Hardware

Maru Takes the Lead

by

Good Morning Folks. I feel pretty miserable. On Tuesday I had several doctors appointments and spent time in several waiting rooms, and am pretty sure I picked up some dire crud. I was a dumbass and did not wear a mask and am now paying the price. I started feeling awful on Thursday, it got considerably worse on Friday, and then has been backing off slowly over the weekend. I am hoping that by tomorrow I will feel functional enough to work again. It started with an outrageously sore throat, a cough, and some intestinal panic… and mostly what is left is the cough. However it has impacted my ability to sleep with me waking up every 30 minutes or so for a good old fashioned coughing fit. However I did manage to move into the new desktop PC that I talked about last week, and have moved my old one downstairs to eventually be used for some living room big screen gaming. Very much a big fan of the Costco pre-built that I talked about, and it was a massive upgrade over my previous 11th gen intel based system with a 3080 in it.

I honestly spent most of the weekend too miserable to care about much of anything, staring blankly at the wall. When I did feel like gaming I largely played Path of Exile. I am alternating between delving on my Righteous Fire Chieftain, and mapping on my Ice Trap of Hollowness Elementalist, and both are extremely solid. I am getting close to level 99 on the Chieftain and when I hit that, I am probably going to spend a bit more time taking on bloodline and pinnacle bosses to knock out some more credit towards the various challenges. I need to start doing a lot more Tier 16.5 maps because I need to complete a bajillion of them in order to knock out one of the challenges. Right now I am doing Blue altars juiced on my Ice Trapper, and at some point I will swap things up to Red altars and then later Maven Witnesses because there are achievements for doing all of those. I really hate the act of witnessing the Maven because I hate running random map layouts. I wish there was a keystone that gave you random bosses at the end of maps so that you could run a single layout and always be witnessing a new boss.

At this pint I have completed 24 of 40 Achievements and knocked out a few thanks to Betrayal like the one that requires you to use a bunch of rare crafting materials. I eventually got a syndicate crafting bench with a Divine Orb on it, which counts for the achievement requirements. There is another one for using rare currency, but I am not sure any of that stuff actually shows up on the Syndicate benches. At some point I should try and craft a dual influence life gain on block shield to replace my current one, and that will use an awakener orb which is one of the requirements. I am really close to Cross Contamination and just need to figure out which combination of scarabs I need to run to make some of those conditions happen. It took me four maps before I was able to get a Delirious Beyond boss which surprised me a bit. Sinew Swarms is actually closer in progress than the 0 of 3 would indicate but that one will complete in time with me just running enough maps.

Over in Destiny Rising, we had one of our best weekends ever… but I failed to take any screenshots. Essentially we managed to find Three Strongholds as a clan, and then did all of them on Saturday afternoon before I started feeling considerably worse as the day went on. We did not record a podcast this weekend, because I sort of cratered as we got towards evening. That has happened most nights, where I do better in the morning and then feel progressively worse as the day goes on. Morgran’s Prey is also going on again so we knocked a few of those rounds out as a group, and then I have run it a few more times solo. Now that I have every exotic weapon, the enticement of getting a new exotic is not nearly as strong as it once was. However it is still a good source of general resources and materials, and the combat itself is pretty fun.

I finished out the battle pass and got my 4th copy of the exotic grenade launcher, allowing me to max that weapon out. There are still a few minor points that I can upgrade it, but it did bump my Maru over 70k making her my highest character currently. As soon as I settle up from Calamity ops I should be able to max out her relic abilities and bump her score up again. After that I am either going to work on bumping up Ning Fei or Gwynn and I used some of the excess fruit that I had laying around to get artifact gilding requirement done for Tan-2. I’ve upgraded a bunch of my characters somewhat even levels of progress, whereas my friend Ace has mostly focused on one or two. Their method is probably better, but I personally like having a wide stable of characters to play.

