Latest Comments by Valck
AMD announce RX 7900 XTX and RX 7900 XT, plus FSR3 teased
8 November 2022 at 12:25 pm UTC

Quoting: raptor85No, I'm thinking you dropped a 0 and you mean 1600, which is closer to average.
Quoting: denyasisUsage also depends on season and weather. In the fall/spring, I can keep the AC and heat off (like I have for the past 2 months). I'm sub 800w/h a day and that is worth a full family and 20 hour a day occupation/use. It doubles in the summer with HVAC and window AC use (older units).

But that also includes charging the car which since it is electric. Even though it's 10 years old, it's still cheaper than gas. The equivalent is 1$ for a gallon in terms of electrical cost.
So let's see... half a year at 800, plus half a year at double that ie. 1600, is (800+1600)/2=1200, divided by "a full family", I'm guessing four? gives 1200/4=300 Watt, averaged over a year. Including the car. Which goes to show that economy of scale works here as well, who would have thought.
No, I don't think I have to be living in a mediaeval hovel to get to the 300–350ish numbers I gave earlier, in fact I'm surprised how high they are in comparison. I don't have a car, nor do I need one, living in a functioning city with public transport and shops in walking distance (for how long they will continue to exist is another matter entirely though).

And yes of course, peak usage; still mindboggling that using such a beast easily doubles your total average consumption *for that time*. Plus the CPU is also bound to get a good workout, so doubling isn't even enough...

AMD announce RX 7900 XTX and RX 7900 XT, plus FSR3 teased
5 November 2022 at 3:23 am UTC Likes: 3

Quoting: raptor85
Quoting: ArehandoroAm I the only one to think that even AMD's new cards are better than Nvidia's on power consumption, 300/355 TDP is still crazy high?

With climate change creeping up on us, current international political affairs affecting prices and availability of energy, and the market saying yes to devices like the Switch and the Deck, perhaps it's about time to demand these companies to release things more align with what the world needs.

We need to use much less energy. Not the same, and definitely not more.
There's still 100 watt and less cards on the market widely available, nobody's putting a gun to your head forcing you to get a higher end card. An extra 200 watts is also not really a lot compared to most other things in a normal household, you can literally offset that usage by not watching TV while the computer is on.
Averaged over the past year and rounded up generously, my entire single person household averaged 160 Watts. And I am confident I could reduce that by another 25% without too much effort.
Peak usage is undeniably higher when the microwave/tea kettle/washing machine are on, but they aren't for most of the time. Top consumers are the PC and the fridge, with the PC sitting at a whopping 80 right now, and hitting 200 with heavy gaming which I admittedly don't do that much these days, most of the games get by on 150ish or so.
I don't play the likes of CP77 or twitchy shooter type games, I had my fill of that crap when I was younger, but some of the sims I like do look pretty and have their respective cost in wall power.

So in summary, even "just" two hundred watts just for a GPU is insane, as are a thousand credits to pay for it, and nobody needs to commend AMD or Nvidia for not going higher still.
Consumers and marketing people alike need to get off that trainSUV, and fast. In fact, DO take the train the next time.

ED: To be fair, that number doesn't include heating, which is still fossil gas and would probably amount to about the same 150ish.figure again, and to bring that down in any meaningful way would require a massive investment in insulation on the landlord's side. Which I'm fairly certain will be coming, if and when legislation eventually requires it. So we're talking 350ish Watts instead, but still. That's one entire household's worth, just for the GPU.

Steam Next Fest - October 2022 Edition is live now
4 October 2022 at 12:26 pm UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: PhiladelphusServants that look like fusions of man and machine that you'd find in Bosch. It's really something.
I take it you're not talking about Bosch the appliance maker ;)
Nice, will at least have to have a look.

Steam drops the Lunar New Year Sale, we're getting a big Spring sale instead
29 September 2022 at 8:43 am UTC Likes: 1

All I can see is another missed opportunity for more inclusive terminology.

Intel Arc A770 GPU releases October 12th
29 September 2022 at 8:25 am UTC

Quoting: pageroundXeSS is a sweet name, good job whoever came up with that. (I'm choosing to pronounce it as 'excess').
In line with how the "Ex-eon" processors are pronounced? There seems to be some serious disconnect in the marketing department.
And not only there, if I look at the lineup. I can't imagine Intel breaking into a market held by a duopoly by delivering worse performance per money OR watt than the competition, with the performance (and price…) side held by green, and the efficiency side firmly in red hands.
I admit I don't have a degree in economics or marketing. Sometimes I wonder what they teach in business classes though.

