Other What currently makes your life awesome?

The amount of player hand-holding in AW is astounding. The atmosphere is good, the story is at least somewhat interesting, but the gunplay is... let's be positive now... it's in the game.

Back on topic, though: I started a new play-through of CP 2077 for the DLC, and I once again enjoy the game tremendously.

 

I really felt like I was forcing myself to like it, I hated it when it came out, the matey has sucha smug "I'm TeH bEsT AcToR" forced fakeness about him (I know he's meant to be playing a passive aggressive pillock but still) and now he thinks he's keanu/John Wick in the new one, hmm. I'm only up for 2 because it's got more control in it, and looks pretty and if they use Controls engine/handling/controls it should be decent...

Yeah I tried to play CP through again, and IMHO it only got good in the last 20% of the main story then ended so was anti climaxing, from how good it got, so was gutted about that personally and on my 2nd playthrough I got bored 13 hours in, knowing it was all going to die off not long after main story quest wise...

Oh and on topic, how embarassing is it when my 4070 stomps a 7900XTX in PL at 1080p and a haha 6900XT can't even do 35 fps with RT... VERY embarassing at native res 1080p... I'm glad I didn't spend the extra £480 now on the XTX! I'd be fuming for a top tier card when even a 4080 beats it, and they're disgusting money for what they are, and remember I'm an AMD guy by preference and own their cpu's in both rigs and have a gpu in my 2nd currently...

It's going to be hilarious in 2-3 years when I've literally got my money back from the money saved on electric from not adding another 320w + to my system+ wall draw and the 4070 gives me £520 back towards a 2026 card, and I can either sell it for extra money or chuck it in my MITX rig I know it'll fit in...

 

Hmm must have something wrong in my setup I was getting ~4fps when I cranked up Cyberpunk after the update. probably doing native 4k.

 

I never really got on with Control either, tbh. It just didn't get me interested or keep me playing, it kinda felt like I was playing a tech demo for a few hours.

And also the heavy AMD tie-in for Starfield... They didn't even put in DLSS support at launch, so I'd be amazed if they added ray tracing support before they start working on Creation Engine 3.

I don't really think good ray tracing performance is something that most people should go out of their way for, to be honest. You'll only really get good ray tracing performance with Nvidia cards, and personally I don't think there are many games that implement it well. Cyberpunk 2077 does implement it well, and does look damn pretty, but if you want all the fancy goodies turned on and cranked to the max then even a 4090 will need DLSS to keep high framerates at 1440p and over. In fact you can't even use the new ray reconstruction feature, at any resolution or quality setting, without DLSS.

Like it or not, consoles are what really drives graphics in games and the PC market is often an afterthought - just look at how many half-arsed ports we get with piss-poor performance or optimisation. Until consoles get powerful enough to run raytracing I don't think we'll see devs/publishers falling over themselves to include support for it. That probably won't happen until the next next-gen comes along, the PS6 and the Xbox WhateverStupidNameTheyUseNext. There'll always be exceptions that stand out from the crowd like CP2077, but personally I don't think it's worth prioritising a feature that's only done well in a tiny number of titles.

Starfield and the CP2077 2.0 update are making me give serious thought to upgrading my GPU again. It doesn't feel like it was that long ago that I bought the 3070Ti, but in reality it was over 2 years ago - long gone are the days when I can just crank the settings all the way and know that I'm going to get 90-100+ FPS at 1440p. But I don't think I'm going to go out of my way to prioritise ray tracing. Maybe if I found a bargain second-hand 3090/3090Ti I'd jump at the chance to stay with Nvidia, but it'd have to really be a bargain for me to get even a top-end a 3000-series card.

 

TBH dude the truth of the DLSS situation came out. Rich Leadbetter asked Bethesda why they had not put it in, and they said "Nvidia have not approached us". So AMD got the blame, then Bethesda, before Nvidia finally did approach them and ask for it to be put in. And it will be, officially, apparently.

TBH? I think the only day I would ever say I actually wanted RT would be *IF* a Fallout game was to get it. And like I said, I can't see that happening. I mean, at least I felt I got something out of CP. It did look pretty, but the story was just a bit discombobulated and it never really grabbed me. As such, as we know, don't matter what it looks like.

