I can stop music on my phone and immediately listen to music from my laptop. I have non-apple headphones, a non-apple laptop and an iPhone. There is no apple magic dust that makes this happen.
A decade in computing used to mean revolutionary improvements:
- from the C64 to the Pentium
- from the Playstation 1 to the Xbox360
- from the Nokia 3310 to the iPhone 4.
Each of these in roughly a decade.
But 2015-2025 in terms of desktop PCs? Some decent (but not revolutionary) steps forward with GPUs, and much more affordable+speedy SSDs. But everything else has been pretty small and incremental.
And when enthusiasts upgrade, the old parts usually find new homes. My old 6th-gen i7 from a decade ago still has more than enough power for my Dad to use as a home PC for basic photo editing, web browsing, and spreadsheets. But Win10 end-of-life wants to turn that machine into e-waste.
I think that is normal across most technologies or fields. Progress is an S curve (or series of curves), and it's easy to be amazed when looking at the steep bit. Early on progress is slow due to not much investment and going down lots of dead ends, while later progress faces increased complexity and no low hanging fruit left.
The middle bit is where the disadvantages of the early phase has gone, but the disadvantages of late phase hasn't kicked in yet.
Exactly. In order to prove you are not 15 online you have to prove you are >=16, even if you are 63.
And there's no "I'm an adult" proof with leaking exactly who you are.
This is thinly veiled "we want to know exactly who is behind every account" legislation. Expect it to be coupled with the usual "If you've nothing to hide you have nothing to fear" argument.
I am not sure who is going to be interested in the general population amoral interest in a country that is/was OK with well known personal personalities being pedophiles and rags like the mail that will push whatever narratives they feel brings the more dosh.
The very people with the most to gain from silencing dissidents or suppressing certain viewpoints given the power to restrict access to selected social media platforms while encouraging the use of others.
None of this recent crackdown on social media is really about 'protecting the kids', is it?
Many people drive older cars worth less than £4000.
Sticking to old/cheap cars seems like an increasingly good option with so many scare stories about the pain and extreme expense of getting modern cars, particularly EVs, repaired.
And the impending ban on new ICE vehicles seems likely to lead to more older cars being kept on the road for a lot longer.
Depends on the parts situation. As someone who works on my own cars I've become increasingly distressed at the car parts industry. Even OEM parts, when they are still available, seem to have had a dramatic decrease in quality over the past couple of decades. This is even assuming the correct part is shipped in the first place, which is another problem that has become entirely too common, especially in an age where everything is computerized. So many times you get a box with the correct part number on the outside but the wrong part inside.
If you have the parts and the will it's possible to keep any car running close to forever. That said if you've gotten to the point where the frame is totally rusted out then maybe it's time to consider moving on.
Plastics. Those are the hard to source bits. Plastic doesn't stay plastic for ever and NOS can be dried out just as much as the bits that are in the car.
Most other things are easy to source, and anything made of steel can be fixed (zero rust, so far).
NL, not a lot of snow but they do put salt on the roads here and it hasn't affected the body at all as far as I can see. My son drives a similar vintage E320 station and it too is still mostly rust free, the only part that seems to suffer on his car is the rear hatch.
Yeah - a car hits a similar valuation around ~15 years of age, meaning a failure of this component limits the financially viable lifespan of a car to this amount - mechanics do engine rebuilds for less money.
It's an interesting case study. They're essentially another 'App Store middleman' raking in a huge 30% cut for selling games digitally. But they do enough really good stuff to keep both gamers and developers generally very happy.
The difference between Valve and the other app stores with an actual user base (i.e. not Microsoft's Windows Store) is that PC gaming isn't tied to a single app store.
To be fair, neither is Android, but Steam actually gets real competition from GOG. The Amazon App Store was never really popular and the Epic Store doesn't seem to contain anything interesting if you're not playing one or two popular Epic games. Small projects can use itch.io. Large companies build their own launchers.
