majestic

Blizzard's solution to keep people engaged longer in the season journey is to make it grindier. Le sigh. Had a good laugh at the season journey including becoming Hatred's Chosen. A long time ago, a prominent member of the German World of Warcaft community said that Blizzard's motto is "Konsequenz heißt auch Holzwege zu Ende zu gehen" (to be resolute means following even the wrong track to its end) which never felt more appropriate than here. There is just no way to become Hatred's Chosen in the state the game is at. With most of you not playing the game, well, Hatred's Chosen is something you can become when killing enough players back to back, for which players obviously need to be in the game's designated PVP zones (imagine a desolate area with tumbleweeds being blown about here). At best you can kill one or two players more by accident than anything else, like it happened to me when I grinded out the Seeds of Hatred requirements for the season and a barbarian thought it would be a good idea to leap on top of me while I had Unstable Currents on, fighting the PVP zone boss. Lighting sorceror wrecks everything at the moment. Better enjoy picking the right class for once before the nerf hammer falls.

The few remaining physics bugs are great and should just stay in the game because they're hilarious. Like that one time I called my car and the game just spawned it in the air. It came crashing down hard, was totalled, killed some innocent bystanders and lead to a shootout with the police. Every now and then a random car chase ends up with cars flying about in good old Blues Brothers tradition too.

Might be region locked to regions where ARTE can be received, but here goes nothing:

Intel's statement for why the software only works with 14th gen CPUs is basically not enough testing for others, so yeah, Intel for sure does not consider this completely ready for launch yet. It also does not work with the 14600K, so there's that. Clearly though, the correct marketing move would be to limit it to 14th "generation" CPUs. Here's a video from HighYield about the tech behind Meteor Lake and what Intel is doing going forward, and the video is a little older, so there may be some inaccuracies (speculation/info on used process nodes might be outdated): Intel's L4 cache for Meteor Lake is actually in the silicon interposer, rather than stacked on top of the compute tiles, where it is accessible by all components of the CPU. It would be technically possible to assign it to the integrated GPU instead of the CPU when needed. It is probably not as fast as giving the CPU tile direct, shorter access to its own dedicated larger cache, but with the design it's also possible to drop a completely separate cache tile on the interposer if necessary. Either way, both tiles and the 3DV-cache are elegant solutions to the problem with SRAM structure sizes. SRAM stopped to scale with TSMC's newest process nodes. Caches aren't getting any smaller going forward, so they need to go somewhere else. That said, the Meteor Lake CPUs aren't going to be any faster than their Raptor Lake counterparts as they're basically "just" Raptor Lake CPUs on a new process node with the new tile design. Just hopefully a lot more efficient. Well, the eight ARC compute units will probably kick Raptor Lake's iGPU to the curb, but if that makes gaming on an iGPU viable stands to be doubted. Although it's not impossible with XeSS turned on where supported.

As for the question of what the hell are modern Intel CPUs doing with all that power they draw, the answer is a big load of nothing, at least in gaming. A German channel whose videos I watch every now and then has tested the 14700K with four power limits, in Cyberpunk 2077, Assassin's Creed: Mirage, Rainbow Six Siege and Far Cry 6. The result, in 1080p, shamelessly copied from the video: Limiting the power draw of the i7-14700K to 80W still only drops average frame rates by 4.6%, while limiting it to 120W gives basically the same results as having no power limit (although it makes no sense to limit it to 120W as that is the average power draw in gaming anyway). This difference is less for 1440p and goes away completely in 4k, which makes sense, as the GPU is much busier. It does cut heavily into all-core workloads during any sort of productivity tasks, obviously. Stands to reason that the same is true for the 13950K, oops, the 14900K. Which tracks with what Der8auer tested with the 13900K, where limiting the CPU to an 80W load pretty much yielded the same result. No really noticable drop in gaming performance, but a massive gain in efficiency. Edit: Well, I suppose that is the reason why Intel gives these CPU a long term powerlimit (PL1) of 125W, with boost up to 253W.

He just didn't realize that the "K" is a multiplicator too. Just times 1000. Intel won that a long time ago.

Yeah, like I mentioned earlier, there's something to be said for being able to buy CPUs that won the silicon lottery, at least if you're into extreme overclocking. Predictably, the 14900K almost instantly took the crown: https://hwbot.org/benchmark/cpu_frequency/rankings#start=0#interval=20 For everyone else though... yeah, nope.

