Nice guide. Small nitpick: The definition of the gold rating is "runs perfectly after tweaks", so there is a good chance these require manual intervention as well. My last gold rated report was Dark Souls Remastered which at first doesn't launch at all, but after installing vcrun2017 with winetricks works perfectly. Could be off-putting to newbies even though it's a simple tweak. Buying a gold rated game thinking it should work fine and then for it to immediately CTD at launch can be quite scary for newbies I would imagine. The ability to refund takes away some of the anxiety though.

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Quoting: eldaking

Quoting: BrisseA problem with the recommendations presented by the ML feature "Interactive Recommender" is that some of my best gaming experiences have been from short and focused interactive experiences which didn't take as much time to go through as some of my top games by hours played. Seems these games are not treated fairly by this algorithm. The recommendations makes sense in comparison to my most played games, but most hours played does not always mean most compelling game, and some of those most played games I'm actually done with and I'm burned out on those genres.

I think a partial solution could be to look at the average playtime for the entire user-base for a game, and then see how my time compares to that of the average user. If I spent more time than average, then I probably found it compelling. Some games are intentionally short, others can be huge time sinks. By looking at a ratio compared to an average instead of absolute playtime we can ensure the former category isn't treated as unfairly as it currently seems to be.

Yeah, using time played as a metric for preference is deeply flawed. But I don't think looking at averages instead is a solution, for some of the same reasons: maybe you put more hours than average, but it doesn't mean the experience is better than that from another game where you put less hours than average.

Ultimately, the ideal metric is asking users "do you want more games like this or not".

Yes, letting the users interact with the inputs could help a lot. If there was a checkbox next to the top 50 list of games used as inputs then I would definitely uncheck some of my most played because I feel like they are no longer relevant to my current preferences. I've had my Steam account since august 2004, so it's almost 15 years old. Mostly played Counter Strike and HL back then. Recent years not so much. I guess some people change over time :)

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A problem with the recommendations presented by the ML feature "Interactive Recommender" is that some of my best gaming experiences have been from short and focused interactive experiences which didn't take as much time to go through as some of my top games by hours played. Seems these games are not treated fairly by this algorithm. The recommendations makes sense in comparison to my most played games, but most hours played does not always mean most compelling game, and some of those most played games I'm actually done with and I'm burned out on those genres.

I think a partial solution could be to look at the average playtime for the entire user-base for a game, and then see how my time compares to that of the average user. If I spent more time than average, then I probably found it compelling. Some games are intentionally short, others can be huge time sinks. By looking at a ratio compared to an average instead of absolute playtime we can ensure the former category isn't treated as unfairly as it currently seems to be.

Edit: Turns out they are already doing something like this :)

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Quoting: GuestCD Projekt has a lot of things to improve on GOG but they don’t seem to care :-/.

Yea, I love the philosophy behind GOG but I pretty much gave up on them the moment I ditched Windows. Hopefully they will manage to sway me back some day.

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Quoting: YoRHa-2BCan't really say that the much more expensive MSI Gaming X model of my RX 480 is free of issues either - I mean, the heat sink is very strong and the card is very quiet under full load, but I had to re-seat the cooler and re-paste the card three times by now because it randomly lost die contact for no reason.

I had an Asus ROG Matrix R9 290 that had the exact same problem. The heatsink was loose and did not put enough pressure onto the GPU. I had to put washers under the screws to mitigate the problem but still had to reseat the heatsink every now and then. The card was obnoxiously loud despite being marketed as a premium model. It was getting decent reviews (I honestly suspect golden review samples, because users were not happy with their cards) and my experience with Asus had been good in the past, but that card was a big letdown.

My hypothethis is that most of these manufacturers design their stuff for Nvidia GPU's first and then reuse the same parts for AMD GPU's but slight differences in GPU package dimensions, especially height can cause problems. I think this is why Sapphire gets it right most of the time because they work with AMD exclusively.

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Quoting: Mohandevir

Quoting: Brisse

Quoting: skry

Quoting: MohandevirHad an MSI RX580 Armor 8gb for 6 months before it died on me. It was a heat generator and noisy as hell, but performances were awesome. I put the failure on MSI's bad design choices though.

Next build (around christmas), if AMD as something to offer comparable to the GTX 1660ti (performance, price and TDP), I might give another chance to AMD in another brand (Gigabyte or Sapphire).

I've had my Sapphire factory OC'd RX480 for several years now. Sure it puts out quite a lot of heat and can get little bit noisy under constant load but its been good card to own, well built and it still delivers (I can play most of the titles I own/play in 1440p and get ~60fps in reasonable detail). Drivers have been solid in recent years and overall I've been very happy with my investment and can highly recommend Sapphire cards.

