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Funnily enough, I gamed on a GeForce 3 Ti200 for years until a good deal on a 9800 Pro came along. This goes back to the split market I was talking about in an earlier post. Some people don’t see the point of cards being any faster because they can already max out their displays with room to...

Yes, as you point out, the hardware will be catching up for a long time as it’s a moving target. Upscaling, frame gen, and eye tracking are each good for about a 30% effective performance improvement before they start to noticeably degrade image quality if developers have the time and resources...

I do get where you’re coming from, and I’m sure there are plenty of people who use and appreciate RT in 2024. In my post I was talking mainly about RT in 2019 when the 2x00 series was on the market. By AI extensions I meant something similar to CUDA where NVIDIA cards accelerate local AI with...

You hit the nail on the head with “a couple of gens.” That’s AMD’s problem in a nutshell. They’ve never knocked it out of the park twice in a row so they’ve never stolen durable mindshare from NVIDIA. Even when they’re on a roll, there’s always some bonehead move like the $900 7900 XT vs $1,000...

There's a lot of doom and gloom around GPU pricing, and not without reason, but at the end of the day NVIDIA's objective is to turn a profit, and the $1,200 RTX 4080 didn't do that because few people bought one. They had to reintroduce the same card under a new name so they could cut the price...

The first “3D accelerators” that I remember were the S3 Virge, Rendition Verite, PowerVR (?), and a little later the 3dfx Voodoo. I was big into Mechwarrior 2, and the Verite was the one I dreamed about at the time. I would have wanted the Voodoo, but my PC didn’t have an add-in video card, so I...

Sold! EVGA GeForce GTX 1660 Ti SC Ultra GAMING, bought from EVGA B-stock earlier this year and ran at stock frequencies and voltage, no mining. Looking for a last-generation RX card. Will add cash depending on which card is being offered, up to $150 for 5700 XT. I have 2 confirmed trades on...

Turns out price-gouging for useless features and strong-arming the gaming media isn't a good business strategy. Who knew?

The negative cost of cycling mostly has to do with reducing traffic congestion and healthier people who will not need as much health care. If someone rode for recreation on the weekends, they would be healthier but would not reduce congestion so they would have to ride a lot to offset weekday...

Sorry, I meant $1.20 was roughly the total cost to society, not a direct taxpayer subsidy. Should have written that sentence more carefully. I used the 2012 Seattle study's $1.82 / mile total cost of driving and backed out the IRS re-imbursement rate (rounded up to $0.62 to make the numbers...

Why stop there? Let's also use the catapult launchers to get cars around really fast! After all, it works on an aircraft carrier, right?

Don't get me wrong, I'm as green as Kermit the Frog and Jill Stein's secret love-child, I just realize that the environmentalist movement's 4 decade-long attempt at shaming people into action has been a miserable failure and touting a solution's green credentials doesn't sell. Musk proved that...

It's a bit complicated to assign blame in this case. When planners design routes that are indirect, a certain percentage of people will ignore them. You almost never see auto infrastructure designed for anything but the straightest, most direct route, yet planners will often design bicycle and...

The things you are claiming to be impossible are things that people do all the time. You also must not have read my link because the winter myth is your post almost verbatim. One of the most bike friendly cities in North America with a high percentage of cyclists is Minneapolis, and they...

These are 2 of the common reasons people always trot out that it's supposedly impossible to get around by bike. Winter cycling is very possible, but even if everyone used cars all winter cities and their citizens would save massive amounts of money if more trips were taken by bike in other...

Musk's traffic tunnel ideas are very much a pipe dream. An elevator would need to be extremely heavy-duty to lower and lift multi-ton objects quickly and would break down a lot. Getting cars into the tunnel would take too long and there would be massive bottlenecks at the entrances. A...

Musk is suffering from the same delusion that the whole country has been afflicted with since 1950. You can't have a city the size of LA and expect everyone to get around in a multi-ton metal box that occupies 50+ times as much space as other forms of transportation. It doesn't matter how many...

I agree that there is probably more downside than upside right now, but if you are currently holding, how do you know when to buy back in? There is no way to evaluate what the price of BTC should be. As they say, trying to buy at the bottom is like trying to catch a falling knife, and the people...

I do agree with the premise up to a certain point. Traditional ICE engines have become much more efficient over the last 10 years, especially on the highway. You can buy a non-hybrid and not feel like you've personally clubbed a baby seal to death using a smaller baby seal. If you want to be...

Chernobyl was actually worse than the current worst case scenario because that type of reactor is no longer in use and all other reactors of that type were retrofitted so that an accident of that type cannot happen. Fukushima used a very early reactor type that was considered unsafe even in...

