Thursday news, part two:

How to watch the PC Gaming Show: Most Wanted 2024
https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/events-conferences/how-to-watch-the-pc-gaming-show-most-wanted-2024/
Tomorrow, the PC Gaming Show: Most Wanted returns. To guide us all through the insurmountable onslaught of new and upcoming PC games (14,000 new games have released on Steam in 2024, yow), our end-of-year PC Gaming Show counts down the 25 Most Wanted games as determined by The Council, our very own panel—or secret society, depending on which rumors you believe—of games industry luminaries.
>> Two things: 1) That tomorrow is today. And 2) Here are the members of that council.

Helldivers 2's departing CM reflects on being the mouthpiece for Super Earth as the game went galactic: 'Crazy, mostly in a good way'
https://www.pcgamer.com/games/action/wrangling-the-helldivers-what-its-like-to-be-the-mouthpiece-of-super-earth/
Helldivers 2 turned out to be one of 2024's surprise hits, partly due to how developer Arrowhead has gently guided an enormous playerbase in the service of Super Earth. Since launch, the game has been under intense community scrutiny and, despite its success, has often found itself at odds with players: Whether that's suffering review bombs or trying to deal with their latest unexpected wheeze.
Part of the whole shebang has been Arrowhead's forward-facing engagement with the Helldivers. CEO Johan Pilestedt isn't afraid to wade-in on controversies and occasionally tease players, the mysterious game master Joel has become a community meme, and community manager Twinbeard, aka Thomas Petersson, has been in the frontlines from the start cajoling and commiserating with the troops.
Petersson's contract with Arrowhead recently ended, and he'll no longer be working on Helldivers 2. We reached out to ask about the experience of managing a community that grew vastly, seemingly overnight, and the challenges of herding Helldivers around the galaxy.

As Viktor mains rage over their fave being hit with the Arcane twink ray, Riot quietly tinkers with controversial skin reworks on the League of Legends test server
https://www.pcgamer.com/games/moba/as-viktor-mains-rage-over-their-fave-being-hit-with-the-arcane-twink-ray-riot-quietly-tinkers-with-controversial-skin-reworks-on-the-league-of-legends-test-server/
Viktor is, uh, looking a little different, recently. As displayed in Riot Games' recent Season 1 update, the developer is keen to start working lore changes made in Arcane, a TV series that's been way better than it's had any right to be, into League of Legends itself. It's an understandable move in terms of marketing, but it's also been heavy handed enough to peeve the old guard something fierce.

Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 players think Treyarch is trying to gaslight them into believing that a hit registration error is really just 'erroneous visual blood effects'
https://www.pcgamer.com/games/call-of-duty/call-of-duty-black-ops-6-players-think-treyarch-is-trying-to-gaslight-them-into-believing-that-a-hit-registration-error-is-really-just-erroneous-visual-blood-effects/
One of the biggest problems that Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 players have faced recently has been hit registration errors. There have been numerous reports of bullets disappearing as players take clean shots at enemies who just don't go down. But Treyarch believes it could be a user error.
"We've identified an issue that could result in erroneous visual blood effects when damage was not actually dealt while shooting at enemies in all modes," a Call of Duty update post reads. This means players aren't actually hitting their targets, and the problem is that they get blood splatter as if they are. But this isn't a good enough explanation for some players.

Stalker 2 is so popular in Ukraine, its launch strangled the whole country's internet for hours
https://www.pcgamer.com/games/fps/stalker-2-is-so-popular-in-ukraine-its-launch-strangled-the-whole-countrys-internet-for-hours/
Before release, Stalker 2 was hotly anticipated. So hotly anticipated, in fact, that we named it our number one most wanted game—the most wanted most wanted—at our PC Gaming Show: Most Wanted of 2023. Did you count that? That's four repetitions of the words 'most wanted' in a single sentence. That's how wanted it was.
And yet, despite how much we were looking forward to the game here at PCG, our anticipation couldn't hold a candle to the hype over in Stalker's home country, Ukraine. Ukrainian players were so eager to play the game that the sheer amount of downloading they were doing on release day caused nationwide internet problems for hours. Two internet providers, Tenet and Triolan, confirmed (via ITC) that downloads of Stalker 2 were responsible for overloading the country's network, causing slow internet speeds.

Dragon Age: The Veilguard gets a standalone character creator and a new patch for Dragon Age Day
https://www.pcgamer.com/games/rpg/dragon-age-the-veilguard-gets-a-standalone-character-creator-and-a-new-patch-for-dragon-age-day/
Just in time for Dragon Age Day—D4, DA, get it?—BioWare has rolled out a new patch for Dragon Age: The Veilguard that makes numerous bug fixes, tweaks the game's photo mode, and adds Hawke's "iconic outfit" from Dragon Age 2 as a new cosmetic. It's also put out a new standalone character creator, enabling the creation of your own personal Rook even if you don't own the game—which can then be imported into The Veilguard when you're done.