I still don't think it is the future either, and I really don't think it will be. With Nvidia focussed now on AI and selling two lumps of the same silicon for $35k? I don't think they will pursue it either, and when it takes a game dev a lot longer to put it in and so on? it won't happen. I think that is why it hasn't been happening either. Kinda like how when DX12 came out all of those years ago and none of the best stuff of it was ever made use of (like explicit multi GPU, and so on and so forth). It all takes time, and time is money.

I'm a bit bummed about Starfield. Maybe I was expecting too much from it? IDK. It does look pants though, no matter how high you put the settings. Far from that though? as has been said, it is for sure a 7/10 game. And I have a hundred or so of those waiting in my collection that have never even been installed.

This year was a big one for games, and I think the highlight for me at least will be Fallout London. That said I did play through The Last Of Us twice back to back, so yeah must admit I really enjoyed that also.

 

I liked Control, and the difficulty and ease of just being brought back to the last taken over portal or whatever you want to call it made it easy to smash out in a 3 nights AW was def weaker/cheesier/linear plot and gameplay wise. I did Control, Control DLC1, AW, then the final AW DLC for Control, in 3 nights haha.

I think it does matter when you're paying the same money as something that offers 3 times the warranty at the same price and uses a third of the power, especially now with the 6800xt in a dress 7800xt being a rip off and not having any new features nor the 7900xt or xtx I wanted originally stumbling at 1080p native, pretty disgusting for what is nearly a grand on a gpu (xt was £930 IIRC in dec, and xtx was £1139 IIRC) I want all the bells and whistles if I'm coughing up a grand and more than a 2 year warranty and a coil wine/leg furnace fest.

I'm VERY glad I didn't wait for the 7800xt now, barely any lower tdp, same perf as a 6800xt which mine beats native res with RT and matches in everything else using a third of the wattage/noise/temps, and from what we've seen of FSR3 it seems to be a lot lower, noticeable worse detail/shimmering and rumour is you can't adjust it either WTH?

All for what £40 less than my gpu with a better brand/3 year warranty last month on scan or only £40 more than a out of stock 7800xt as we speak? No brainer for this price range.



The more we tolerate it, the more this nonsense continues!

I still think it's mint that in 3 years time my gpu gives me a full refund with change and I can either sell it on/put it in my mitx which I know it fits, can't fault that for free, £192 a year saved on electric QUICKLY adds up!

 

It's one feature that is hardly used anywhere well, everywhere else you pretty much get 4080 performance from the 7900xtx for £600 less never mind the slow 4070 , guess it depends on what is important to you really, good performance in a small niche or great performance everywhere else.

 

How's the 4070 slow?

Mine out the box has 2852mhz base and will laugh at 3.1ghz when oc'ed (proven by '8PACK' the uk overclocking champ - check his review on my asus) and still do 500mhz ontop of that on the ram whilst sipping power, fwiw STOCK mine is over 350mhz more than the ref Nvidia card? and when sat next to my mates 6800xt at the same native res/settings it matched it in every game, all whilst running at 53-57c without the fan on sipping power, and now undervolted never goes above 105-145w (the latter being with RT on and max native 1440p settings or DLSS3.5/FG/RT on pyscho in CP)

Then when it can't play nice I just use DLSS/FG/SLL whilst the 6800xt owners have to replace their cards...

so do elaborate?

I've no interest in what it compares to last gen - as I don't own last gen, so that's irrelevant to me as a buyer when this was brand new with 3 years warranty and modern featuresets like FG/DLSS3.5/SLL etc etc that actually work even on a lower tier model such as mine and give me headroom where the AMD's I was going to buy wont.

And as already mentioned by the 3rd year it's cost me nothing netting me £192 a year back on my electric bill vs having a 6800/6900/6950/7900xt... Free is free, and I can still sell the card and it'll be only just about to be out of it's 3 year warranty... Cant loose. Then I have nearly £600 towards a 2026 GPU AND whatever the 4070 sells for...

