I don't think the prices wil come down. I think Nvidia pulled a fast one. It's like the car dealership that advertises a model at a low price when there is only 1 car on the lot at that price and the rest of them are thousands of dollar more. It allows them to advertise an MSRP that is for all intents and purposes BS. Technically that's not false adverstising, but the effect is the same. All that said, if the 5070 TI is $750. The 9070XT should be $600 at most. But it is AMD's Radeon division, so they'll screw it up somehow. Pricing their cards correctly at launch seems to be a completey foreign concept to them. 

All AMD needs to do is a pull a Radeon HD 4870/5870. - It may not have been the fastest GPU on the block, but they were stupidly good value... And AMD was awarded handsomely with volume sales.

They need to realize they don't have a premium offering, thus their prices need to reflect that.

My current GPU is getting very long in the tooth, so I am looking to upgrade sooner rather than later... But I am not seeking the fastest or the cheapest, I am seeking the best bang for buck... Like the Geforce 8800GT, Radeon 9700 and other legendary parts.

When mentioning both, you should really have mentioned the legendary Radeon HD 4770.

• Performance almost on par with the 4850, sometimes even beating it? Check!
• Affordable? Doublecheck! (MSRP was just $109(!), the 4850 cost almost twice as much with $199)
• Cool and quiet? Also check. TDP was just 80W for the card.

It was really the best GPU one could get back in the days without breaking the bank, and NVidia had nothing to counter it. Oh, they tried with the GTX 275 (the first 70 card btw)... but it wasn't really faster, much more expensive ($250) and much hotter with a TDP of 219W

Ah, sh*t, here we go again. AMD never misses an opportunity...to miss an opportunity.

The irony is the Radeon HD 4730 was a better GPU than the 4770.
Same number of functional units, but the 4730 had the bandwidth of a 4830... And some variants had higher clockspeeds than the 4770.
And the other benefit? It was cheaper and overclocked like a champ being a die-harvested 4870.

But you are correct the 4770 was a legendary card.

The 4850 at $199 was still stupidly affordable compared to what we have today... $199 USD in 2008 accounting for inflation would be the equivalent of $293 USD today.


...I should also mention how legendary the Radeon 6950 was.
I had four of them in Crossfire... And using a simple BIOS mod, I was able to unlock the extra shader cores and turn them into full-fledged Radeon 6970's.
..And this was at a time when you could use a BIOS glitch (ACC aka. Advanced Clock Calibration) to unlock CPU cores and cache on Phenom/Athlon processors.

The 4730 had just two problems: 1. Half the amount of ROPs compared to the 4770 and 4850. This limited the card sometimes, otherwise it was very good, and 2. It was very rare (at least here), so finding one was the main issue.

Yeah, I can remember the ACC. Tried it on my Athlon II X4 635 but sadly it didn't work, probably my cache was compromised so it couldn't be reactivated properly.

The only time the ROPS became an issue if when you started to throw lots of Anistropic filtering at games, the sampling just smashes ROPS.
Otherwise the Radeon 4730 could match or beat the 4830 in most Unreal Engine 3 powered games when no AA/AF is enabled.

Obviously buying a 4870 and overclocking that would give you the best results, especially at higher (1080P) resolutions thanks to it's superior fillrate.

It's hard to deny the banging value AMD had that GPU generation... Even their integrated graphics were brilliant, I recall having an Asrock A880G Extreme3 which had included 128MB of sideport memory/VRAM on the motherboard just for the integrated Radeon 4250 graphics.

I managed to push that integrated GPU past 1.3Ghz (More than double the stock) and zip-tied a small 40mm fan to the chipset to keep it cool... And even overclocked the integrated RAM by a modest amount... I had a Phenom 2 x4 960T which unlocked into a full-fledged Phenom 2 x6 chip... Was my main transcoding PC for streaming to my home theater for years.

Silicon lottery was definitely more prevalent back then on what results you could achieve, now tweaking of CPU's and GPU's is pretty much a pointless affair as they are designed to operate as high as they can right out of the box.

...But to also be fair, I miss the days of playing with jumper settings and playing with the clocks/busses/multipliers/dividers on motherboards to overclock my CPU's, external Cache chips, Ram and more. It's a lost art form now.

Apparently, according to some leaks, Strix Halo review embargo drops today, so we'll see what that chip really can do soon...

