Hardware Archives - Tales of the Aggronaut

Intentional Downgrade

October 24, 2022 by Belghast

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

September 21, 2022September 21, 2022 by Belghast

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.

Poor Driving and Change

May 15, 2019 by Belghast

Last night I largely spent the night playing Rage 2 and doing a really poor job of driving around the wasteland. In theory I should use this as an opportunity to test out the little 3D Printed controller wheel that I have… but instead I am just suffering through the mouse and keyboard controls. It is funny how even when they do not feel amazing… I will still gravitate towards mouse and keyboard in part just to keep from having to switch between controller and keyboard all the time. I will always be of the firm opinion that shooters are just better with a mouse… and then many of those shooters also want you to control vehicles which work best with a controller. So either I suffer with the shooter gameplay or I suffer with the often side content that is driving. The problem with Rage 2 however is you spend a lot of time in your vehicle as you cross wide swaths of territory between missions.

So while I did not get a screenshot of this because I was enthralled by the combat… one of the random events that happened in the world is that I encountered an enemy vehicle convoy… which I followed around trying to take out. There were roughly 3 car type vehicles, 3 or 4 motorcycle type vehicles and one giant Semi sort of hauler vehicle that was the primary objective. I managed to whittle down the convoy to just being this big massive vehicle… and chased it around through the landscape for a good fifteen minutes slowly plinking down its health. Often times I would drive poorly and get way off track forcing me to jet booster thrust my way back into gun range. Unfortunately I only managed to know it down by about half health before I got a verbal warning that I was almost out of ammunition. I am guessing I need some of the vehicle upgrades to realistically fare well in vehicle to vehicle combat… but I gotta say… I was completely hooked by the experience.

Every town seems to have a major problem that you need to deal with for them… before they can turn around and help you. Last night I made it through one of those missions… which unlocked another sequence of events that I am going to need to do before they can actually help me. That is fine… like I said yesterday there isn’t a lot of back and forth in the dialog so I more than expected to keep going on fetch and assistance quests until the storyline culminates in a battle with the big bad of the world. It is the moment to moment game play and the exploration of new areas that make the game interesting to me personally. I like checking enemy camps off of my list, especially when they happen to be hiding an ark full of goodies. As I move forward into the game I keep encountering newer and tougher groups of enemies… and I have to say… Authority soldiers are already a pain in the butt because I don’t have an amazing answer to their energy armor yet.

Last night during the quest I was speaking of in the previous paragraph, I picked up my first new weapon… which is a really amazing shotgun. Shotguns are a weapon that I always find deep kinship with, because they are sort of the no-nonsense killing machine option that have been pretty much something I gravitated towards since Doom. The most recent Doom game had an awesome design as far as shotguns go with some interesting mode switching, and Rage 2 does something very similar. If you are firing the weapon blindly you end up with a fairly rapid fire short ranged blast option. However if you hold down the right mouse button and aim the weapon, according to the in game dialog, the weapon melts together all of the shells into one large high powered slug that knocks targets back and has a satisfying thump when it fires. When it says it knocks things back… you can get some interesting situations where you hit a single target and it ends up knocking a whole line of enemies down if they are approaching single file through a choke point. So far this weapon really is my only answer to the Authority troops, and you end up getting it in a mission where things are constantly leaping out of the walls so it also does a great job of twitch reflex killing.

I’m still very much enjoying the game and look forward to playing more of it as the week goes on. However there is one more topic that I want to bring up. I will be over the next few weeks moving all of my sites from my current host over to a different host. I’ve been with my current host for the entire decade during which Tales of the Aggronaut has existed. Initially I used them because a good friend of mine was one of the system admins, and I could always poke him if I needed something weird done. However after he left the service has not exactly been that stellar. Additionally there has been a pretty constantly series of blips in server up time and I am getting tired of it. I needed to find a good host to use for another purpose… and instead of doing a single one off… I bought a big enough hosting account to hold everything of mine and even do MP3 hosting if I choose to do so and move away from Libsyn. I will go into more details later as I move everything over depending on how positive or negative the experience is. I’ve moved a single non-gaming site over and it went pretty smoothly. This weekend I plan on moving AggroChat and depending on how well that goes might move Aggronaut as well.

Mostly I just wanted to give my readers a heads up that some changes will be coming in my infrastructure and it might wind up with me being down more than I intend to.

Kindle Arrives

December 8, 2015 by Belghast

A New Toy

Sunday I wrote a bit about my troubles with Amazon and shipping recently, and I guess maybe that complaining worked. Not only did I get additional prime subscription time added to my account to appease me, but yesterday mid day my new Amazon Fire 7 inch tablet showed up. As a result I spent a good deal of last night fiddling with it, and I figured I would write a little bit about it as a result. The tablet I am talking about is the one that has been widely advertised as being sold in six packs…. and singles go for only $49.99 so that the marketing can say “under $50 dollars”. Over the recent holiday consumer madness… they were selling the tablet for $34.99 which finally got me to jump on buying one just to see what it is like. I already have owned several android tablets, and even got a used ipad 2 since my wife loved hers so much. After all of that I had pretty much decided I simply was not a “tablet” person. If I have time to use a tablet… I am probably at home and could just play on my PC, PS4, Vita, PS3… you are getting the idea. What I lacked though was a really good device to read on… because the iPad and Android tablets were just too bulk to use in bed comfortably without nodding off every so often and whacking myself in the face.