 

For what it's worth, I am really not a fan of upscaling and Nvidia are absolutely leading the charge with that. It started with DLSS from Nvidia, then we had FSR from AMD, and now there's XeSS from Intel. Not only that but now we have a machine learning model running on a GPU - at the same time you're running a game - which attempts to interpolate new frames that haven't actually been rendered. And where Nvidia have led, others will follow with their own frame interpolation technology. Now we have a potential improvement to ray tracing which, in the one implementation we've seen so far, doesn't even work unless you turn on upscaling. The most expensive consumer GPU available, a 4090, should absolutely destroy everything thrown at it, even at 4K. This is a £2000 piece of hardware that still needs upscaling and frame interpolation to effectively use all the features available.

I knew there was an update coming that adds official support for DLSS, but that part I didn't know about, I'll have to look that up...

That's fine, if that works for you then great. My point was that I don't think ray tracing is a feature that people should be too concerned with going out of their way for. And if the cost of 7900 XTX is "disgusting" because of it's ray tracing performance... then, as I said above, it's nothing short of an insult that a card costing twice that amount still needs to rely on upscaling in order to use all of its features and maintain performance.

I got over platform fanboyism back in the very early 90s when me and my friends were arguing between Amiga and Atari - I long ago lost the patience for that kind of argument. The fact is that no matter which brand of GPU you buy you're still getting something that has a lot of shortcomings and compromises, even if you buy the most expensive model.

 

Yeah I wasn't ever a fan, credit where credit's due dlss3.X is ridiculous in person, I have tricked so many people when they come round haha!
TBH I only use it on Starfield. Nothing else has required it. CP I can happily get over 63-70-80fps native maxed out 1440p without RT, or use it with FG/DLSS3.5x and have stupid fps, just a nice bonus for new hardware for a bit of future proofing headroom later down the line vs just relying on lowering the graphics settings, nice to be able to do either or a combo of both, and free is free, throw in some bonus RT and a 3 year warranty whilst running whisper quiet stupidly undervolted/never turning it's fan on and not turning my room into a sauna and win win!

Yeah same, I just always got all the consoles, or I'd have one the brothers would have the others, and swap weekly etc

Yeah I'm the same with modifying cars, I've no loyalty to putting a different company/countries engine in if it makes the power/torque where and when I want it in the rev range, regardless of the fabrication to shoe horn it in haha. Plus it's nice not being a sheep!

I prefer to not let shills/journos/youtubers choose what I spend my money on either First hand experience vs sheep'ism Cheesecake. At worst it costs you what some postage to return it and a few hours to test it, versus being closeminded and acting like you're the oracle on everything you don't own, people like that are pathetic and must lead some extremely uneventful lives eh!

Especially when they're quoting blatant sensationalised clickbait from someone half their age on yt/twitter/a washed up journo from a mag that's died/no-one cared about when it wasn't worth the paper it was printed on nor to read on a free website

 

Was about to throw out some random squares of glass in cardboard sleeves. Only had £2.54 written on them so couldn’t be much, until the cardboard literally flaked away in my hand.

Turns out its Durst Anti-Newton Glass inserts and goes for between £40-£60

I have 3.

Noice!

 

How long have Limp Bizkit been making glass?

 

Come to think of it… dem glasses…

 

Lol, a 4090 can't run the Odyssey Neo G9 7680x2160 at 240Hz, you need an AMD 7000 series.

Lol.

Not that I'll have either, it just tickles me.

 

At £2,199 on Samsung UK, I don't really care what you need to run a game well on it...

 

Very true.

I mean they say you need 7000 to get 240Hz on it but I doubt you'd probably only see that on the desktop at that resolution.

 

There’s always Minecraft… So long you don’t turn on RTX.

 

Well it seems I plain forgot about Alan Wake 2.

Has the RT apparently and so long as it’s not shooting at words like the terrible DLC for the first one I may have some nicer things to say about RT later this year.

Doubt it, tho. I bet it will still look ace without it.

 

Payday with a backdated payrise

ching.

 

Nice, we used to get those as our previous owners worked on a calendar year whereas our new owners run on financial years. This meant that until we go fully assimilated we got our pay rise in April, but it was backdated to January. Always made for a tidy little bonus. Could do with it now, got some hardware in dire need of upgrading.