AMD Ryzen AI MAX 300 “Strix Halo” reviews are here, dawn of mid-range discrete GPUs

https://videocardz.com/newz/amd-ryzen-ai-max-300-strix-halo-reviews-are-here-dawn-of-mid-range-discrete-gpus

They must mean discrete "iGPUs" in the title and not just gpus. From what I have seen in notebookcheck and dave2d, it performs similarly to a power limited 4060/4070 around 65-75 TDP. If you increase the TDP of a 4060 laptop to say 110 watts, the 4060 laptop will beat the Strix Halo by 7% in gaming workloads at 1080p. Strix Halo doesn't do very well at 1440p gaming but neither does 4060 laptop so that doesn't matter much either way. Really the strength of Strix Halo is the vram so if you need a ton of vram for Ai stuff or video editing, it's really good.

The biggest drawback is certainly going to be the price. Hopefully cheaper configurations will be coming out as the laptop costs around $2000 while 5070 Ti gaming laptop from Asus will start around $1899.

https://www.tomshardware.com/laptops/gaming-laptops/u-s-rtx-50-laptop-pricing-starts-from-usd1-899-for-an-rtx-5070-ti-toting-asus-rog-strix-g16

First shipment of GeForce RTX 5070 Ti not expected to be better than RTX 5090/5080

https://videocardz.com/newz/first-shipment-of-geforce-rtx-5070-ti-not-expected-to-be-better-than-rtx-5090-5080

AIDA64 now supports Radeon RX 9070 series, software drops support for Windows 95/98

https://videocardz.com/pixel/aida64-now-supports-radeon-rx-9070-series-software-drops-support-for-windows-95-98

Acer Becomes The First Manufacturer To Announce 10% Price Increase On Consumer Products Amid Trump Tariffs; ASUS, HP & Dell To Likely Follow

https://wccftech.com/acer-becomes-the-first-manufacturer-to-announce-10-price-increase-amid-trump-tariffs/

Welcome to the Tuesday news:

SALES/PLAYER COUNTS & DEALS

Steam’s Top 10
 
(Click here for the top 100)

Steam has two deals and several sales/events:

• Sea of Thieves: 2024 Edition will be 65% off until February, the 22nd: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1172620/Sea_of_Thieves_2024_Edition/
• Arctico spots an 80% discount until the 28th of February: https://store.steampowered.com/app/325210/Arctico/
• These are the sales/events:
  • The Super Bundles Blast Event is here, with all kinds of bundles available. I say available and not on sale because not all of them come with discounts. The highest discount I’ve seen is 50% and the event will last, in theory, until the 24th of February: https://store.steampowered.com/curator/40645616/sale/SuperBundlesBlast
  • The charity sale Play it, Build it, Beat it brings games up to 95% off. Some Mosr deals seem to end on the 24th, but I’ve seen some ending the 22nd: https://store.steampowered.com/curator/32941731/sale/GreatOrmondStreetHospitalCharitySale2025
  • The Quebec Games Celebration features games up to 85% off. The length of the deals vary, but most will end between the 24th and the 25th: https://store.steampowered.com/sale/quebec2025
  • For Bruce Wayne’s birthday, the Batman games are on sale, up to 90% off until February 26: https://store.steampowered.com/sale/brucewaynebday2025
  • The Total War: WARHAMMER franchise is on sale with up to 75% discounts until the 27th of February: https://store.steampowered.com/sale/TWWarhammerSale2025
  • The Storyteller Festival is full of VisualNovels and Narrative games, with demos and also up to 85% discounts. Once again, the length of the deals vary, with some ending later today and others lasting up to March 3: https://store.steampowered.com/curator/42395212/sale/TheStorytellersFestival2025
  • Publisher Excalibut Games puts its titles on sale with up to 80% discounts until the 3rd pf March: https://store.steampowered.com/curator/32976461/sale/FebruaryFunSale
• And, of course, there’s also the weeklong deals

Fanatical has two new deals:

• The new Star Deal is Warhammer Triple Pack, 91% off during 24 hours: https://www.fanatical.com/en/bundle/warhammer-triple-pack
• The Warhammer franchise is on sale with up to 92% discounts during the next 6 days: https://www.fanatical.com/en/franchises/warhammer

SOFTWARE & DRIVERS

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MODS, EMULATORS & FAN PROJECTS

