Jolt Country

TLDR I needed a new computer to play The Last Of Us, Pt. I. I bought a desktop in 2016 or so that had a 6th-gen I5, an NVidia GTX-960, and 8 gigs of RAM. This was fine at the time, but was a bit long in the tooth for 2023. Especially now that I regularly stream as well as play games that have gotten exponentially more demanding on hardware.

"So buy a console!" I hear you cry, in an annoyingly nasal voice. I actually have a posting history on this very BBS that goes back almost 20 years condeming consoles, so I'll do like Nancy Reagan and just say no. But also, fuck off. The new rig has a 13th-gen I5 and an RX3050 (almost went AMD for graphics but I wanted the hardware encoder for OBS) 16 gigs of DDR4. It runs The Last Of Us, which is all it had to do! So I am happy.

It runs quite smoothly actually, which is surprising because the port is currently being review bombed for running badly, crashing, etc. This card is actually below the recommended spec (they want a 3060) Yet I had someone stop by my stream yesterday and said the graphics looked like 8K (the game is running natively at 1080P) It is extremely funny to me that the graphics I can't see work flawlessly for me, while all these shitstains who hate the game can only wheedle patheticly on steam about their poor experience. Got performance problems? Feel bad for you, son. I've got 99 problems but framedrops aint one.

I also recently purchased a new phone! This is a bit more interesting. https://www.fxtec.com/pro1x

It is a solidly midrange device, which is a bit of a bummer. It also has some pretty serious problems: aptx doesn't work, GPS randomly doesn't get a fix, the wifi is actually better on my old phone, and for some reason the mic will mute itself when I am on an LTE call! (WhatsApp works fine though :D) So why am I holding onto it? Because of the keyboard. Good luck finding anything reasonably modern with one of those (particularly one that isn't pre-backdoored for your convenience by the PRC) I now have Android 13 running on it and am reasonably happy with it.

Most of the issues with that game occur when RT is enabled, which your GPU doesn't support (you'd need an RTX card.) Although it's still weird that the game runs at playable framerates on a 960. I would have thought the only way to have it be playable with that would be 720p and enabling the FSR option as well.

I completely forgot that objectinspace is Lysander.

BTW (for TDarcos) my new computer runs windows 11.

Lysander. That name brings up memories.

RealNC wrote: Tue Apr 04, 2023 1:02 pm Most of the issues with that game occur when RT is enabled, which your GPU doesn't support (you'd need an RTX card.) Although it's still weird that the game runs at playable framerates on a 960. I would have thought the only way to have it be playable with that would be 720p and enabling the FSR option as well.

Yeah, I'm still able to play most modern games with a GTX 1660ti and relatively high settings and I usually have great to good performance.. but my resolution is 1920x1080 (relatively small LCD monitor) and the only time I use raytracing is for Quake II RTX and occasionally in Cyberpunk in certain areas.

Still on Windoze 10.

RealNC wrote: Tue Apr 04, 2023 1:02 pm Most of the issues with that game occur when RT is enabled, which your GPU doesn't support (you'd need an RTX card.) Although it's still weird that the game runs at playable framerates on a 960. I would have thought the only way to have it be playable with that would be 720p and enabling the FSR option as well.

I believe the minimum specs are an 4th-gen I7 and a GTX970. My old computer was closer than I thought to the minimum specs! But not close enough.

I heard it was also murder on the steamdeck, which it is supposed to support? Which was surprising, I would not think it could run a game like that. I probably would not enable ray tracing even if my card did support it because I have heard nothing but grief about the performance hit. I also have DLSS on in performance mode (though it seems just fine in fidelity mode TBH) and turned off the film grain and motion blur. I've had maybe two or three crashes after 20+ hours. If I'm dropping frames I don't notice, it doesn't feel stuttery at all. The initial load time averages 35-45 seconds, which I guess is unusual for PC users but is very normal for TLOU generally.

I very much wish to believe that people just don't know how to configure their graphics settings. The idea that I actually understand this stuff better than they do is quite delicious to me!

Mama Blue wrote: Tue Apr 04, 2023 6:09 pm Lysander. That name brings up memories.

Hopefully positive ones!

I think I am gonna get a 4080 soon or something, so lemme know if you want to buy a gently / non-cryptocoin 3080 in a month or two. I recommend it!

That is very kind of you sir! May well take you up on that.

I think we both deserve QUALITY RIGS!

Update! My phone's display has started doing this:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1-2hUF ... p=drive_fs

Which it turns out is not actually a dealbreaker for me, but it's still pretty bad so I should probably get it fixed!

Meanwhile, I will be rocking this:
https://store.planetcom.co.uk/products/astro-slide

Android 11, which is a major bummer, and mediatek which is an even majorer bummer. But I can live with it for a few weeks.

The computer, however, is working great! Been playing lots of Mortal Kombat 1, and then Forza when it comes out next week. CHALLENGE ME!

Huh, a smartphone with a full keyboard. That should have been here decades ago!

AArdvark wrote: Thu Oct 05, 2023 4:47 pm Huh, a smartphone with a full keyboard. That should have been here decades ago!

I still have my G2 slide phone as I can't bear to get rid of it. It's power jack broke so it won't charge and even if it did it wouldn't work on Xfinity network nor run a decent version of Android, but I can't bring myself to throw it away because I loved that keyboard so very much.