More than 300 game developers lost their jobs in one day, just three weeks before Christmas
https://www.pcgamer.com/gaming-industry/more-than-300-game-developers-lost-their-jobs-in-one-day-just-three-weeks-before-christmas/
It's another miserable day for the videogame industry, as the past 24 hours have seen hundreds of people put out of work at Ubisoft, Torn Banner, and Sweet Bandits.
>> It’s even worse as Friday the 13th developer Illfonic has also laid off some employees.

Monster Hunter Wilds is running better in recent console previews, and the game director says the PC version will see 'the same level of framerate improvement'
https://www.pcgamer.com/games/rpg/monster-hunter-wilds-is-running-better-in-recent-console-previews-and-the-game-director-says-the-pc-version-will-see-the-same-level-of-framerate-improvement/
The Monster Hunter Wilds open beta didn't exactly go off without a hitch. In fact, there was a lot of hitching. While I delighted in having new monsters to fight and new mechanics to fight with, the Wilds beta had serious performance issues on PC and console alike. Luckily, however, game director Yuya Tokuda says we should expect to see optimization improvements when Wilds releases in February.

A Valve engineer fixed 3D lighting so hard he had to tell all the graphics card manufacturers their math was wrong, and the reaction was: 'I hate you'
https://www.pcgamer.com/games/fps/a-valve-engineer-fixed-3d-lighting-so-hard-he-had-to-tell-all-the-graphics-card-manufacturers-their-math-was-wrong-and-the-reaction-was-i-hate-you/
(… after a long intro…)
"The math that we were using was wrong," says Birdwell. "And not only that, the math that everybody was using was wrong. And then as I started to correct it I realised just how bad it was… and then I fixed it and suddenly everything looked great!
"I had to go tell the hardware guys, the people who made hardware accelerators, that fundamentally the math was wrong on their cards. That took about two-and-a-half years. I could not convince the guys, finally we hired Gary McTaggart [from 3DFX] and Charlie Brown and those guys had enough pull and enough… I have a fine arts major, nobody's gonna listen to me."

Tiny indie studio realises someone is selling its free games for $100+ on eBay and is totally stoked: 'We're a real developer now' it declares, adding an 'in your face!' to a homebrew convention that rejected them
https://www.pcgamer.com/games/action/tiny-indie-studio-realises-someone-is-selling-its-free-games-for-usd100-on-ebay-and-is-totally-stoked-were-a-real-developer-now-it-declares-adding-an-in-your-face-to-a-homebrew-convention-that-rejected-them/
Friends, let me summon my full videogame-expert authority to tell you: Studios don't like it when you pirate their games. They're not fans! And fair enough, really. If I found out that someone was filtering all my articles into Athletic Dame Repacks that you had to read off of torrented .iso files, I'd be… mystified, primarily—this is a free website—but also a bit miffed.
That sets me apart from the good folks at Safety Stoat Studios, a small studio that specialises in "innovative games that run on outdated hardware," meaning Sega Mega Drive/Genesis games released (on Itch.io) in our big year of 2024. Generally, the expectation is that curious players will check them out on emulators, but Safety Stoat recently became aware of at least one entrepreneur who had taken one of its games, packaged it up in seemingly era-appropriate Japanese Sega packaging, and began flogging it for $120 on eBay.

There was a Lego James Bond pitch that never got made, presumably because of all the murder and sex involved with James Bond
https://www.pcgamer.com/games/action/there-was-a-lego-james-bond-pitch-that-never-got-made-presumably-because-of-all-the-murder-and-sex-involved-with-james-bond/
A concept trailer for an abandoned Lego James Bond game has leaked online, and is currently being chased around by lawyers in a game of copyright whack-a-mole. The minute-long trailer, first shared on X but now mirrored across various platforms and easily findable, shows a selection of the different Bonds and recreations of some iconic and not-so-iconic scenes, such as when Roger Moore's stunt double danced across some crocodiles in Live and Let Die.
The Bond series is in one sense a fantastic fit for how Traveller's Tales approached the later Lego games. It has such a rich history, so many great characters and gadgets, and endless opportunities for big set-piece recreations. On the other hand, James Bond is most definitely adult entertainment: Each film features dozens of nameless goons being gunned down in the name of England and, depending on the entry, veers from knowingly salacious to outright smut. It's hard to imagine Lego ever signing off on a Lego version of Bond girl Honey Ryder, who emerges from the sea in a bikini in Dr. No (featured in this trailer), nevermind the likes of Pussy Galore.

I won't try to defend what's indefensible, but that comparison is, at the very least, misleading.

The 6800XT is last gen, not this gen. The 6800XT had 72 CUs, yes, but the 7800XT has 60CUs. That means that the 8800XT's alleged 64 is an increase over what we have. And let's not forget that the 60CUs of the 7800XT are as fast at the 72s of 6800XT.

Plus we have the other rumors about how it performs outside of its technical especifications.

Let's put everything into perspective.

