My parents bought one of the very first wave of Vista laptops, just a few weeks after the official launch. With 512mb of RAM, it ran like an absolute dog and that should never have been listed as the minimum spec. That said, surely some of the blame here must attach to the hardware vendors? Whatever MS put on the box as the minimum spec for Vista, they must have known they were pushing borderline-unusable PCs out the door.
I also remember the constant UAC prompts, but suspect MS made the right call here in the long run. It was infuriating for users, to be sure, and probably did result in a good few either disabling UAC or just habitually clicking "yes" to every prompt. But it also got a lot of people complaining to developers, which in turn persuaded them into better habits. A lot of people who turned off UAC on their early-era Vista machines probably didn't do so on future machines. These days, a lot of people know to think carefully before clicking yes to an unexpected UAC prompt.
I'm still not seeing anything about this that addresses the biggest problem that's hit previous gaming services such as OnLive and the like. That is to say; input latency.
30ms latency is indeed a generally acceptable figure for normal online gaming. But don't forget that what you're talking about under normal circumstances is the latency between the server and the client. So that latency is only relevant to the server-side game interactions. What we're talking about here is having an additional 30ms latency before you even get to that point. What that translates into is a far more distracting gap between the player's control inputs and a visible reaction on-screen (added on-top of the standard display-related latency, which even on a really good gaming monitor is likely to be at least 10ms).
This is really, really distracting, particularly in games which use mouse controls, where it is highly noticeable that there is a delay between mouse movements and in-game response. 30ms is roughly equivalent to what you'd get from a particularly horrid vsync implementation (e.g. what you see in the PC versions of Skyrim and Fallout 4), which can be distracting in regular gameplay and a real killer in any kind of competitive online action game.
The Hardwareluxx benchmarks are interesting. They certainly don't show "no" impact on gaming. In fact, what they show is more or less what you would expect to see with decreased CPU performance.
If you look at the 4K benchmarks, there is minimal-to-no impact. That's not surprising, because you would expect most modern games to be GPU-constrained at 4K, outside of some really fringe cases. Drop to 1080p, however, and you are looking at roughly a 4% or so reduction in framerates. Their test rig has a 1080 Ti - one of the best gaming cards money can buy right now and one that you would expect to be able to eat most games for breakfast at 1080p. It's not unusual for games on high-end graphics cards to hit CPU constraints at 1080p and, indeed, this is usually how sites like Eurogamer's Digital Foundry benchmark CPUs for gaming performance. By their usual standards, that 4% performance loss is pretty severe.
Will it actually affect anybody's gaming performance in the real world? Possibly. Gamers with older CPUs but a more recent graphics card (a fairly common combination) still using 1080p monitors may well see modest but still noticable performance hits based on those benchmarks. Even if it's not a huge real-world impact, it's a massive reputational blow for Intel.
I'll be the first to agree that real-money loot boxes in gaming are a terrible thing (if they're only available with in-game currency, I don't give a stuff). At their most benign (e.g. Overwatch), they are an inducement for people to continue to sink cash into a virtual slot machine. At their worst, when used as part of a pay-to-win system, they fundamentally corrupt a game's mechanics.
And yet...
I really, really wish that gamers (of all people) had not been jumping up and down and begging for Government intervention. Should you boycott games for containing loot box systems? Yes. Should you take to social media and cause as much brand damage as possible? Definitely. But bringing Government into things? Not going to end well...
Popular authoritarianism and censorship is on the march at the moment, driven by both the religious right and the snowflake left. Do we really think that Governments poking around with one area of video-game regulation are going to limit themselves to that particular area? That this won't turn into some kind of "think of the children/think of the trans community" moral crusade.
There's a real risk here that games are rushing headlong towards a cliff that could see German, Australian or even Chinese-style censorship of games spreading worldwide. The US might be at least partially protected due to its First Amendment, but here in the UK, with an authoritarian Government faced with an even more authoritarian opposition, I'm getting properly worried.
The 56 isn't a bad card. In theory a bit pricier than the 1070, but we'll see what the miners do to the respective prices when it actually hits the shelves. Performance is mid-way between the 1070 and 1080. Power consumption is high, but if you're not worried about that, then this is a gaming card that for certain given budgets will be the rational purchase.
The 64 aircooled is in theory pricier than the 1080. It offers a very similar level of performance to the 1080, but with much higher power consumption. There doesn't seem to be any reason to buy it beyond brand loyalty to AMD, should you be so inclined.
The 64 watercooled looks like an absolute disaster. Prices are comparable to the 1080 Ti, but with a level of performance only very slightly better than the base 1080. In addition, various sites have reported issues with the sample cards they were sent. PCGamer's had nasty coil-whine. Eurogamer reported that their card was overloading a 1000W PSU and that they had to switch to a 1200W to keep it stable. God only knows why anybody would want to pay almost as much as you pay for a 1080 Ti for a card with significantly lower performance and possible "issues".
Nvidia's Volta cards probably aren't coming out tomorrow, but I wouldn't be surprised to see the first wave of consumer cards in 6 months time.
I'm one of those guys who likes to have a top-end gaming PC. Spend quite a lot of money on it. Put a lot of thought into when to do part-swaps and when to go for a whole new system.
I'm not really sure this is going to matter all that much for most people, even for people like me. Even for high-end gaming (i.e. trying to hold 60fps with high/ultra graphics settings at 4k), the CPU upgrade cycle isn't particularly intense. If you're using a decent Skylake or Kaby Lake (e.g. a 6700K or 7700K) you should be good with it for years. Your GPU is going to be the bottleneck under almost all real-world scenarios.
If you're on an older CPU (a second or third gen i7, for instance) then you might be starting to hit CPU bottlenecks and it might be time to think about an upgrade. But then the sockets changed for Skylakes, so you'd be looking at a new mobo (and other associated components) whatever you went to.
tl;dr version - you probably don't need a CPU upgrade. If you are one of the fringe cases that does, you were always going to be looking at a new mobo (and probably starting over with a new PC anyway) whether or not Coffee Lake changed the socket size.
