tal

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GPU prices are coming to earth

Nvidia reportedly no longer supplying VRAM to its GPU board partners in response to memory crunch — rumor claims vendors will only get the die, forced to source memory on their own

If that's true, I doubt that they're going to be coming to earth for long.

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tal @lemmy.today 2d ago

Prices rarely, if ever, go down in a meaningful degree.

Prices on memory have virtually always gone down, and at a rapid pace.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/historical-cost-of-computer-memory-and-storage

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tal @lemmy.today 2d ago

Do you feel sad about the fact that you'll probably die within 100 years (or less)

A quote from Richard Dawkins:

We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?

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tal @lemmy.today 2d ago

If consumers aren't going to or are much less likely to upgrade, then that affects demand from them, and one would expect manufacturers to follow what consumers demand.

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tal @lemmy.today 2d ago

I remember when it wasn't uncommon to buy a prebuilt system and then immediately upgrade its memory with third party DIMMs to avoid paying the PC manufacturer's premium on memory. Seeing that price relationship becoming inverted is a little bonkers. Though IIRC Framework's memory-on-prebuilt-systems didn't have much of a premium.

I also wonder if it will push the market further towards systems with soldered memory or on-core memory.

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tal @lemmy.today 2d ago

You can have applications where wall clock tine time is not all that critical but large model size is valuable, or where a model is very sparse, so does little computation relative to the size of the model, but for the major applications, like today's generative AI chatbots, I think that that's correct.

tal @lemmy.today 2d ago

Last I looked, a few days ago on Google Shopping, you could still find some retailers that had stock of DDR5 (I was looking at 2x16GB, and you may want more than that) and hadn't jacked their prices up, but if you're going to buy, I would not wait longer, because if they haven't been cleaned out by now, I expect that they will be soon.

tal @lemmy.today 4d ago

Not if the pool is all of the colors. I haven't even had all of them before.

https://gatorade.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_Gatorade_Thirst_Quencher_Flavors

There are some that I could distinguish from the others.

tal @lemmy.today 4d ago

Have you played the existing Legend of Zelda titles? I mean, there are a ton of them. Even if you stop at Tears of the Kingdom and Breath of the Wild:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Legend_of_Zelda

|Year|Zelda Game| |-:|-| |1987|The Adventure of Link| |1991|A Link to the Past| |1993|Link's Awakening| |1998|Ocarina of Time| |1998|Link's Awakening DX| |2000|Majora's Mask| |2001|Oracle of Seasons| |2001|Oracle of Ages| |2002|Four Swords| |2002|The Wind Waker| |2004|Four Swords Adventures| |2004|The Minish Cap| |2006|Twilight Princess| |2007|Phantom Hourglass| |2009|Spirit Tracks| |2011|Ocarina of Time 3D| |2011|Four Swords Anniversary Edition| |2011|Skyward Sword| |2013|The Wind Waker HD| |2013|A Link Between Worlds| |2015|Majora's Mask 3D| |2015|Tri Force Heroes| |2016|Twilight Princess HD|

tal @lemmy.today 1w ago

Oh, gotcha, good point.

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tal @lemmy.today 1w ago

I think that it's the other way around --- he's fine with using a controller, is unhappy with the mouse.

Though if someone does want to play first-person shooters on a gamepad, I understand --- I've never done it myself, that the preferred route by people really serious about the gamepad is the gyro-using flick stick. I understand that Steam Input plus appropriate configuration can provide support for it to games that don't natively support it, and the WP article says that there's some kind of direct support that went into Steam Input a few years back that I hadn't been aware of.

tal @lemmy.today 1w ago

If you're playing PC games on a TV from a couch --- I'm just guessing here, but if you're (a) using a gaming controller and (b) having difficulty seeing the aiming cursor, I'm wondering if that might be the case --- one other issue you might run into with PC games is FOV.

It's pretty normal for FPSes (I haven't looked at third-person shooters, though I assume that the same is true) to have something of a fisheye lens effect, because the monitor actually represents only a small portion of your visual arc, yet you want to let the player see something comparable to what the character would. Even more true for a TV (bigger, but also usually so much further away that it is a smaller portion of the visual arc) than a monitor.

https://expertbeacon.com/do-humans-have-120-fov/

Research shows the average person sees about 135 degrees horizontally per eye. Stitch our binocular vision together, and we get approximately 114 degrees of FOV.

https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Glossary:Field_of_view_(FOV)

PC games should be designed with a high FOV of around 85-110 because players normally sit closer to their display.
Console games should be designed with a lower FOV of around 55-75 because their players usually sit further from a display; normally the distance between a couch and a TV.

Usually there's still going to be some fisheye lens effect (the FOV setting is higher than the actual portion of our visual arc that the display takes up), but it's not so dramatic as to make people nauseous or look weirdly distorted.

You can typically fiddle with the FOV setting in PC games, but games are also gonna be balanced for one FOV, so if you crank your FOV in a PC game down, it may make the thing more-difficult than the game designers intended.

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tal @lemmy.today 1w ago

I'm pretty sure that Wolfenstein 3D had mouse support, unless it was added later, and I'm sure that (original) Doom did.

checks

https://soulsphere.org/apocrypha/keyboard/

Debunking the Myth that Doom was Keyboard-only

It also mentions Wolfenstein 3D:

I don't know if I used the mouse with Wolfenstein 3D when it first came out. But I recall playing the Mac port later with a mouse, and that it didn't feel great there.

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tal @lemmy.today 1w ago

I don’t feel comfortable using a mouse

You might also consider, if you've never tried one, using a trackball. Might be a benefit outside of just games, too, if you're using a PC. There are some people who really strongly prefer them and dislike mice for various reasons (including some people who find mice to be more-problematic for some sort of repetitive stress injury they have).

I prefer a mouse as pointing device, but one can't really use one if lying on a couch or in bed or something, and I keep a trackball around that I sometimes use in those cases.

Trackballs aren't as common these days as a mouse alternative, given that laptops with trackpads have become more-prevalent, but I'm more accurate with one than with a trackpad, and if I couldn't use a mouse, I'd probably spend a lot more trackball time.

We do have a trackball community here: [email protected]

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tal @lemmy.today 1w ago

There was an era, very early on, when PC first-person shooters were generally played with the keyboard. Wolfenstein 3D. I remember people who specifically wanted to play Doom with the keyboard rather than the mouse.

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tal @lemmy.today 1w ago

https://store.steampowered.com/search?sort_by=Reviews_DESC&tags=3814&controllersupport=28%2C60&supportedlang=english&ndl=1

Steam list of third-person shooters sorted by user rating for which controllers are preferred or full controller support is present.