I ran two of the three weekly legendary missions this morning, because I needed the components to bump up Maru’s weapon and completed my first three chest run with Gwynn that I have ever done. I need to do another one of these runs as Wolf because the last step that he has between getting another gold medallion is surviving a challenge mode without dying. The push to get more gold characters stopped being anywhere near as interesting when I was not longer gated from upgrades because I was too low level. Now that I am over Ascension 55 I think I can pretty much do anything in the game. I need to spend some time in the coming days trying to get through some more of the challenge content. I am not sure what day of the week Ace and I will get together and do the Grandmaster stuff, but I am sure it will be one of these first few days of the week before Thanksgiving.

Playing Path of Exile on the Livingroom TV was a bit of a wild experience. One of the things that I want to sort out over the holiday weekend is trying to figure out this doodad that I bought which serves as a USB to Bluetooth adapter and should allow me to remote control the device with a normal keyboard and mouse. A lot of the games that I plan on playing in the livingroom will be controller games, but I do still want the ability to play MMORPGs and ARPGs if I so choose it.

New Metas, New Weapons, and New PCs

by

Good Morning Folks. I am getting a bit of a late start today because I am fighting some sort of unnamed crud. On Tuesday I had a bunch of doctors appointments, and I am pretty sure I picked up something in the waiting room. I had been hacking and coughing for a few days and this morning I woke up with a ridiculously sore throat and almost hay fever like symptoms. I am taking the day off because I do not feel like working, and going to be trying to push fluids and rest as much as I can. I did not do the weekly Thursday night GW2 thing last week, but did last night and it was quite a bit of fun… even though I was running pretty low on energy. We happened into the meta event for Starlight Weald and that was quite a bit of fun. So far I have liked both of the new meta battles, though I have only caught the first zones a few times now. I’ve yet to properly unlock the second zone, but I did the teleport to friend thing so I could join in the reindeer games.

It has been a bit since I talked about Destiny Rising, but I am still playing at least some of it every day. I managed to pull the final exotic that I was missing the other day when I crafted an engram. Most of these I have not upgraded or anything, but it did feel good to at least check off this box in the grind. I doubt I will ever actually use this Hand Cannon because I greatly prefer the one that works somewhat like a pulse rifle. To be truthful it is going to take a new champion that really makes Hand Cannons fun, before I play any character regularly that uses one. I mean I won’t discount it because I did not like the single shot grenade launcher until Maru dropped, and now I am loving it.

That said, Maru really does not feel good until you get the exotic grenade launcher. I pulled her on the second acount and have been using the mythic grenade launcher with her, and it feels really bad. A lot of her power comes from the exotic’s ability to explode multiple times in a row. Without that, she just does not really have the clear speed. However I am still happy to have pulled her at all on my entirely free to play account, because I never managed to pull Helhest. Maru if nothing else plays a much more important role in the game than Helhest does, because she fills a niches that only one other champion Ikora can really fill. There are at least several other Precision champions at this point, and I have three of them, so if I had to spend my luck on anything I would rather have the void grenade launcher champ.

Ace and I got together last night and did Calamity Ops now that we are finally in a bracket again that allows us to group up together. In doing so I managed to get enough materials to be able to finally push Maru to Gold on my main account. I am still missing one of her weapon mastery points, but after that I will likely start working on pushing Gwynn up. We have three strongholds unlocked this week and need to figure out a time when we can get everyone together to take them down. We did not clear any stongholds last week, and I would really like to get the points this week. We cleared our Grandmaster content earlier in the week, so really the last remaining thing that I really want done this week is the strongholds. I should probably also try and get one more legendary content run so I can get my maximum points.

Over in Path of Exile, I am mostly still chipping away at challenges. I’ve done almost all of the really easy ones, and now everything else that I am doing takes some effort. I’ve unlocked 3 of the bloodline bosses for example, because I finally found an Aul the other night down in Delve. I should wrap up the Bijou Beetles within my next few map runs, because I am running with 5 Scarabs pretty much every time I run a map. Cross Contamination is going to require specific focus and figuring out how to make sure I force a few different mechanics on the map at the same time. Remarkable Realms I should at some point get Doryani’s Machinarium to drop in Delve, because it is currently back to selling for around 5 Divines each due to it being back on the list of challenges. Cunning Crafts requires me to use a Divine Orb, but I keep hoping I will get a Betrayal Stronghold with a crafting bench that has Divines on it, which should count. Atlas Awe requires The Feared…. which I might just pay for a carry because I am not in the mood to farm up all of the content required to unlock that.