Yes, I did wonder whether any of this was related to the problems with Anniversary Update and Avast antivirus. For those unaware, this saw a large portion of Win10 64-bit PCs running Avast go into a BSOD reboot-loop during the installation of the Anniversary Update.
There was an Avast update that fixed the issue within around 48 hours, but it was still a fairly major headache in the interim. It's not entirely unreasonable of MS to have acted to prevent a repeat of this.
What's badged as Amazon Logistics seems to actually vary a lot from country to country, depending on local conditions and labour laws.
Here in the UK, it is an absolutely bare-bones system with very few actual employees. It's mostly self-employed drivers hired on a contracted basis via a system that seems to be total chaos.
I've certainly had problems with the Royal Mail as well in the past. When I was in my late teens, our local Post Office was raided by the police due to a systematic programme of theft of and from parcels (this was in the very early days of Amazon, when they still mostly sold books). Hilariously, we had one package arrive which had been opened and DVDs stolen from it, while the books were left intact.
But by and large, our Royal Mail has a fairly well established logistical chains and is reasonably good at keeping things moving through the system. Amazon Logistics in the UK, by contrast, is a case of "give it to whichever guy-with-a-van turns up on the day and hope for the best".
Here in the UK, our biggest problem isn't the postal service. I've had experiences with both the USPS and the Royal Mail. By and large, the Royal Mail is not that bad. It has its problems, sure, but I've generally found it more reliable than the US equivalent. Our geography is generally just easier for that kind of thing, I suspect.
The biggest problem we have over here in the e-commerce sphere is Amazon Bloody Logistics. This is the single worst delivery organisation I have ever encountered, by a long reach.
Lost parcels. Parcels randomly delayed for days or even weeks in transit. Parcels delivered to the wrong address. Delivery status screens which may or may not update, and which probably contain the wrong information when they do. 15 hour delivery windows with no estimates within that. No opportunity for Amazon's call-centres to contact drivers or even delivery depots. No ability to re-route missed parcels to post-offices or collection points.
There's a theoretical option to have parcels sent to a pick-up locker instead, provided you select this option before dispatch. When this works, it works well. Unfortunately, over the last 12 months, Amazon have systematically widened the number of products this isn't available for to the point it's nearly useless. Even for products that are allegedly eligible, the system will often just say "nope, can't do that" for no readily appreciable reason.
It's also highly variable across regions. Urban areas seem to fare much worse than rural ones. I'm in London and promised Sunday-deliveries never emerge here. Friends and family in more rural locations seem to be slightly better served.
Over the last 12 months, I've shifted a large portion of my online shopping away from Amazon as a result of their whole-hearted adoption of Amazon Bloody Logistics. I'm also going back to bricks and mortar stores to a greater extent than at any time in the last 5 years.
Even Valve only implemented refunds in response to a) growing legal rumblings and b) EA's Origin jumping the gun by going first and putting the publicity spotlight on Valve.
It's an issue where competition genuinely worked for the customer. It probably didn't hurt that threats of legal action in certain jurisdictions were hovering in the background.
Going from TFA, it appears to refer to vapour-chamber cooling. Now that's not actually an MS innovation; it's already in use on tech such as very high-end PC graphics cards (it's on the Nvidia 1080 Ti in my PC). But this is probably the first time it's been used in a piece of mass-market hardware like this.
Having read the Eurogamer/Digital Foundry articles, the quote you pick out appears to mean that users with 1080p displays will be able to enable supersampling, where the console renders an image at 4k but then displays it over a 1080p output.
It's basically a very, very resource heavy version of antialiasing and has been available in many PC games for years now.
The Switch is an ergonomic nightmare. I've got mild RSI and I have to be very, very careful about using it undocked, or via the joycons attached to the grip. Fortunately, the Pro Controller, while expensive, is fine in terms of its ergonomics (though the lack of analogue shoulder triggers reduces its quality as a controller).
But the Switch itself is about as bad as you can get. In undocked mode, the control inputs are right on the very outer edge of the unit. If you have normal-sized hands, the only way to hold it is via "pinching" the edges. Your hand is entirely unsupported and will slip into a cramped posture by default. The same problem is also present with the joycons when using them undocked.
Modern video game controllers have "wings" for a reason, even though they are generally just hollow plastic. They fill the palm of your hand during play and prevent you from cramping up your hand. This is both more comfortable in immediate terms, and less likely to lead to problems with your hands over prolonged use. Nintendo have completely ignored two decades of ergonomic progress with the Switch. A lot of people will be happily using their units right now and not (yet) feeling any ill effects, but storing up all kinds of problems with their hands for later in life.
If you want to play Zelda, then go ahead. It's not really my cup of tea, but some people seem to like it a lot. But for the love of god, get a Pro Controller if you're going to do so. No game is worth inflicting long-term pain on yourself.
I'm well outside the 18 to 24 demographic myself, so I may not be best placed to comment on this, but I'm not really sure how many of today's big movie releases are really targeted at that demographic.
Increasingly releases seem to be split into three categories:
1) Very Important Movies About Very Important Things (TM), also known as Oscar-bait, which is usually targeted at the middle-aged-and-older demographic.
2) Millennial/Gen-X nostalgia-fests based on comic-book franchises or reboots of old movies and the like which were big for people born in the '70s and '80s, but probably don't have much resonance for people born after around 1990 or so.
3) Kids' films, for which the actual spending-demographic is usually the parents in their 30s, 40s and 50s who are actually footing the bill.
That makes commercial sense, because those demographics are where the spending power lies. A visit to the cinema these days can be a fairly pricey affair, so I suspect the 18-24 demographic might just not be seen as worth chasing.
AMD's issue here isn't necessarily that they have more of these problems or that the problems are more serious. It's that they have a reputation for having more of these problems and for them being more serious when they happen.
A lot of people, self included to a degree (though I do try to counter it) have picked up trust issues around AMD products over the years. In many cases, including mine, that may well be because we tried running AMD CPUs which just run a bit hotter than the Intel equivalents with cooling that would have been acceptable (but no more) in an Intel system, and ran into stability/longevity problems as a result. So it's more of a user-error than something innate in AMD's hardware. But the reputation is there and it's very easily reinforced by stories like this, even if it's a bit unfair.