Just heard the news that Christian Pilnacek died. Not that any of you need to have heard of him, he was a high ranking public official and legal practitioner attached to the Ausrian Ministry of Justice. A couple of years back he was suspended in the wake of leaked messages between high ranking ÖVP party officials that made it abundantly clear that he abused his position to stop unwanted investigations, help the "right" being promoted while keeping the "wrong" people out of positions of power (right and wrong determined by party affiliation, of course), and help to prepare party officials under investigation on how to conduct themselves during interrogation and raids they should not have been aware of before they happened. One of those people, our former Minister of Finance, just happened to send his wife on a walk with their newborn baby when a raid happened. Curiously enough, his wife took his notebook computer for a stroll, because clearly, who does not take their mobile computer with them while strolling through the city with a newborn? Sure, the notebook was brought back eventually, by someone else. Seems legit, really. Certainly nothing untoward happened there. Needless to say, the raid did not turn up anyhting useful. He is on record stating that an investigation into potential (read "potential" as "confirmed" in any but the legal sense) kickbacks surrounding our 2002 acquisition of 24 (reduced to 18) Typhoon fighters must be "daschlogn" (colloqual Austrian for death trough blunt force, often also used when killing insects with swatters), because said investigation would have implicated his party friends. Or, as our former chancellor liked to call his party friends: the family. Prior to his suspension the section of the ministery he worked at was split into two sections, reducing his influence, making him solely responsible for legislation. A little while later he sent a text to the govenor of Styria (who, as you have probably guessed by now, is also an ÖVP party member), suggesting that his wife's applicaiton as President of the Higher Regional Court of Graz would be a decent way to make good on the "humiliation" his family suffered. Looks like he was caught driving drunk on the wrong side of the motorway yesterday evening. Police stopped him, he lost his driving license, was picked up by someone else and then by all accounts committed suicide. De mortuis nil nisi bene, I suppose, but that's a bit hard in this case. Good riddance. Burn in hell, bastard.

Nah, wait for the 14600K review, that one will show zero difference from the prior generation. Originally thought I'd be upgrading to a better mainboard with this release, but that is going to be a , the 14700K isn't worth spending any money on, and that goes doubly so for the others. I'll just wait for Arrow Lake and see how that will turn out. There's a marginal chance that the lower tier CPUs will be interesting. Leaked benchmarks show more of an improvement between the 13400 and 14400. I don't know if the 14100 is going to be just another Alder Lake with slightly higher clocks (IIRC, the 13100F just had four Alder Lake cores, making it wholly uninteresting for budget use compared to the 12100F), or if it will have actual Raptor Lake cores, which would come with a decent boost in cache size. Still don't quite get what Intel is doing there. Granted, for 13th gen, it was about catching up to Zen 4 and surpassing the 5800X3D in gaming, which made some sense at the time, and an all core workload on a 13900K does not draw that much more power than that of a 7950X (30 watts, according to Steve's charts - which is 10%, yes, but it's nowhere near the ludicrous difference between the gaming power draw of a 7800X3D and a 13900K). Dropping 100mV makes all core workloads on a 13900K cap out at roughly 250w. Still nuts, but on par with the 7950X. Should have just collected the parts that undervolt the best, slap an E at the end of the CPU, undervolt them by default and call it the Raptor Lake Efficiency refresh. Jayz2Cents recently showed off an undervolted 13900KS that reached 42k points on Cinebench R23 without ever surpassing 80° core temperatures (hat was his Thermal Grizzly KryoSheet test). 'Course, that would have made the more expensive mainboards fairly pointless. Which... oh, right, which answers that. Well, let it never be said that Intel's marketing is any better than AMD's.

Yeah, for most of them not just for any intents and purposes, but like, well, literally. They're basically 13th gen CPUs that won the silicon lottery and can reliably be boosted a little higher than before. On the bright side, that might make them interesting for overclocking competitions. For everyone else, that's a hard pass, especially since the 13th gen CPUs are cheaper. Pretty sad showing. Steve had it right, this really looks like an investor/shareholder appeasement release. "New" gen resets MSRPs too, making the suits happy, at least until they see that sales figures for this "generation" are in the dumps. By then Arrow Lake is hopefully out.

An hour ago I turned on D4's patching to get into the new season, as Blizzard made many quality of life changes and I wanted to check it out. However, well, it seems that Blizzard transported me back in time almost thirty years. Good grief.

The tagline reads The Shining of a New Generation. The comparison made in this way is meant to imply a work of equal significance or craftsmanship within a simlar genre or setting. Whoever wrote that seems to have been impressed enough with the film to assume it will reach a similar significance. That does seem to be exaggerated, although I must admit to not having seen the film (yet). Presumably it comes from a review or critique, but I cannot seem to find it. Googling the phrase just turns up links to the DVD version (the BR version has a different tagline). If you want to further explore films, Veronika Franz and Ulrich Seidl have collaborated before, but - and that is a major caveat - many of Ulrich Seidls films are highly disturbing at the best of times. They sometimes include unsimulated intercourse and scenes of violence. Hundstage ("Dog Days") is a good example. If you ever want to watch a film that finally convinces you that humanity has no right to exist on this beautiful planet, then go right ahead. The film follows a couple of people living on the outskirts of a large city, going about their daily lives.

