Monday 15 August 2016

NO MAN'S LAND

I am conflicted.

Exactly like the reviewer in the link at the bottom.

This is over the game called No Man's Sky. Ugh .. in pain and there was a bit of a pause for an hour, lol.

Yeah I had been quite interested in the No Man's Sky reviews so was somewhat shocked when I saw streams and videos of game play from average customers going up a week before release, ten days for the PC release.

It turned out some copies were mistakenly sent out early and the next thing I knew I was hooked on watching other people play this game and that has never happened to e before.

I really wanted to play it ... sort of. I think there is the hook.

As someone with a big interest and fair knowledge of astronomy and very high knowledge of animals I found the game potentially intriguing. I still kind of do and I do very much want to play it.

Except the animal designs are not realistic, the planets are in far too close a proximity, you cannot fly close to the stars or in other words there aren't any and the NPC aliens are tied to the spot, do not walk around or even get out of their ships. The space stations look massive but have the same and stupidly designed interiors too.

In every other reality I would have walked away in disappointment and frustration.

But I still want to play it and have lost many hours watching others playing it. I thought that by continuing to do so the urge to play it would wane. But this failed to happen.

The only thing is that my health and finances have gone into some damned free-fall momentarily, or ta least I hope, and there is the little matter of Deus Ex coming out very soon!

Damn it!

Mind you today I have been in far too much pain to really care and the fact that I have now typed this for five minutes without running off, or rather limping off, in pain is a huge relief and I am only hoping that it is an end right now. Still .. it proved a theory of mine to be correct I have since ignored no less than three times. No doubts about it now and I have something to tell my GP this week!

It is a little strange that you can have all these animals running around on planets but not intelligent aliens. Except of course, when they occasionally fly overhead in the starships.

Oh yes and it did not help when there was a report that someone managed to navigate to the centre of the galaxy which contains 16 quintillion planets in just 30 hours?! Yikes!

People complained it was not multiplayer ...pffff multiplayer is crap, overblown, shallow and mostly ruined by have way, way too many idiots. I absolutely hate the fact that multiplayer is so focused these days and the only way I would play a game that is multiplayer would be co-op with some friends. Except I do not have any. Well none that play video games at all actually.

Saying that I watched others play No Man's Sky was not all good, some were dreadful to watch, onbviously really cccrap at gaming and were totally missing things on screen and walking right past valuable and needed resources. One even did all this, was a bid pilot but kept barking "Captain's Log" and similar sci-fi and Star Trek film like commands as he woefully played the game. I was like "God ... duuude?! Stop, just stop!" Lol.

Needless to say I had to turn some of them off. What I found bizarre was the number of views and subscribers they had! Madness! There really is no sense out there in a big way, lol. Either that or these bad ones were just getting a lot of 6 to 12 year olds following them that was interested in the game?

If it was not for Deus Ex Mankind Divided I would have purchased No Man's Sky. Oh that reminds me of one dude who was playing No Man's Sky but kept talking about Deus Ex coming up but kept calling it "Humanity Divided"? Lol, I think you were getting your titles a little muddled up there, buddy?

It has gotten a little hard to budget for anything lately as my payments have changed drastically and with my well known memory issues I cannot keep track of them and not sure when my next payment it because I simply cannot recall my last! I mean that very literally too. They call the memory issue Fibrofog and mine has been affecting me and gradually getting worse over the last 7 years or more. It might be closer to ten but was not that noticeable back then? I know I used to forget a lot way back then but used to just think it was normal. I had a friend who would always ask me if I had my keys, phone and other things if we were ever leaving my house from five years ago so others noticed it. I only realised I had this condition around two years ago when the condition of Fibromyalgia explained around several dozen things, a dozen of which were pains. The pain I have right now? I simply do not know until after tests.

So I have difficulty keeping myself occupied and am crying out for a damned playable game right now.

I just hope and pray that the imminent Deus Ex title is a lot longer and bigger than the last one?

Of course I am losing a lot of viewers though all this and potential subscribers.

Oh well ... just have to keep on planning and manoeuvring I guess?

Thursday 30 June 2016

THE RADEON RX480 THOUGHTS

Well the NDA has lifted.

I flicked through several reviews to see whats what.

Sounded in some as what was expected and stated by AMD while in others it did a little less and around and even see below a GeForce 970? Weird.

What was stranger still was the power draw of the RX480. Not normally something I looked at and only did because of the talk of efficiency I did spot a few graphs and something caught my eye.

In several I looked at I noticed the power draw to be above 150W and I thought the benchmarks were BS ... except I only ever look at sites with good reputations?!

The problem with this is that the PC-Express sockets are only rated at 75 Watts and the 6 pin connector is the same at 75 Watts. So how can the card be drawing more than 150 Watts? Then I thought that maybe with some motherboards they might be rated higher? But that certainly would not be the case with all of them.

Then I found that there was indeed an issue and as a result some people testing the cards were deciding not to overclock their test cards. I mean if your getting over 150 Watts already you do not want to tempt fate. I actually read a power draw of 200 Watt written somewhere, provided that was not BS.

Someone thought that nVidia might have rushed their 1070s and 1080s and I am beginning to think it might be the other way around? Or perhaps they were both trigger happy worrying about what the other one was going to do far too much?

This new generation of 16nm and 14nm chips is working out very bizarre this time around and far from straightforward. I hope nothing untoward happens with Zen.

Though saying that this is not necessarily a hug thing. Could turn out to be ... I mean that the extra wattage might be going through the 6 pin connector which may be able to handle it. As opposed to a dissolving motherboard?

They could simply add a power connector to the cards while ones purchased would have to be returned to manufacturers. But then most people are probably waiting for the cards from Asus, MSI, Sapphire and others, AIB, anyway that probably wont have this issue. Unless they have been silly too and been stock-piling the things up like AMD have done?

It still looks like a good card for the money ... though some tests have it close to a nVidia 980 while the odd one close to a 970. But it is good to see this level come down to the price point it is at. AFter all once everything has levelled out with supply the cost of cards lke these can only ever go downwards which means everyone benefits.

Anyway there is this link on Reddit that has a few details about the power draw ...

https://www.reddit.com/r/Amd/comments/4qfwd4/rx480_fails_pcie_specification/

Wednesday 22 June 2016

A SMALL BACKLASH

I am stating this is small as it appears to be thus far.

This may turn out to be something far bigger in time and mostly because most of the drooling people make the first few hundred comments because they cannot wait. Plus they do not mind bending over with their pants around their ankles to get what they are drooling over.

However due to the location of the link below I finally have something that shows that others are beginning to see that I stated bloody years ago.. yes, literally years.

Even as I am typing on my junk Roccat keyboard that keeps adding keystrokes I am thinking of the irony of all the ripping off that has and is going on.

Now I was not familiar with the prices of nVidia's 970 and 980 families of graphics cards so this was kind of lot on me.

I also want to state that I used to buy every issue of Custom PC magazine until I started noticing two things ...


  1. They were talking through their arses about what you can and cannot play games on which seemed to tally up nicely to the fact that ...
  2. Intel and nVidia tech was always praised, even when things surfaced later on about total bollocks going on with the tech. TIM, 5% increases in performance, 20% prices and other things
Now then...

I stated long ago that I stopped purchasing Custom PC Magazine and that despite the cover price being hiked beyond that of many books they were becoming biased to the point of lying.

Now they recently did a review of nVidia's 1080 and 1070 graphics cards, which I for one was disappointed in. VR performance was a big improvement ... everything else ... not so much no matter what reviewers say what ... they are blowing it out of their holes. The process node should have been better than this and some tests suggest it was a decrease.

Now the part I did not pick up on ... the prices were substantially higher than the cards they replaced, the 970 and the 980. Some have said this is not the case ... fuck ... off!

The other thing is that I thought immediately ... hang on a moment ... you pay for a wafer and that price is fixed ... so with smaller chip[s your getting way, way (no exaggeration here), way more chips per wafer than with the previous ones.

