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Latest Comments by F.Ultra
AMD announce RX 7900 XTX and RX 7900 XT, plus FSR3 teased
4 Nov 2022 at 12:16 am UTC

Quoting: jordicomaAnd I don't understand the AI accelerator part.
It's for people doing machine learning, they use GPU:s to handle the vast amounts of data so AMD, nVidia (and now Intel) are implementing new functions on their cards to improve the performance in that area. Nothing that helps the rest of us who only use these for displaying graphics and playing games.

Quoting: CyborgZetaWait, Tesla? Tesla cars have AMD GPUs in them?
The revamped S and X models have RDNA2 GPU:s in them yes: link [External Link]

Steam Deck pushed Linux to the highest share on Steam in years
2 Nov 2022 at 4:37 pm UTC

Quoting: TermyI was a bit surprised when i got the hardware survey prompt on my deck. Somehow would have thought they don't need the survey they... ^^
Technically they don't need it anywhere but they decided to make it voluntary.

AMD to fully reveal next-gen AMD Radeon RDNA 3 in November
21 Oct 2022 at 5:14 pm UTC

Quoting: PublicNuisance
Quoting: F.Ultra
Quoting: PublicNuisanceI am hoping for open source firmware to match the drivers; no AMD PSP and no Pluton. With the way hardware is going these days I will probably be unlucky enough to get none of my wishes.
Neither of PSP or Pluton exists on GPU:s, they are both CPU technologies. Both are also highly exaggerated by the conspiracy crowd. E.g if Microsoft wants to spy on their users they don't need to implement a whole new chip (Pluton) to do that when all of their users happily runs millions of lines of code all of which Microsoft controls to 100%.
Pluton didn't exist on their CPUs either until they put it on there, no reason to suspect they won't continue to infest other product lines with it. As for PSP it is on GPUs starting with Vega and newer from what I have gathered.

https://libreboot.org/faq.html#amd-platform-security-processor-psp [External Link]

"The Platform Security Processor (PSP) is built in on the AMD CPUs whose architecture is Late Family 16h (Puma), Zen 17h or later (and also on the AMD GPUs which are GCN 5th gen (Vega) or later)."

As for whether they are exxaggerated or not that is subjective and not relevant to my wishes above. I don't want more closed source black boxes on my hardware. I can't think of any good reason for anybody to want them. People don't want them, they tolerate them, there's a difference.
That link is wrong and I have no idea where they got that info from, PSP is a CPU feature. Perhaps they are confusing it with the CPU:S that contain a low performance GPU aka the APU:s.

There is no role on the GPU that a Pluton or PSP chip can fill, by design they have both to be on the CPU (they need to be in the pre-boot environment).

Agreed that open firmwares for both would be much better, not only for "big brother" reasons but also because we all know just how badly these things are coded so they most likely contain tons of security holes.

They are not there to spy on people though, that is the conspiracy that have made so many people constantly asking if they are included or not so that is why I falsely assumed you asking the same, sorry about that.

edit: misread what you wrote about pluton so changed that part.

AMD to fully reveal next-gen AMD Radeon RDNA 3 in November
21 Oct 2022 at 1:53 am UTC

Quoting: PublicNuisanceI am hoping for open source firmware to match the drivers; no AMD PSP and no Pluton. With the way hardware is going these days I will probably be unlucky enough to get none of my wishes.
Neither of PSP or Pluton exists on GPU:s, they are both CPU technologies. Both are also highly exaggerated by the conspiracy crowd. E.g if Microsoft wants to spy on their users they don't need to implement a whole new chip (Pluton) to do that when all of their users happily runs millions of lines of code all of which Microsoft controls to 100%.

Mystery adventure Kona II: Brume gets a Linux demo ready for Steam Deck
13 Oct 2022 at 8:33 pm UTC

Quoting: morbius
Quoting: F.Ultra
Quoting: morbiusI played the first game and it was so-so. Somewhat interesting premise, but an adventure at its heart. You had to go around looking for things and if you missed something, you couldn't progress until you find it.
Isn't that a "problem" with all games?!
No. Good games guide you towards what they want you to discover. In Kona, there is a magnet that you don't know that you need, hidden behind a house that you have no reason to go around back. That's just bad game design. That's how adventures from the early days of gaming used to work, no wonder that genre all but disappeared.
Ah I see now, well the drawback IMHO with more modern games is that they do too much hand holding, but yes that magnet thing is very silly indeed.