Sapphire RX480 was indeed a bit on the noisy side. They revised and improved their design quite a bit for the RX580 so despite it being basically the same GPU it was much less noisy. A lot of people were a bit let down when the RX480 came out after Sapphire completely blew their competition away with their R9 290, R9 390 and Fury but those came with a much beefier three fan heatsink similar to what you see on their Vega. These were 260-300W TDP GPU's but Sapphires awesome boards and heatsinks managed it without fuzz and their noise levels were on par with the best Nvidia based cards. I guess it was a bit overkill for the Polaris so they developed a cheaper heatsink when the RX480 came out and the first iteration was a bit noisy with fans regularly hitting >2000rpm. My Fury usually sits at 0rpm even during light gaming, and when fully loaded (260W) it hits about 1100-1200rpm, I had two of them for a while and that was a bit toastier so then they could hit 2000rpm sometimes when putting load on both cards which could be a bit too noisy for my taste.

Thanks! You just comfirmed what I suspected. Sapphire will probably be my next try, if AMD delivers something in my price range (sub 400$ CAN).

Thing is, when you buy a GPU, you don't buy it thinking it will break in the next 6 months. This one had really cheap fans that had bearing noise problems. None of my GTX650 (ASUS), GTX750 ti (Gigabyte) and GTX960 (Gigabyte) had these problems and I never paid for premium models. There's a minimum quality that must be respected. Not going to buy any GPU from MSI ever again.

Well, one of my brothers had three different GTX970's, some from MSI and some from Gigabyte. They're good GPU's but one of them were semi passive and one of it's fans had trouble spinning up so the card would run really hot due to only one fan spinning. Another (or was it the same?) died after a MOSFET burned up. Yes it was overclocked, but they're supposed to be able to handle that and there are safety features built in that are supposed to stop that from happening. Stuff can happen to Nvidia-cards as well but I guess they're a bit more forgiving due to those GPU's generally using less power.

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Quoting: skry

Quoting: MohandevirHad an MSI RX580 Armor 8gb for 6 months before it died on me. It was a heat generator and noisy as hell, but performances were awesome. I put the failure on MSI's bad design choices though.

Next build (around christmas), if AMD as something to offer comparable to the GTX 1660ti (performance, price and TDP), I might give another chance to AMD in another brand (Gigabyte or Sapphire).

I've had my Sapphire factory OC'd RX480 for several years now. Sure it puts out quite a lot of heat and can get little bit noisy under constant load but its been good card to own, well built and it still delivers (I can play most of the titles I own/play in 1440p and get ~60fps in reasonable detail). Drivers have been solid in recent years and overall I've been very happy with my investment and can highly recommend Sapphire cards.

Sapphire RX480 was indeed a bit on the noisy side. They revised and improved their design quite a bit for the RX580 so despite it being basically the same GPU it was much less noisy. A lot of people were a bit let down when the RX480 came out after Sapphire completely blew their competition away with their R9 290, R9 390 and Fury but those came with a much beefier three fan heatsink similar to what you see on their Vega. These were 260-300W TDP GPU's but Sapphires awesome boards and heatsinks managed it without fuzz and their noise levels were on par with the best Nvidia based cards. I guess it was a bit overkill for the Polaris so they developed a cheaper heatsink when the RX480 came out and the first iteration was a bit noisy with fans regularly hitting >2000rpm. My Fury usually sits at 0rpm even during light gaming, and when fully loaded (260W) it hits about 1100-1200rpm, I had two of them for a while and that was a bit toastier so then they could hit 2000rpm sometimes when putting load on both cards which could be a bit too noisy for my taste.

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Quoting: MohandevirHad an MSI RX580 Armor 8gb for 6 months before it died on me. It was a heat generator and noisy as hell, but performances were awesome. I put the failure on MSI's bad design choices though.

Next build (around christmas), if AMD as something to offer comparable to the GTX 1660ti (performance, price and TDP), I might give another chance to AMD in another brand (Gigabyte or Sapphire).

Isn't MSI's Armor series one of the cheaper models though? Noise and heat isn't a problem with this GPU, it's a problem with that particular card. Go for something a bit more premium next time and you will be happier. Sapphire is usually a safe bet if you want a good AMD-based graphics card.

Sorry for off topic. ACO sure came as a surprise. Sounds promising. It's been well known for some time that LLVM isn't optimal for graphics shader compilation.

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One of those games that I keep coming back to every now and then ^_^

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Go team turtle!

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