With the Steam Deck and now the upcoming new Steam hardware, that may change, depending on how hard Valve makes it to integrate with Steam's UI. Right now, Heroic works fine, from desktop mode, but if a company like GOG would like to actually take part in SteamOS, they'd need some kind of integration capability.
So far, nobody but Valve seems to have even considered supporting Steam and Linux' market share is small enough that it barely affects the gaming market, but if their Steam Machine explodes in popularity and they make mistakes, they can end up on many people's bad side just as well.
You actually get more, for the 1500€ you don't have to mess with sticks yourself. They solder it directly on your mainboard. If that isn't great service, I don't know what is.
Might almost be a good thing, if it means abandoning overhyped/underperforming high-end game rendering tech, and taking things in a different direction.
The push for 4K with raytracing hasn't been a good thing, as it's pushed hardware costs way up and led to the attempts to fake it with AI upscaling and 'fake frames'. And even before that, the increased reliance on temporal antialiasing was becoming problematic.
The last decade or so of hardware/tech advances haven't really improved the games.
DLSS Transformer models are pretty good. Framegen can be useful but has niche applications dure to latency increase and artifacts. Global illumination can be amazing but also pretty niche as it's very expensive and comes with artifacts.
Biggest flop is UE5 and it's lumen/nanite. Reallly everything would be fine if not that crap.
And yeah, our hardware is not capable of proper raytracing at the moment.
The push for ray tracing comes from the fact that they've reached the practical limits of scaling more conventional rendering. RT performance is where we are seeing the most gen-on-gen performance improvement, across GPU vendors.
Poor RT performance is more a developer skill issue than a problem with the tech. We've had games like Doom The Dark Ages that flat out require RT, but the RT lighting pass only accounts for ~13% of frame times while pushing much better results than any raster GI solution would do with the same budget.
The literal multi-million dollar question that executives have never bothered asking: When is it enough?
Do I, as a player, appreciate the extra visual detail in new games? Sure, most of the time.
But, if you asked me what I enjoy playing more 80% of the time? I'd pull out a list of 10+ year old titles that I keep coming back to, and more that I would rather play than what's on the market today if they only had an active playerbase (for multiplayer titles).
Honestly, I know I'm not alone in saying this: I'd rather we had more games focused on good mechanics and story, instead of visually impressive works that pile on MTX to recoup insane production costs. Maybe this is just the catalyst we need to get studios to redirect budgets to making games fun instead of spending a bunch of budget on visual quality.
Well in the case of Doom: The Dark ages, it's not just about about fidelity but about scale and production. To make TDA's levels with the baked GI used in the previous game would have taken their artists considerably more time and resulted in a 2-3x growth in install size, all while providing lighting that is less dynamic. The only benefit would have been the ability to support a handful of GPUs slightly older than the listed minimum spec.
Ray tracing has real implications not just for the production pipeline, but the kind of environments designers can make for their games. You really only notice the benefits in games that are built from the ground up for it though. So far, most games with ray tracing have just tacked it on top of a game built for raster lighting, which means they are still built around those limitations.
I'm not even talking about RT, specifically, but overall production quality. Increased texture detail, higher-poly models, more shader effects, general environmental detail, the list goes on.
These massive production budgets for huge, visually detailed games, are causing publishers to take fewer creative risks, and when products inevitably fail in the market the studios get shuttered. I'd much rather go back to smaller teams, and more reasonable production values from 10+ years ago than keep getting the drivel we have, and that's without even factoring in how expensive current hardware is.
I can definitely agree with that. AAA game production has become bloated with out of control budgets and protracted development cycles, a lot of that due to needing to fill massive overbuilt game worlds with an endless supply of unique high quality assets.
Ray tracing is a hardware feature that can help cut down on a chunk of that bloat, but only when developers can rely on it as a baseline.
Not holding out much hope for a good Win12 given the priorities seem to be to wreck the UI/UX, remove customisation options, turn things into advertising billboards, and force AI into everything (even bloody Notepad).
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