In theory this can mean that the cost of any one chip could be 50% to 70% that of the previous chips on the bigger process nodes. So how come the new cards have gone up by that same percentage?

Because they think we are are all idiots? Or because they think there are enough idiots to keep those selling at the overblown prices for at least 6 months to a year?!

Bot to my surprise on Custom PC's site a few commenters have pointed out this becoming obvious and not just with Custom PC Magazine. In fact they mention a number of the YouTube reviewers who are seen as the big guns on YouTube, like JaysTwoCents and LinusTechTips. Oh dear.

One asked why they had not seen one single mention of the high prices and that everyone gives the stuff the recommended and the extreme awards. They rightly point out that we are supposed to trust these guys to inform us honestly.

In some of the possible reasons in the comments there is the excuses that they have to rely on these vendors giving them stuff to survive ... well does that not then suggest that YouTube and Google are being totally unfair to YouTubers and Bloggers?!

Google? Unfair? Noooo, there's a surprise! The company that claims to be for the people, humane and fair?! Yeah, right.

So for me to see people actually saying this is like a breath of fresh air and relief that some more of the thinks I quote, claim and predict (albeit on another blog) has and is coming to light.

The other hilarious thing is that I was involved in a family argument for my Christmas because one family member who is into music tech believes all the crap they give out. Oddly it was about What Hifi Magazine and I pointed out that one review they printed was utter shit. Well blow me down if What Hifi does not go and get mentioned in the comments of the Custom PC Magazine website comments?!

I will have to bookmark that for a later date but will tell other family members that also thought the one I argued with was naive.

The only thing is this is small potatoes. I know it will take an inordinate amount of time for the majority to finally bloody realise that not only is this practice going on but has been going on for a very, very long time!

*SIGH*


Monday 20 June 2016

THE ORIGINAL MIRRORS EDGE

Well Mirrors Edge was another title I totally missed in my long sabbatical from PC games.

In fact I only learned of its existence when I read about the follow up, Mirror's Edge Catalyst, which intrigued me.

I was not entirely sure about this title, I have to tell you. This is because I have this rather annoying fear of heights, though I prefer to say fear of gravity and I have a theory on that like everything else.

That may sound ... well, weird but let me tell you it can and did translate over into games .. but not all games, curiously.

I had no problem in most titles or being up a mountain in Skyrim, for example. I did, however, get the shock of my life when my fear of heights kicked in climbing those ... umm beacons in FarCry 3!

Yup after the first couple I dreaded the damn things ... I still climbed them even though it got worse later on as they got more and more run-down and with segments and stairs, ladders missing. In fact I remember kudos to the programmers for actually making me feel I was up high, along with cursing them! Lol.

Dying Light was another one.

Other than these two titles I did not have much of a fear of the heights I was at and this is also true in the original Mirrors Edge.

As I was interested in Mirrors Edge Catalyst I did want to try this one out and play it through before playaing Catalyst and had to go for it when I saw it on Origin for a couple of quid! Was still £9.99 on Steam so I took the plunge and was looking for something else to keep me occupied anyway. Well in between going in and out of The Witcher 3 Wild Hunt to finish the last fifth to one quarter of the game that is.

My Plays.TV program seems to only work at less then half the time currently but it did record a few plays so I thought I might upload them to my YouTube account?

I am stuck on this part where after a fight with a runner you chase them. Firs off I got my arse handed to me several times before I changed my strategy. I then kicked their arse a dozen times before I wondered why it was taking so long and then saw their gun turn red. Oh, so to win I have to disarm them?! Yeah getting a kicking from me for an hour is no good, lol.

Chase them through a building and then you have to do this console like button sequence, I hope Catalyst is not like this, jump-turn to wall-jump, spin, jump, swing, jump, climb over then chase. Then bloody relieved I finally nailed it and then yo chase them a long way then run out of bloody time! I think just as I was at the end of the sequence too as they were standing in front of me?!

Rage quit?

Nahh, some swear words as I was pushed right back to that jump-jump-spin-undress and run naked, you know what I mean. Still tried it another dozen times, pulled it off to my relief .... later ran out of time again!

Then I rage quit!

LMAO!









On a funny note I have had these choice people saying some choice stuff because I took issue with games they love, got how bloody sad can you get.

It got better when one with a similar name to a sad twat I knew told me to fuck off and call me a loser and I ripped him one. He did not take the hint and sounded threatening as well as stating he had a better history of gaming than I did. So I gave him my history, tester for WAP for smartphones, interview with Pivotal Games for Desert Storm series and then told him I had gamed on Commodores VIC-20 and Amiga! Oh and he said I was being disrespectful to him for poking fun out of his English. That is before pointing out to him that he swore and called me a loser and therefore cannot speak to anyone else about being disrespectful.

They are so easy to wind up. I do like to wind them up and watch them go, though this one did not bite and his very last comment was 'That's nice!', lmao.

Good God how I hate idiots and especially when they are idiot fanboys! Grow the fuck up!

Another one took the piss, well a couple did, out of my Witcher 3 gameplay and me grumping about it and pointed out I was shit. Yeah except other than the fact it was on the hardest difficulty and they did not think to ask themselves this, the video was from May 2015 and it is now June 2016!

Obviously quite a few cannot bloody read either?!

LMFAO!

Tuesday 14 June 2016

MY E3 2016 THOUGHTS

Hmm been waiting for this and it has finally started ...

... I am still waiting for ... this.

So there has been the first few days of flurries of news and as per usual all the headlines in the links say "All this latest and most exciting games revealed here!" or something to that effect.

Umm, no.

So far I have seen some re-reveals and ... umm re-re-reveals?

Now let us see ...

XBox reveal that was not what we thought and a slim version coming in a few months and the more powerful rumoured one coming in a year?! Hmm yeeeah think that out paid to all the Polaris rumours as I now cannot see Polaris as we know it being used in a console that is still twelve months away?

Polaris is out imminently, more versions in a few months along with Vega between October 2016 and January 2017. By this time next year we would have had a whole gamut of Polaris and several Vega versions out and everyone will be talking and speculating about Navi.

Though they could go the dual Polaris route I guess by then?

Sony said nothing about their consoles despite Microsoft announcing two.

Still nice t have it confirmed even if I never took part in the slabs of plastic since the Atari 2600!

Games?

Mass Effect Andromeda ... again. More footage, looks good.

Battlefield 1 we knew about.

Ghost Recon Wildlands ... again.

For Honor ... again.

Horizon Zero Dawn ... again and not on PC anyway.

State of Decay 2 ... oh OK that looked cool ... but it is zombies ... yet again. Have they ran out of ideas? Lol.

Titanfall 2 we knew about but its single player makes it semi-interesting.

Dishonored ... again and this one I am waiting for.

Elder Scrolls 6 being worked on .... well, duh!

Elder Scrolls Skyrim ... again ... wait, what?!

Resident Evil 7 ... again ... but with a full name and probably not on PC.

Star Wars game we are still only aware of the fact it is a Star Wars game ... again.

FIFA 17 ... yawn! Wait ... it has a what?!

Madden ... at least I understand football ... sorry I mean soccer.

Quake ... again, oh cool but I think it will probably turn out to be Quake Arena ... again.

Prey ... again. Wait ... thought this was cancelled? Now it looks one of the two interesting games announced at E3 this year?

Gears Of War 4 again.

Was there a Gods Of War or something?

Scalebound ... again.

Dead Rising 4. OK sort of interesting and new but it is the 'Z' word for the millionth time.

Gwent... umm Gwent?! Running 750 watt system for a ... CARD GAME?! Yeah right, next!

Tekken ... YAWN!

Just Dance ... oh for the love of ...

Watchdogs 2 we knew about and hopefully will be better received than the last one?

Detroit Become Human again but looks damn interesting ... oooh wait ... yeeeah not on PC, lol.