I suspect administration is the biggest factor here, at least assuming trends in the US have been anything like those here in the UK.
I still get the quarterly newsletter from my old college (usually accompanied by requests for donations of varying subtlety). What's been clear looking at these over the years is just how sharply the size of the administration function has increased since I was there. I did a quick and dirty estimate around 12 months ago, provoked by a particularly aggressive thrust of the begging bowl (I do actually make an annual donation, but never for as much as they want) and estimated that the administrative headcount had (at least) tripled in around 20 years.
I'd be prepared to bet that many of those administrators are paid as well as, if not better than, the lower and mid-ranking faculty. There were a lot of job titles that included the word "director", usually accompanied by a bunch of nebulous words that told you little about what the person actually did.
Luxury student accommodation probably pays for itself. Certainly, at my old college, the luxury accommodation they built is rented at premium rates to overseas students (typically Chinese or Middle Eastern) whose families can afford it and don't like the idea of their offspring roughing it.
The problem here is people going along with the flow and stampeding into fields which are either fashionable at the time, or else subject to big public messages around skills shortages. Those inevitably result in over-supply by the time the people who are choosing their educational path at the time actually make it into the job market.
A couple of decades ago, when I was making the educational choices that would largely define my career route, the accepted wisdom was that if you wanted the high-income middle-class lifestyle, you should become a lawyer. Go around my sixth-form classes (note for non-Brits - sixth-form is the usual term for the 16-18 slice of our educational system) and pretty much half of the class would have said they wanted to be lawyers. 20 years later, large tracts of the legal profession have been hit by a combination of massive over-supply and growing automation. It turned out to be anything but a pathway to riches for most.
This can happen with any field. STEM is not immune. Specific sub-sets of STEM, such as video-game design (which is the trendy pick of choice for modern teenagers), are critically over-supplied (and have been for a decade or more) to the extent that pay can be kept rock-bottom and staff treated like dirt.
There's no hard and fast secret to avoiding finding yourself in a similar situation, but as a general rule, keeping your skills sufficiently flexible to allow for a bit of direction-change and doing what you can to avoid lemming-rushes will generally help manage your risks.
The real comparison will be with the AMD Vega line, which is expected within the next month or two.
Nvidia is clearly worried that AMD have something good up their sleeves on that front, or we would not have seen a 1080 Ti with these specs at this price point.
To some extent, that's going to depend on the size of your screen. Larger screens will show up a lack of anti-aliasing a lot more harshly than smaller ones. I suspect a lot of people still gaming at 1080p don't have massive screens (though of course there will be plenty of exceptions).
The 1080 Ti isn't really pitched at people still playing games at 1080p. The 970, which is a few years old now, is still a pretty solid choice for 1080p gaming and its direct successor, the 1070, is overkill (and just fine for 1440p in many cases). Hell, running a lot of games on a 1080 Ti at 1080p, you will probably only see a modest improvement in performance over older cards before you hit CPU-constraints anyway.
The 1080 Ti is really designed for two things; 4K gaming and VR (and, to some degree, people wanting to do 1080p or 1440p gaming at 120Hz). Both of these make much better use of its capabilities. The rapid growth in affordable 4K monitors around 18-24 months ago was a bit of a shock to the system for a lot of people. Running games at 4K requires a huge escalation in resources compared to 1080p, which had been the de facto standard for a long, long time. The 970 and 980 both choked on 4K. The 980 Ti could manage it acceptably (and with a few image quality compromises) in some games, but was still overall more of a 1440p card. Even the 1080 wasn't really up to scratch. The benchmarks seen so far for the 1080 Ti show something that looks much more like an actual single-card 4K gaming solution (even though getting there fully will probably have to wait for Volta).
Then there's VR, which benefits from being able to hold very high framerates (while outputting more than one image) to counter-act motion sickness.
I... rather suspect that you are mixing up which card you have. Either that, or you have an "Nvidya G-Forks 1080Ti" with a suspicious amount of Chinese script on the packaging and curiously disappointing performance.
The GTX 1080 was launched in May 2016. The Titan X (Pascal) in August 2016. You might also be thinking of the lower-end GTX 1050 Ti, which launched in October 2016.
The "faster than a Titan" thing has been causing a bit of angst. The early reviews and benchmarks do indeed show that the 1080 Ti outperforms the Titan X (Pascal) in many cases. It's not universal; some games and benchmarks still favour the Titan by a tiny margin, but those are a minority.
But the sheer price of the Titan X (which was unprecedented in the Pascal series) has driven a lot of extra discontent this time around, especially as the 1080 Ti came out with a lower price than a lot of observers had been expecting (there were confident predictions from usually-reliable sources that it would be $200 north of where it actually landed). If you need a bit more salt in your diet, take a look at some of the threads over on the Nvidia forums today from disgruntled Titan X owners.
This is, however, pretty much par for the course in the high-end PC game and it's not as though Nvidia haven't slipped into a predictable cycle over their last few generations (at least since the 700-series) that makes clear how things work. If you want to buy a card that is "top of the range", you've basically got three options:
1) Buy the *80 card that arrives with the first wave of consumer cards in each generation. You will get a few months at the top of the tree, until the release of the (massively more expensive) Titan. This is always the cheapest of the three options, but also the most time-limited.
2) Buy the Titan that comes out a few months after the *80. This will have an absurd price tag - often twice that of the *80. It will be the fastest thing around for, in general, 6-9 months, and even then, the next card may only match it rather than beating it.
3) Buy the *80 Ti that comes out 6-9 months after the Titan. This will generally give you framerates in most games in the +/- 3% range of the Titan, but for a price much closer to the *80. This will hold its place at the top for anywhere from 9 to 15 months, until the release of the next generation of cards. In the next generation, the *80 will outperform the last generation *80 Ti and the *70 will offer broadly comparable (maybe slightly better) performance for around half the price.
I've been going for the *80 Ti route for a while now, on the grounds that the price/performance ratio tends to hold up better over time. I'm seeing complaints at the moment from people who bought a Titan within the last few weeks, which is just bizarre. The 1080 Ti has been known to be close to release since January, so why anybody would take the plunge on a Titan at $1200 under those circumstances is beyond me.
