Hotpink Bonefish seems best named one.

Idk how much PC exclusive genres of games are discussed on this thread as I know it's predominantly regarding hardware, but I just saw the trailer for Tempest Rising from THQ Nordic's summer showcase, and it looks like DOOM and C&C had a baby and I LOVE IT!!!! I didn't realize how PC-centric THQ is becoming. There were a few other PC only strategy games that were announced during the showcase as well but this game stood out the most to me! Especially claiming to have that 90s to early 2000s style gameplay that I miss so much. Age of Empires is having its own golden age, but it's exciting to see RTS making a comeback!

I don't mind the actual game posts. In fact, I don't care much for the hardware speculation, but I'll take it if it means this thread stays alive.

Anyway, it's a cool-looking game, so I wishlisted it. I hope it turns out good. Not a fan of the voice acting though, but perhaps it's not an issue during gameplay.

They may be saving that for the 7950XT or for an 7900XTX, the halo product that only a few will be able to buy.

There's a lot of hardware talk because new stuff is always exciting and also because it's easier than talking about games. A CPU is a CPU and the same goes for the GPUs, and it doesn't matter if you prefer one brand over another, you'll still need one of each.

With games it's more difficult because there' a lot more variety (thankfully!) and some people prefer some genres while others despise those games and focus on others. That's why it's easier to make threads to talk about certain games, tho I guess it would be possible to make threads based on genres, to try to engage more people (nowadays it's hard to get people involved in talking about a game unless it's a console exclusive, and a big one).

About Tempest Rising, it's quite clear they took a lot of inspiration from C&C (it even has harvesters!) but, from the few glimpses of gameplay, it looks good enough. Thanks for sharing it.

Yea I like my hardware toys but I certainly like talking about games as well. Looks really good actually. I have been waiting for a long time for a good new RTS. Hopefully this will be great!

The hardware news keeps coming today...

AMD Sets Eyes on Gamescom 2022 For Ryzen 7000 “Zen 4” & AM5 Platform Announcement

https://wccftech.com/amd-sets-eyes-on-gamescom-2022-for-ryzen-7000-zen-4-am5-platform-announcement/

• Product announcement: August 29, 2022 at 8:00PM ET / August 30, 2022 at 2:00AM CET / 8:00AM TW
• Press embargo: September 13, 2022 at 9AM ET / 3PM CET / 9PM TW
• Sales embargo: September 15, 2022 at 9AM ET / 3PM CET / 9PM TW

I'll be going on a roadtrip that week so someone else may need to cover the juicy articles. I might post my reactions and such though.

Tempest Rising looks like it could hold promise, but their trailer didn't really show off much gameplay, besides 1.5 second snippets between CGI trailer footage, which kinda tells me they aren't as confident to show much of it fof yet (Older C&C trailers for example showed up to 5 seconds or more of actual gameplay footage, even Red Alert 3 managed to meld both live action and gameplay footage better than Tempest's trailer).

That being said, I'll prob buy it, but again, because the market isn't pushing as hard for RTS, I don't see this lighting the world on fire. I originally hoped AoE IV would set a fire under the genre, but it didn't do much of anything, and that's coming from Microsoft, a trillion dollar company, and if they can't light the fire to reignite the genre, then I don't see THQ managing it.

Personally speaking, I do wish there was more of a push for the genre as say, Turn based/metroidvania/Souls-likes/Rogue-likes are getting. Games like XCOM managed to set fof squad based tactics making a comeback, I really wish devs would be like "hey that's a cool RTS, I should make one like it!" (which is what every souls-like dev is literally doing every time one comes out). 

Depending on your motherboards CPU support, you could get a generational leap just by replacing the CPU alone.

The 2700X was a fine chip, but you can get a good 40%-100% performance increase by dropping in even a lowly 5600x, depending on application/game of course... The 2700X only closes the gap (But never wins) only when all 16 threads are loaded.

I personally believe the 5900X is the best price/performance at the moment though and it will last years, prices on those have tumbled hard.

Sadly AMD's Ray Tracing capabilities are pretty terrible... Which is sadly also the benchmark for Ray Tracing capabilities for consoles.

AMD just doesn't invest in the "side things" as heavily as nVidia... AMD had Tessellation in it's GPU's for example back in the Playstation 2 era... Something which didn't become common until the Xbox One/Playstation 4 era on console.
But when nVidia introduced the technology, despite being a decade late to the party, it absolutely dominated AMD's implementation, took AMD years to catch up.

AMD just spends more transistors on compute.

It also doesn't help that the consoles are using old Zen2 CPU cores paired up with only 16GB of Ram which holds things back too.

Personally I think he should upgrade to 5800X3D when Ryzen 7000 comes out as I am sure it will be half the price since CPUs go down in price quickly when a new one comes out. That way he doesn't have to buy a new motherboard and new ram with it. And since a 5800X3D can trade blows with a 12900k and Ryzen 7000 should be around the 12900k performance... That's a lot of savings that can be spent on a beefier GPU or hookers.

Since we see how CPU heavy Ray Tracing can be, imo, you should do a complete platform upgrade only when the CPU is like 50-70% faster than the current one. And Ryzen 7000 is only supposed to be 15% faster than normal Zen 3 (not X3D). So even if it's 20% faster than normal Zen 3, it could very well be only 10% faster than 5800X3D in gaming for quite a lot of money.

Could be the difference between getting a 4070 or a 4080.

With mining coming to a stop
3000 series getting deep discounts
4000 series bringing fap worthy performance uplift
And now, UE5 getting an On-demand shader compilation + Auto PSO gathering which should remove the shader compilation stutter without developers needing to do it manually with UE5 titles on PC...

We might just hit peak PC gaming bois!!!