PC Gaming

Wish more gamers would but that ship has long sailed unfortunately. I mean look at what the majority of gamers tolerate now.

And then you pick up a steam deck and play games that were originally meant to play on cards the size of steam deck.

I’ve said for a while that AMD will eventually eclipse all of the competition, simply because their design methodology is so different compared to the others. Intel has historically relied on simply cramming more into the same space. But they’re reaching theoretical limits on how small their designs can be; They’re being limited by things like atom size and the speed of light across the distance of the chip. But AMD has historically used the same dies for as long as possible, and relied on improving their efficiency to get gains instead. They were historically a generation (or even two) behind Intel in terms of pure hardware power, but still managed to compete because they used the chips more efficiently. As AMD also begins to approach those theoretical limits, I think they’ll do a much better job of actually eking out more computing power.

And the same goes for GPUs. With Nvidia recently resorting to the “just make it bigger and give it more power” design philosophy, it likely means they’re also reaching theoretical limitations.

I barely remember this anymore but the downgrade had certain things deactivated. Something like my card had four "pipelines" and the high-end one had eight, so a minor hardware modification could reactivate them. It was risky though, because often imperfections came out of the manufacturing process, and then they would just deactivate the problem areas and turn it into a lower-end version.

After a little while, someone put out drivers that could simulate the modification without physically touching the card. You'd read about softmod and hardmod for the lower-end radeon cards.

I used the softmod and 90% of the time it worked perfectly, but there was definitely an issue where some textures in certain games would have weird artifacting in a checkerboard pattern. If I disabled the softmod the artifacting wouldn't happen.

Yeah, those were the days when cost control was simply to use the same PCB but with just the traces left out. There were also quite a few cards that used the exact same PCB, traces intact, that you could simple flash the next tier card's BIOS and get significant performance bumps.

Did a few of those mods myself back in the day, those were fun times.

I remember using the pencil trick on my old AMD Duron processor to unlock it. 🤣

Just like I rode my 1080ti for a long time

You only skipped a generation. What are you talking about?

I'm still riding my 1080ti...

Trump's America has none. But the FCC is suing public broadcast services. So thats what we get.

Jensen Huang is meeting with Trump to make sure there is none.