I'm working from home today and waiting for my 1080 Ti to be delivered. I wish I could say I'm not bouncing up and down in my chair going "SQUEEEEEE!!!" like a 12 year old girl at a One Direction concert, but I'm not sure how convincingly I could make that case.
I bought a Switch at launch, more out of curiousity than anything else. The story of the platform across the board is "handful of nice ideas let down by corner-cutting and failure to comprehend basic design lessons".
I haven't personally experienced the most serious issues with the device. That's to say, I have no dead pixels. I do not, under normal circumstances, have the wireless interference problems that is causing the joycons (particularly the left one) to lose synchronisation (though I can replicate them if I try, by switching on more devices). Nor have I yet scratched the screen putting the thing into and out of its dock.
That said, there are some design decisions around the Switch that scream "cheap", some which scream "incompetent" and some which scream both. For a relatively pricey piece of hardware, that's not really acceptable. Let's leave aside for the moment the crap Bluetooth transmission from the joycons and the dead pixels; here are some of the smaller quality-of-life issues with the Switch that should not be an issue in 2017:
- The size of the joycon controllers is way too small for the average Western hand (and certainly for a good proportion of adult males). The shape of the thing provides relatively little support to the hand and, whether it is held on its own or in the grip, encourages a cramped hand posture. This is really, really bad for your hands.
- When the unit is used in handheld mode with the joycons attached, the impacts on hand posture are arguably even worse. The device is reasonably large and, while I wouldn't describe it as heavy, nor is it particularly light. Your hands are supporting a noticeable degree of weight here. But the design of the joycons and the manner in which they attach to the main unit means that you end up crabbing your hands if you want to both hold the unit up and reach the control inputs. Unlike the Wii-U Gamepad and the Vita (both of which were by no means perfect in this respect), there is no grip at the back to allow you to distribute some of the weight more evenly around your hands or improve hand posture. It's worst for your right hand, where the location of the right analogue stick at the bottom of the unit means that you are essentially going to end up holding up that end of the unit by "pinching" it near the bottom.
- The layout of buttons on the joycons is terrible. The + and - buttons are located, for some bizarre reason, "above" the analogue sticks. This means you need a large thumb movement to reach them, which is both uncomfortable and likely to result in an accidental button-press or analogue stick input.
- The charging point's location on the bottom of the main unit means that it is awkward to support the weight of the unit on a table while using it in handheld mode. It also means you can't charge it while using the built-in stand.
- The built-in stand is a cheap, nasty and fragile plastic flap, barely capable of staying upright. Many people are already reporting this has snapped off or failed.
- The cartridge slot cover feels flimsy and fragile. I haven't yet seen reports of these snapping off, but I wouldn't be surprised to. The Vita had the same problem here.
- The dock unit you use to connect the thing to the TV has a cheap and nasty plastic feel. There are numerous reports that the version of the dock shipped with retail units is lower than that which was seen on preview units used for demonstrations and sent out for review purposes (though I haven't seen a preview unit myself yet, so cannot confirm this). Certainly, it is a loose and wobbly fit for the console on retail units and there are many reports of the dock scratching the main-unit's screen.
- The process of attaching/detaching the joycons is a bit fiddlier, and requires a bit more force, than had commonly been assumed.
- It is easily possible to put the joycons on the grip unit the wrong way around. What is rather less possible is getting them off again (at least without a very large degree of force) after you've done
The Gamecube controller was absolutely awful. The right analogue stick was an abortion... a hideous shrivelled nipple which was of no use whatsoever in-game.
I kinda get what they were going for, with the face buttons. Until the PS2/Gamecube/Xbox generation, there tended to be one controller button that was used more than the others, so why not make it bigger. Unfortunately, they did that just as console games were getting more sophisticated and button usage was getting more evenly spread. So they ended up with a godawful controller where accidental button presses were the norm.
Also, the cable was about 3 inches long. They had this weird, fucked up idea that people played console games sat in a ring on the floor around the TV. The cable just wasn't long enough to reach to the average sofa.
I would personally rate the Gamecube controller as one of the worst ever made. The N64 and Dreamcast ones also had their woes, but the Cube one was just nasty.
Meh, it's a bit of a mixed bag. I've found a few things to like about it; the screen is good quality (first time for that on a Nintendo handheld device). The UI is pleasant and functional (compare and contrast with the XB1's). Plus, Nintendo finally step into the 21st century by abandoning region locks and the whole "multi region account switching" thing is pretty easy, which is nice.
But there is also a lot wrong with it, and I'd be lying if I said I don't have a bit of buyer's remorse. The ergonomics are bloody awful unless you have the pro controller. The joycons are so tiddly they must have been designed for toddlers or Trump. The locations of buttons on them, particularly the + and - buttons, makes accidental inputs inevitable. Worse, when holding the thing in handheld mode with the joycons attached, the shape and layout puts stress on all the wrong parts of your hands. In the long term, this thing is an express ticket to RSI-town. Nintendo have forgotten or ignored some basic design and ergonomic principles that everybody else has known about for years.
The pro controller is mostly fine, other than the lack of analogue shoulder triggers, which will screw things up a bit for certain genres (particularly driving games). It's expensive, though, and given the low quality of the joycons, it really should have been a pack-in.
There are a few other niggles with the hardware as well. The little stand on the back for use when the thing is undocked is nasty and flimsy, The cover for the cartridge slot feels like it is going to be very easy to snap off (also a problem with the Vita). The location of the charger port on both the unit itself and the docking station seems to have been designed for maximum inconvenience. Oh, and the undocked battery life is absolutely terrible.
I haven't experienced the joycon sync issues that have been plaguing some people during normal use, but I can replicate them if I switch on a couple of my other consoles and create a bit of wireless interference.
I'm also now seeing reports that the build quality of the docking station and its "fit" with the main console unit is of lower quality than in the pre-release demonstration units. Not sure whether that's true - although it is definitely true that the fit is loose and wobbly on mine - but if it is, it feels like pretty sharp practice.
Slashdot Mirror
Hah, yes!
