LadyCrimson

^ Was thinking "what nice/pretty photos" and then ... I desperately want a Hello Kitty cone thingie, now. Those Japanese business men/friends my father worked for, who would come visit him occasionally when they were in the US, would always bring small Hello Kitty things as gifts to their friends adopted daughter. Erasers, pencil boxes, hair ties, stationary. I never got super into HK but still brings memories. Also, I wouldn't mind a giant inflatable like that. I could put it on our roof during holiday seasons. Santa? No, Hello Kitty!

To sell gpu's and games, of course. I'm not sure what you mean by cartoony look tho. From what I've seen that doesn't occur. It's just for people who think hyper-realistic shadowing, surface/directional reflections, lighting/lighting movement/cycles, fog/particles sun/god rays and all of that enhance their "immersion." When I tried turning all the pathtracing stuff on, in this game there's not a huge difference. I mean sure the sun rays through windows, reflections on glass, some shadowing was enhanced, not trying to say there was zero difference, but it wasn't "OOOHHHH WOWWWW". Cyberpunk was better in that regard, imo. In Indy, the base global illumination is already pretty decent. Of course, the fact they're using RT global illumination (remember this is "separate" from full ray/path tracing) may be part of the reason. The RT-GI already gives a little boost to lighting, sun rays filtering through windows etc, so full pathtracing is less dramatic in some ways. Maybe. I'm theorizing, not a gpu tech. I don't feel like the RT-GI hindered my FPS at all. I've played some newer games without any RT that were a little harder on the FPS than this one. It's just the VRAM issue and can't use the vaunted 1080 anymore. EDIT: oh, also, the game engine itself may be a performance factor. It is not using Unreal 4/5, something else, maybe it's easier to optimize.

Spent another hour fiddling with the Indy game, along with a small story progression. I definitely think one gets more visual "showcasing" by leaving texture pool size Low and upping other things as much as you can, instead. I also tried turning pathtracing (full RT) on for lol's. DLSS-balanced/same settings = 25fps, haha, yeah, no thank you. Not even that different. I read posts saying that 8gb gpu's won't even have the path-tracing option active/usable, but dunno. Gameplay - game said "best with controller!" so I'm trying that first. It feels ok. Not great, a little clunky at times, but ok. Npc's/Indy cycling of flavor or hint dialogues as I admire/wander surroundings vs. rush to advance, became tiring almost immediately. It's the rate/speed of repetition. Over and over. You have the usual jump/climb/hang and lift/move/grab type controls. 1st person punching is ok. Throwing things you pick up at people is often amusing (see dunkey video if you want a slapstick guffaw). But world detail to admire is very good, has nice movie tie-ins/nods here and there, Indy-fans will definitely love the game for that.

I dunno, for the lowest "texture pool size," medium-ish settings and no full ray/path tracing, I think it looks pretty good. And ofc, it looks a lot better on-screen vs. screenshot. *shrug* Outside of enforced RT global illumination req, the game seems well optimized re: looks vs. performance, actually. A lot of world details for those that like such things, too. The face and body animations (clothes, running, expressions) are sometimes off, but eh, still fine.

Ok, I spent my first hour trying settings on the Indy game etc. Here is my very early performance take, with only the mandatory global illumination/not full ray tracing: (2080ti/9900k/32systemram) EDIT: oh, for whatever reason, despite seeing posts to the contrary, I had zero shader compilation etc steps. It just fired up/went to menu. Maybe it just did it super fast in my case. Or maybe because I don't allow Steam itself to do any caching (steam setting unchecked) - I let the gpu do it. ---the "texture pool size" is the main vram controller. If you have an 8gb vram gpu, I'm going to guess that one would need/want that on "Low". ---Since I have 11vram, the game likes to use about 8-8.5vram of it with texture pool at Low, mostly medium settings, DLSS-quality. If I up texture pool to Medium, all other settings the same, that goes up to 9-9.5. I do not know if this will increase later/other areas in the game. If I put it to High, 10+gb and game wanted to warn me I was being stupid. ---the settings I'm using, if one is interested: (4k/55" TV being used) in this image Motion Blur is totally off, btw, there's two separate setting lines for it. >.> ---altering resolution (I tried native and dlss 1440 as well as 4k) did little re: vram usage, mostly only FPS. Maybe 1gb less vram. Upping certain other settings (shadows, reflections, global illumination etc) will affect vram used a fair bit taken together, so the lower the texture pool size, the higher you can put those types of settings. ---fps for me at dlss-4k is the usual "mostly 60 but I'm sure areas/moments will drop to 50". I did try native 4k, that dropped fps by 10 or so, average. ---fps at 1440 with the same settings in the linked image gained me maybe 15-25fps (depending if dlss on or off) but vram usage remained close to same. To be honest, the difference between "low" and "medium" texture pool size, visually, wasn't all that noticeable. I suppose some tree leaves looked slightly less crisp. So for those of us that don't have 16-24 VRAM, may as well leave that one at "low" - it's not going to look super better at Medium. High did start to look sharper/cleaner, a little. That said, it still looks good/fine, imo. Faces and rocks don't get low-res fuzzy or anything.