Rebel Galaxy Outlaw and some reflection on Steam Reviews
19 September 2022 at 6:04 am UTC Likes: 3

Quoting: ShugyoushaI also think the game is gorgeous (those cockpits! :swoon:) but my graphics standards may be somewhat low since I grew up with the old Privateer games and thought they looked great at the time as well ...
Say what you want, but they did look great at the time. As did both early Wing Commander titles, and not to forget Strike Commander, before Mr Roberts decided to go "multimedia". And even WC three and four still had brilliant graphics for the time, before the competition finally started to catch up -- if one could make it past the cut scenes :)
Enough with the nostalgia already. Isn't the future a great time to be living in...

EA AntiCheat could spell trouble for Steam Deck / Linux
15 September 2022 at 3:55 am UTC Likes: 2

Quoting: Purple Library GuyLot of people saying doesn't matter cause they don't play EA games and already hated EA anyway. I don't think I own any EA games either and not planning to get any. But in context, that is unfortunately somewhat beside the point. The point is, in putting some popular games off limits, could this blunt the growing wave of Steam Deck adoption?

I think probably not, on its own, as long as this doesn't either become a product they successfully sell for use in other games as well, and as long as it's not a harbinger of similar moves by other big game companies. But it's not a happy thing.
I see, so "don't care" could be read in that tone as well, yes.

While I doubt the current state of anti-cheat will significantly slow down Steam Deck adoption, I can definitely see the growing significance of the new market segment as a means for creating enough pressure [ha. ha. Steam. Pressure.] from that other "don't care" crowd to open up the kernel for anti cheat monitoring malware, which they will vehemently demand as rightfully theirs, cheer when it eventually happens, and likely not stop there.
I on the other hand will stop here, it's already depressing enough ;9

W4 Games raised $8.5 million USD to support Godot Engine
15 September 2022 at 3:38 am UTC

Quoting: Purple Library Guy
Quoting: Valck
Quoting: KimyrielleLet's see where this goes, but I am not too worried. If the worst case happens and that company gets taken over by big-evil-business, I am very confident that Godot will get forked by a new dev team and live happily ever after. It happened after OpenOffice got taken over by big-evil-business, too. The good thing about open source is that it's fairly immune against hostile takeovers.

In the best case, this could be a positive game-changer for Godot. While not everything the team will be working on will get upstreamed to Godot, I am sure that a lot of it will.
I just can't help but wonder how long until the "oops, well of course we promised to give back whenever possible, it just turns out whenever is never" announcement.
The thing is that when your business is wrapped around an open source project, to which there are significant other contributors, "not giving back" actually creates significant costs. Aside from reputational costs, which are going to be serious (look how many people are dumping on them and they haven't even done anything bad yet!) a big cost is just the fact that by effectively creating a separate private fork, you massively increase your maintenance burden. Beyond just maintaining a project, you have to deal with the problem that contributors to the main, open version will not take your private additions into consideration when they add code, so it's gonna break your shit all the time. Or the new open stuff you want to take advantage of will be broken if you try to fit it into your altered codebase, so you gotta tweak it before it will work, but then the open version won't have those tweaks, so when that stuff's updated if you try to import it it will break again . . . way bigger pain than just keeping the thing mostly open.
That is correct, under the assumption you want to keep the business working...

W4 Games raised $8.5 million USD to support Godot Engine
15 September 2022 at 3:35 am UTC

Quoting: elmapul
Quoting: Valck[1] with all the vanilla out there, does anyone actually still crave for more? How about bananas?
[2] relatively, for an open source project. Peanuts for "the gaming industry".

1)the more we need now is more income for developers using godot, consoles might help with this.

2)do you think its more likely for godot to "kill it self" than for the competition to kill it?
More money is certainly welcome.
And therein lies the issue -- accepting investors' money opens up for investors' influence. That is exactly how the competition can get their say in an open source project. Usually not immediately, openly and directly, but yes, that is the big concern I have, that the competition will use their influence over key people as a lever to fracture Godot back into insignificance.

- branch them out into a new company, because reasons. Oh yeah, trade secrets.
- pamper them with money
- slowly introduce new features that can't be backported because of trade secrets
- wait for the community to tear itself apart over this
- ...
- profit

EA AntiCheat could spell trouble for Steam Deck / Linux
14 September 2022 at 4:52 am UTC Likes: 1

Quoting: Purple Library Guy
Quoting: Pengling
Quoting: KimyrielleParticularly not when said band-aid solutions behave just like malware....
Perhaps it's just me, but in my books they meet the exact definition of it. It's like nobody learned from the music industry's Windows rootkit nonsense 20-odd years ago, or something.
They learned that Sony's still rich.
Some "they" did, and strive to continue its legacy, apparently with great success.
The other "they" still do what they did twenty years ago...
Quoting: WorMzy![link](https ://c.tenor.com/1jJz8nnoUv0AAAAC/attempting-to-give-a-fuck-give-a-fuck.gif)
EDIT:Link intentionally broken