I’ve been running a lot of Alva, just because it is great experience and also if you run it with the scarab that generates a random temple, you end up getting a locus of corruption shockingly often. Those sell for at least 100 Chaos each, and if you get a Locus plus the other key rooms they go for significantly more. Essentially I tend to make enough currency to keep funding my scarabs, so that I can mostly just use it as an experience farm. I really should swap one of my scarabs for a stack of Niko scarabs just so I can force getting sulphite at the same time. Every so often I get a big ticket item like a Valdo’s box which also makes the entire thing profitable. At the moment I am running it with Toxic Sewers and at some point I will flip and probably level my Ice Trapper in Tropical Island because it prefers a more open layout so that I can seed the traps before mobs get to me.

Lastly I jumped on a deal for a new computer, so this weekend I will be migrating over to that. Essentially I had been watching a few different pre-builts, one of which at CostCo and with Black Friday specials it dropped in price by $400 finally making me take the plunge. My current machine has been functional with an 11th Gen i7 and a 3080, but it is also around five years old at this point. I had been looking for something reasonable with a 5080 in it, and this MSI pre-built has an Ryzen 9, 32 GB ram, 2 TB M.2, and a RTX 5080 for $2200 currently through the week after Thanksgiving. The CostCo options were already a bit cheaper than some of other other pre-builts I had been looking for, and I priced things out and could not really build something with a 5080 for cheaper. The price drop just finally made me do it…. so now I will be spending my weekend swapping things around and getting it set up. I think I might end up using my current system as a living room PC.

Anyways. Apologies for not blogging yesterday but I was coming down with the crud that I am dealing with today, and just was not feeling up to it. Hopefully y’all have a wonderful weekend and if you are traveling for Thanksgiving, I hope it goes smoothly for you.

Intentional Downgrade

by

Good Morning Friends! This is going to be a bit of a hardware discussion. For the last six years, I have been using an LG 43UJ6300 43″ 4k 60hz television as my main gaming display. In the grand scheme of things, it was an economic way of getting a large display and since I specifically shopped for the lowest latency panel I could find, it was a pretty solid gaming experience. I would not shy away from using a television again in the future because it had a lot of benefits. Firstly the price of a reasonable 43″ 4k 60hz television is roughly 1/3rd of the price of a similarly sized gaming monitor. The other massive benefit of a large 4k display is that it is effectively a 2×2 grid of 1080p monitors, so a ridiculous amount of productivity space.

For gaming purposes, however, I honestly found little difference between running a game at 4k resolution and running a game at 1440p. So while I had the horsepower to run games at 4k 120hz due to my RTX 3080, I never did because I did not have the display to support that. Instead, I was far more likely to run at 1440p 120hz which my display did a fairly good job of supporting even though it seemed to be an “unofficial” mode. The other thing that I noticed over the years is that 43 inches is a wee bit too big to comfortably use at normal monitor distances, and by the end of the day my neck would end up getting sore from gazing upward to see anything I had at the very top of my screen.

Then there was the color accuracy problem. I had been running my LG TV next to a bog standard 1080p monitor, and whenever I moved windows from one screen to the other there was a massive difference in colors and clarity. For a while, my wife had been telling me that my screen was blue, and it was super noticeable any time I attempted to take a photo in my room. However, I had gotten used to it and was seemingly adjusting in my brain to the color shift. What I was noticing however is that my screen kept getting dimmer and the only way to adjust for this was to essentially wash everything out. Modern televisions are just not designed to last anywhere near as long as their tube-based cousins, and eventually, there are going to be problems be they dark spots, color shifts, or in my case global dimming. Last week it was finally time to move on when several times a day the display would just blink off for a few minutes and then go through a series of flashes as it finally woke back up to work again.

