Like can you imagine if they came back to PC with:

• An apology for leaving PC in tatters, for Valve to clean up the mess, and for mocking us while they praised consoles out the ass.
• A speech towards the customers, not just the dev's, on them having a lower price cut, but also that they are putting money into making games of their own.
• Poured some money into R&D to their storefront before launch, to make it match at least half of Steam's features.
• Not doing any exclusivity deals, just offering a better cut and price instead for the dev/consumer.
• Not waste time & money with petty court battles.
• stop wasting years in trying to create their own walled garden monopoly.
• Actually making games, and continuing Unreal T.
• Actually look at what Valve is doing and try to do one better (instead of the complete and total opposite).
• Actually supporting Linux.
• Their CEO staying the fuck off social media.

I would have given them a chance, had they met the majority of that list, but instead, everything there is basically non existent, or a pale imitation. 

Dang end of an era. The first time I saw the term "PC Master Race" was from a joke that Yahtzee made in one of his ep about the Witcher. I'll be interested to see where he goes from here.

NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 4070 Ti SUPER: packaging design leak hints it might be real

https://videocardz.com/newz/nvidias-geforce-rtx-4070-ti-super-packaging-design-leak-hints-it-might-be-real

Personally I liked the old Super styling better

NVIDIA CMP 50HX turned into gaming GPU shows lackluster performance due to limited PCIe lanes

https://videocardz.com/newz/nvidia-cmp-50hx-turned-into-gaming-gpu-shows-lackluster-performance-due-to-limited-pcie-lanes

AMD Ryzen Surpasses Intel Core CPUs In Korean DIY Market, Ryzen 5 7500F Top-Selling AM5 Chip

https://wccftech.com/amd-ryzen-surpasses-intel-core-cpus-korean-diy-market-ryzen-5-7500f-top-am5-seller/

Noctua Goes All-Stealth With Its NH-D9L & NH-L9x65 chromax.black CPU Coolers

https://wccftech.com/noctua-goes-all-stealth-with-its-nh-d9l-nh-l9x65-chromax-black-cpu-coolers/

I wouldn't even need most of that. For me to give them a chance, they simply needed to not go full retard mode. If they want PC gamers to like them, they needed to cater to the audience. If instead of forcing exclusivity, they made it so that the games that launched on EGS day 1 had a discount vs every other store front instead of doing exclusivity, then I think many people would give them a go. Especially if they gave out free games on top. Instead they chose to go towards what PC gamers hate and Timmy fought tooth and nail to ruin any chance EGS had to succeed.

These days EGS is considered a platform that is disliked by pc gamers in general proven by the lack of sales and profitability. And them continuing with their strategy will be their demise.

So it's almost confirmed, we'll have a card that'll be both Ti and Super. I hope reviewers mock Nvidia for this silly move.

By the way, here's a couple of news that may, or not, interest you. I wouldn't put too much faith in the first one given the sources (RedGamingTech and Moore's Law is Dead) and some dubious conclusions that even the article refutes, while the second one looks cool but I think it will have a hard time going forward:

AMD prioritising multi-thread over single-thread performance for next-gen Zen 5 CPUs according to new rumours
https://www.pcgamer.com/amd-prioritising-multi-thread-over-single-thread-performance-for-next-gen-zen-5-cpus-according-to-new-rumours/
AMD is on the record scheduling its next-gen Zen CPUs, to be known as the Ryzen 8000 series, for next year. We could even see Zen 5 launch in some form in the first half of 2024. So, it's no surprise that the rumours regarding the new chips are now coming thick and fast.

The latest comes from YouTube channel RedGamingTech and among numerous details perhaps the big stand out is a claim that AMD is prioritising multi-threaded performance over single-threaded.

(...)

Now, given the far greater financial rewards of server chip sales for AMD, RedGamingTech's claim is that Zen 5's architecture has been tilted slightly in favour of server performance over client PC performance. And server performance is generally all about multi-threaded performance.

The consequence? The gap between the maximum single-core clock speed and maximum multi or all-core clockspeed has been narrowed for Zen 5 compared to previous Zen chips.

The immediate implication is that single-thread frequencies may have suffered. If that's the case, it does not appear to be by much. RedGamingTech claims that "late engineering samples" of what the channel claims to be the Ryzen 9 8950X are hitting 5.6GHz. That's just 100MHz down on the existing Ryzen 9 7950X.

And, of course, we're talking engineering samples, not final silicon. So, that frequency could yet improve.