Call Of Duty again, again, again.

Some interesting sounding VR titles like the Batman one and X-Wing.

Crash Ban... oh why bother, lol.

Farpoint I did not see much about ... probably a console exclusive?

Might have missed a few and I hope some people have at least been excited by the announcements but it has not really done much for me thus far.

Hopefully there might be one or two things before it finishes?

Sunday 5 June 2016

THE NEW AGE OF GAMES

Ugh!

I really am not up to typing this out as I am ill. I took receipt of two very nice Vape juices and within a couple of hours I was going down with my first does of the flu for a few years! Typical.

I have been wading through the Internet and YouTube as there are now announcements regarding AMD's Polaris, even brief one of Zen, and nVidia's Pascal coming thick and fast!

Only ... it has been a little odd, I am not the only one to have noticed and I am now wondering whether or not people are actually going to wake up to being fooled as well as being misled?

Basically nVidia announced there cards and everyone went nuts. Except I thought the cards sounded complete shite, many people missed an important point but some did spot it.

In fact I sometimes wonder to people's sanity and their own self proclaimed levels of intelligence as I have seen many arguments with the typical nVidia fanboys stating "The 1080 is 2.5 times the power of the 980!" Or they stated the 980Ti, cannot remember, does not matter ... because no it does not!

I wanted to chuckle each time someone then replied with "Nooo! It is 2.5x the performance in Virtual Reality, did you even WATCH the video?!" LMAO!

But then once corrected they are harping on about the actual 30% increase in power, so wwe have moved 150% to 30% or 2.5 times to 0.33 times the power.

Umm ... did anyone note the insane clocks?

A node shrink and insane clocks? I am sorry but I expected a fair bit more than that to be honest and I thought it would be in excess of 50% at the very least.

Oh yeah, and the node shrink? Absolutely everyone completely forgot about one other thing regarding node shrinks that it seemed nVidia forgot all about too?!

It wont be to scale but as an example 14nm is half the size of 28nm. They pay for the wafers used to grow chips so for the same money they get, theoretically but like I said not quite to scale, double thee amount.

This equates to being half the price of the previous equivalent chips. NOT far more expensive!

Yet there will be these morons that think themselves sooo smart that will fight tooth and nail to defend nVidia while being taken advantage of while their back is turned that they might as well bend over and drop their pants!

These same people were also bitching about AMD's Polaris chip and how it needs to be less than $300?! A chip no one has tested. Jesus Christ, do these people even HEAR themselves?! Do they even read back the utter tripe they type?!

So when I then saw a headline in a report that stated that AMD have just announced $200 for their Polaris 10 card I was ... taken aback and laughing like a drain! Hmm, why do we say that? Drains do not laugh, lol.

So all these morons would finally shut the hell up as the Polaris is not only cheaper than the £300 they harped on about but was a whole $100 cheaper than that? Umm ... welllllll .... noooo...

You see now what they are saying is that the card must be absolute shit to be priced that cheap ... despite the fact that AMD have clearly iterated and re-iterated many times that they were going to release the cards cheap, get VR to the masses and that everyone would be shocked.

Nope! The small minded fanboys who have no life popping off to anyone to get a rise out of them with all their spelling mistakes ad typos still troll around the Internet looking for someone or something they want to disagree with.

I will give you a little info ... I have lost count at the number of times I have wanted to reply and rip the living daylights out of these people and I ... resist. I think, no, no don't. They think they are smart but they are not and will not listen because they actually believe that their deductions are so good that they are both immediate and infallible. You cannot help nor educate people like that just let them go off and blow that same old trumpet.

All they succeed in doing is leaving one hell of a trail on the Internet that can be traced back for bloody eons proving over and over again that they are small minded fools.

But ... Polaris being $200? Wow, not even I expected that!

I am very interested to see how it benchmarks, with what drivers and if they are stable or not, as this might give us an insight into the faster cards from AMD coming between October and early 2017.

I like the idea of them moving the 'X' moniker to after the 'R' and doing away with the '9' and '7' as it was stupid and confused less tech savvy people. Oddly everyone is still expecting a Radeon RX-480X. Maybe a X Series Radeon RXX-480XXX? LMFAO.

I am expecting an RX-490 and two Fury cards and all based on Vega. You were told about Polaris 10 and 11 and have now been shown them and told when. Next is Vega.

I cannot remember now, was there a 470 mentioned?

I had noted that the compute units had dropped in number from the R9-390 which was interesting. I realised that there is a large area for increases in these CU's to 9 increase in number. A very large area and you just know that the top Vega will have more of them than thee Fiji chips? I feel pretty confident about this.

Hmm ... unless that ends up being the Navi chip?

At the end of the day they will both have to space out the increases in power, compute units and chip sizes until it is time to move on from both 14 and 16 nanometres and likely onto 10 nanometres?

Do this too quickly by competing too much and you end up with things being squeezed in without the proper engineering and you know what happens then, right? Things get too hot ... oooh wait a minute?!

Another things that everyone noticed very quickly was that when nVidia made their announcement o their 1070 and 1080 cards the Internet and YouTube was awash with them.

You could not move for all the videos and all the convenient memories of tech journalist fanboys, or on the payroll, for crap about how brilliant the 1070 and 1080 was. I was furious at the over use of the "2.5x" which was a load of shit and quite deliberately misleading.

AMD have an announcement and you would be doing damn well if you heard any of those same journalists so much as break wind!

Luckily and quite fortunately I was far from being the only one that noticed this.

Sorry but I think that being paid off is not only completely immoral it is the very basis for how corruption starts and is so rife. It is both expected and hated in equal measure and many times seemingly by equal amounts?

Now all I have to do is chew on my fingernails until October.

What's all that blood? Lol.

Wednesday 1 June 2016

THE QUALCOMM QUANDARY

I am a bit confused.

My smartphone, a Moto G, has need replacing for a fair old while now. It does not register calls quite often, nor texts, the glass has worn patches and the battery ... hmm the battery? Sometimes it goes all night and seems to use no power at all and can be 90% full the next morning and other times it runs out completely?!

Madness.

This morning it was completely off and switched itself on?! Something that should be impossible and this has never occurred with me before with any of my phones, tablets, laptops or desktop computers.

Immediately made me think of how they have stated that those agencies that would spy on you can actually turn your phones on. When I heard this I thought it was pure hogwash. Yes they could turn things on and off as long as your phone was on, like listening in on the microphone or watching things your camera lens can see, but not turn it on when it is actually off!

Anyhoo ...

I now have two extra cameras that can link up to my phone and along with the fact it has become erratic in its behaviour and decides whether or not to register or even let through phone calls and texts I am limited to 8GB of memory and no SD Card slot.

There are lots of apps I had previously for cycling, maps and all manner of things. But I had to keep this to a minimum. I also used to use my main phone for recording things too. Cannot do that on the Moto G as it dos not have the memory.

So I need something that is waterproof, has far bigger memory, SD card slot and with a better battery.

I have had an eye on a Moto X Force and this is the only one that does everything I want it to...

Except...I am hearing that thee SnapDragon 810 processor tends to overheat, though idiots blame Motorola for this and it is not their fault.

So I looked for the 810's replacement as it might end up running cooler as well as more powerful and this could be combined with a shrink in the chip's lithography.

Enter stage left the SnapDragon 820 ... umm ... except ...

I was just reading a weird report that both shocked me and then confused me and it amazes me these journalists get paid to write some of their stuff.


  • First off whereas the SnapDragon 810 is an Octa-Core chip, it has 8 cores or processors in one, the follow up 820 is only a quad core?!
  • They state that they have gone backwards, first I have ever known this to happen in tech, as it will run cooler and the operating systems and apps were not coded to run on a core or two?!

Do you see the deliberate mistake here? It does not add up! Because ....