Less Alien: Isolation and more SOMA, what with everything going on. But yeah, a tad too long for its own good. Still, pretty enjoyable quest, all in all.

Doubt anyone here plays Counter Strike 2 (I certainly don't), but if you do, do not turn on Anti-Lag+, it will be detected as cheating attempt by Valve and you will potentially be banned from the game. Actually, migth do well to not turn it on in any competitive online title until the issue is resolved.

Want me to post the picture I posted the last time the topic came up? Anyway, at least the repeat was not within the same iteration of this thread, it was the last one. You know, unlike that Stephen King discussion between Hurlshot and Xzar_Monty which repeated almost verbatim only like four pages apart. Well, we don't make gołąbki, but sarma, which differs insfoar it is made with sauerkraut leaves. Obviously we use our grandmother's recipe with mixed minced meat (beef and pork, as inaccurate as that is, the regional, organic mixed in our local market works really well), and she never braised them in the oven, just in a regular pot, and no shenanigans with smoked meat. Pretty sure @Sarex's family has some variation too. Well, like you said, most people in Eastern Europe do, although nowadays that's more called Central and South Eastern Europe. Silly former Warsaw Pact nations thinking they're not part of Eastern Europe. They're lucky we don't still just call them the Russians.

That's not really a problem, I even make sure to execute peeps that accidentially survived after I massacre my way through any given location. No loose ends. The few instances where you need people alive, like the Buddhist side job or the cyberpsychos, well, that's what overheat or incendiary grenades are made for - or non-lethal takedowns.

The skills all increase with abilities and weapons of their associated stats, the perks are pretty good at telling you what you need to use to gain experience. Shinobi you get for using assault rifles, SMGs and blades, Solo for blunt weapons, LMGs and shotguns, Engineer for doing things with technical ability and grenades, Netrunner for hacking and the access point minigame and Headhunter for killing with sniper rifles, pistols, revolvers and throwing knives. Then there's some overlap. Tech weapons give you experience for their respective skill as well as Engineer, while smart weapons give experience for their associated stat as well as Netrunner. No need to worry about skills too much, they come while playing the game anyway. Getting them all to the extra perk point threshold is fairly pointless in my experience. Plenty of perk points and no real synergy between the trees outside of picking supporting perks. Trick out Technical Ability and your weapon category of choice and you're good. That all said, throwing knives are ridiculously powerful, and they're really fun. Just use them.

Just pretend I killed your buzz with a real post, it's quicker that way.

A scene from Vivid Strike!, a genre fusion between martial arts tournament and magical girl anime. It was a little less offensive than its predecessor series, but... that would also have been kinda hard to pull off. It is not very interesting and the premise is highly silly. Oh, wait, you meant the other video, right?

Well, would rate 5/10. Vivid Strike! clearly still has the best bullying revenge scene. Crunch.

There was one thing in Reloaded that made watching Revolutions wholly unnecessary. The architect dropped a big ass spoiler. Only logical conclusion of Smith being the Matrix trying to correct an error by introducing balance to an equation. One cannot defeat the other, therefore, if Neo dies, so does Smith. Walked out of the theater talking to my friends how the next film is going to end with Neo's death. The two and a half hours before that, yeah, nothing of interest happened. Almost fell asleep when Morpheus fell off the van while backflipping for the fourth time, and it is really hard for me to fall alseep in bright light while hearing loud noise. To make matters worse whenever the two films are not having ludicrously drawn out action sequences, they're dipping their toes way too deep into pseudo-philosophical musings. Hey Neo, you're in Limbo. *wink* *wink* Get it? Limbo. Spelled out on the station name. Not sure what the bigger disappointment turned out to be, Matrix Reloaded or The Phantom Menace. Leaning towards the former, but that might be hindsight (not to mention viewing the prequels in an entirely different light after the sequel travesty, err, trilogy).

Yeah, certainly was better than any of the sequels...

Yeah, got one where I had to drive from Pacifica to the ass-end of Watson in under three minutes, in a pickup truck. That would have been close as the bird flies, never mind driving through the city. Anyway, I started Escape from New York Night City. So far so good.

You could prepare for The End of the World by watching Utena. Before we crack the world's shell.

That is a pretty good example of what happens when you enjoy a film vs. when you do not. The mess - if there is any - does not matter as much. The opposite, for me, can be seen in the Half in the Bag about Skyfall, I film I had such a bad time watching that I decided to not bother with going to the cinema for Bond movies until there is a different Bond than Craig, although in hindsight I should probably have done that after Quantum of Solace. Mike and Jay, on the other hand, like it. Jay even says that the problems of the film can be ignored because it is overall pretty good. Needles to say, it is one of those instances where I disagree with them. @PK htiw klaw eriF and @InsaneCommander, would you care to seal the deal?