I've been wondering why my PC suddenly gets loud at times, and upon investigating, I found that it was the GPU that was seeing high utilization. In very lightweight desktop use, that seemed unexpected, so I looked around a bit more and ran into something called hardware-accelerated GPU scheduling. Turns out it's been causing people similar experiences. It sounds like a reasonable feature and annoying to try to determine whether that is indeed my issue or not (since the utilization spikes are fairly rare), so I left it on and can't say whether it's really the cause, but a curious find nonetheless. If any of you has had similar issues, this might just be the cause.
By the way, pressing and holding Ctrl in Task Manager freezes it, so everything doesn't go back to looking normal before you can see what's happening. I'm assuming some of you have also been cursing the uselessness of Task Manager when investigating utilization.
| JEMC said: Call of Duty 2 looks unbelievable with RTX Remix Path Tracing |
It seems like there's two things at play here: lighting improvements and geometry improvements. That's actually the two things I often pay attention to: I wish for options to use better lighting in old games, since I find it to be perhaps the most significant thing that could improve many games, and on the other hand, many (really) old games look terrible at high resolutions because of lacking details/geometry. The issue gets even worse when you have high-resolution textures, because it just highlights how empty the environments are. Very good and impressive, well targeted changes in the game!
| JEMC said: Oblivion Remake in Skyrim Gets New 20-Minute Gameplay Video |
The Skyrim engine is really showing its age here, but phenomenal work from the team regardless! And getting back to my previous remark about lighting, they've also embraced a style that doesn't need better lighting, so a good design choice as well.
| JEMC said: Sid Meier’s Civilization VII will not require the 2K Launcher |
The Steam store page also mentions no 2K account is needed for offline play. Instead, only online features require it. I'm still not thrilled about the situation, but it seems somewhat reasonable now (assuming the game isn't heavy on online features even in single-player, which I guess is a real worry these days). I unignored the game and restored it to me wishlist, which I'm happy about. Of course that doesn't change the fact that I should probably still play the older Civ games more before getting a new one...
| JEMC said: Oops! Bungie accidentally changed the names of a 'high number' of Destiny 2 players, says a fix 'will take some time' to figure out |
Since it's taking time, I'm assuming they don't have any records of the old names in any easy-to-use format, and they might have to resort to something laborious like scouring their log files. As a software developer, that's a bit of a nightmare scenario to me. Ah, and in general they probably don't have tools for mass-reverting such a change, so fun times for Bungie, it seems. This is also why I'm quite wary about any mass modifications, e.g. to files - they can be a pain to revert it something goes wrong.