  • Either they are telling the truth, apps and OS's were only running on a couple of cores in which case the chip is utter tripe as it was overheating therefore you were paying for an octa-core chip that actually did not even qualify as a hexa-core, 6 cores, chip. (i.e. over heating with 2 or 4 cores means it is not capable of running as a 6 or 8 core CPU)
  • They are lying and I have only just discovered recently that Mediatek have a 10, yup that is TEN, core chip! This suggests they are indeed lying.
  • At the end of the day each process running in the background will use a core and for me it is not unusual to have 3 or 4 apps running and the operating system, Android/iOS/Windows, to run on an absolute minimum of 2 cores and should use 3 or 4
  • Full Windows and other Operating Systems like Linux and MacOS and software like that used in 3D Modelling, like 3D Studio Max and Soft Image will use as many cores as you can throw at them ... LITERALLY!
  • What is going on as the above have done this for a decade and yet I ma hearing gamers constantly state you do not need more than 2 cores, I disagree on that number, and now SnapDragon claiming phones only using a couple of cores?!

CRAP!!

Now what do you do?

Sorry but concurrent programming is not impossible, it might be difficult but that is why they earn the big bucks, and has been going on for whet feels like a lifetime and in a few years may well be.

If, however, you have a load of new programmers/coders that do not have the tech know how but produce a slow app, game or programme but want the money that 'AAA' and Professional stuff commands ... sorry but, NO!

When they do this and then try the pay to win or use crap I really get irate and want to contact them and call them some choice names while ripping the crap out of their abilities, lmao.

Hopefully I will find out what the truth is before long, figure out if I need to look at Mediatek's ten core chip, as I am fed up with phones slowing down or looking like crap after 5 minutes.

Good God, finding a phone that is suitable is worse than ever!

I wouldn't mind but I do not even have anyone to bloody well phone! LMAO!

I liked the sound of WileyFox, Honor 7, Huawei's latest ones ... oooh wait is that the Honor? Lol. Motorola with the Moto X's and I have always loved LG's flagships ... just that they are not waterproof.

Samsung Galaxy S7? Yup, nice but like iPhones its an idiots amount of money! Those phones should be no more than £400 as that is all they are worth and cost a little over a qaurter of their asking price to be made.

I hhave stated before I am not a gig fan of Apple's stuff either, except their laptops albeit still overpriced.

To me Apple eis a fashion item and your paying them for the name. Sorry but only a self lobotomy what allow me to pay over the tops money by almost double the amount so that I have the word 'Apple' printed on it somewhere.

I think iOS is bland and dated looking too. Just an app tray and I have seen friend's phones with dozens and dozens of apps and it looks an absolute mess. When helping them with their phones its a nightmare trying to locate apps on the phones, lol.

As the memory gets bigger this will obviously get worse still.


http://www.trustedreviews.com/opinions/snapdragon-820-vs-snapdragon-810

Tuesday 24 May 2016

THE VIRTUAL REALITIES

It has started.

Yet another huge company that should know better has made the age old mistake and thinks itself so big and soo superior that it can do anything where its customers are concerned and thinks everyone is too stupid to think for themselves and go with it?

I was sent a notification via Flipboard that Oculus Rift had started using a DRM, more of what they want on your headset that is NOT relevant to your gaming experience, in the Rift VR headset.

Apparently it turns out that people with a HTC Vive have been playing Oculus titles on their headset, which I had not heard of previous to be honest.

Well is not selling the software what it is all about? I'm confused.

Years and years and likely decades have people complained about a dodgy port of a game going from a console to the PC. History is littered with famous titles and that recent Batman Arkham Knight being a prime example.

But here we have software that works across platforms and they are slamming the door on this?!

Umm ... is not the aim of the game right now to make Virtual Reeality and the headsets the next big thing? Yeeeah locking people out of software and games is going to help bundles, you absolute blithering idiots!

EDIT: Apparently Oculus was first quoted as saying that if their software gets modified to play on other systems it will not mind. So a one eighty has been performed by them!

Here is another link reporting on that story with the contradictions I mentioned by Oculus themselves on Slash Gear.

http://www.slashgear.com/oculus-locks-out-vive-users-with-new-drm-20440933/

Sunday 22 May 2016

CRYSIS 2 ON MY SYSTEM

It is funny really because as I play through Crysis I find it hard to believe that the company went south for the winter.

Yes it may have been a bit linear but it was such fun to play and look at.

Except...I am going through this one in a pretty quick time and I think I should have picked a harder setting? Many times I reach the ammo pick up points I am already full.

I had thought I had played through this one but then as I played I thought I had not. Then I reached a large room in a roof where you get three gunships and a load of guys on the roof and it seemed somewhat familiar.

I do have these memory issues that have plagued me for years. I could never understand how or why I was so forgetful and for years it got me into various problems until I discovered I had a condition called Fibromyalgia Syndrome which itself causes dozens and dozens of problems from painful area anywhere to embarrassing or irritating conditions as well as a memory problem that has its own name...Fibrofog.

So yeah its explained these days but still damned infuriating.

The only bit that was familiar was that roof section in that guy's lab. After this section it has gone back to being unfamiliar, lol.

Now I do remember starting and playing the third title but I am ... pretty sure I did not play that very far before taking it off. Probably because the AMD APU on its own was struggling and I did not want to turn the graphics down to uninstalled it until I got a dedicated card. Probably forgot all about the game, so that will be next.

I do not know why but Raptr failed to record the first half dozen times I played it and I changed it over to manual and it would not start.

Then bizarrely and out of the blue ... it started recording on this play-through.

Now I am still on the AMD A10-7850K and a Radeon R9-280, non-X, with this being designed to last me until I build another system. This next system will come around the end of the year and will be a Zen based system with as many cores as they release and a Vega GPU. Most likely.

You never know I could end up with an nVidia GPU. Or it is even possible it could be a surprise Intel CPU they might bring out that does not force you to sell your house? Lol.


Thursday 19 May 2016

SHINING POLARIS & PASCAL IMMINENT

Yeeeaah...funny times and goings on at the moment.

I have been perusing through webpages and expecting some benchmarking to come up of the imminent GPUs from both AMD and nVidia but not much has come out.

Ohh much has been said, that is sure enough, but nothing has come out.

The first thing I noticed was nVidia's surprise and knee-jerk reaction to all the talk about AMD's Polaris and some big claims were made. Only they weren't.

'Its got double the speed of that and this amount of power compared to this' was stated a lot. Except it was not quite how it was put across.

There is no doubt that it is way too early to call anything yet but what nVidia stated themselves was that the only way you were going to see these massive boosts in performance and that was if you already had or planning to purchase imminently a Virtual Reality headset. Oh and that those threee short sentences about the nVidia 1070? What was up with that? Weird.

Many got so giddy headed that they failed to note that the up and coming nVidia 1080 GPU was around 30% up on the nVidia 980Ti. Yeah that is good ... ish. It certainly is not double!

In the red corner you have the fans by the ring side giving up theories of the advancement in power of the imminent AMD Polaris 10 GPU. Also predicting whether or not these cards will be Radeon 480's with the 'X' prefix or not and that the 480 will be as fast as the Radeon 390.

Some are saying more.

I will go on record to state I am going to side with the 'more' camp and that a fraction over a Fury card might be the case.

This is a big lithography jump and if you say that Pascal is a shrunk Maxwell card and has 30% then you can say that the new node brings 30% improvements. Except, no in AMD's case.

Because they have changed and added several things to the GCN GPUs.

They themselves have stated it is the biggest jump n their history. They are not stupid enough to repeat what happened with bulldozer which was more than many tech journalists made out anyway. Ergo, you can game on an AMD A10-7850K APU. Simply stating that you cannot game on said chip is quite simply untrue.

The same is true of the FX chips but yes they did not turn out quite as I had envisioned. I thought the very idea was sound but went wrong in the process somewhere. I also put it down to desperation because, and as I stated, the new node shrinks were taking longer than they had previously.

This even put Moore's Law on the brink of collapse, though he only stated it would last ten years and was a great prediction.