My parents bought one of the very first wave of Vista laptops, just a few weeks after the official launch. With 512mb of RAM, it ran like an absolute dog and that should never have been listed as the minimum spec. That said, surely some of the blame here must attach to the hardware vendors? Whatever MS put on the box as the minimum spec for Vista, they must have known they were pushing borderline-unusable PCs out the door.
I also remember the constant UAC prompts, but suspect MS made the right call here in the long run. It was infuriating for users, to be sure, and probably did result in a good few either disabling UAC or just habitually clicking "yes" to every prompt. But it also got a lot of people complaining to developers, which in turn persuaded them into better habits. A lot of people who turned off UAC on their early-era Vista machines probably didn't do so on future machines. These days, a lot of people know to think carefully before clicking yes to an unexpected UAC prompt.
I'm still not seeing anything about this that addresses the biggest problem that's hit previous gaming services such as OnLive and the like. That is to say; input latency.
30ms latency is indeed a generally acceptable figure for normal online gaming. But don't forget that what you're talking about under normal circumstances is the latency between the server and the client. So that latency is only relevant to the server-side game interactions. What we're talking about here is having an additional 30ms latency before you even get to that point. What that translates into is a far more distracting gap between the player's control inputs and a visible reaction on-screen (added on-top of the standard display-related latency, which even on a really good gaming monitor is likely to be at least 10ms).
This is really, really distracting, particularly in games which use mouse controls, where it is highly noticeable that there is a delay between mouse movements and in-game response. 30ms is roughly equivalent to what you'd get from a particularly horrid vsync implementation (e.g. what you see in the PC versions of Skyrim and Fallout 4), which can be distracting in regular gameplay and a real killer in any kind of competitive online action game.
The Hardwareluxx benchmarks are interesting. They certainly don't show "no" impact on gaming. In fact, what they show is more or less what you would expect to see with decreased CPU performance.
If you look at the 4K benchmarks, there is minimal-to-no impact. That's not surprising, because you would expect most modern games to be GPU-constrained at 4K, outside of some really fringe cases. Drop to 1080p, however, and you are looking at roughly a 4% or so reduction in framerates. Their test rig has a 1080 Ti - one of the best gaming cards money can buy right now and one that you would expect to be able to eat most games for breakfast at 1080p. It's not unusual for games on high-end graphics cards to hit CPU constraints at 1080p and, indeed, this is usually how sites like Eurogamer's Digital Foundry benchmark CPUs for gaming performance. By their usual standards, that 4% performance loss is pretty severe.
Will it actually affect anybody's gaming performance in the real world? Possibly. Gamers with older CPUs but a more recent graphics card (a fairly common combination) still using 1080p monitors may well see modest but still noticable performance hits based on those benchmarks. Even if it's not a huge real-world impact, it's a massive reputational blow for Intel.
I'll be the first to agree that real-money loot boxes in gaming are a terrible thing (if they're only available with in-game currency, I don't give a stuff). At their most benign (e.g. Overwatch), they are an inducement for people to continue to sink cash into a virtual slot machine. At their worst, when used as part of a pay-to-win system, they fundamentally corrupt a game's mechanics.
And yet...
I really, really wish that gamers (of all people) had not been jumping up and down and begging for Government intervention. Should you boycott games for containing loot box systems? Yes. Should you take to social media and cause as much brand damage as possible? Definitely. But bringing Government into things? Not going to end well...
Popular authoritarianism and censorship is on the march at the moment, driven by both the religious right and the snowflake left. Do we really think that Governments poking around with one area of video-game regulation are going to limit themselves to that particular area? That this won't turn into some kind of "think of the children/think of the trans community" moral crusade.
There's a real risk here that games are rushing headlong towards a cliff that could see German, Australian or even Chinese-style censorship of games spreading worldwide. The US might be at least partially protected due to its First Amendment, but here in the UK, with an authoritarian Government faced with an even more authoritarian opposition, I'm getting properly worried.
Yeah, the basic consensus seems to be...
The 56 isn't a bad card. In theory a bit pricier than the 1070, but we'll see what the miners do to the respective prices when it actually hits the shelves. Performance is mid-way between the 1070 and 1080. Power consumption is high, but if you're not worried about that, then this is a gaming card that for certain given budgets will be the rational purchase.
The 64 aircooled is in theory pricier than the 1080. It offers a very similar level of performance to the 1080, but with much higher power consumption. There doesn't seem to be any reason to buy it beyond brand loyalty to AMD, should you be so inclined.
The 64 watercooled looks like an absolute disaster. Prices are comparable to the 1080 Ti, but with a level of performance only very slightly better than the base 1080. In addition, various sites have reported issues with the sample cards they were sent. PCGamer's had nasty coil-whine. Eurogamer reported that their card was overloading a 1000W PSU and that they had to switch to a 1200W to keep it stable. God only knows why anybody would want to pay almost as much as you pay for a 1080 Ti for a card with significantly lower performance and possible "issues".
Nvidia's Volta cards probably aren't coming out tomorrow, but I wouldn't be surprised to see the first wave of consumer cards in 6 months time.
I'm one of those guys who likes to have a top-end gaming PC. Spend quite a lot of money on it. Put a lot of thought into when to do part-swaps and when to go for a whole new system.
I'm not really sure this is going to matter all that much for most people, even for people like me. Even for high-end gaming (i.e. trying to hold 60fps with high/ultra graphics settings at 4k), the CPU upgrade cycle isn't particularly intense. If you're using a decent Skylake or Kaby Lake (e.g. a 6700K or 7700K) you should be good with it for years. Your GPU is going to be the bottleneck under almost all real-world scenarios.
If you're on an older CPU (a second or third gen i7, for instance) then you might be starting to hit CPU bottlenecks and it might be time to think about an upgrade. But then the sockets changed for Skylakes, so you'd be looking at a new mobo (and other associated components) whatever you went to.
tl;dr version - you probably don't need a CPU upgrade. If you are one of the fringe cases that does, you were always going to be looking at a new mobo (and probably starting over with a new PC anyway) whether or not Coffee Lake changed the socket size.
