thread now that we have to friend each other to send keys...

They must have good reason not to accept keys from you... think I'll pass
I don't have the sub anymore and I don't think adding another game to my 1200+ library would be a good idea. Thanks though!!

@neogunhero sad thing about that game is if we had bought our GPU now, we would get that game for free as its part of an offer for AMD GPU purchasers this month. Or at least, it is in USA. No idea if I would have got it.

It's only for RX 9070 XTs anyways, I have the 9060 XT. However, the price I paid for my card plus the price of the game would basically amount to buying a 9070 XT, so I kind of feel ripped off! For the same amount of money I could have had a better card and the game!

 

[Colif]

I hadn't looked into the offer enough to see it was just my GPU.
Seems it applies here too... but only through specific retailers, and not the one I bought card from.
The stores that do have the offer don't appear to sell the model I own.

1. One only sells the XFX Swift 9070,
2. one sell the XFX Swift 9070 XT
3. and One of them just makes PC so they want you to pay for an entire system to get a free game.

But even if they had the right model, I got a $245 credit on the purchase on my card, and the game costs me $110, I would still be 135 up on the purchase if I did buy game... might have to look at it, but everything I look at these days seems to come out next month... not just games. Credit reduced the price I paid down to same price as a 9070.