I spent a lot of time, for a while, on Path of Exile 1 (from the original beta period onward). Gave them a lot of cash (stashstashstash and pets). I haven't touched it in some years. I was mildly keeping an eye on PoE2, but from what I've seen I think I shall pass. That passive skilltree and their constant chr. resets (that applied even to non-seasonal/don't care about seasons, chrs) so you'd have to redo it (and no wholesale respec feature) - had enough of that routine. ================ Anyway, right now it's not "what I am playing" but "what I am downloading." If I didn't have fiber net, Indy is not a game I'd want to put up with to download. Even with fiber net, because Steam sometimes is 30-50% slower than our "potential max", it's still 30-ish minutes. WAHHH. Gimmie my full speed, Steam, you wankers. *me playing microscopic sad violin for spoiled, short-attention-span brains* ...of course I'm joking. Mostly I'm still worried about it installing/compiling/starting properly. Cross fingers.

Yeah, that's my concern at the moment. Could be a week from now it'll all start again. Never know with PC's. And feels like they don't make "parts" like they used to, longevity/toughness wise. I suppose I could get new ram/psu etc but I'll wait and see what happens. If it could just hold on for another year or so, that's ok. lol Anyway, even if the PC was 100% vs. being kind of maybe right now, not even sure if that Indy game will install/compile shaders/run properly for me. Maybe it'll want drivers or Windows upgrades I don't have, who knows. If I buy it and it looks like I'll have to fiddle with it for five hours just to get it working, it's getting refunded.

Based on some forum posts and user reviews, in terms of the Indy game I think this is mostly going to be dependent on resolution and settings one personally tolerates. Outside of the "needs a rtx capable card", ofc. I mean it sounds like the visual differences with settings aren't super extreme - a trend I've noticed happening over recent years in a lot of games, actually - and one has to remember that while actually playing, most aren't staring at every pixel to notice fine differences, like all these comparison videos emphasize. In terms of upgrading GPU's - I'm not much of a conspiracy theorist but it does make one feel like AAA devs/nvidia are working together to force people to buy the top tier cards - eg, gimping the 60/70/80 series re: vram. >.> I've said it before and I'll say it again - it may be "slower" generation but the 11gb of vram in my 2080ti (and sometimes, dlss, of course) is probably what has allowed to me to marginally still run some of these games at 4k at my personal tolerance of 45-60fps/mid-high settings etc. I refuse to do less than dlss-quality tho. I've tried. "Balanced" dlss still looks like crap, imo. I might as well just drop the native resolution to 1440, then.

Ok may have figured it out. I had the mobo XMP/higher ram frequency oc on. I remember doing that ages ago when I noticed the ram speed reported by Windows didn't match the ram packaging/wondered why. So I enabled that. Noticed it maybe gave me 3-5fps more in games, whoopie, shrugged, forgot about it. 4.5 years later, it would seem the ram/cpu/whatever doesn't like it. I think the 9900k is technically "rated" for 2133 but the xmp feature could oc/boost/bypass. So I guess you can go months/years with it seeming ok, then it suddenly causes issues. Edit: hubby mentioned someone at work having similar issues after a few months/it was the ram boosting vs. cpu rating). Everything that was causing a reboot now loads, fps/performance/game settings is the same as ever, etc. Which just goes to confirm to me again that (with the same type of ram, at least) that faster ram speed doesn't do jack for games, really. Hopefully that's the root of the issue/solved now. Which means tomorrow I could try that Indy game.

