I figured this would happen and it made me ambivalent about getting my X at launch because it was obviously positioned as “the most ridiculous luxury phone ever, accept no substitutes” to the point where a good chunk of its audience would be expected to be every-year upgraders who would then do a lot of aftermarket dumping but for me it was also “the first thing I’ve been able to justify upgrading to from a Windows phone with a snapdragon S4” so I’m at least heartened to see it was barely improved upon
The last beta release had an incredibly weird bug where the keyboard would lag behind like a RAZR V3 so I’m glad they just put the GM out.
The “screen time” stuff is neat because I’m actually getting less Online as I get more of a professional life so it’s nice to quantify over the summer. Way more indicative of my health than, say, steps.
you don’t buy extra PSU overhead for whatever requirements are in place or for future add ins, you buy overhead for the efficiency curve and running semi-fanless
I’m not going to tell you to run out and buy 700-1000 w of PSU, but hey, imagine not ever having the fan run in it because you overshot your power draw and now it’s blissfully quiet
There probably really are a few deals in there from sellers so rich they literally don’t give a shit about wasting 300$, but I suspect they’d either be snapped up real fast or be damaged/scammy. At a quick glance on Ebay, most of the listings are still around 800$.
That’s not exactly the take I’d use on it as massive phones became big first in South Korea and China especially as a fashionable statement, but they’re far too big for my large male-sized hands too
looks like the earliest reviews that include overclocking results for the 2080ti have it at 50% up on the 1080ti, which is about 19 fp32 flops without any of the additional features, which is quite respectable
I can’t read mainstream GPU reviews anymore though because I think about these too much in terms of their compute ability
also these are predictably CPU bottlenecked below 4k; the baseline “2500k with a mild overclock” and all of its many successors was generally just barely enough to not bottleneck the highest end Pascal GPUs released almost six years later, but it seems like you finally need 6+ CPU cores to say the same for these. Given that Nvidia will almost certainly get another big bump from 7nm within a couple years that’s probably going to push CPU upgrades.
I have to say the increasing irrelevance of laptop graphics when you can just stream from something like this instead has me more willing to consider getting a whiskey lake product than I was before
I’m also kind of surprised they can’t offer DLSS as a driver level feature yet, doesn’t seem like it’s something that needs to be added to individual games’ rendering pipelines as it’s just a raster pass but maybe they’re saving that
also wondering what exactly AMD is planning on for the next round of consoles at this point because even if it’s not really viable yet ray tracing is a real banner feature that can be shown off well in ads and everyone’s been saying that they probably can’t even hope to compete before 7nm. I was thinking that if they can ship a 1080ti-ish thing cheaply then fine but that’s still not going to make the PS5 more exciting than the xxx_boner_xxx in practice so I wonder what that’ll look like now.
Nvidia vs the world
Maybe Microsoft ditches AMD and comes out with an ARMxCUDA console (like one of the 100w+ tegras that they keep paper launching for car manufacturers), that’d be fun. I guess it depends on how portable the x86 recompiler they’ve been working on to get 360 backwards compatibility this generation is? Since I doubt they’d want to abandon that. Or maybe Sony does it and sells another whole batch of remasters instead. I kind of doubt it though with how happy everyone has been to standardize on x86.
I’m more into the idea of a Pascal/Volta-derived Tegra to go in a rev. 2 Switch. The refresh rate gains with a Ryzen APU and HDMI 2.2 will honestly be the nicest thing for consoles, and if you count on people sitting 6+ feet away you can easily get away with cheating on resolution.
re: freesync/HDMI 2.2 yes! agreed. They should have bundled it with 4K support and it sucks that there are going to be a lot of 4K TVs without it in the wild.
It might be nice if Microsoft does the console + live + gamepass subscription/payment plan out of the gate for the xxxbox like carriers do no interest payment plans on phones. As long as the termination policy is reasonable (return the console and pay a restocking fee?) it’d make it easier to get in and have a variety of games. Maybe they can eventually start fronting money to indies like streaming video companies.
I can also definitely see “Gold” going away once gamepass has its footing. It’s weird to charge for it on xbox if you can play the same stuff on PC without.
