Most people don’t own flagship GPUs

Spec sheet culture has warped our expectations

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We’ve somehow convinced ourselves that everyone and their dog owns bleeding-edge hardware when they really don’t. Only a tiny percentage of users run cards like an RTX 4070 Ti Super or above. The overwhelming majority are on midrange builds with similar VRAM and system memory to what the Steam machine is going to ship with.

Repeating this, because it needs to be repeated.

It is extremely not normal to own a high powered GPU.

Very, extremely, not normal.

Further, you can make a lot of good arguments that nobody fucking bothers optimizing anything anymore, that gameplay, story, writing, art design trump pure graphical realism power.

Real time ray tracing is still a ludicrous, unsustainable, elitist, exclusionary paradigm, from every way you look at it.

Beyond that, … I’m looking at a potential Steam Machine buy… because there will probably be a way to plug an oculink adapter into one of its M.2 ports, figure out where to cut a hole in the case and snake it out, and then you can just attach an eGPU of some kind, with its own PSU, to it, if you want to crank up the gfx even harder.

Then, your next upgrade path is along that paradigm: A superior mobo+cpu combo.

Somebody on github I saw already mocked out how you could get close-ish to M.2 long term storage transfer speeds out of the Machine’s fancier USB port, or you could just run it all off of an SD card if that doesn’t sound like its worth the trouble.

Oh, also, a default Steam Machine?

Way less power draw than a comparable PC, more like a beefed up laptop.

If you’re worried about either sustainability, or just the power bill going up… worth considering.

Badger Badger Badger Badger

MUSHROOM MUSHROOM

The kids are in fact not alright.

I’m a bit older younger (don’t post right before falling asleep, kids!), but this reminds me of back when people used to shame people with 8 digit SteamIDs, because they were obviously noobs, compared to 7 digit people, and of course the 6 digit people.

Bwah, my 7 digit one starts with a 0, yours starts with 8, [insert various slurs]!

And now the entire format has been through I think like 3 total revisions or something?

We built this city…!

What, none of ya’ll ever cooked a ribeye steak across a shopping cart, under an overpass?

After losing your fancy pants tech job?

Casuals.

Make it a regular occurence, you get to meet the people who made a few of the most recent tags!

So the answer is shrug with a side of “thoughts and prayers!”

No real downside to installing a newer one; but depending on your setup there could be a few regressions that might force you back to stable.

So there are no real downsides except for potentially that it won’t work and will waste a whole bunch of time and you’ll have to revert.

Yep. No downsides.

Is… is it as exciting as their most recent Windows driver?

Given the number of people I have seen making allusions to themselves sleeping in the kennels they keep in their rooms…

This is just an out of touch marketing exec.

Yep.

Its cat food.

For cats.

Yep.

Mhm.

Yep thats our market demo, mhm.

Step 1: Insert hand.

Step 2: Firmly grip base of spine.

Step 3: Rapidly draw back your arm.

Step 4: You are now the proud owner of a battle trophy!

Andalites.

… But yes. They’re fucked up too.

The GameMaster’s barely disguised projection of “actually, you’re racist!!!”

…

including taking advantage of the session to make advances on everyone he was attracted to at the table whether they were in committed relationships or not.

Wait, what?

Oh god.

Ah yes, the DnD dating service, producing God-tier cringe on a regular basis since at least the 1980s.

Holy shit, I’m just… now I’m just seeing a Funkopop wall, an actual literal family heirloom Nazi flag, a trillby called a fedora, an AppleJack body pillow, a pre-prepared argument for why body odor is actually attractive…

I mean, pick all your deadly sins, right?

Brothels, Restaurants, Blood Sports…

I mean, Boston Dynamics figured out how to build essentially robot mules and cats like a decade ago, and they’re actually currently building and improving on humanoid designs.

They got basically acquired by/folded into Hyundai, you know, an actual manufacturing company, unlike Elon’s ongoing fradulent shitshows.

I… I know that… I’m just trying to point out how the insanity knob appears to just ratchet forward and there seemingly is no way to dial it back… we’re just gonna keep cranking it up untill it blows out the amp, so to speak.

Nah, you just take a normal brain and give it CTE or make it have a stroke.

Or indoctrinate it with the gospels of Supply Side Jesus.

If you go by the AniMatrix canon, yes, basically.

The Machines win the war against the humans, and keep tens to hundreds of millions of them alive, and basically build an entire economy based around doing Mengele level expiriments on them, for… decades? centuries? … to derive all possibly derivable information about our biology…

And then they take what they’ve learned, and bio-engineer us into livestock.

The canon explanation from the movies is that humans are somehow used as a heat source… but… you can have an alternate explanation, that I do not think actually conflicts with at least any of the first 3 movies.

Morpheus is wrong about the battery thing.

Zion doesn’t understand what is actually happening.

(Its fairly well established, in that same scene and those near it in the first movie… Zion and Morpheus admit there is a whole lot they don’t know.)

(They don’t even know what year it actually is, and the 2nd and 3rd movies introduce ideas that strongly suggest their current best guess is very far off.)

What is actually happening could be that, like how a crypto miner hijacks your pc…

… the humans in the Matrix fundamentally constitute a massive network of processing power for the Machines.

The simulation of the Matrix is the illusion generated to keep the humans alive for as long as possible.

Meanwhile, unbeknownst to the humans… the actual important thing is that the Machines are using the other parts of the human brain, the parts not directly involved in experiencing the simulation… to ‘run conpute’ for … all of the rest of the workings of their apparently planet covering ecumenopolis/mega-city and society…

… Similar to how we currently house scores and scores of GPUs, in warehouses, to mostly generate text and visual hallucinations for humans, but also do things like map out social networks, pinpoint the most psychologically effective marketing techniques, evaluate military kill chains, fold proteins, etc etc.

Just reversed.

Now, we are the processing units, doing work for the Machines.