Mystery adventure Kona II: Brume gets a Linux demo ready for Steam Deck
13 Oct 2022 at 6:48 pm UTC

Quoting: morbiusI played the first game and it was so-so. Somewhat interesting premise, but an adventure at its heart. You had to go around looking for things and if you missed something, you couldn't progress until you find it.
Isn't that a "problem" with all games?!

Mystery adventure Kona II: Brume gets a Linux demo ready for Steam Deck
11 Oct 2022 at 7:09 pm UTC

Quoting: Purple Library GuyTrusty dogsled? Dude. There were skidoos in 1970.
They had a skidoo in the first game.

Google gives up on Stadia, will offer refunds on games and hardware
30 Sep 2022 at 7:12 pm UTC Likes: 2

Quoting: Purple Library GuyReally, it's amazing Google make so much money, because they are obviously pretty terrible at business. Decent at technology, but terrible at business. I guess they just were the people with the right piece of internet tech in the right place at the right time, and it doesn't matter how many other mistakes they make as long as they keep that stranglehold on search + ads.

It's kind of comforting actually, because they clearly jettisoned "don't be evil" a long time ago and want to be bastards like Facebook or early Microsoft, so if they're going to be like that I'm glad they're pretty crap at it.
Or they are actually good at business, just specifically at the search+ads business, then you add in that they make so much money on that one business that people around them constantly tell them how good they are so you start to think that you can take on any other business, and when that fails it's not because you failed (obviously since every one tells you how good you are at your business) but due to some other external factor.

I see this all the time where successful people tries to go into a completely new venture with the "how hard can it be" attitude only to find out that the answer was "more than you thought". This is probably also why most companies survives one major change in their market, but you seldom see any one survive two major changes in the market.

One locally classic example is Facit (Swedish company that could have matched IBM if things hadn't gone to shit) who had a large business in the 1930:ies with office machines such as calculators and type writers (just like IBM), in the 60:ies they even started to build main frames (11 in total if I'm not mistaken) so they both saw the future being the computer, had the money and the experts in house, yet they where basically killed over night in 1971 when the Japanese started to make electronic calculators and Facit was still selling their mechanical ones. And since they had expertise knowledgeable enough to build mainframes they obviously could have built electronic calculators, but they never did.

This is why this business theory is called the Facit trap (Facitfällan) here in Sweden. Not 100% compatible with Google since they are not experiencing a technology shift, but I think that it's the same mechanisms that explains why they keep on failing in their new businesses.

The obvious solution would have been to invest in some smaller existing game streaming service and just support them with money and resources but keep it as a separately managed entity, but they never do.

Google gives up on Stadia, will offer refunds on games and hardware
29 Sep 2022 at 7:46 pm UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: BlackBloodRum
Quoting: Klaas
Quoting: kuhpunktheld seminars
If I recall correctly, they claimed that they were cleverer than the wine developers because they needed so much time.

Anyhow, I'm glad that this scheme is dead.
Sadly, a lot of the large proprietary businesses think like this. It's not overly uncommon for a large business to claim "our product is much better than any free version you can get, it works better yadda yadda".

When they do release the product it can be either:
- Very limited in features
- Buggy / has lots of problems
- Just generally not very good
- Sometimes, rarely, actually a good product :tongue:

:grin:

(I'm biased...)
The age old "how hard can it be". Well quite often: much.

Canadian customers seeing a temporary delay for the Steam Deck
27 Sep 2022 at 6:00 pm UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: Grogan
Quoting: F.UltraJIT is in the producer line and not in the shop so to speak, unless you have some specific local brands of course (or if we speak about a farmers market).
Production is different here too. Here, if a farmer produces something they take it to a marketing board receiving center. Produce as much as you can, and there's a guaranteed sale of it. Livestock, foul, eggs, milk etc. There are also farmer's market type places as anywhere, but the supply chain side may be different too. We've got big grocery chain conglomerates that source things from wherever they can and they go to distribution centers to be distributed to stores. There are mom and pop places, but big grocery stores are all affiliated with some supply chain conglomerate even if they aren't under their name. Then there are Walmart stores in most localities and most are superstores with grocery.

We didn't really have much in the way of shortages. There are umpteen different brands of arsewipe for that example, so if one brand is scarce there are others. Shortages of manufactured commodities may have been more of a problem in the cities though.
So a farmers market, happy to hear that there are some hold outs still there in the world!