We are now on the brink of an amazing 6 months of tech gold and then some!

Two GPUs with Pascal and Polaris and then there is Zen. Throw in the node shrink and it is all good, though I am very interested indeed in the latter two from AMD. Am interested in Pascal, do not get me wrong but would be more so had they announced loads of core level changes as AMD have done.

Then there will be the HBM 2 chips and everyone keeps stating that it wont be ready until September? Err yeeeah that is HBM 2. What about HBM 1? This is just a die shrink after all which is not what HBM 2 is. Not in my opinion but I could be wrong here. These are on top of the GPUs when they are grown, so surely the same HBM is the same lithography and I see HBM 2 as having other things improved. Like the interconnects? Maybe higher stacks?

The way I see it is that the one I am more interested in waiting for, which is AMD's Vega though I am also interested in say a 1080Ti or a Titan Z and what they can do, Vega is the one I am likely to be if my theories are correct and I have read everything right?

Oh and Vega in October?! *CHOMP-CHOMP-CHOMP* Feck it! No fingernails!

Deus Ex Mankind Divided in August, Radiohead album out imminently and I even had an extra album not long ago from my very much loved Pink Floyd. Another Amused to Death style album from Roger Waters and I think I just might die this year?!

LMAO!

Oh...my...god and then there are the movies!

Oh and the Blu-Ray releases like Batman v Superman and all the info about Justice League that will come out? Doctor Strange.

Possibly a surprise Mass Effect release and I am even seeing rumours about Elder Scrolls VI Argonia and a possible release or announcement?! WHAT?!?!

Oh-oh-oh and then there are the Playstation Neo and XBTwo announcements?! Awww I can't call it X-Bone any more? Oh darn it!

So much is going to be occurring I am not sure if I will be able to keep up?!

Where did I PUT those damned blood pressure pills?!

THE CHIPPED DIAMOND

Purely by chance and I do not know how but I came across a little article about the future of the silicon, or not so silicon any more, processor.

I was looking up the history of the humble Marshmallow as I have been thinking about it and it must be named after a plant. I wanted to know how and why, lol. I have a pack of Mega Mashmallows right next to me, I wont get into the incident with The Bag Police at the Tescos in Enfield, lol.

Long story short I am eating them as I got into vaping and was introduced to The Marshmallow Man flavour by Joshua at the local London Vape Co. So I was thinking of Marshmallows, lol.

I miss my days from Middlesex University when we used to speak in great depth how both CPUs and GPUs were made. It was sixteen years ago, JESUS, and even back then we knew that as the lithography of microchips got smaller there would be problems.

It was commonly known that due to the impurities of the Silicon itself that getting it down towards a certain point would be hard and its limit was theorised at around 10nm, or nanometres.

In an exact play through of those predicted difficulties CPUs and GPUs have taken longer this time around to go from 28nm to 16nm.

This is the reason why in the past I have been critical of computer tech journalists going nuts over a GPU card that squeezes a tiny bit more ability from it for astronomical amounts of money.

Some companies had the resources to get there somewhat sooner than the others. Before long the materials of Silicon Carbide and Gallium Nitride become commonly used and the transistors themselves had to change.

Now for a very ... VERY long time I have not kept abreast of these developments and I do not have access to a copy of New Scientist every time it s published, as we did at university.

So as I started out this post saying ... I happened across this blog called Chemical & Engineering News where a journalist is speaking to a man carrying diamonds. Not a deal, smuggler or even blood diamonds as these diamonds are grown. On a wafer, or we getting there yet?

It seems a company is keen on using grown diamonds to put across an idea. An idea that involves growing diamond on top of silicon because of its vastly superior thermal conductivity which is 22 times greater than silicon. He believes that eventually grown diamond will replace silicon altogether.

That is a truly bold and astonishing claim!

What with this diamond microprocessor and graphene it seems the very common substance that makes up all living things and commonly abundant, carbon, has some very, very startling qualities.

Sitting there right under our noses this whole time and we did not think to look!

I only hope that the fact that the element of carbon can become graphene is certain instances that it stands to reason that other elements may all have their own situations where there qualities and abilities change radically?

Why you don't think there is just one magical element in in the periodic toolbox, do you?

I wonder what will be first in this instance, a GPU or a CPU?

He himself thinks something along the lines of a Pentium CPU in a five year period? Interesting.

http://cen.acs.org/articles/94/i20/diamond-power-future-electronics.html

Wednesday 18 May 2016

RETURN OF THE WITCHER ... 3 WILD HUNT WARRIORS

Well after a long hiatus ... finishing Sniper Army Zombie Hoard .. thingey 2 in a couple of evenings and Metro 2033 deciding to not work any longer and exiting the game to its main menu without warning ... I have finally gone back to The Witcher 3 Wild Hunt and walked away from a fight with a beat that is 8 levels higher than me!

Taking time to get back to using those controls and I am also having some issues ... I do not know if something was updated on the game that has slowed it down, or something on my system, like Raptr?

Used Raptr before and was not a problem but as you can see from the videos below ... it is laggy and it has been driving me nuts!

No rest for the wicked!

Note that in the second video I am trying to save this guy while all these Wild Hunt Warriors and their dogs attack and I go through dozens of them and then ... DIE?!

They just keep respawning! I even wondered whether or not this chap was supposed to die, as this is a flashback being told by the guy I am trying to save who has been ... well bought back from the dead?! LMAO!

That was a slick ride though!




Saturday 14 May 2016

PLAYING METRO 2033 REDUX

Well that Sniper Nazi Zombie Army game was meant to last me until Homefront The Revolution and maybe even until Deus Ex Mankind Divided.

Three days later I finished it.

Sorry but I really cannot come to terms with the fact that a £30 plus game only lasts me a couple of evenings. I had thought after buying Fallout 3 a couple years back that short games like this were a thing of the past?

Mind you I say that but my very much loved Deus Ex Human Revolution only took me several nights on the second go at it.

So now I see Metro 2033 Redux on special offer of a silly couple of quid! It was one I always wanted to play so I got it! If it does not take me more than a few days at least I have the follow up, Metro Last Light, waiting for me to buy it.






Sunday 8 May 2016

MORE NAZI ZOMBIES

Been playing this Sniper Nazi Zombie Army 2 game and am stuck on a section designed for co-operative play.

What is annoying is that often I get near the end but get taken out by those hard zombies with machine guns that seem to need being shot a dozen times before they go down!

Or I get done by the suicide zombies with the grenades just before the machine gun toting zombie appears!

Still, it is fun despite the old looking graphics.

Collision detection is garbage and hopefully the next ones will have less linearity.

I will be keeping an eye out for the fourth version of these Sniper games as well as that Sniper Ghost Warrior 3 game, or its predecessor, though it still seems to be full price for some reason?


Here is the video of me starting off playing the game, in case you missed it or I forgot to post it, lol ...


Saturday 7 May 2016

SNIPER 2 ZOMBIE ARMY STARTING OUT

I have gotten really bored with the PC gaming titles I have on my computer and am really waiting around for Homefront The Revolution, if the reviews are good, and mainly Deus Ex Mankind Divided.

Every now and then I kept wading through Origin, Steam and UPlay and the odd visit to my Game Store for something to turn up but could not find anything that peaked my interest. Or at least anything that took me longer to play than it does to take a piss?!

Sorry but things like Call of Duty are OK but simply do not last anywhere near long enough for the money they charge and even at cut down prices I ... hesitate and then decide, no.

Outside of Call of Duty 4 Modern Warfare that is and with the bad reviews they get. I simply do not understand how they sell as well as they do? I mean always the top seller when all they have had since that title is really crap scores?

Do not get me wrong...I can lay claim to buying and playing the very first two titles when they came out, unlike most people and I remember them well, and with fondness. Since then I have only ever read about them via other that have played the titles. So very short games with very bad scores.

I onlly purchased Call of Duty 4 because it got very good scores.

