Humanoid

Downloaded and installed Blood and Wine, dug up my old save game from the system drive of my previous PC, fired up the game and ....dammit, I'm only level 23. It's been pretty much a full year since I've played so I can't even tell what functionality is new, changed, or has always been there. Ended up just spending an hour or so just playing the tutorial from scratch to regain my bearings. Presumably next time I play I'll resume the old save. Probably. Maybe. I don't know.

The absence of the 480X from the announcement has people wondering whether Apple snaffled them all up for the iMac refresh. Shame, would have been interesting to see how close Polaris could get to the 1070 if they released a fully-enabled version at say, $300, but we might be waiting a little longer for it.

I forget whether I'd mentioned that one of my Dell U2711 displays is dying. I had held out on replacing it for a while since the flaw is only really obvious on relatively bright images. A month or two ago I got an Asus MG279Q to replace it, except that I had to get my sister who lives interstate to buy it from a bricks and mortar shop so I don't actually have it yet. Today I saw a nice deal on the recently superseded U2715H for $560AUD (~$405USD) delivered, so I ordered one (and was sorely tempted to order two), so once everything arrives I'll be running triple 27" displays. The Asus will have to be the centre screen because of the Freesync functionality, even if it probably has marginally inferior display quality. Trying to match up three completely different panels will be tricky, so we'll see how it goes. Just for the hell of it I also added a P2414H to the order, which has an identical panel to the U2414H, but being the "professional" series it has DVI instead of HDMI. I'll probably use it as backup, unless I have issues matching my surviving U2711, which is a wide-gamut display, to the standard sRGB gamut of my two replacements. Unfortunately one big issue created by multi-display setups is speaker placement. Even with my two current displays, my speakers end up being placed too far apart, almost to either side of me, which wrecks any sort of positional sense for games that require it. With three, I will probably have to build a couple of stands to raise the speakers above the monitors, which is risky in itself because they're pretty hefty at 5.3kg each, and I'll have to tilt them down towards me somewhat. Good ol' Blu-tack will help secure them to the stands somewhat, but it's still far from an ideal solution and is probably flirting with disaster. Clearly someone needs to come up with acoustically transparent OLED panels, fast.

I'm watching Galaxy slowly download Blood and Wine, does that count as playing it? (Going to have to be an overnight job, so it'll be almost 20 hours again before I can play it )

Democracy 3, because after all, there's an election campaign already in full swing here. It's okay in what it tries to do, but is fairly self-limiting by essentially boiling down politics to starting you at below 5% approval as a newly elected government (which makes no sense at all), then seeing if you can get to 50%+ approval over the course of your first term to be able to stay in power. It's trivial to win any subsequent elections (if you set the term limit to anything more than two), so the game essentially ends right there whether you win or lose, so it's a very short game indeed. Fire Emblem Fates, only up to chapter 4 which is still in the tutorial part of the game. Too early to make any sort of definitive calls, but on current evidence, it's a regression from the previous game. Character creation is somehow more confusing while having fewer options, and the art direction and story are as subtle as a brick through the window. Your "home" looks like frikkin' Mordor and you're just meant to accept this as normal everyday life...

And then there's Daikatana.

GTX 1070 reviews are out, and consensus seems to be that at stock vs stock, it is indeed a few percent faster than the Titan X/980Ti as promised. However it has far less overclocking headroom, so even with very mild overclocking, it quickly falls behind, and at maximum typical clocks for both, the old cards end up in the region of 10-20% faster. It's not surprising of course, that a cut-down small chip needs pushed to its limits to match a big chip. But with 980Ti prices now as low or lower than the 1070 FE, it's far from clear cut on which is the better buy. Of course, that will change once the custom 1070s come out (assuming they do around the $380 RRP) and also once the stock of the older cards runs dry, but I suppose whether you buy a custom 1070 or a discounted 980Ti, the shake-up is that we should have 980Ti performance for ~$400 shortly. There's still nearly a month before the NDA on Polaris lifts, and by that point we surely will have at least a little news on the GP106 (i.e. GTX 1060/1050), so it'll be that long at least before we get a clear picture on the overall state of the market.

Worse, the stock FE 1080 actually throttles at out of the box settings. After about 20 minutes under load, it hits the thermal limit and drops clocks dramatically. Forget the 2000MHz+ clocks they were demoing at the presentation, it struggles to maintain any sort of boost clock at all. This behaviour would likely escape notice under testing conditions because few reviewers would run their benchmarks for that length of time, and often they run the cards on an open bench rather than in a case. When those factors are accounted for, the 1080's advantage over the 980Ti quickly diminishes, and possibly even disappears completely. With this FE cooler, nV have done an AMD, but arguably even worse. The R9 290 reference cooler was a shocker, but it was cooling a 250W+ card. This 1080 FE cooler is struggling to cool a sub-200W card. $100 extra for a "premium" cooler that can't even handle factory settings? This thing is a shocker. FE? Fool's Edition. TL;DR: The 1080 may be a decent chip, but the FE is anything but a good card. After 20 minutes the fan is at full tilt just maintaining that 82C threshold at diminished clock speeds. And in the next graph we see why: It's about to fall off a cliff... And it actually does tip off the edge for quite a number of games.

New species of adorable tiny dancing spiders discovered.