Yes, I did wonder whether any of this was related to the problems with Anniversary Update and Avast antivirus. For those unaware, this saw a large portion of Win10 64-bit PCs running Avast go into a BSOD reboot-loop during the installation of the Anniversary Update.
There was an Avast update that fixed the issue within around 48 hours, but it was still a fairly major headache in the interim. It's not entirely unreasonable of MS to have acted to prevent a repeat of this.
What's badged as Amazon Logistics seems to actually vary a lot from country to country, depending on local conditions and labour laws.
Here in the UK, it is an absolutely bare-bones system with very few actual employees. It's mostly self-employed drivers hired on a contracted basis via a system that seems to be total chaos.
I've certainly had problems with the Royal Mail as well in the past. When I was in my late teens, our local Post Office was raided by the police due to a systematic programme of theft of and from parcels (this was in the very early days of Amazon, when they still mostly sold books). Hilariously, we had one package arrive which had been opened and DVDs stolen from it, while the books were left intact.
But by and large, our Royal Mail has a fairly well established logistical chains and is reasonably good at keeping things moving through the system. Amazon Logistics in the UK, by contrast, is a case of "give it to whichever guy-with-a-van turns up on the day and hope for the best".
Here in the UK, our biggest problem isn't the postal service. I've had experiences with both the USPS and the Royal Mail. By and large, the Royal Mail is not that bad. It has its problems, sure, but I've generally found it more reliable than the US equivalent. Our geography is generally just easier for that kind of thing, I suspect.
The biggest problem we have over here in the e-commerce sphere is Amazon Bloody Logistics. This is the single worst delivery organisation I have ever encountered, by a long reach.
Lost parcels. Parcels randomly delayed for days or even weeks in transit. Parcels delivered to the wrong address. Delivery status screens which may or may not update, and which probably contain the wrong information when they do. 15 hour delivery windows with no estimates within that. No opportunity for Amazon's call-centres to contact drivers or even delivery depots. No ability to re-route missed parcels to post-offices or collection points.
There's a theoretical option to have parcels sent to a pick-up locker instead, provided you select this option before dispatch. When this works, it works well. Unfortunately, over the last 12 months, Amazon have systematically widened the number of products this isn't available for to the point it's nearly useless. Even for products that are allegedly eligible, the system will often just say "nope, can't do that" for no readily appreciable reason.
It's also highly variable across regions. Urban areas seem to fare much worse than rural ones. I'm in London and promised Sunday-deliveries never emerge here. Friends and family in more rural locations seem to be slightly better served.
Over the last 12 months, I've shifted a large portion of my online shopping away from Amazon as a result of their whole-hearted adoption of Amazon Bloody Logistics. I'm also going back to bricks and mortar stores to a greater extent than at any time in the last 5 years.
Even Valve only implemented refunds in response to a) growing legal rumblings and b) EA's Origin jumping the gun by going first and putting the publicity spotlight on Valve.
It's an issue where competition genuinely worked for the customer. It probably didn't hurt that threats of legal action in certain jurisdictions were hovering in the background.
Going from TFA, it appears to refer to vapour-chamber cooling. Now that's not actually an MS innovation; it's already in use on tech such as very high-end PC graphics cards (it's on the Nvidia 1080 Ti in my PC). But this is probably the first time it's been used in a piece of mass-market hardware like this.
Having read the Eurogamer/Digital Foundry articles, the quote you pick out appears to mean that users with 1080p displays will be able to enable supersampling, where the console renders an image at 4k but then displays it over a 1080p output.
It's basically a very, very resource heavy version of antialiasing and has been available in many PC games for years now.
The Switch is an ergonomic nightmare. I've got mild RSI and I have to be very, very careful about using it undocked, or via the joycons attached to the grip. Fortunately, the Pro Controller, while expensive, is fine in terms of its ergonomics (though the lack of analogue shoulder triggers reduces its quality as a controller).
But the Switch itself is about as bad as you can get. In undocked mode, the control inputs are right on the very outer edge of the unit. If you have normal-sized hands, the only way to hold it is via "pinching" the edges. Your hand is entirely unsupported and will slip into a cramped posture by default. The same problem is also present with the joycons when using them undocked.
Modern video game controllers have "wings" for a reason, even though they are generally just hollow plastic. They fill the palm of your hand during play and prevent you from cramping up your hand. This is both more comfortable in immediate terms, and less likely to lead to problems with your hands over prolonged use. Nintendo have completely ignored two decades of ergonomic progress with the Switch. A lot of people will be happily using their units right now and not (yet) feeling any ill effects, but storing up all kinds of problems with their hands for later in life.
If you want to play Zelda, then go ahead. It's not really my cup of tea, but some people seem to like it a lot. But for the love of god, get a Pro Controller if you're going to do so. No game is worth inflicting long-term pain on yourself.
I'm well outside the 18 to 24 demographic myself, so I may not be best placed to comment on this, but I'm not really sure how many of today's big movie releases are really targeted at that demographic.
Increasingly releases seem to be split into three categories:
1) Very Important Movies About Very Important Things (TM), also known as Oscar-bait, which is usually targeted at the middle-aged-and-older demographic.
2) Millennial/Gen-X nostalgia-fests based on comic-book franchises or reboots of old movies and the like which were big for people born in the '70s and '80s, but probably don't have much resonance for people born after around 1990 or so.
3) Kids' films, for which the actual spending-demographic is usually the parents in their 30s, 40s and 50s who are actually footing the bill.
That makes commercial sense, because those demographics are where the spending power lies. A visit to the cinema these days can be a fairly pricey affair, so I suspect the 18-24 demographic might just not be seen as worth chasing.
AMD's issue here isn't necessarily that they have more of these problems or that the problems are more serious. It's that they have a reputation for having more of these problems and for them being more serious when they happen.
A lot of people, self included to a degree (though I do try to counter it) have picked up trust issues around AMD products over the years. In many cases, including mine, that may well be because we tried running AMD CPUs which just run a bit hotter than the Intel equivalents with cooling that would have been acceptable (but no more) in an Intel system, and ran into stability/longevity problems as a result. So it's more of a user-error than something innate in AMD's hardware. But the reputation is there and it's very easily reinforced by stories like this, even if it's a bit unfair.