So when I got my replacement, I unintentionally chose another LG product not necessarily for any real reason other than the price to specs seemed to be the best deal. Instead of going with another 4k display, I “downgraded” to 1440p 165hz which could be debated as an upgrade instead. The higher refresh and supporting Freesync are both big bonuses. Having HDR10 which is a published standard instead of the jank HDR support the previous display had. The thing that I was not really prepared for is just how sharp and crisp everything looks. I am not entirely certain I realized how fuzzy everything was on the television and that everything essentially had a bit of a halo around it. There were a lot of times I had trouble reading things, and I just assumed it was my old man eyes getting the best of me… but instead, it seems that maybe the text itself was nowhere near as sharp as I thought it was.

The thing that I was not quite prepared for is just how my screen real estate I lost. Remember before I said that a 4k panel is an equivalent of having a 2×2 grid of 1080p monitors. The above image is the proportions of a 1440p screen with a 1080p black square in the upper left corner. I have more height and width than a normal 1080p screen but it isn’t a ton of it. My hope is that I can get used to this, but it is going to be an adjustment. I was used to having three or four windows open and arranged on screen at the same time where I could see and work from them all. Editing the podcast this week was the first time I noticed the big difference because often times I would be working on something in photoshop while my audacity window was sitting beside it and hot swapping between both of them while each was visible.

It does make me wonder if I am heading towards just adding a second one of these 32″ 1440p panels and calling it good.

Maybe Skip This Generation

by

Yesterday was the big Keynote from GTC… which is a conference that Nvidia essentially made up in order to have a venue in which to sell their graphics cards. One of the hot debates from yesterday was whether or not CEO Jensen Huang was an AI character and rendered in real-time… seeing as the last generation he did the entire demo in a virtual environment. The larger talking point however was the price tag associated with this generation. As is often the case Nvidia focused entirely on the highest end of their graphics cards, namely the 4080 and 4090. For those who don’t remember the “90” series came on board the last generation and has effectively replaced the Titan nomenclature for their extremely high-end cards that are not necessarily targeted at gaming. The products announced yesterday:

  • GeForce RTX 4090 24GB – $1599.99 MSRP
  • GeForce RTX 4080 16GB – $1199.99 MSRP
  • GeForce RTX 4080 12GB – $899.99 MSRP

From there you can expect board partners to release variants ranging from lower ram versions that are likely cheaper and cards with extra features that will cost more than the founder’s edition cards. One thing that will be interesting to see however is how the lineup of third-party cards shakes out now that EVGA has decided to stop producing Nvidia cards… and graphics cards entirely. Based on some very terse comments released around that news… it seems that board partners are often losing money on the higher-end graphics cards due to the chip costs set by Nvidia, and the price ceiling placed on product families.

If you compare the pricing of the last several generations, you can see that the lowest-end version of the 4080 is an almost 30% increase over the cost of the MSRP of the previous generation. Unfortunately, as we all know too well, it was almost impossible to find a graphics card during most of that generation for anywhere close to that price point. The pandemic happened and made the market go wonky… with issues in the supply chain followed by an increased demand brought on by a boom in gaming. This was only increased by the fact that so many set out of the 2000 series completely due to a similarly high 16% price increase over the previous generation.

I lucked into buying a reasonably priced prebuilt system for my birthday last year. It was a good call for me personally because I needed to completely refresh my system, as I was still using a 5th gen Intel platform. However at least part of my logic behind the purchase was that if anything went really wrong, I could at a minimum flip the graphics card and make more money than I paid for the system. At that point, I had checked Ebay and the 3080 was selling through at around $2500 each. However, a lot of things have changed since then. Firstly the supply chain issues have cleared up a bit, and the demand for chips has lessened to the point where most card manufacturers have cards in stock. Combine this with some very public crashes in cryptocurrency and the recent move of Etherium from proof of work to proof of stake… and the third-party market is deluged with used cards. If I were careful I could probably pick up a 3080 right now for under $500, which is a significant change in the market.