At the same time, RedGamingTech has some claimed information regarding Zen 5's IPC or instructions per clock performance, which is the measure of the performance of a single software thread per clock cycle. In other words, independent of clock speed.

Earlier info from competing rumour monger Moore's Law is Dead revealed a purported AMD internal slide showing Zen 5's IPC improving by 10 to 15%, which was a little disappointing.

RedGamingTech is now claiming the slide in question used the narrow measure of SpecInt to come up with those IPC numbers, and that broader IPC gains across multiple integer and floating point workloads will likely be 20% or more.

Assuming that Zen 5 does hit similar peak clockspeeds to Zen 4, we're then looking at about 20% more single-thread performance. But the multi-thread performance gains should be bigger given that claim of narrowing the frequency gap between single and multi-threaded loads.

So you could argue that it's more a case of multi-thread performance getting a particularly big boost than single-thread performance suffering. But if this is what AMD is doing, you could also argue that single-thread performance would likely be better still had that been the priority.

Canon challenges ASML dominance with new chipmaking tech that could lead to cheaper chips
https://www.pcgamer.com/canon-challenges-asml-dominance-with-new-chipmaking-tech-that-could-lead-to-cheaper-chips/
The chips we know and love are made with some of the most advanced manufacturing methods on the planet. The smallest nodes require billions of dollars in capital expenditures, a big part of which goes to Extreme Ultraviolet Lithography machines manufactured by ASML, the current market leader. But there's a new challenger and some exciting tech on the horizon that aims to change the status quo, potentially leading to a fall in the cost of chips.

Japan-based electronics giant Canon (via Bloomberg) has developed what it calls Nanoimprint Lithography technology that it claims could scale down to 2nm. That's small enough to rival EUV lithography, but the more important part of this news is the claim that Canon's technology will have a price of "one digit less than ASML's EUV tools". In other words, Canon's tech should cost just a tenth of an equivalent ASML machine.

(...)

Nanoimprint lithography is pretty much as it sounds. Using NIL, circuits are essentially printed directly onto a wafer. It involves applying a resin directly to the wafer, followed by the pressing of a mold to create surface patterns before ultraviolet light is used to solidify the patterns. However, production yields and the potential for defects remain unanswered questions for now.

The games for Humble Choice November have been revealed.

• Hardspace: Shipbreaker
• WWE 2K23
• Unpacking
• Friends vs Friends
• The Legend of Tianding
• SCP : Secret Files
• Souldiers
• Prodeus

Thanks, Rhonin. I didn't know some of those games, but it looks like it's a good month.

I skimmed through the analysis article, and it seems like a pretty good read. I'm currently thinking the game needs a good bit of optimization but necessarily for all of the listed slow parts, as the game, as well as it seems to utilize the CPU, will probably become CPU-bound at some point anyway, at which point it doesn't make (much) sense to optimize rendering further. But there's definitely a lot of sensible room for rendering optimization still. I think they released the first moment they thought the game run passably on a range of hardware they considered acceptable, and considering the hardware that can actually run the game passably, I think that's an... understandable decision, although not one I would have picked due to the outrage that was - or at least should have been - easy to foresee.

I'm personally having more fun with the game that I would without it since it still runs just fine at 50k population, so I'm all for this decision, considering they're 100% going to optimize the game to a degree largely considered acceptable, unless the outrage manages to kill the game first (which doesn't seem to be the case at the moment, since the game is #16 on Steam top sellers globally, right below Mass Effect Legendary Edition at -84%/9.59€). Should definitely have released in Early Access or something though to make it clearer what the state of the game is.

I know there's a lot of Epic hate lately, but anyone who enjoys playing around in 3D software should check out Humble Bundle's Unreal Engine Asset Bonanza. Pretty killer value. I didn't even know HB sold asset packs.

Also, check out this original series being made in Unreal:

I found out what happened 2 days ago.

I used to originally be on the Escapist forums all those years ago, hell I've still got 2 friends from there on my Steam list.

Fuck those new execs that took over the site some years ago, they were looking for excuses to fire Nick the whole time. 

At least Nick and the whole media team saw the writing on the wall months beforehand and planned for this mass exodus when the day finally came. I still watch ZP here and there, and their semi new show (Cold takes), so I'm hoping they get their new stuff up sooner so things can go back to how they were.

The Escapist as it stands now, is literally just a name and a logo. All media staff are gone, leaving it a literal husk of it's former self. PPl need to stop thinking it's okay to just go in, buy out a company and gut it from the inside out and then walk away debt/consequence free, while those below suffer for it.