Still way to short.

So I ended up seeing Sniper 2 Zombie Army on a special offer and just a couple of pounds and thought that would keep me busy for a few weeks.

Well in the evenings that is as I have a new fandangled Nikon camera to keep me very busy during daylight hours, if the weather is good.

Anyway here is a video of my first hour or two of playing the title and getting to grips with its very ... differentness! Lol.




Friday 6 May 2016

THE NEW PHOTOGRAPHIC TOOL NIKON P900

After a long, long wait and my Sony Cybershot being technically broken for about 6 months I have finally gotten around to replacing it!

My Sony has a 50x zoom, which I cannot use anything close to any longer and has now been relegated to being permanently attached to a tripod for filming in the house. As short range it can still manage to do.

After an arduous journey and battle with London's public transport, some stupid mistakes and several times where I had to stop and hand near my pocket to grab my phone and call for an ambulance, I managed to somehow struggle through it and find the camera!

Rather oddly I had left the address behind of the Camera World store I was aiming for and though I knew its rough location I was a bit worried about ending up in hospital so headed for faithful old Jessops!

Before even exiting the station at Russell Square on the way there I was slumped against a wall on a staircase!

Only when I got to where Jessops was the last time I was in there ... it was not there!

That is the other problem with Fibromyalgia ... memory problems! I had forgotten to take the address to Camera World with me and never thought of checking to see if Jessops was still at the location it was when I was last in the in New Oxford Street! Dumb-arse!

I do not know if the slumping against the wall ore the burning, tingling feelings I had for thirty minutes afterwards was anything to do with Fibromyalgia, lack of blood pressure pills or something else? Or just an unfit bastard? Was a bit rough though, which means a lot of i say that.

Walking up Oxford Street instead of heading back into Tottenham Court Road, where some loom directed me, I walked past some scaffolding and there was a PC World! I know, I know I have had a refurbished item from them and it could have happened again. But I just wandered in just to see if they had a display one. They did. It was huge!

I saw an older gentleman who looked Indian standing  looking miserable. I got the impression he might not be happy as all the younger sales people probably intercepted any sales and I asked "Well you look like your not doing much?"

After initial shock someone asked him something and walking him tot he camera I asked if they had any in stock. They did. He got the box out, I checked for any seals over the lid of the box, dead give-away to refurbished items, and there were none.

Often there are these little seals that are clear but when pulled off say the word 'void' in gold that magically appear.

I had these on three Nikon cameras I bought a few years back from Argos. Nikon do not put any seals on their box and Argos swore blind they did not do it and stated it was Nikon. Wrong.

I also had an Olympus camera that went wrong in a line of consecutively received and amounting to four cameras from Argos.

I had one professional Corsair Vengeance Keyboard with a large dent in the aluminium base plate from PC World, just in case you were wondering. Oddly the Roccas Ryos keyboard I exhhanged that one for and around 8 months down the line started missing keystroke now and then and also adding one, or even bloody two extra keystrokes! So I guess we can safely take a stab in the dark about where that came from?

To be fair the Sony Cybershot came from PC World and that was new. It ias also the only thing that I have bought that has worked flawlessly for well over two years until it got dropped on its head and it still works to a degree!

Anyhoo ...

Thought you would like to see the new camera?

Nikon Coolpix P900 ....


Thursday 21 April 2016

WITCHER 3 - IMPOSSIBLE INSECTOID ... CRAB ... BOSS ... THINGEY!

LMAO!

So ... I went back to The Witcher 3 ... forgotten all the controls it had been so long and forgot about this!

Then I remembered why I had stopped playing it last time!

I clearly am not levelled up enough to beat this large Insectoid or crab like creature ... but ... I am bloody stubborn and would have given it fifty attempts and then exited the game with no interest go go back and try again. Well on the last fifty attempts that is, lol.

I think now I remember I quite the game to keep the upload small to show I am back in this game and will have to go to an earlier save before we go off to kill this thing.

The problem is I am thinking this was a mission I started and at the same time pointing out another problem, along with the tiny effects I have had on this creature, did get its life energy down to 50% at my best attempt, that ... wizard, or whatever he is, stands their attacking it for ages and has no effect on the creature whatsoever.

That's a bit pants to be honest, lol. Might as well not even be there!

Still, I will go to an earlier save, which I really hate having to do, and try and get back into this and remember where I am, what missions I had to do, where in the story I was and recall the controls, lol.

Well it has been longer than 6 months since I played it last, I did not even expect to be at home, or in the same home, about now.

And remember ... I have memory problems ... and do not take that as me being STUPID as that is not what it means.

As you can see from my other videos or my fourteen blogs ... I have a degree in applied computing and am expert in herpetology, batrachology, ichthyology, orhidaceae, astronomy, astrophysics and I even know Wing Chun.

Lol, too many people, trolls and fanboys are far too quick to make immediate assumptions about people on the Internet and I would rather just try and avoid all that up front. LMAO!

I completed Deus Ex Human Revolution again, hoping it would last me up until Mankind Divided in August, or close. But I whizzed through it far quicker than I expected too and wish I had upped the difficulty on it?!

I think I uploaded some Deus Ex stuff?

Darn it!!

I notice now my earlier prediction of the Nintendo NX is having unconfirmed leaks appearing that it is to use AMD's Polaris. Hearing this about the PS4.5 thing and the XBOne.5 too.

Well if I recall they did state when they designed the PS4 and XBOne that they did so with the idea of upgrading being easier. I did think of them improving it but thought it more likely they were talking about backwards compatibility with the PS5 and XBTwo with the previous generations for the older games.

But I also did state that in my opinion they sounded well under powered too.

All this has to do with the fact that the previous generations had been out a very long time and the chip lithography shrinkage, node shrink/chip shrink, from 28 nanometres to 16 and 14 nanometres was way, way later than previous in arriving. Unless you went solely to Intel for CPUs, way over priced, and GPUs, way underpowered, for your chips.

Yeah right, lol, no one in their right minds would do that, especially wanting to sell the machines/consoles for well under £500. You can pay double that just for a decent, not half decent but decent, Intel CPU. For me that is an 8 core, Core i7. A four core and eight thread CPU would be a half decent one in my book. But the prices! OK to begin with bit pricey but they have stayed high ...

..or at least will until AMD's Zen 6, 8 and 16 core CPUs arrive and then it will go mad for about 6 months to two years!

Surprised that the AM4 motherboards have not appeared on retail listings as they were meant to arrive in March and it is now mid April.

I could regurgitate everything that is said or leaked on here but I am not going to do that. I absolutely hate it when people and websites do that and I am always seeing the same crap over and over. If I hate it then I simply will not do this myself.

The latest seems to suggest that the Polaris chips will arrive around June or July time and Zen around October to November time?

I fully expect that these chips will be faster than the 390's by some margin. I also expect that Vega with HBM2 will arrive around December to February at the latest and will be so fast that we will have to pick up our chins?!

I fully expect a big improvement from nVidia but reading between the lines it seems likely that they will be a step behind AMD this time around? Likely not far behind but behind is what I expect them to be.

As totally natural for nVidia's Pascal to be fairly swifter than their old cards, plus rumour of them ceasing Maxwell production, along with AMD's confidence and string of design wins, companies all lining up to use Polaris and Vega, is why I am expecting old 390's to be eating the dust of Polaris 10 and 11.

I still want to wait for Vega though to pair with a 16 or 8 core Zen, whichever the larger core count turns out to be.

Though I wont be using an APU this time around I am also very interested to see an APU using Zen along with what graphics they use on the chip, how it pairs up with a graphics card on Crossfire along with all the heterogenous compute stuff, which is improved over previous APU's and I would like to see this fully exploited to see what it can do?

Imagine an AMD APU with 8 Zen cores and also able to use the cores from the integrated GPU for normal computing tasks?! I wonder if we will ever see 16 Zen cores and an integrated GPU?!