Seems my current PC-reboots issue is a kernal power error 41 thing. It only reboots (sometimes) with some games. Often when trying to load a save - sometimes I can load/play for a few hours and exit game with no reboot. FFXV on C drive, 7 Days and others on G drive, doesn't matter. Started maybe a week ago out of the blue etc. It's the no-blue-screen/any message/freeze type of reboot. Just whomp, pc shuts down like the power went off (it didn't) and reboots immediately. Has yet to do this using anything else (browsers, pic editors, email etc) only when trying to game. CPU/GPU temps are all fine. Well, at least there have been no spontaneous reboots when idle/while I'm sleeping this time, just high-power draw or high cpu use cases, perhaps. So I'm guessing .... failing power supply, or a power cable, or failing power strip again. Or something along those lines. Pfft. So do I buy all of those things, replace all and hope something worked? Or do I build a new computer. Hahaha (probably not). Anyway, that was my day. Stupid pc testing. EDIT: if only I didn't like game mods/some pc-only games and/or control-freaking. I'd just get a console or two, and mini-pc, and have done with it. But nooooo...I must control-freak on stuff...

I don't know/care about "woke" but sometimes I'm a little tired of all the constant "female protagonist" games (when you can't choose) in a lot of the games - well, at least re: those that aren't purposefully otp machismo-action/godofwar/military/whatever fantasy. I just sometimes (well, ok, often) don't want female protagonists. I weirdly don't relate most of the time, or don't like many female VA's, perhaps why any "gaming imbalance" never bothered me in the first place. What I've always wanted is a kind of equal numerical balance of all the tropes/issues/genres/hoohaa of the moment. So there's plenty of options/styles etc. all around, all the time. Which I know is unrealistic to expect, and it never happens - always swings one way or the other to extremes as trends. Ah well. I was considering wasting money on the Indy game out of curiosity re: performance on my aging rig - plus he's a non-otp-machismo male protagonist - but after skimming through a few ppl playing it, it looks ... kinda boring. I mean if one really wanted an Indy game to capture an Indy feel, it looks good for that - I just mean, for my gameplay tastes. I might still waste money on it tho, could be false viewing impression. Not paying the early-access price hike tho.

It wouldn't surprise me if I could still get it to run non-native "4k" at 45-50fps with dlss quality/mix of basic/no bling settings etc, and it's not a mega speed action game- but yeah...PC requirements/what some devs keep trying to push have me thinking "that looks like a great game to play in 7 years when the 70xx or 80xx period arrives!" Like they're all trying to make their games the new "can it run Crysis". Haha. I have no idea about frame generation, don't have a gpu that can use it. But it hasn't sounded like a great thing to me, at least at its current state. Or at least, it would do nothing for me.

^ Looks like that Indy game is going to require a GPU that is RT capable. They are listing 2060Super and Ryzen 5 3600 (for 1080) and specifically mention "gpu hardware ray tracing required." To be clear, that does not equal "needing" full blown fancy bling ray tracing being "on", but that they are using RT tech for their basic lighting/illumination or something like that, with no other lighting tech method offered, thus gpu has to support that tech. Wouldn't surprise me if AAA games all start going that way before too long. edit: I guess dev's may also like the RT lighting tech vs. older methods (I hear it's easier/simpler for them or some such? don't quote me, could be wrong)

I can't decide if I'm interested in that Indy game or not. Not even about possibly "quality", simply do I want/care about a game based on a film character. I'd likely be more interested in an all animated Indy movie or series re: continued Indy stories (please no more live-action ones). At least Troy Baker seems to have done an all right job with the voice, although he sometimes drifts off a bit/not perfect (not that I expect it to be, that would be impossible). Indy's face animation gives me super uncanny valley in this game tho.

I opened the garage door, my foot went downward and must've decided the first step down was higher then it is, leg gave way and I ended up plonked on my hip/butt on the stair. I'm usually cautious but I guess my mind was distracted. Sigh. edit: the garage steps in this house are especially steep/tall/concrete/poorly done. My foot and hip hurts but nothing serious I think. Hubby says he thinks about moving back to the house in the Bay Area sometimes, with the "no stairs there" as a big reason. Just need some ramps is all, I say. Finding someone to build them is the trick. Unless you "know someone", most places wouldn't find tiny jobs like that worth the time these days and/or would over-charge you something silly.

