Wisdom, well learned.
Only ever touch the computer’s Bios settings when all else has failed and you have a figurative ( if not literal ) gun being held to your head.
I have many mental & physical scars from those kinds of adventures.
Mark Gosdin
i remember when you were supposed to go into the bios and change settings to make things work. ah DOS how I miss thee.
it is like this and the Brain Drain thread are bleeding over into each other… i am just going to walk away…
So I got my hands on a free copy of Thief, the new reboot of the classic franchise (which I haven’t played). So far the game is living down to the reviews but I remain optimistic.
In playing the game initially I was getting horrible framerates and massive amounts of stutter. I realize that I’m pushing the game way beyond what it was ever designed for and I’m asking more of my ancient GPUs than they were ever expected to give but I expected better performance. I mean, the graphics in this game are rather poor.
I saw that I needed to grab the new AMD beta drivers to get real crossfire support for Thief. I did, and the game feels smoother, but my framerates are still far lower than they should be.
I’m hoping that Mantle and TrueAudio will change that for me, but with such a poorly optimized game in the first place I’m not holding my breath. 
Yea, pc games do take quite a bit to run right. I really don’t have any myself, because they add so much stress to a comp.
With old dual gpu setup:
Min FPS: 4.9
Max FPS: 29.9
Avg FPS: 20.3
With new single-GPU setup (all settings equal):
Min FPS: 61.9
Max FPS: 96.2
Avg FPS: 76.9
It’s amazing how far GPU technology has come in 3 or 4 years. The secret seems to be AMD’s system named Mantle. My old cards were fine for 19201080 but they just weren’t up to the task for everything at 25601440.
This is tangentially related to Amazon’s Fire Phone and more properly related to Amazon itself :
It’s a piece about the publishing business from authors Sara Hoyt and Carlie Martin.
I had wondered about this sort of thing happening, I had seen signs of it for many years. I’ve just about quit Barnes & Noble because they don’t carry anything other than Managa that I’m interested in and Books a Million has a better selection.
I used to be a avid reader, Science Fiction, Fantasy, Adventure, Historical, Cozy Mysteries and many other things. Sometime in the late 1990’s the bookstores began to dry out, to no longer have books with a - worthwhile is the word I’m looking for - worthwhile content.
Having Amazon to draw on for fresh material has helped, and Manga - with it’s Japanese viewpoints - has helped.
So, maybe now we get to see what happens when the MBA’s that run publishing decide to cut their losses.
Mark Gosdin
Of course the publishing is in crisis as well as books and reading. it stems from reading stupid crap that people are forced to read in schools that are so out of date and out of touch with the modern time because they are “classics”. really how many people care about Romeo & Juliet?
“To die in Shakespeare’s time meant to have sex”, are they still teaching that 13 year olds should rebel against their parents wishes and have sex behind their backs? and you wonder where the current state of the world came from?
publishing needs both, but unlike Betamax/VHS, DVD/BluRay, vinyl/cassette/cd/mp3 they havne’t taken full advantage of the new medium that allows for easier access to printed material. it is like music they want some kind of DRM and crap that forced proprietary software to read or so many stings attached, that people just don’t even bother. how many books did that one place a few years back jsut pull from people that had paid for digital copies of them
entertainment need to stop trying to be the RIAA and get the idea that people will share stuff digitally. HBO wears as a badge of honor that Game of Throne is the most pirated TV program of all time!
everyone needs to stop trying to be Disney and accept things like Sherlock Holmes is public domain (except the last 10 stories with Watson’s second marriage and Holmes liking dogs).
the more access people have to media, then the more they will enjoy your work and art. close access off and you will only fail.
D&D, and RPG has gone through not unlike the RIAA an attack on its customers to the point it pulled PDF copies of its decades old products that it doesn’t even care to sell from distribution channels. the backlash cost them lots and they learned that you just have to grin and bear it and it is better to be able to sell a few of something that was made 20 years ago and get some extra income rather than sell nothing and make nothing.
now, for some reason i couldn’t get the article in question to load, but i am sure it has to be about one of these things as that is all it is ever about. DRM and such.
does it even mention libraries or how they are in decline?
aaaah! the whole entertainment industry and copyright nonsense jsut ticks me off to no end. especially people trying to make money off things they never created jsut because they were the first to do it a new way (Disney and Alice in Wonderland for example…)
[quote=“shadzar” post=170860]Of course the publishing is in crisis as well as books and reading. it stems from reading stupid crap that people are forced to read in schools that are so out of date and out of touch with the modern time because they are “classics”. really how many people care about Romeo & Juliet?