I suspect administration is the biggest factor here, at least assuming trends in the US have been anything like those here in the UK.
I still get the quarterly newsletter from my old college (usually accompanied by requests for donations of varying subtlety). What's been clear looking at these over the years is just how sharply the size of the administration function has increased since I was there. I did a quick and dirty estimate around 12 months ago, provoked by a particularly aggressive thrust of the begging bowl (I do actually make an annual donation, but never for as much as they want) and estimated that the administrative headcount had (at least) tripled in around 20 years.
I'd be prepared to bet that many of those administrators are paid as well as, if not better than, the lower and mid-ranking faculty. There were a lot of job titles that included the word "director", usually accompanied by a bunch of nebulous words that told you little about what the person actually did.
Luxury student accommodation probably pays for itself. Certainly, at my old college, the luxury accommodation they built is rented at premium rates to overseas students (typically Chinese or Middle Eastern) whose families can afford it and don't like the idea of their offspring roughing it.
The problem here is people going along with the flow and stampeding into fields which are either fashionable at the time, or else subject to big public messages around skills shortages. Those inevitably result in over-supply by the time the people who are choosing their educational path at the time actually make it into the job market.
A couple of decades ago, when I was making the educational choices that would largely define my career route, the accepted wisdom was that if you wanted the high-income middle-class lifestyle, you should become a lawyer. Go around my sixth-form classes (note for non-Brits - sixth-form is the usual term for the 16-18 slice of our educational system) and pretty much half of the class would have said they wanted to be lawyers. 20 years later, large tracts of the legal profession have been hit by a combination of massive over-supply and growing automation. It turned out to be anything but a pathway to riches for most.
This can happen with any field. STEM is not immune. Specific sub-sets of STEM, such as video-game design (which is the trendy pick of choice for modern teenagers), are critically over-supplied (and have been for a decade or more) to the extent that pay can be kept rock-bottom and staff treated like dirt.
There's no hard and fast secret to avoiding finding yourself in a similar situation, but as a general rule, keeping your skills sufficiently flexible to allow for a bit of direction-change and doing what you can to avoid lemming-rushes will generally help manage your risks.
The real comparison will be with the AMD Vega line, which is expected within the next month or two.
Nvidia is clearly worried that AMD have something good up their sleeves on that front, or we would not have seen a 1080 Ti with these specs at this price point.
To some extent, that's going to depend on the size of your screen. Larger screens will show up a lack of anti-aliasing a lot more harshly than smaller ones. I suspect a lot of people still gaming at 1080p don't have massive screens (though of course there will be plenty of exceptions).
The 1080 Ti isn't really pitched at people still playing games at 1080p. The 970, which is a few years old now, is still a pretty solid choice for 1080p gaming and its direct successor, the 1070, is overkill (and just fine for 1440p in many cases). Hell, running a lot of games on a 1080 Ti at 1080p, you will probably only see a modest improvement in performance over older cards before you hit CPU-constraints anyway.
The 1080 Ti is really designed for two things; 4K gaming and VR (and, to some degree, people wanting to do 1080p or 1440p gaming at 120Hz). Both of these make much better use of its capabilities. The rapid growth in affordable 4K monitors around 18-24 months ago was a bit of a shock to the system for a lot of people. Running games at 4K requires a huge escalation in resources compared to 1080p, which had been the de facto standard for a long, long time. The 970 and 980 both choked on 4K. The 980 Ti could manage it acceptably (and with a few image quality compromises) in some games, but was still overall more of a 1440p card. Even the 1080 wasn't really up to scratch. The benchmarks seen so far for the 1080 Ti show something that looks much more like an actual single-card 4K gaming solution (even though getting there fully will probably have to wait for Volta).
Then there's VR, which benefits from being able to hold very high framerates (while outputting more than one image) to counter-act motion sickness.
I... rather suspect that you are mixing up which card you have. Either that, or you have an "Nvidya G-Forks 1080Ti" with a suspicious amount of Chinese script on the packaging and curiously disappointing performance.
The GTX 1080 was launched in May 2016. The Titan X (Pascal) in August 2016. You might also be thinking of the lower-end GTX 1050 Ti, which launched in October 2016.
The "faster than a Titan" thing has been causing a bit of angst. The early reviews and benchmarks do indeed show that the 1080 Ti outperforms the Titan X (Pascal) in many cases. It's not universal; some games and benchmarks still favour the Titan by a tiny margin, but those are a minority.
But the sheer price of the Titan X (which was unprecedented in the Pascal series) has driven a lot of extra discontent this time around, especially as the 1080 Ti came out with a lower price than a lot of observers had been expecting (there were confident predictions from usually-reliable sources that it would be $200 north of where it actually landed). If you need a bit more salt in your diet, take a look at some of the threads over on the Nvidia forums today from disgruntled Titan X owners.
This is, however, pretty much par for the course in the high-end PC game and it's not as though Nvidia haven't slipped into a predictable cycle over their last few generations (at least since the 700-series) that makes clear how things work. If you want to buy a card that is "top of the range", you've basically got three options:
1) Buy the *80 card that arrives with the first wave of consumer cards in each generation. You will get a few months at the top of the tree, until the release of the (massively more expensive) Titan. This is always the cheapest of the three options, but also the most time-limited.
2) Buy the Titan that comes out a few months after the *80. This will have an absurd price tag - often twice that of the *80. It will be the fastest thing around for, in general, 6-9 months, and even then, the next card may only match it rather than beating it.
3) Buy the *80 Ti that comes out 6-9 months after the Titan. This will generally give you framerates in most games in the +/- 3% range of the Titan, but for a price much closer to the *80. This will hold its place at the top for anywhere from 9 to 15 months, until the release of the next generation of cards. In the next generation, the *80 will outperform the last generation *80 Ti and the *70 will offer broadly comparable (maybe slightly better) performance for around half the price.
I've been going for the *80 Ti route for a while now, on the grounds that the price/performance ratio tends to hold up better over time. I'm seeing complaints at the moment from people who bought a Titan within the last few weeks, which is just bizarre. The 1080 Ti has been known to be close to release since January, so why anybody would take the plunge on a Titan at $1200 under those circumstances is beyond me.