Ooh would you look at that? I have dribbled all over my keyb ... *


Friday 8 April 2016

THE COMING OF THE NEXT GENERATION

Well it's been quiet on the news front.

Well that is if you don't count the announcement that AMD AM4 motherboards were going on sale in March, umm last month, which every single computer tech site religiously copied.

Then there was the site claiming to have benchmarks for an engineering sample of AMD's next generation, in everything way, CPU called Zen. I then couldn't help but check the date and she enough it was the 1st April!

The aforementioned websites of course then copied said website and everyone was reporting it.

Supposed to be tech journalists? What tossers.

What's hilarious is that they all copy each other and then can't help themselves blowing their I own bugles when the copied report turns out to be correct. Don't mention when they got it wrong though, funny that.

What makes the April fools joke a pain is that for at least a week the pages reporting this keep coming up in the first few pages of search results. Morons keep commenting on it so many keep coming up for weeks! Great!

Annoyingly they also don't take the effing pages down either, click baiting much?

But it's getting ever closer to many early presents appearing what with Deus Ex Mankind Divided with AMD's GPU Polaris arriving just prior or about the same time. Then shortly after AMD's Zen should appear finally and by that time the new m.2 and NVMe drives should be hitting a good place and price?

Hopefully by this time some more games should have been announced, maybe even some being coded with the next generation graphics cards in mind?

Oh course there is nVidia's Pascal GPU and HBM should be getting somewhere by then. Perhaps AMD's Vega GPU won't be too far behind all of these things?

They seem to be starting off late that it will be Vega that will have HBM 2.0 and be the replacement to AMD's Fiji graphics cards?

I'm hoping for some serious competition between AMD and nVidia on the graphics card front and AMD and Intel on the CPU front?

That would be cool! Very, very cool!

Also mouth watering from Intel, for once in a blue moon, was that new Xeon CPU with 22 cores and 44 threads, I think it was. I think the price was in the region of $4,000 though?!

Cor blimey! Nice though!

Now if I can just pick out the six winning numbers on the lottery one week!

I can remember drooling over single core chips and Intel having dual CPU socket motherboards! Now you can get 22 cores on a single chip!

Now with the die and node shrink shook we need for done very good time I'd for AMD to push the envelope beyond 8 cores on the consumer front and ... well, oh boy what good times will roll.

Probably won't happen immediately but it won't take much or very long for a rush between the two of them to outdo reach other on the consumers front.

Wasn't interested in any Intel chips, I don't believe what they report as it's shite, but that Xeon ... ooooh boy, lol.

Now just counting down the months until some engineering sample benchmarks start appearing.

Funny as we have not had much in the easy of excitement but now we are looking at 4 or 5 chips, at least, over the next 6 to 8 months. Polaris, Vega, Zen, Pascal and whatever Intel will introduce as a knee jerk to Zen? They, Intel, have to do it, you just know they will.

Let the good times roll!

Tuesday 5 April 2016

COMPLETING ALIEN ISOLATION

Well after an eight month hiatus, give or take a month or two, I got back to the Alien Isolation game and getting past an annoying part early on suddenly I found myself progressing a great deal better than I was before.

Except in a few places, lmao!

But I had the determination of getting past these parts thanks to the realisation it was not going to be like that first part every step of the way.

Plus I picked up on a couple of things too.

SO here are a few videos ...

Annoying Synthetics

Leaving Sevastopol Part 1

Leaving Sevastopol Part 2

Last Survivor Complete

Thursday 17 March 2016

THE APPROACHING NEW ERA

Well it has been awhile since I typed anything out about the up and coming CPUs and GPUs.

But then I really do not like to use every excuse to publish something, like many like to do, and then harp on for the first couple of paragraphs explaining how I had previously stated this with a series of dates that go back a year or two, YAWN!

I always check though and have a read around once or twice a week, though sometimes I leave it a couple of weeks so that news and rumours can build up.

So at the moment it is looking like AMD's Polaris is going to be with us in a couple of months time and thankfully their Zen processor in October, see? I ... SNIP!

This is great news and better still seems to be the buzz about them. The lower power draws for Polaris 10, as they are naming it, sound absolutely great as does that being predicted for Zen.

The latest seems to be projecting an 8 core Zen releasing in October of this year, 2016, but I am still expecting something with a larger core count than 8 and purely because of the 14nm Finfet lithography they are using. This is not merely just a shrink but, as I understand it to be, a stacking too.

So if you can make an 8 core processor on 28nm you can make a 16 on 14nm, theoretically though the size may have to alter slightly.

Now start to stack them?

I would imagine that in the first versions the stacking may only be usable if done once, but later on with some refinement may stack three layers high, with luck. So HBM memory could go on the third layer, which I would wager is what the Zen+ turns out to be? We will see.

The only thing I worry about is that the consoles will hold back many game developers from utilising this extra power ... unless ... the Nintendo NX, fingers crossed, uses these new Polaris GPUs or that the XBOne can be upgraded, via a plug in graphics card. Microsoft have alluded to as much and lets be honest, Sony had that Vaio Carbon laptop several years ago that had that separate GPU in a box ... umm, thingey! Lol.

As they are meant to be so similar it stands to reason that the Playstation 4 can probably be upgraded graphics chip wise too? Umm, it is Sony!

Of course I am simply going to have to build one!

My only worry is that I build an 8 core Zen PC build only to have them release a 12 or 16 core Zen chip two or three months later?! Grr! Maybe when Zen is finally released we would have found out whether or not a higher core count Zen will release in early 2017?

I also note that in the wake of Polaris things were at first quiet on the nVidia front but then a flurry of information started to surface.

It is times like this that puts credence in both the new info, nVidia, to that previously released, AMD, as one is seen as a knee-jerk reaction to the other releasing details. At least that's one of the techniques I have used to separate the wheat from the chaff, and I do so hate chaff.

It will be such an interesting time to see what Zen, Polaris and Pascal can do and of course added to this will be Intel's own knee-jerk reaction to AMD's releases. So if you think that the second half of 2016 is going to be both mad and exciting, well just wait until the first half of 2017!

For me the Intel chips have done bugger all in the way of progression and added to that they have remained artificially high, some VERY high, with the higher core count chips of 6 and 8 cores. This is so bloody typical of Intel of old and it seemed like forever back in the day to go from a 386 to a 486 CPU, the two chips that preceded the Pentium, which was in essence the 586.

Though I use an AMD A10-7850K right now I will be building with a solely Zen CPU core next time around. The highest core count they release or at least intend to release between October 2016 and probably March 2017, if my nerves can hold out that long.

Saying that I am still interested in what APUs they will be releasing using the Zen cores along with what they will do with the GPU side of the APU. I mean to think of something as could be as powerful as a R9-380 or a Maxwell in an APU? Maybe if it turned out to be better still these could have a dramatic effect on the Virtual Reality headsets also releasing over similar time frames to all these other chips.

I like the idea now, finally, of having a really small form factor PC that can do everything I ask of it and store everything I ask of it and do tasks in a fraction of the time they do now? Oooh.

Also about that time 4K might be becoming commonplace and in so doing mobile telecoms companies and other IP providers will have to up their speeds and stop screwing the public for simply looking at a few webpages and downloading a few small files.

Tech simply has to keep up with tech. But they are such lamentable human beings and completely greedy that I think it will take an uproar from customers and government then forcing them before they do this.

A 4GB download limit was utterly laughable when I first saw them set the figure several years ago, now beyond ridiculous and soon to be 'way out there' ridiculous.

Monday 11 January 2016

THE CORRUPTION AND THE IDIOTS

I spent a very long time tonight reading an argument that went on forever in the comment section of a YouTube video that points out that gaming developers and publishers have been lying to the public for several years.

In this instance it is UBI Soft, oh surprise surprise, but they are all now doing it.

This chap points out that a game called The Division now looks a lot worse than the videos we were shown a year or two beforehand.