“To die in Shakespeare’s time meant to have sex”, are they still teaching that 13 year olds should rebel against their parents wishes and have sex behind their backs? and you wonder where the current state of the world came from?
publishing needs both, but unlike Betamax/VHS, DVD/BluRay, vinyl/cassette/cd/mp3 they havne’t taken full advantage of the new medium that allows for easier access to printed material. it is like music they want some kind of DRM and crap that forced proprietary software to read or so many stings attached, that people just don’t even bother. how many books did that one place a few years back jsut pull from people that had paid for digital copies of them
entertainment need to stop trying to be the RIAA and get the idea that people will share stuff digitally. HBO wears as a badge of honor that Game of Throne is the most pirated TV program of all time!
everyone needs to stop trying to be Disney and accept things like Sherlock Holmes is public domain (except the last 10 stories with Watson’s second marriage and Holmes liking dogs).
the more access people have to media, then the more they will enjoy your work and art. close access off and you will only fail.
D&D, and RPG has gone through not unlike the RIAA an attack on its customers to the point it pulled PDF copies of its decades old products that it doesn’t even care to sell from distribution channels. the backlash cost them lots and they learned that you just have to grin and bear it and it is better to be able to sell a few of something that was made 20 years ago and get some extra income rather than sell nothing and make nothing.
now, for some reason i couldn’t get the article in question to load, but i am sure it has to be about one of these things as that is all it is ever about. DRM and such.
does it even mention libraries or how they are in decline?
aaaah! the whole entertainment industry and copyright nonsense jsut ticks me off to no end. especially people trying to make money off things they never created jsut because they were the first to do it a new way (Disney and Alice in Wonderland for example…)[/quote]
Yes and if people didn’t pirate stuff then we wouldn’t need things like DRM, see how these things work? Yes I agree that some of it is really asinine and cringe inducing. It works both ways though.
well if it was for BGM and their price fixing for decades of records and tapes and CDs that caused the lawsuit against them, prior to RIAA, then there wouldnt be piracy. the industry got out of hand and the consumer said %E^& YOU to them and are voting with their wallets. to this day they STILL vote with their wallets. maybe it is time that the rich snobs making millions on a movie or a song realize that they are lucky to have that money and if they want to have people enjoy their music, then they better bring prices down. everywhere doesn’t have a Braodway to have a musical for $150 a ticket, because most places people wouldnt be able to afford it. thus why m,ovies end up in the end in $1 cinemas before leaving, and why the amount of time has reduced from the big screen showing to the small screen.
again this goes with how copyright has been screwed up from what was created to protect the create of a type of artwork, and has become Disney’s playgound to prevent anyone else from use Steamboat Willy which would give them the right to the predecessor of the Mickey Mouse character. (see TARP funding in 2008)
businesses are NEVER too big to fail, if they are, then they should fail.
“The customer is always right”. remember when the US went over to Japan demanding fan-comics be stopped and how Japan laughed at the US politicians about it because ^%$# YOU USA ignorance?
“We The People”, not we the businesses. priorities need to get straightened out on tech among other things. just look at the telecomm industry and how USA is becoming a backwater to places like Slovenia.
Will a Sistine Chapel ever exist in USA, hell no, because the drek created and protected that does not allow for free inspiration in this country such that actual art could be made.
What the hell is made in USA anymore other than crappy movies, and greed? name a product that the USA makes that everyone wants (other than Levi’s Jeans on the Russia Black Market from the 1980s)? not a damn thing!
piracy exists because prices are too high. how often is music pirated now with $1 prices per song rather than $20 prices for one good song and forcing you to take another 10 you probably don’t even like? look into the price-fixing of the big music places like Sony etc related to CD prices and such, and then you see how nothing was done but the RIAA being retaliatory to the consumer. the consumer owes the corporation NOTHING. again, “the customer is always right” and people should be voting with their wallets, but the ignorant litigants cant figure out the simplicity of it all that they are pricing things too high if they REALLY want EVERYONE to want and be able to afford “one”. thus why TV isnt even free because of the whole DTV cap, and soon the phone companies will have radio pulled as well so people cant get anything.
what disgusts me is the lazy SOBs that dont do more to fight the situation and just roll over and take it! America the fat and lazy. sure glad China is buying it all up, so maybe one day jobs will come back to America and maybe again things will say “Made in USA”.
