The flipside is: why the hell doesn’t any game work on eight gigabytes of VRAM? Devs. What are you doing? Does Epic not know how a texture atlas works?

It’s not that they don’t work.

Basically what you’ll see is kinda like a cache miss, except the stall time to go ‘oops, don’t have that’ and go out and get the required bits is very slow, and so you can see 8gb cards getting 20fps, and 16gb ones getting 40 or 60, simply because the path to get the missing textures is fucking slow.

And worse, you’ll get big framerate dips and the game will feel like absolute shit because you keep running into hitches loading textures.

It’s made worse in games where you can’t reasonably predict what texture you’ll get next (ex. Fortnite and other such online things that are you know, played by a lot of people) but even games where you might be able to reasonably guess, you’re still going to run into the simple fact that the textures from a modern game are simply higher quality and thus bigger than the ones you might have had 5 years ago and thus 8gb in 2019 and 8gb in 2025 is not an equivalent thing.

It’s crippling the performance of the GPU that may be able to perform substantially better, and for a relatively low BOM cost decrease. They’re trash, and should all end up in the trash.

Basically every one of them made in the past 4 or 5 years?

Some are better than others - CP2077, for example, will happily use all 16 threads on my 7700x, but something crusty like WoW only uses like, 4. Fortnite is. 3 or so, unless you’re doing shader compilation where it’ll use all of them, and so on - but it’s not 2002 anymore.

The issue is that most games won’t use nearly as many cores as Intel is stuffing on a die these days, which means for gaming having 32 threads via e-cores or whatever is utterly pointless, but having 8 cores and 16 threads of full-fat cores is very much useful.

And they also had the turn-into-a-zombie plague event when Wrath launched, too.

As I recall, that mostly just made everyone rage because the assholes running around spreading it everywhere were just annoying the crap out of everyone and the general thought is they just needed to fuck off and find something else to do.

Or, basically, Covid.

Ah HP printer drivers, my favorite form of self-inflicted malware.

My favorite HP sucks story happened many a year ago. The boss’s shitty HP multi-function POS died, and we got him a nice Brother instead, and then went to uninstall the drivers.

Somehow, and the reason for this is totally unknown to anyone other than HP engineers, the driver ‘uninstaller’ decided that today’s hilarity would be that it was going to uninstall… everything.

After about 15 minutes of the drive churning away I got concerned, rebooted it, and found that nearly 75% of everything on it had been deleted by the uninstaller.

No fucking idea, but that was a fun thing to explain and then fix.

Alas, the only thing I can think of at this point when someone mentions nVidia:

It’s a slightly more performant GPU with a worse CPU than a Z1. (Zen3 vs Zen4, 680M vs 740M)

But we’re talking very slightly better GPU performance, so calling it essentially equivalent for gaming is probably perfectly reasonable.

Except, of course, you can find the Z1 Ally for $250 at BestBuy damn near any day of the week, soooooo uh, yeah that pricing huh.

No joke.

I’ve gotten to the point where I just don’t really play anything anymore because of it.

You go ‘boy I’d like to see what new games are coming soon’ and you immediately land in a cesspool of people throwing a fit that there’s a black guy, or a trans girl, or a white chick that doesn’t make their little peepee hard, as well as any other awful sexist, racist, ableist swill you can possibly imagine all over every inch of anything that remotely looks like gaming media or discussion forums.

I just kind of have quit looking, and just playing old games for the 2nd or 3rd time, despite the fact I would happily have bought anything that seems remotely fun a couple of years ago because I don’t want to subject myself to those morons, end up playing games with them, or like, having anyone confuse me as being one of them as you said.

But I was assured it would be the equivalent of a 4090! Surely someone with an ugly jacket wouldn’t lie about their products?

(/s, etc.)

Why is every CEO’s brain turning to sludge all of a sudden? I mean I get sucking on the toadstool of the king to ensure you get your share of the public coffers as they’re looted, but uh, this dude sells plastic toys and video games t-shirts for twice the price of everyone else.

And he wants to sell parts of his company which are in countries that aren’t absolute shitholes, and his sales pitch is that you get… free woke?

Even following ‘beginner’ tutorials is hit or miss

It’s gotten worse than it even used to be, because more than half the “tutorials” I’ve run across are clearly AI written and basically flat out wrong.

Of course, they’re ALSO the “answers” that get pushed by Bing/Google so even if you run into someone who is willing to follow documentation, they’re going to get served worthless slop.

One thing I will give arch is that if there’s a wiki entry for something, it’s at least written by a human and is actually accurate which is more than I’ve found ANYWHERE else.

And more fun, lots of laptops have really goofy routing. I’ve got one where the DP alt mode on the USB-C ports are on the dGPU, but the HDMI ports are on the iGPU. And the internal panel is on the iGPU unless you switch it to be on the dGPU because yay mux.

Why? I don’t know. Too much meth while laying the board out or something I guess.

Everything is temporary, except for that 25 year old system that’s keeping everything running and can’t be replaced because nobody knows how or why it works just that if you touch it everything falls over.

You keep cloning and configuring shit on a Win10 instance because you can’t find the key?

That’s silly and you should just stop doing that: https://github.com/massgravel/Microsoft-Activation-Scripts

There you go! One less problem to deal with.

completely disable Windows Update

Since this is a work thing, I’d maybe check with whomever is in charge of your shit that you’re not violating any compliance shit by turning updates off.

If you’re not, cool, then whatever, but compliance bullshit is awful and sucks and it’s better if you’re not the reason you fail an audit.

Edit: for the OP, not you.

Yeah. Those Durons were a stupidly good deal at the time since you could overclock the snot out of them and get a CPU on par with a top of the stack one for absolute pennies.

Unless they caught fire. But that mostly usually didn’t hapen all that often sometimes.

Question: how is LinkedIn useful to you?

For me it’s just a non-stop swarm of recruiters from India who want me to kindly listen to their offer of a job that pays less than I’d make picking up garbage, utter sociopaths dredging up some psychotic hustle culture nonsense, and previous people I’ve worked with/for asking for favors, which of course means free.

Is it somehow more useful for an actual business?

I wouldn’t argue with the dude; he’s got a clear case of bad-faith-itis. What you did was bad, so you shouldn’t have done it, but no I won’t tell you how to fix it.

The absolute best you could have done is cross-posted to a Mastodon/Bluesky/whatever account as well, but you can’t just always go around yanking the rug out underneath communities especially if you’re in a position where it’s not just lazy shitposting and worthless commentary.

…that said, you have moved anything you can to being posted somewhere in tandem riiiiiiight?

You can also just drop the youtube channel link (ex. https://www.youtube.com/@LinusTechTips ) as well into most readers and it’ll sort it out for you, so you don’t even have to go digging.

And if you don’t want to deal with those breaking (becaue google is actively shooting them in the face) they DO provide RSS feeds for your creators.

Just add the channel url to your feed reader (ex. https://www.youtube.com/@LinusTechTips )and forget the youtube webui exists.

Well, no benefits for you anyway.

You just know this will end up mandatory.