On the other hand, the 32CUs of the 8600 is rather disappointing, so they better be extra powerful to match or beat the 7700XT.

I forgot to add in the news that tomorrow is festive over here and there'll be no news. A tragedy, I know, but I'm sure you'll manage until Monday.

It is extremely misleading, you probably understand my pet peeve with people taking one aspect of a piece of silicon and running with it. :P

80CU's at 1GHZ is equivalent to 40CU's at 2Ghz.

That's ignoring architectural changes like dual-issue ALU's which, although compiler heavy, can increase throughput substantially in the right circumstances... Which also means you don't need as many CU's. - Which is why we saw that CU regression in the 7800XT, but still offered more compute and often outperformed the 6800XT.

The 5600XT had 36CU's and got beaten by the 6600XT with 32CU's by about 20% on average.

Let's take mobile for example. AMD has stuck with 10-12CU's for years, yet my old Ryzen 2700u (R.I.P) notebook from 2017 with it's 11CU graphics is not even remotely in the same ballpark as something like the Z1 Extreme with 12 CU's, we are looking at like a 5-6x performance uplift.
The 1.3Ghz vs 2.7Ghz clockspeed difference doesn't help, but neither does the DDR4 2400 vs DDR5 7500Mhz.

More to a GPU than just the CU. I'm fine with 32CU's, it's everything AMD builds into those CU's that matters.
AMD also need to focus on maximum bang-for-buck, which means smaller, faster chips at a lower price.

Of course I agree.

My disappointment with the rumored 32CUs for the 8600 is not related to its possible performance, but its possible memory configuration. We don't know if AMD has changed it or not, and so those 32CUs made me think of a 128bit card with, yet again, 8GB. For a card that should hopefully perform like the 7700XT, that's not enough.

Hopefully, that's not the case, but the doubt will remain until we know more.

CU's have zero correlation to the memory controllers and memory sizes that the GPU interfaces with.

I.E. 7900GRE and 7800XT are 60CU and 80CU with 120 and 160 ROP's respectively, both run on the same 256bit bus that interfaces with 16GB of Ram.

AMD years ago also decoupled it's ROPS from it's memory controllers when it adopted a crossbar memory controller, so it could parry up any memory bus width with any number of ROP's which have a direct relationship with the CU's.

In saying that... If AMD adopts fast GDDR7 32GT/s then their 128bit bus would offer 512GB/s of bandwidth anyway, which is equivalent to a Radeon 6900XT.

But AMD also obfuscates it's memory bandwidth deficits by using large, fast, chunky caches.
There are lots of variables and unknowns at this point, but there is room for tangible gains even if they retained a 128bit memory bus.

In saying that, current leaks (Grains of salt) are suggesting a retaining of GDDR6, but with a 192bit memory bus @ 19Gbps which would mean the 8600XT would have 468GB/s of bandwidth which is still more than the 7700XT and 6750XT.

But other technologies may be thrown in like an improved delta colour compression and better culling/discard.

Dunno if anyone cares, but Cities: Skylines II is free to play for the weekend: https://store.steampowered.com/app/949230/Cities_Skylines_II/ If you do try it, do know that some of the default settings are poorly optimized and it runs much better if you google which settings to lower. Otherwise the game's been improved a lot since its release, but it still has some rough edges for sure.

Oh, Spain too? Nice! We have our Independency Day here in Finland on Dec 6, not that it's a very interesting day in practice. But a day off is always nice!

One question to you guys:

My secondary SSD in my laptop is dying. Well, maybe not dying, but slowing down to the point of blocking the entire PC, even things that are only on the system drive get affected by the slowdown. And with slowing down, I mean, without any exaggeration, Floppy Disc speeds, where it gets pings of over a couple seconds for chunks of data that are less than 100kB in size.

I bought a new one to replace it (2TB WD Black SN770, which I got for 114€ on Cyber Monday), but my question is: Should I simply take out the old one and replace it with the new one or should I try and delete everything from the old drive first (or even reformat it) before exchanging the drives? So far in 30 years, this is the first time a secondary storage drive died on me, so I'm not quite sure how to proceed on this one.

Do you happen to be using disk encryption? If so, I bet you can just lose the password for good and be done with it, although don't quote me on that. If that's not the case, it probably depends a bit on how valuable data you have there. If you do, you might want to run some data erasure software, because simply reformatting isn't a reliable way to ensure no one can access your data. Some would probably speak about a threat model, which would dictate how you should handle the situation. It's probably overkill, but the point still stands: what you should do probably depends on things (but the chances are that there's no need for you to be too paranoid).

Valuable data has been dealt with beforehand. Thankfully it wasn't a lot because due to the extremely slow speeds as explained above, it still took several days for the couple GB it was in total! Hence why I didn't update on the greatest game list - just opening the freaking .odt file with my game list and prepared hints was too much for the drive, but I managed to transfer it now.

What's left is mostly just videogames, and programming software and frameworks, plus LibreOffice (but not it's tables and documents, those are safe), all stuff I should be able to re-download