The existence of DRM drives piracy. Not only are the pirated versions of games often more convenient to play and store (Steam’s backup system is a bad joke) but the malware that they might infect your system with might be less heinous than the DRM software. Sony’s rootkit and crap like SecuROM live in infamy.
BTW, perhaps it isn’t so much that the prices are too high as it is that the amount of disposable income is too low.
Somewhat ironically, the undeveloped third-world nations have a huge advantage in telcomm modernity as they don’t have entrenched infrastructure to take out and replace (“if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” mentality), although as I understand it many of those countries have switched to cellphones rather than pay out for the traditional infrastructure. Also, the USA is much larger than these other countries and that makes building an infrastructure harder. At least we’re still leagues ahead of other large countries like China where venturing away from the cities and sweatshop compounds is like going back in time to the era of Sun Tzu.
If you could find some wealthy patrons to commission some actually talented artists who don’t fool around with that “modern art” nonsense, aka how fine art was once created, then I don’t see why you couldn’t have another Sistine Chapel.
No they just want to think, like most of those 150k+ people, that everyone lives in NY or LA where $30 gets you a movie ticket or a coffee and donut. the people really are out of touch and trying to milk every cent out of everyone not understanding the prices across the country cant work that way. thus $1 songs on iTunes and crap like that.
thus why the cost of living is too high, there is NO disposable income for anything, and due to everyone not born with money or a drug dealer or politician taking kickbacks for corrupt dealings, you are a slave to the businesses out there that purposefully create a bad education system, solely to make money and not to teach anyone a damn useful thing.
USA exists for one thing and one thing only: GREED.
that is why planned obsolescence exists. make a lower quality product and raise the price so people have to buy the product more often. i have a vacuum that is 30 years old and still works and am on the last 2 bags for it unless Sears still makes them. only problem with the thing is the cord doesn’t retract on its spring. you wont find a quality product like that these days because it means the company doesn’t get a continual stream of money from EVERYONE.
that is why VOD works and PPV is in decline on TV, and why the FCC can’t fight the cable companies because the GREED they have thinking they are the ONLY ones with the right to get any money from video entertainment.
you know i just watched that crappy magical warfare on crunchy, as well a few many other Adult Swim and TAN titles this week, and i sure as hell wouldn’t pay for ANY of them because they are not worth the money. not 12 shows a week for $6. hell i want a refund on my time from Magical Warfare and Engaged to the Unknown!
again the cost of a b-whatever they just sent over to Europe would build 20,000 homes at $100,000 each for the homeless and impoverished in this country. i hear HFH homes cost around $30 with all the bells and whistles like a bathroom and washer and dryer… you know those luxuries that cost like $1000 now after they had gone down in price.
how about those price drops on electronics! $300 for a calculator in the 70s, and you can get one today at a $1 store. but basic run of the mill computers that are low end machines? $2000 in the 90s. about $1000 today.
it really is prices for crap is too high because people like Glen Brit got millions for being a CEO while stockholders get more, and there is no repairs done on the services with the customers money. they gave it all to the CEOs, so if customers want repairs? they have to pay more!
greed and mismanagement.
that is why there is no quality, because it would cut into the earnings of already millionaires. that is why i get so pissed around here when something like Phi Brain gets the description screwed up every other week. it isn’t anything extra, it is the job SOMEONE should already be doing and to copy and paste from the website to the pitch thing shouldn’t be that hard!
books used to have the highest markup @ 44% but now most other products have in the range of 1000% or more especially if they are modern tech necessities. big screen HDTV for $2000, go to an electronics store and get the parts and just assemble your own with basic video playing functions for a couple 100 bucks. but people don’t know how to do that and too lazy to. build your own furniture? nope, go buy some ikea crap that is just cardboard that will fall apart when it gets wet from a sneeze.
AAAAH! I’m just so done with this!
When coupled with foresight and a long-term goal, and bounded by ethics, greed is great.
I’m not entirely certain that one could go to an electronics store and build an HDTV of any quality, especially for less than the few 100 dollars that prebuilt ones cost.