Now before this happened with a title called Watchdogs and as it turns out has happened several times since then. I noted it with The Witcher 3 also.

Now this argument started because of a couple of console fanboys that sounded like children, though one tried to insist he was in his thirties or more, did not like what the guy was pointing out in his video. Except ... he was merely telling and showing the truth. A bit like what I do on my corruption blog.

A couple of PC gaming people tried to point out what they were saying to him and that these next gen consoles were not as powerful as they first made them out to be.

Now you may have to look back on here but I certainly thought the specifications published before release looked surprisingly underwhelming and now they are proving to be the case.

PC gamers are pissed because they have spent large amounts of money on vastly overpriced graphics cards that tech journalists and gaming journalists also surprisingly talk up. Added to this another subject I see mentioned a great deal, 60 frames per second and higher, also cropped up.

It went on for absolutely ages. At one point one person pointed out it had gone on for several weeks!

But one of the defenders of the consoles became completely stupid and was quite obviously not taking things on board and kept sinking down to name calling and insulting.

This got so bad and so obvious that another console gamer that realised the truth came on, pointed out he was a console gamer and that this other guy...sorry, kid making out he was a middle aged man should not e arguing, that it has been obvious for a time that the console gamers were lied to from day one and be quiet. Surprise, surprise he did not get reacted to because he could not throw words like 'PC gamer' in his face.

Then a bunch of people came on at the end and pointed out just how corrupt and greedy Sony and Microsoft were, surprise, surprise once again, at cheating people and misinforming them about their hardware and then getting developers to make videos of upcoming games that look better than they will in the end to get people to buy the consoles.

I had never even thought about it that way, but then I have never bought a console machine.

There was a point they had missed, though one lady came on to point out the financial crisis and said this was why the both, Sony/Microsoft, elected at a lower powered machine.

The point they missed is that outside of the extremely overpriced Intel, none of the other players had shrunk their chips down as was usually the case every couple of years. In fact it has been more than five years since this last happened.#

The two graphics chips makers of AMD, who Sony/Microsoft used, and nVidia were both stuck with the same size chips at 28 nanometres, where Intel had shrunk theirs to 16nm, I think it was, a few years ago and left prices artificially high because they could. Yet you get idiots defending Intel too?! Such naivety out there in the world, there really and truly is.

And that ios why they do it and that is why they get away with it. Because they have too many brainless morons without any thoughts that are their own that leap to their defence when someone says something they do not like. Or thinks for themselves.

I even had an argument with a family member over Xmas, though not computing related but music headphones, I have had three times before because they believe that everything that is stated in WhatHifi is gospel. Even though we had a mutual friend who was into cycling, as am I, tell him fifteen years ago that you cannot go by what the reviewers say because they are all paid to type their crap out. We both had several things that contradicted what magazines we both purchased said.

So much so that with the sky high prices of magazines now I cannot bring myself to buy one because I am actually paying them to be lied to!

However it is refreshing to see that with this video on YouTube and the comments made along with a whole bunch of videos being made about Star Wars The Force Awakens that the majority of people are now realising how far and to what extent this corruption and lies reaches. Even some comments like "is the corruption really that widespread" I have spotted on the Internet and on YouTube. This was when large numbers of people realised that the latest Star Wars was a really bad rip off of the very first film and were asking out loud, not in their heads, why every single reviewer, even nromally over critical Mark Kermode, raved about the Star Wars film and getting in the nineties out of a hundred and fours out of five on scoring. In the USA, the UK, Europe and even Ireland and someone replied "well they were quite obviously all PAID to say that!"

While worrying about expected plans not happening, Christmas coming and going and getting a real shock over the Star Wars movie I had totally missed the fact that several games publishers and developers houses had struck not once but several times with their games! #FACEPALM!

I am also starting to wonder if this is why they keep pushing games back now as is the recent fad? I think it may well be down to the fact that they do not want the backlash from gamers ... well the ones with brains and free thinking that is?

I myself studied software engineering and the graphical elements to programming. I was well into all the modelling techniques years ago and so I watched this guy's video with a great deal of interest. He showed to a factual level that the dynamic lighting and destructible environments along with several other things they claimed their games had was nothing more than complete bullshit.

In fact I was aghast at how obvious it was and wondered how in the world these companies like Sony, Microsoft, UBI Soft and EA among others ever thought they would get away with it?

I also thinkk that they are a few months away from being dealt a sucker punch by Nintendo that neither Sony or Microsoft will ever forget!

How?

Umm Nintendo NX, codename, comes out later in the year right about the time that all of the shrunken CPUs and GPUs alll come available? You work it out. I have not read of one person that has seen this one coming! Really ... no one!

Maybe then PC gamers can stop blaming consoles for crap graphics? Though they do have a point but at the end of the day its down to the developers or just how powerful their £500 plus graphics cards really are or that they lapped up the bullshit in a gaming magazine along with ten other people and no developer is going to put time, money and effort because ten people were stupid enough to spend over £500 on a graphics card. Or worse still TWO at that price!

I play all games at full setting despite having a AMD A10-7850K APU that all magazines state clearly you cannot game on and an out of date Sapphire Radeon R9-280 graphics card.

Yes every single tech journalist and games journalist said that you cannot game on the machine I built, except I knew that each and every one of them was talking utter bullshit. Worst offender was CustomPC Magazine.

So a shed load of PC enthusiasts went out and spent thousands of pounds/dollars and console gamers spent hundreds of pounds to play games with a visual perfection that were never going to arrive.

Everyone and their brother who bought along their gran went to see Star Wars The Force Awakens went to see what was billed as the greatest Star Wars movie ever made and ended up watching Star Wars A New Hope and left the theatres going "Err ... what?! Did I go into the correct theatre? I am sure I remember Boba Fett in that movie!" Peter Griffin will NOT be pleased! Lol.

So ... something seem to be going around now and picking up speed in both the movie industry and the gaming industry? Just to the lengths these companies and everyone else involved will go to to get your money out of you.

They are also realising what the consequences are of having no accountability.

Funny as I have been watching the old X-Files episodes again for the first time in years and every time I hear the line "Law doesn't apply to these men!" or "You can't bring these men to justice!" I laugh at now those lines are becoming common place, while secretly worried about it.

Well it doesn't, does it?

If someone wanted to do something about any of the fiascos of recent years you would have to band together with dozens, if not hundreds of others that felt the same way. In the UK they have been eroding your legal rights here for years, be bit by bit removing parts of the legal aid system. Even if you did you would likely get hundreds of fanboy idiots standing outside the courts willing to kick your arses for free and risk prison to defend these multi billion dollar companies?

I just hope the situation changes before it gets out of hand.

But then I think ... 'Why should I think that?' Maybe it is what these morons in power deserve? Just maybe it is the only thing that will stop them from doing what they do, for things to get very much out of hand?

But then I think deep down we all know that the laws only exist to protect them and not us when we find out we have been lied to and manipulated?

I know I do, lol.

Oh and if you look there are plenty of interviews and stuff from all accused about denials, despitye being proven, and even JJ Arbahams, or Jar jar Abrams as they are calling him, on why episode 7 is similar but not the same as episode 4. Yes mate, all movie goers are bind of course! Oh wait ... to be fair I did accuse Mark Kermode of being that ... and he did say this film was good! LOL!

Here is the link to that video about games and the lying...

and a few of the Star Wars fans that were disappointed ...


















A young girl ...




From the era of A New Hope ...




And an young kid, the target audience ... quite funny but you felt for him, lol ...



I could go on and on with these and you could argue they are just a few. But then I would first ask you to type 'Star Wars The Force Awakens Sucks' into YouTube and see what you get.

I would also point you to the number of likes and dislikes each of these gets and you will note that around 70 to 80 percent like them, lol.

Public organisations or private companies ... they all tell lies and therefore they all ... 
SUCK!!
LMAO!!

I thought I had seen Disney sink as low as it could be charging such obviously forced premium prices on children's films ... but this?