The first shocker is the size, because really when you think about it… 7 inches sounds like a large size. The tablet as a whole feels more like a large phone… so something along the lines of a Samsung Note and less like a tablet. The build quality is solid, and the device feels nice in your hand… but the plastic back makes it feel a little on the cheap side. Then again this is a tablet that I just paid $34 for… and in the past that would have gotten me some shanzhai reject and not a perfectly viable device. There are some caveats to know going into it. Firstly there is no Google Play store on the device by default, and in theory it is set up in a way to keep directing you at the Amazon ecosystem for music, movies and everything else related. This is good in one aspect, especially if you are a Prime user… since well it has one of the better interfaces for actually watching the free streaming with Prime. The whole lack of Google Play would have potentially been a deal breaker since, as someone already embedded in the Android world… I already own pretty much all of the apps I need to function there and have zero interest in repurchasing them from Amazon. Thankfully I did a bit of research before jumping into this device and apparently it is a relatively trivial experience to load the Play store, it simply involves loading four different android apps on your device in a specific order. Luckily however the above video shows you the appropriate order and provides what seems to be a clean link to the downloads. I personally just downloaded them from my device to save having to try and swap them over through a computer.

It Plays Hearthstone

The other thing that I would really like to do with a tablet is to be able to quickly get into Hearthstone and play it from bed. Previously most of my Android devices simply performed like crap in Hearthstone, with the best possible version being on my Samsung Galaxy S5… and even then it was super sluggish. This device however, took a bit of time initially to boot into Hearthstone and sign into Battle.net the first time, but from that point on I have been able to get in and doing stuff pretty quickly. The interface ends up being a little small, so things like the settings gear can be a bit awkward to click on at first, but the base interface of the game performed smoothly. I played a few games last night, and experienced real issues, and even as multiple effects were firing on screen I didn’t see any noticeable lag. So for my purposes the device passes with flying colors when it comes to gaming. At some point I will throw other games on it and test those out as well, but since I was mostly concerned about running what is normally a fairly intensive mobile game like Hearthstone… that is what I went with first. Please excuse the kinda crappy photo but I wanted to take a photo of me running hearthstone ON the device… which meant taking a photo with my phone since I have not figured out how to do a screenshot on Kindle Fire OS yet and the normal methods from my phone did not work at all.

As far as the other purpose of the device, it also passes with flying colors. Any device can read a book, so that wasn’t really what I was concerned about… so instead I booted into my Marvel Unlimited account and attempted to read some comics. I wanted to see if a full comic page was readable with the small screen size and my less than perfect eyes. I have to say I was pretty happy with the end results, and the slightly strange format as you might expect fits a page size perfectly. Laying in bed last night I read around a dozen or so comics and my eyes never felt like they were being strained. The only time things got awkward is when I needed to read a double panel spread, at which point I had to mostly zoom in and move around the screen to read the panels. These were still awkward as shit on my full sized iPad, so I am not really too shocked about this. These are one of those things that only really works well in a physical book. The next step will be to load the puppy up with books, since right now our Amazon account is loaded up with quite literally thousands of books that I have zero interest in… since my wife and her mother are the primary users of that account. In the past I always preferred reading through Aldiko so I will have to install that and test it out as well. All told though… I am really happy with my $34 purchase… which after using some built up Discover cash back bonus… ended up covering the entire cost.

Best Laid Plans

Last night I had every plan of running a bunch of LFR in the hopes of getting a main hand weapon. However in the middle of piddling around in Tanaan jungle I got a Baleful Armament to drop for me. Unfortunately… it turned into the lowest possible version I could get. That said it is better than nothing and matches the 650 shield that I have as well. I am at the very least “viable” as a tank, though I need to do some stuff to set up my bars. It is my hope that at some point I will get a decent sword and shield to drop in normal that I will roll offspec on. In the meantime I need to get used to tanking as a Paladin, and this at least gives me the ability to run the daily heroic relatively easily for Valor. As to how much pug tanking I will be doing… that is an entirely different question. The main problem with last night however… is that I did not really sleep well Sunday night. So by the time I spent awhile fiddling with the Kindle, my wife suggested that it was bedtime… and for once I agreed. Admittedly I went to bed and continued to play with the Kindle, but sitting on the couch was invoking the most furious of yawns. At the very least tonight I want to run the Black Gate on both characters, in the hopes that Tuesday night LFR is still the best possible time to run it. In theory I should probably do the entire LFR on Belghast in the hopes of getting an upgraded weapon before the Wednesday night normal raid with Jed and crew.