There is also the problem that a lot of the features that are being added to these new RTX cards are not actually being used by the bulk of gaming. Ray tracing has yet to really take the world by storm, and Nvidia banked during the 2000 series that gamers would favor higher resolution gaming as opposed to higher framerate gaming. In February of 2021, Steam passed 50,000 games listed on the platform and available for sale. There is a curated list of all of the games that feature “RTX On” support and right now currently that list only contains 132 games. While Nvidia keeps pioneering new AI features on their cards… it is highly unlikely that we are going to see the benefit of them anytime soon. Sure I love the AI ability to knock out background noise on my microphone or clip out the background when I am on a video call but I am not running any heavy processing routines on my card. Instead, I am still spending most of my time running games at 1080p or 1440p at which point I favor framerate over raw rendering detail.

Don’t get me wrong… I think a lot of the things demonstrated in the keynote were extremely cool. However, I also think that most of those things don’t really factor into my usage pattern for the cards. Nvidia has gone hard on AI research and simulations, and the vast majority of its presentation was focused on that market. Gamers are no longer the key demographic that they are chasing as a company and likely have not been for a very long time. So my advice would be that unless you are one of those folks who just have to have the newest and shiniest thing… maybe you should skip this generation of graphics cards entirely. The price point is tied to an artificial anchor of demand that is not going to hold up in the long run. That price is anchored to the eBay highs of the pandemic and a desire to squeeze more profit from the consumer as a result.

You can snap up some pretty reasonable deals in the after-market right now on 3000 series cards, and that is honestly more cards than is needed to get you through to the next major graphical update. If you follow the trends, 4k gaming has not really taken off as anyone had hoped for either. As I said before gamers tend to be favoring running games at a lower resolution but 144hz or higher frame rate. Right now mining cards are flooding the market because it is no longer profitable in the least to run a graphics card setup. There have been numerous videos covering the fact that so long as the cooler is still functioning properly, it is perfectly fine to buy a mining graphics card for gaming performance.

The 2000 series was the last time that gamers largely gave a generation a hard pass, and it was not necessarily for the same reasons. While there was a much larger jump in price point, it was more a case that the performance increase was not all that significant over the 1000 series. The 4000 series on the other hand seem to be a pretty massive leap in performance over the 3000 series… but it isn’t performance that we really need yet. The price point of 4k high refresh gaming is still pretty steep when it comes to monitors that are largely still in the $700 range. Whereas you can pick up a 1440p panel for around $200 and at the most popular sizes of around 27-inch displays… there isn’t much noticeable difference between the two. You really need to get up into the 40-60 inch display range before 4k has a clear advantage over 1440p.

Basically I think the 4000 series is really cool, but way to costly for what it is giving us. Get a cheap/used 3000 series card and call it good and wait this generation out.

Update – 9/21 4 pm

When I made my post this morning I did not have all of the information, or at least I took some things for granted. If you have two cards that are 4080s… and announce them as the 16GB version and the 12GB version, I go into that assuming that is the key difference. They are apparently just completely different cards, and today there has been a lot of speculation that the 4080 12GB was originally intended to be announced as the 4070. Why this matters, is that the 4080 12GB is essentially a worse card than the existing 3080 cards. While the boost clock is higher, the RTX 4080 12GB only has 7680 CUDA cores, whereas the existing 3080 series has 8960. That is a difference of over 1280 CUDA cores, which seems at least on paper to be a significant loss in horsepower as compared to the current generation. I am not sure if the clock and memory speed differences make up for it, but it does not look great.

That also means that the true generational price comparison is not that 12GB thing being called a 4080, but instead the 16GB model that has the much higher CUDA core count or 9728. That also means that the price difference between a 3080 and a 4080 then is an over 70% increase as opposed to the 30% mentioned earlier. This honestly just keeps looking like a worse deal, and I again stand by my statement that you really should be looking at getting a 3000 series card while they are dropping in price with the incoming wave of new cards, instead of looking at the 4000 series.