[hr]
Speaking of foresight, I was playing an older RTS and noticed some performance issues. Viewing the task manager shows that the game is entirely single-threaded. Since single threaded performance hasn’t increased by a huge percentage since the time of this game (At best it has doubled) the game is stuck with a performance cap that wouldn’t have existed now had the game been multi-threaded. Dual Core chips were out when this game came out so the devs should have known better. For a 2 hour match one core of my CPU was pegged at ~100% while the other cores twiddled their thumbs.
I realize that my CPU is at a disadvantage when it comes to single-threaded tasks but this was still pretty ridiculous as my CPU offers single-threaded performance that didn’t exist in the time of this game.
VERY few games actively use multiple cores in CPUs. It’s just the nature of how games are made.
multi-core CPUs is just an excuse to charge mor for computers and keep the prices higher rather than to let prices drop and everyone have access to lower cost high speed machine. Moore’s Law says every low end computer should be running 4 ghz now, but still 1 ghz machines are being sold.
the ONLY thing I know of using multiple cores is things like PlayStation and other game consoles where the machine is proprietary in design. some processors for sound, some for visuals, some for calculations. a real computer doesn’t need and can’t use that because most programs are made for a single processor.
An RTS is a game type that just lends itself to multithreading though. I’ve noticed that the lag and core peaking only occurs when playing against multiple AI opponents. All of that decision tree AI stuff could be running across my other 7 cores.
I’ve really hoping that the ps4 with its “lots of weak cores” setup will be a game changer for game design lol. The 360 was stuck with the classic 2 thread unreal engine 3 design but we’re past that now.
I wouldn’t want a single core machine as no matter how fast that single core is it can still only do one task at a time. Intel recently released a cheap dual core Pentium that you can easily give a massive over clock to and while it can, with the OC, hold its own in many games and thread limited operations it chokes on multithreaded applications or when tasked with doing something in addition to the demanding thread limited task. I don’t miss the dark days of single core where disabling antivirus to game was recommended and onboard sound had a significant effect on fps.
GHz is cool and all but it isn’t everything: my CPU runs at 4 GHz constantly and at 4.2 on single threaded tasks and it can be beaten in single threaded applications by slower clocked CPUs. Though even having an i7 host (haswell/ivy bridge) the game with the same settings produced similar lag. Playing this with so many AI opponents back when this was released several years ago must have been almost impossible.
Lines do what they’re told to, no way around it 
Who’s offering a fix to this?
I’m happy with the Dual Core machines that are my main personal system and company system, both are laptops. I built a Quad Core PC that is our bedroom machine and is the only one that ever gets used for gaming - very little by my wife and none by me. The true gaming is done by my sons on XBox, Playstation, Vita, 3DS or WII which makes sense as far as I can tell. Use a PC for PC tasks and a Game System for Game tasks.
As far as performance goes, I’ve always found that added memory in a computer was as much a boost as a faster CPU … sometimes more.
Mark Gosdin
You would think that the average pc would leave any console in the dust, especially considering advertising these days, but there seems to be a huge gap between the two. How is that? Do we need a poll?
sadly a gaming console has more power than a desktop computer. that is why so many people turn old consoles like the PS2 into linux and windows machines because they can do better than the same priced computer on the market today.
the thing with consoles is that the hardware handles the workload distribution. so when something comes along that needs to be done with more than one processor, then mor of them get used based on what the console says to do.
desktop computers with more than one processor require the SOFTWARE to tell it to use more than one, but the desktop operating systems arent made to know how to do that so a program has to be made specifically to tell it how to do it. i can tell right now that mine only ever really uses a single processor, the other is probably just keeping crap in memory active like those things that come on with windows or other programs you turn on.
the problem with multi-core machines also is that they share the same memory.
1 ghz dual core doesnt mean 2 ghz worth of processing, when they have to share the 4 gig memory.
so when the 4ghz cap was reached and that was the speed that could be made, they just needed to ad the other part of the power equation and get MORE memory.
1 ghz dual-core with 4 gig memory, means if both are working, you only have 2 gigs memory each they could use, so it is nothing more than a computer from 2001 in 2014.
not to mention microsloth wants to turn everything into an iPhone with its Windows 8 crap, not understanding that if everyone wanting the Apple operating system, they wouldnt be buying Windows computers!
I hate the Windows system, waaaaaaay too much incorporation in it for a single product.