The Street Fighter movie was excellent though, perhaps it's better not to bury your actors under prosthetics and an inch of makeup. But then, being compared unfavourably with Battlefield Earth.... For what it's worth, I've been on-again-off-again WoW player and play no other Blizzard games. I'm not the slightest bit interested in the movie, but then I generally dislike their attempts at "storytelling" in that game. (And knowing what I know about the other games, not a fan of their approach at all)

That said, the Source engine games are the only ones which have ever given me motion sickness. Even watching some YouTube video of Half-Life 2 is enough to force me to have a lie down, but fortunately I have no real desire to play that game. For Bloodlines, I sort of managed it by mostly playing with the third-person camera - I played a stealth-oriented melee character so it worked out. While there's no reason to believe the same would happen with any new VtM game, I'd like that option to be retained, if only as a reminder that calling Bloodlines a first-person game is technically inaccurate.

1946 That said, I quite liked the Disney adaptation, though 90% of that is probably due to Gaston, who carries the movie. Then there's Borowczyk's very loose (and pornographic) adaptation which made me very uncomfortable given the subject matter.... P.S. Also just learned that Klaus Kinski has also played The Beast. He wouldn't even need any makeup.

So this is you? http://forums.obsidian.net/user/131513-miffe/

I don't care about the perspective, but if they make it a party-based game I will be very upset.

Only about 20-odd hours into Stellaris and I'm shelving it for now. I'll revisit it come the final pre-DLC patch (1.2) but it's flat out not working for me. People talk about the Paradox sandbox model, but I call it the toybox model. CK2 is a box of Lego, but by comparison Stellaris is a box of Army Men, it's a lot more limited in what you can do with them. I know, I know, it's not fair to compare them at this point in their release cycle and that it'll be fixed once it's received some DLC, but the simple fact is that right now the game is in a state such that I can't enjoy it. I've maxed out peaceful expansion, pointlessly crushed a couple of neighbours, all my resources are capped with literally nothing to spend them on, and all my science and construction ships are idle. So instead I've fired up FTL for the first time and predictably died horribly. Easy ain't easy.

As long as they only remake half of it.

This one benchmark tells the story, but granted FO4 is an extreme case. Other games will show modest gains and others again none at all.

The theory is consoles - game engines are now written on the basis of having the limited (in-size) but very fast shared memory that the current-gen consoles have. The gains vary massively from game to game, but Fallout 4 to give an example benefits massively, well into double-digit framerate gains.

I'd probably be able to play FO4 properly once someone does a fully-functional mod which removes the whole pre-war survivor aspect and instead just makes you a random Joe out in the wasteland. I think that's why Skyrim worked for me - the player character was completely unattached and could be shaped in whatever way the player wanted. Whenever Bethesda stray from that formula, they fall flat on their faces.

Me too, but as Paradox has said - compared to their other titles, it's a bit 'bareboned' at the moment. Which means it's got flavor coming out the wazoo of course, but if you're used to Crusader Kings 2 etc it can fell quite a bit shallow after the midgame. The challenge will be finding at what point they reach "peak Stellaris", when enough features are added but before it becomes a dog's breakfast. For what it's worth I just picked it up myself, haven't had a chance to play yet though. ($28.85 at the moment from WinGameStore seems the cheapest from a 'legit' store)

So, enslave or purge?

Having a bootable Linux stick always on hand is useful for situations like this. Also just run the integrated graphics while testing to minimise points of failure. (EDIT: Or if you suspect something's up, then explicitly disable it because it likely defaults to "auto") Power draw isn't an issue, since all Intel CPUs have similar draw these days and your problems are not occurring under load so the system power consumption at point of failure would only be about 50W. Not to say it's impossible for it to be a PSU problem, but it can't be a wattage problem and since the other CPU works fine, it's unlikely to be a general PSU fault. Optimised defaults for memory might also be incorrect, or maybe the memory isn't stable at the XMP settings. Manually set the RAM to the DDR3 standard of 1333MHz, timings at 9-9-9, 1.5V.

Gamers' time and money are not infinite resources, so you need to consider that when discussing jobs in the videogame industry. The failure of one studio doesn't happen in isolation, it may well directly lead to the survival of another, or in the creation of space for a new entrant in the market. In relation to gaming budgets, Disney Infinity and its rivals would take up an even bigger chunk proportionally due to the high cost of entry with all the toys, microtransactions, and frequent refreshes. It's not hard to imagine then that its disappearance will lead to said money being distributed amongst quite a few different companies and thus keeping them afloat. Impossible to quantify exactly of course, but I wouldn't be terribly surprised if it led to a net positive in job numbers for the industry as a whole.

Now I want a Witcher - Stardew Valley mashup/crossover.

Realistically though, 60% more performance at 5-10% more power consumption would suggest more like 50% gain in efficiency. Obviously there's no hard data on performance, but I'm mostly taking nVidia's own very basic (and no doubt heavily "massaged") slide here: The other thing to bear in mind is that the 980Ti has a lot of room for overclocking, and I reckon a heavily overclocked one could probably match a stock 1080 given the estimated difference of 20%. Much of the 1080's value then will be in how much it overclocks in turn. EDIT: Another of their own slides here might be more instructive. Eyeballing that shows an approximate rating of 2.6 for the 980, 3.6 for the 980Ti and 4.4 for the 1080. Normalising the figures to 100%, we get 1.38 for the 980Ti and 1.69 for the 1080. Normalising the 1080 vs the 980Ti we get 1.22 which is pretty close to my earlier estimate. 980Ti is down to $550USD now, and the 1080 will roll out later for $600. It barely moves the price/performance stakes at all. The "Founder's Edition" (early access reference design) card for $700 is particularly laughable in this context, it's for suckers only. More speculatively, if we take the same 3.6 value to be the 1070's performance, that's 1.71 relative to the 970 at 2.1. A slightly bigger increase in relative performance to the card it's replacing, but at half the price increase (or two-thirds in relative terms). I reckon that's fair enough, it's around what I'd have guessed prior to the reveal.