Super Mario Bros. CD Demo Available for Download
https://www.dsogaming.com/news/super-mario-bros-demo-available-for-download/
Now here is something truly amazing. The FamicomCD Team has released a demo of Super Mario Bros. CD which is playable on both real SNES hardware and emulators.
Super Mario Bros. CD is a ROM hack of Super Mario World, imagining what an SMB game might be like on a CD-based console. Basically, think of it as Sonic CD but for Super Mario. Here is a twist, though. This fan game is for an imaginary NES CD console, and not for the canceled SNES CD. So, don’t let the parent ROM fool you. This isn’t Super Mario World in CD. This is the classic NES Super Mario Bros. in CD.
The demo allows you to play five levels from the game. These are Grasslands, Underground, Athletic, Golden Jungle and Beach. All of them come with proper gameplay elements. As such, players can control Mario, collect powerups and coins, and fight classic enemies.
Since this is a fan-made project, you should temper your expectations. This ROM hack tries to re-imagine the classic Super Mario Bros game of NES as a CD game. It’s not meant to showcase what a CD version of Super Mario World could look like.
This is even obvious from the sprite used for Mario himself. As you will see, his 2D sprite is similar to the one used in the NES games, and not the one we got in Super Mario World.
Going into some tech details, Super Mario Bros. CD utilizes the MSU-1 chip to deliver original and rich CD-quality music, fully animated cutscenes, and more complex environments, even on original hardware via the SD2SNES/FXPak Pro. SMBCD also heavily utilizes Mode 0 (a SNES background mode, akin to Mode 7) for its levels, providing more layers for foreground environments and background parallax. Mode 0 allows for 4 layers at once rather than the usual 2-3 layers found in SMW by using Mode 1.
>> The article has a 10 minutes video.

Resident Evil Revelations 2 gets raw mouse input support
https://www.dsogaming.com/mods/resident-evil-revelations-2-gets-raw-mouse-input-support/
Dawid Freeman has released a mod that brings raw mouse input support to Resident Evil Revelations 2. By using this mod, you will finally get to experience Revelations 2 with proper KB&M controls. So, make sure to get it as this mod will greatly enhance your gaming experience.
Going into more details, the mod replaces the analog stick-emulated in-game camera with a proper raw mouse input with no acceleration. The mod only works with the Steam version of the game, and the camera will not work on a controller.
>> This article also has a video, roughly 5 minutes long.

Dark Souls 2 Renewal Project overhauls all textures & normal maps
https://www.dsogaming.com/mods/dark-souls-2-renewal-project-overhauls-all-textures-normal-maps/
Modder ‘AnemoiaWorks’ has released a new version of the amazing Dark Souls 2 Texture Renewal Project. This latest version, which is around 23GB in size, upgrades all textures and adds normal maps. This is a must-have mod for everyone who plans to replay DS2. So, let’s take a closer look at it.
According to its description, the mod upgrades every texture in the game to 4096×4096 resolution. It also adds roughness maps to every texture along with fixes to missing/low-quality normal maps, vanilla displacement maps and the occasional texture seam present on the vanilla files.
>> Screenshots, this article has some comparison screenshots.

A Fallout: New Vegas fan is so fed up waiting for a remake he's decided to do it himself. The twist? He's making it in the Sims 2
https://www.pcgamer.com/games/fallout/a-fallout-new-vegas-fan-is-so-fed-up-waiting-for-a-remake-hes-decided-to-do-it-himself-the-twist-hes-making-it-in-the-sims-2/
Just when you think the PC gaming modding community couldn't get any more wonderfully weird, someone goes and announces a Fallout: New Vegas 'remaster' in the Sims 2. That's right, a game which came out six years before Obsidian's beloved RPG, and is designed to do entirely different things than take a golf club to deathclaws and beat down on cosplaying Romans.
I struggle to see how anyone could justify such tomfoolery, but New Vegas modder and superfan FalloutPropMaster nonetheless gave it a go. In a reddit thread announcing the mod (via The Gamer), naturally called The Sims 2: New Vegas, FalloutPropMaster explains that he's become "impatient waiting for a remastered version of Fallout: New Vegas," specifically one that "allows us to revisit some cut content that existed during the in-house Beta" of the game.
Which is fair enough. But why not recreate those cut bits in Fallout: New Vegas using existing modding tools, rather than a game which has no combat mechanics or, indeed, comprehensible language? FalloutPropMaster states that he saw some examples of a couple of New Vegas casinos remade in the Sims 2 using its build tools, and it "inspired" him to remake all of Fallout New Vegas in Maxis' game "to the best of my abilities."
PropMaster mentions that he has "modded Fallout 3 and New Vegas in the past", but "never the Sims". Which in my opinion only raises further questions, but let's not derail this story any further. He does state that he's using various third-party tools such as FOMM, Blender, Nifscope and "others", to bring objects and elements from New Vegas into The Sims.
The project has received several progress updates since its initial announcement a week ago, including a planning layout of the New Vegas strip, ongoing construction of Goodsprings, and a test of some custom New Vegas UI (featuring bonus Mortimer Goth cameo). This same image also shows the mod utilises the same stat bars and behaviours from Maxis' life sim, suggesting the mod leans more toward being a New Vegas colony sim than a nuts 'n' bolts remake of Obsidian's RPG.
>> The article has one, and only one, screenshot.

GAMING NEWS

-Nothing from them-