Hopefully that means same day releases (including the Nintendo deals, because fuck that), no more Denuvo, uncapped framerate and settings that actually do as implemented (like the god damn shimmering in Remake 2-3 that was never fixed). 

If they do that there's no chance I'll be buying their games ever again. 4 clients is my top and I already find that too much for me, that I end up just using 2.

I wouldn't at all be surprised if they even hired someone from Era for ramen noodle prices tbh. With the founding fathers gone, I don't think the company gives an actual damn what customers and staff members want anymore. 

I think it's safe to say that SE has gotten into bed with Epic, because another AAA release is going to EGS only, and Steam is stuck with piddling mobile phone style pixel FF "remasters", which tells me that SE cba with Steam anymore, that it's AAA releases aren't set to release at the same time on two storefronts.

Guess that means VII remake pt 1 is also going exclusive, which likely means I'm not gonna bother with SE anymore (not like their PC ports where decently priced or stellar anyway).

Also:

A different composition can affect it's efficiency, but depending on what they were using as fuel since there's more than one type of coal: Brown coal, the youngest and cheapest, but also the least efficient and most polluting; black coal, which is quite a bit more efficient and has less polluting elements in it (things like sulfur for instance), but also more expensive, and anthrazite, which is almost pure carbon, but also by far the most expensive.

A power plant built for brown coal could overheat on Anthrazite, and a power plant built specifically for Anthrazite will potentially not get enough heat from brown coal. In most cases however, you can get by by using less heating material with those that were built for brown coal, while those built for Anthrazite would get less Steam and thus less power and very bad efficiency, but should still be able to work. That is, if the plant was working with a subcritical steam turbine.

The problem can however be very real if the steam generators are supercritical or ultra-supercritical, which often need high grade coal powder (coal gets powdered these days to burn better and hotter) to reach the necessary temperatures to work properly. Those are also the among the most modern and efficient designs, and most coal power plants built in the last 40 years are either of those types or co-generate both electricity and heat for heating buildings, So it's not impossible that the power plants really needed to be shut down if the coal available to them ain't of high enough grade for those power plants to reach supercriticality.

Indeed.
At the end of the day, faster RAM and more die-space to extra GPU hardware is the general preferred approach.

But to implement high-speed, wide memory controllers also costs a ton of die space and power... MCM with stacked cache is likely the end goal that AMD is walking towards, which will also show up in Ryzen as well.

I think it's proven itself on lower-end, 128bit memory buses. A-la. Radeon RX 6600XT where bandwidth is more of a premium.

I do mine-site rescue here as part of my response area... And the general consensus amongst employees/managers/staff is that Australia is trying to ditch China as a customer and diversify it's clients in order to reduce risk of Chinese "attacking" us through trade.

And it's not just our natural resources doing this either, grain (Another response area of mine) is doing the same thing with prioritization to South America, Africa and Middle Eastern customers.

Politically and economically we as a nation are changing tact and removing the issue of having all our eggs in one (chinese) basket.

Will Intel win me back from AMD? Time will tell.

Quad Channel... And a CPU with better single and multi-threaded performance over my Ryzen 9 would be great.

Yea it will be interesting for sure. Personally I am waiting for Raptor Lake vs Zen 4 but realistically, I will probably upgrade my CPU more so around the RTX 5000/6000 series than anytime soon. The annoying thing is Zen 4 is supposed to be DDR5 and PCI-E 4.0 while Intel is going full DDR5 and PCI-E 5.0. As a platform, I'd like to have both instead of just one but performance of the CPUs will matter most at the end of the day.

PCI-E 5.0 is probably going to be super important, mostly because of SSD's...

But the other issue is how some GPU's (I.E. Radeon 6600XT) which only has an 8x interface... And because of such has a corresponding hit to performance on PCI-E 3.0 and 2.0 systems... AMD has set a precedent now and I wouldn't be surprised if we see GPU's with a 2x or 4x interface in the low-end to cut costs. - PCI-E 5.0 would be beneficial for those parts as PCI-E 5.0 8x is equivalent to PCI-E 4.0 16x and so on.

DDR5 I am neither here nor there about... For Notebooks and Desktops that use integrated graphics, it's a massive boon as they are super bandwidth starved. (Where is that cache AMD!?).
Otherwise like all the other jumps in DRAM technology... I.E.
EDORAM > SDRAM
SDRAM > DDR
DDR > DDR2
DDR2 > DDR3
DDR3 > DDR4
The performance gains for regular desktops without integrated graphics was pretty marginal until a few years down the line when improvements to memory controllers and DRAM has taken place.

Hopefully socket AM5 has support for DDR4 and DDR5 so I can bring forwards my 64GB of Ram.

Thanks for the detailed explanation.

To diversify your investments and who you depend of is always a smart move, specially when China is involved. Kudos to your government.

Intel Arc Alchemist reference desktop card shown in new renders, rumored to launch in Q2 2022

https://videocardz.com/newz/intel-arc-alchemist-reference-desktop-card-shown-in-new-renders-rumored-to-launch-in-q2-2022

Looks pretty meh tbh... I'd certainly put it behind Nvidia's FE and RDNA2's FE in terms of looks. If Q2 2022 is real, then this might just be DoA. Lovelace and RDNA 3 should launch shortly after that and launching a 3070 Ti competitor that late is pretty yikes! Of course, if the price is right, then it could still be successful but man, if that released this year, it really would have been a success.

Intel Core i9-12900K ES2 engineering sample pictured up close, 16 cores up to 4.5 GHz

https://videocardz.com/newz/intel-core-i9-12900k-es2-engineering-sample-pictured-up-close-16-cores-up-to-4-5-ghz

Not sure what's with the pattern but it does look like a beauty. We will see how it performs though. Of course, this is now considered to be old as there's ES3.

Grant Theft Auto: The Trilogy - The Definitive Edition has been rated in Korea

Kotaku thinks it will be released in November

https://kotaku.com/the-gta-remastered-trilogy-sure-seems-imminent-now-1847774767

Windows 11 will hobble gaming performance by default on some prebuilt PCs

https://www.pcgamer.com/windows-11-pcs-can-hobble-gaming-performance/

From reddit comment:

"Microsoft is enabling a sandbox feature (Virtualization-Based Security) on OEM Windows 11 installations by default, which can result in significant performance deltas for some games, on the order of 28% for their Shadow of the Tomb Raider test. In-place upgrades so far do not enable this feature, and it's unclear at this point whether or not OEMs such as Dell or Lenovo will ship gaming-oriented systems with VBS disabled or not.

The option can be toggled by the user, and was already part of Windows 10"

Now what I am thinking is that for prebuilts targeted towards a business environment, this will be enabled by default where as the ones that is targeted towards a home/gaming environment, VBS is disabled by default. Still worth to keep an eye on though in case MS enables it by default some day.

Q2 for Alchemist will be eaten alive if AMD decides to launch RDNA 3 in Q2 or even Q3. If they can only manage to get a 3060 Ti/3070 competitor out for similar prices now for a new unproven DGPU manufacturer they sure do have a steep hill to climb. But then again we're still in a deep GPU/chip shortage and it might work for them.

The design is standard if a little uninspired stuff. Heatsink looks fine and fin stack is quite dense so cooling looks adequate for a sub 300W card. Not a fan of the blue light as well, though I guess its their brand.

Alchemist will only have to face Nvidia's Super cards... if they happen to be real. Neither AMD nor Nvidia will launch anything else until after Summer, with Nvidia probably going October, like with Ampere, and AMD going when they can.

Intel will have time to shine by itself, but only if their products aren't worth it and they're priced right.