I'm working from home today and waiting for my 1080 Ti to be delivered. I wish I could say I'm not bouncing up and down in my chair going "SQUEEEEEE!!!" like a 12 year old girl at a One Direction concert, but I'm not sure how convincingly I could make that case.
I bought a Switch at launch, more out of curiousity than anything else. The story of the platform across the board is "handful of nice ideas let down by corner-cutting and failure to comprehend basic design lessons".
I haven't personally experienced the most serious issues with the device. That's to say, I have no dead pixels. I do not, under normal circumstances, have the wireless interference problems that is causing the joycons (particularly the left one) to lose synchronisation (though I can replicate them if I try, by switching on more devices). Nor have I yet scratched the screen putting the thing into and out of its dock.
That said, there are some design decisions around the Switch that scream "cheap", some which scream "incompetent" and some which scream both. For a relatively pricey piece of hardware, that's not really acceptable. Let's leave aside for the moment the crap Bluetooth transmission from the joycons and the dead pixels; here are some of the smaller quality-of-life issues with the Switch that should not be an issue in 2017:
- The size of the joycon controllers is way too small for the average Western hand (and certainly for a good proportion of adult males). The shape of the thing provides relatively little support to the hand and, whether it is held on its own or in the grip, encourages a cramped hand posture. This is really, really bad for your hands.
- When the unit is used in handheld mode with the joycons attached, the impacts on hand posture are arguably even worse. The device is reasonably large and, while I wouldn't describe it as heavy, nor is it particularly light. Your hands are supporting a noticeable degree of weight here. But the design of the joycons and the manner in which they attach to the main unit means that you end up crabbing your hands if you want to both hold the unit up and reach the control inputs. Unlike the Wii-U Gamepad and the Vita (both of which were by no means perfect in this respect), there is no grip at the back to allow you to distribute some of the weight more evenly around your hands or improve hand posture. It's worst for your right hand, where the location of the right analogue stick at the bottom of the unit means that you are essentially going to end up holding up that end of the unit by "pinching" it near the bottom.
- The layout of buttons on the joycons is terrible. The + and - buttons are located, for some bizarre reason, "above" the analogue sticks. This means you need a large thumb movement to reach them, which is both uncomfortable and likely to result in an accidental button-press or analogue stick input.
- The charging point's location on the bottom of the main unit means that it is awkward to support the weight of the unit on a table while using it in handheld mode. It also means you can't charge it while using the built-in stand.
- The built-in stand is a cheap, nasty and fragile plastic flap, barely capable of staying upright. Many people are already reporting this has snapped off or failed.
- The cartridge slot cover feels flimsy and fragile. I haven't yet seen reports of these snapping off, but I wouldn't be surprised to. The Vita had the same problem here.
- The dock unit you use to connect the thing to the TV has a cheap and nasty plastic feel. There are numerous reports that the version of the dock shipped with retail units is lower than that which was seen on preview units used for demonstrations and sent out for review purposes (though I haven't seen a preview unit myself yet, so cannot confirm this). Certainly, it is a loose and wobbly fit for the console on retail units and there are many reports of the dock scratching the main-unit's screen.
- The process of attaching/detaching the joycons is a bit fiddlier, and requires a bit more force, than had commonly been assumed.
- It is easily possible to put the joycons on the grip unit the wrong way around. What is rather less possible is getting them off again (at least without a very large degree of force) after you've done
The Gamecube controller was absolutely awful. The right analogue stick was an abortion... a hideous shrivelled nipple which was of no use whatsoever in-game.
I kinda get what they were going for, with the face buttons. Until the PS2/Gamecube/Xbox generation, there tended to be one controller button that was used more than the others, so why not make it bigger. Unfortunately, they did that just as console games were getting more sophisticated and button usage was getting more evenly spread. So they ended up with a godawful controller where accidental button presses were the norm.
Also, the cable was about 3 inches long. They had this weird, fucked up idea that people played console games sat in a ring on the floor around the TV. The cable just wasn't long enough to reach to the average sofa.
I would personally rate the Gamecube controller as one of the worst ever made. The N64 and Dreamcast ones also had their woes, but the Cube one was just nasty.
Meh, it's a bit of a mixed bag. I've found a few things to like about it; the screen is good quality (first time for that on a Nintendo handheld device). The UI is pleasant and functional (compare and contrast with the XB1's). Plus, Nintendo finally step into the 21st century by abandoning region locks and the whole "multi region account switching" thing is pretty easy, which is nice.
But there is also a lot wrong with it, and I'd be lying if I said I don't have a bit of buyer's remorse. The ergonomics are bloody awful unless you have the pro controller. The joycons are so tiddly they must have been designed for toddlers or Trump. The locations of buttons on them, particularly the + and - buttons, makes accidental inputs inevitable. Worse, when holding the thing in handheld mode with the joycons attached, the shape and layout puts stress on all the wrong parts of your hands. In the long term, this thing is an express ticket to RSI-town. Nintendo have forgotten or ignored some basic design and ergonomic principles that everybody else has known about for years.
The pro controller is mostly fine, other than the lack of analogue shoulder triggers, which will screw things up a bit for certain genres (particularly driving games). It's expensive, though, and given the low quality of the joycons, it really should have been a pack-in.
There are a few other niggles with the hardware as well. The little stand on the back for use when the thing is undocked is nasty and flimsy, The cover for the cartridge slot feels like it is going to be very easy to snap off (also a problem with the Vita). The location of the charger port on both the unit itself and the docking station seems to have been designed for maximum inconvenience. Oh, and the undocked battery life is absolutely terrible.
I haven't experienced the joycon sync issues that have been plaguing some people during normal use, but I can replicate them if I switch on a couple of my other consoles and create a bit of wireless interference.
I'm also now seeing reports that the build quality of the docking station and its "fit" with the main console unit is of lower quality than in the pre-release demonstration units. Not sure whether that's true - although it is definitely true that the fit is loose and wobbly on mine - but if it is, it feels like pretty sharp practice.