Not really. The worst nuclear accident in history (Chernobyl) is responsible for an estimated 46 deaths from both short and long term effects. Fukushima's death toll was zero. Three Mile Island was zero. Fears of the effects of nuclear power is roughly a million times larger than its actual...

Reminds me of the old joke "we lose money on every unit we sell, but we make up for it with volume!" As the trend of every company becoming a tech company intensifies, ignorant attitudes about the interchangeability of coders is going to start producing seas of red ink and getting CEO's fired...

Most of the benefit of hybrids comes from high-gearing. You have the high instant torque of the electric motor to get you off the line so you can gear the engine for efficiency over low-speed grunt. OTR trucks spend most of the time at speed on the highway and would not see enough benefit from a...

"Crony capitalism " is really just Soviet style communism, but for giant corporations. The more the politics is captured through bribery *cough* campaign contributions to enshrine politically connected elites and prevent competition, the farther we slide into a command economy. I hear that form...

I've definitely noticed an increase in idiots waltzing out into the street without looking, some with their noses buried in a smartphone but most lacking even that excuse. I believe the increase in fatalities is due to quieter vehicles. Not just EVs and Priuses, but all engines have gotten a lot...

I had this idea years ago when I paired my HTC One X to a Bluetooth keyboard/ trackpad and propped it up with the kickstand at my desk. It was a perfectly functional device for basic tasks like reading and answering emails and I realized that with the ability to run Windows or OS X and wireless...

I did say "almost everyone". Even so, I don't know how the infrastructure is from Houston to Dallas, but the equivalent drive here in CA is SF Bay to Los Angeles or vice versa. You would have to stop once for 20-30 minutes with a Bolt or Tesla on a drive where most people stop for lunch at some...

Because you can't fuel up at home, meaning you're saving a lot of time not having to go to the gas station, way more time than the occasional half-hour on a road trip, during which you probably would have needed to stop for lunch and bathrooms anyway. Yes the 1st gen EVs wouldn't work for a lot...

Surveys of people who have actually owned EVs show that range anxiety is blown way out of proportion and charging times are a non-issue. Most people don't think about the 10+ hours they waste every year going to gas stations, or that gas cars have their own range anxiety. Ever decided to skip...

Leaving aside the snake oil, both this electrolyte thing and hydrogen fuel-cells are an attempt to solve a problem that doesn't exist. Namely, "Electric car? But how will it fuel up!?" It's an attempt to force limitations of old technology onto new tech due to lack of imagination, not much...

We've had viable mass transit since the 1890's and not much has come of it in the US. I don't think that is going to change.

Even if that's the case, the car share can replace a lot of personal vehicles. Zipcar claimed something like 27 cars off the road for every one of their vehicles. Risks average to a predictable expense for a large fleet and whatever risk remains can be insured against. Uber and Lyft will simply...

I drove for Lyft and Uber for a while and hardly deadheaded any of my miles (industry jargon for driving without a passenger). Granted I'm in SF which is very densely packed, but I suspect that even nationwide the deadhead miles are offset by the ones with multiple passengers. Are you kidding...

When I said "my city is 7 x 7 miles" that meant that I live in San Francisco :) I did acknowledge that it was pie-in-the-sky in my post. However even sprawling cities don't necessarily need to be designed with the nearest grocery store being a Super Walmart 25 miles away. Proper bike...

Absolutely. When are urban planners going to get it through their skulls that designing cities around the automobile is a terrible idea whose inevitable result is traffic jams and frustration? Buses and trains are nice, but I don't see a critical mass of middle-class America ever becoming...

Nintendo has the right idea. Fixed devices have faced declining interest for years now and graphical horsepower is sufficient to make fantastic looking games on portable devices as long as there is good art direction. Sony and Microsoft may have more powerful hardware but they still can't pull...

I agree with you. If the companies that control the platforms of expression get together and decide to censor speech, that's the same as the government doing it and we should have a national discussion about it. I was just pointing out that the First Amendment does not apply to private companies...

Oh, the memories! Come to think of it, I only ever played the demo on that one, might be worth firing up. Front Mission 3 on the PlayStation was another great turn-based mech game.

MW2: Mercenaries is one of my favorite games of all time and MW4: Mercs isn't far behind although it didn't quite live up to the original. My main concern is oversimplification. The Mechwarrior games have always been arcadey sims with about 25% of the complexity of a serious sim, basically XWing...

You'll still be able to drive a stick in the self-driving electric car future, you'll just have to do it at a racetrack. Same as riding a horse after cars took over