--Deleted sql databases/old websites/directories etc off my servers. Not that there was tons, but blargh, still a pain. Just wanted to make sure there was nothing on them that I might really care about, in case I poof it all. --Spent a lot of time with the hubster. He's thinking of taking all Xmas/New Years week off too. His work has been nuts I guess, he's tired/stressed. Or just old. Either or. Anyway, relaxing/pleasant week. --My PC is acting flaky again, although so far only when playing 7 Days. The spontaneous reboot (temps are fine) Blargh. Whatever. Eventually maybe that'll be my "excuse" to build another. --Had pizza. It was yummy. Jalepeno's on pizza is just the best. I wonder what a kimchi pizza might be like - I like kimchi in eggs, tomato sauce based soups, stir fries, maybe I'd like as a pizza topping. I doubt hubby would go for that tho. I'd have to make it myself. Hehe.

Can't resist the pet wants your food face!

I'll let you guess which "type" I am.

The Madness, Netflix --first episode, 7.5/10 --all 8 episodes, 6.5/10 That first kinda hooks you, not a bad suspense/fugitive/whoreallydunnit starter. The rest was still decent, with some good moments, but felt like it went on too long with too many fits and starts of the whodunnit, of the mystery/danger, or not the right methods/choices for drawing out the story etc. But one of the better netflix produced offerings, perhaps.

It crossed my mind that perhaps I should look for a new website/server host. Something cheaper. I only need email address ability and some file storage for occasional, y'know, picture uploading. That's it, I do nothing else now. So I start internet searching. Everything feels like an ad, whether a big name magazine page or tomshardware or anything else that comes up that has a site name I vaguely recognize - and all the "click link so we can get affiliate funds", the listed packages from all these companies feels too good to be true (maybe this is normal now?), all the companies seem the same and seem to create their websites from the same template, and reviews are all suspect. I'm totally lost. I could actually live without ever posting screenshots, but I need (many) dedicated email addresses. gmail or whatever is common now will not suffice. >.> F, I hate the internet now.

^ I've never had an ultra-wide so can't say anything. But 4:3 on 16:9 I can't recall any major issues. But likely depends on what - images, browsers, video, games, etc. I have nvidia's use "aspect ratio" plus any actual display/monitor option preference setting (if you have any of those) is what I use, and videos/games/images all seem to work properly for me. At least, they don't get stretched or squashed/I get the black bars. I much prefer black bars vs. cropping or stretching etc. EDIT: To be fair, I can't even really recall what it was I disliked about AMD's software back then, outside of an expected lack of familiarity. I recall struggling to make games behave/look like they "should", for hubby a few times when he had AMD and not being able to.

Whenever I do get around to it, I'll be taking a hard look at AMD across the board then, for sure. A lot of it for me is software packages, drivers, as well as performance/cost. I never liked AMD's user software/interface, which I know is a persnickety thing, but it's been a long time. And what Nvidia keeps doing gets worse and worse. I like that they're getting rid of "experience" (which I never install/use) but I dislike that they're getting rid of "control panel" and what is replacing it looks like ... it sucks.

In other what you did today for LC, the dental cleaner said while my few very deep pockets are still deep pockets, overall my gums are looking better than before (pre-the tooth extractions) and my blood pressure was "really good". Although I'm not sure why taking blood pressure was part of a basic tooth scraping/cleaning appointment, but ok, nice to know that at least that's not something to put on the laundry list of concerns. Still can't decide on the Invisalign tho. I could definitely use it for back teeth "bite" alignment reasons (not cosmetic) but ... $10,000 and 1-2 years of wearing the things constantly. If only I could know if the bite alignment would get worse or stay as it is now. If doesn't get worse, it's ok/tolerable regarding eating/chewing. Can't do implants until I decide.

I always want a new PC. I just usually don't have even a fluffy excuse for it. I think it's going to be just like when I wanted to upgrade from the 980ti/i-920 5ish years ago (I think?) ... "now?" "No, don't really need it." and so on for some years.... I'm kind of hoping that Death Stranding 2 will be console-only for a year, so I'd have 2+ years before I'd really think about upgrading for it (if I "need" to). Maybe the 6090 will be almost out then, for only $3699, with triple digit vram! The more you buy, the more you save!

Hubby took the whole holiday week off. Me: "What cha gonna do/what do you wanna do? Day trips? Anything?" (his back thing limits activities a lot now) Him: "Kinda, maybe, dunno. It's winter. And I'm cold." ...he's currently watching TV lying on the couch, cocooned like a burrito in giant fluffy blankets. So cute.