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 ... *

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!

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.

THE IMMEDIATE FUTURES

I have to go out shortly ... to vote in my first ever General Election, in the UK if your from another county, lol.

I have a little time to kill and I was thinking about my playing Dying Light and that it is the only one I run on my PC presently. Now as we are into May, 2015, this started me thinking what it might be that I play next? I then started thinking about the next generation of GPUs, from AMD, in the form of the Radeon R9-390 and the CPUs that now must be within a year from release? As the Carrizo seems to be only mobile this means that the next step on the horizon is the often quoted Zen chip.

This has excited me, I have to admit, because all the signs are that this is going to be good and as the bulldozer design was good in some ways but only not so much in others this will be huge step forward.

My system runs on Kaveri, the AMD A10-7850K and I do not buy into much of the stuff fanboys seem to spout. Because that which they are using their PCs for wont see a difference to the naked eye.

In fact I can now tell you of an example I have only just remembered!

A game playing brother visited me a couple of days back and he also plays Dying Light only he has had issues with his one and had to limit the game to ... wait for it ... 30 frames per second to stop it juddering about something awful.

Now I was suprised to hear this for reasons I will go into in the next paragraph and let me tell you it will be a surprise, but I told him I had no issues at all and I was running everything on maximum. We were both surprised. Why?

The game is supposed to run better on nVidia graphics and you get the logo at the start. But his uses an AMD FX-8350 now, as he picked one up for £80. He also now has the nVidia 970 Maxwell card, the Strix model I believe.

Err unless you failed to pick up on it I have an AMD A10-7850K which has half the cores his does and a lower frequency. Oh my card? That would be an older than Maxwell Radeon R9-280. No 'X', just a 280.

He saw my game running and was shocked to see it running so well with half the CPU cores and a slower GPU!!

I built my system to play games on and I knew it would do that. But I knew also that in a couple of years there would be some new shiny kit I would want. There was nothing out that made me want to buy it, when I built mine, other than so very over priced kit from Intel. Eight cores and those expensive motherboards would have been the only other way to go. But the price! To see n o difference unless some software was running some numbers in front of my face. Something I grew out of and grew tired of some years ago now. The only time I want to see these numbers is when a new CPU or GPU is released. Then I want to see them only to compare them with the older versions and the rivals versions. That still interests me a great deal but unlike many I do not then hold onto the fact that one set of numbers is lower than mine, in case of a rival chip, and hard on about it.

So yes Intel is faster presently but you wont see it and it means that AMD have to focus on getting things better. Meaning that during 2016 there will be new and fast Zen processors that will then force Intel to bring out better gear. Something Intel fan-idiots would not otherwise get until probably 2019.

So yeah it is a bit of an exciting time but a bit of patience is needed.

We are now getting into a period whereby a new Fallout game is due which will mean that an Elder Scrolls game will follow before very long. The fact this has been under wraps for so long tells me that the games are likely coded for the next chips like the nVidia 980 Maxwell and the Radeon R9-390's.

By the time we have digested these announcements and any new titles not seen on the horizon then Zen will be staring us in the face.

The one thing I have found is that despite the new generation consoles and all the software houses harping on about coding for all platforms being easier ... well there has not been a great deal of stuff coming out. The graphics departments only seemed to be incremental too. As opposed to revolutionary that is.

Now I have a sneaky suspicion that Fallout 4, or whatever it will be called, will change this to a greater degree. All we need is something that changes things to a greater degree and then we now that everything that follows will be the same ... err to a degree, lol.

A new Deus Ex in Mankind Divided was pleasing to me in a big way. In a few weeks Fallout 4 could stand beside Deus Ex Mankind Divided in a dreamy vision of the not too distant future. Over the next 6 months I dare say there will be more.

There is still the Dead Island 2 game to come out that I am particularly interested in reading the reviews of, due to the love of the combat of Dead Island and Dying Light and curiosity ... well because of Dead Island and Dying Light, lmao!

Oh yeah and then there is Star Citizen!

Oh and I am waiting to see what Project Cars will be like along with the next Need For Speed title, I need a good car game since Hot Pursuit ... err 2? Lol.

Oh a good combat flight simulator would be nice too, based on an EFA, F22 or F35 or preferably all three!

Yes my games catalogue needs more diversity! It is great having two of three FPS games and RPG games but something very different to go with them like driving of flight simulation would be cool. I cannot think of anything to buy in all honesty.

Hopefully and soon I will be utterly spoiled for choice?!

Here's hoping!

AMD AND THE ARM CHAIR ZEN EXPERTS

Well I am now reading one hand if the news I was electing the lady couple of months from AMD. Jim Keller returned to the fold to design the next generation architecture a little after Bulldozer was first released.

Sorry air the pun in the title but there were snippets of info regarding their combined x86 and ARM chip along with the sole x86 design code named 'Zen' at AMD.

Zen? What a cool name, they should use that!

First of the first Bulldozer chips were a little disappointing but all the hate was way over the top. I liked a remark made recently in a webpage, think it was WCCFTECH but maybe PC Games, that something like 'Oh finally, AMD can now make a chip that runs ten year old games at decent frame rates!'

Oh how I roared at that one, simply classic and to the point. I sad all along that to much was made out of all this and it was utter rubbish most of the time. There is someone trolling AMD in the link below and I am sure it is the same old one that guess over the top while making no arguments whatsoever?

Yes I originally wanted an FX8150 when it was about to come out but put it off. Waiting was not really under my control anyway and two architecture updates later and I build a PC. I skipped Bulldozer and piledriver and ended up with Steamroller in the Kaveri APU. Yes they dropped the clock frequency but, well you can change that and I did. I word have preferred 6 cores and a little higher frequency in both halves out of the box but it does a commendable job and the fact is all on one slither of silicon with 4 CPU cores and 8 GPU cores is simply stunning and that  is what I like to buy into. Thinking outside the box not resting on your laurels with one fat cow parked in front of you is what I like to see, it's why AMD broke away from Intel in the first place. Umm you do know your silicon history, right? Lol.

Interestingly is that it mentions an expected date in 2016?! That is far away but more importantly is that it is very unusual for AMD to be so calm about next architecture news and so upfront about what went before. For something that we are not going to see for over a year from now is very out of character for them.

This is good and I was worried about how they acted, and a certain JF-AMD who was claiming things he fluid not back up being the wrong thing to do.

People want to discover for themselves what they think and not be told to think the way a corporation wants them too. Is this attitude why we have so many fanboys out there and why they act the way they do. The funniest thing is their site of naivety at some of the things they cling to no matter what. They think that because a generation and their updates have not overtaken their rivals this means they are generations behind and always will be? No, you cannot possibly know this. Staying this is nothing more than edging your bets based on a tiny window in the history of the silicon chip.

Often the creators and manufactured simply do not know until all testing had been done. So anyone that stars otherwise is a native idiot. Always. Besides that they are not a million light years behind as some would have you believe and Intel has the jump on the lithography anyway.

Lastly I cannot see AMD having nothing new between now and 2016, leaving my A10-7850K being their flagship APU? Especially as the litigating mentioned was going from 16nm to 14nm I think it stated and no mention of 20nm or 22nm.

Also the next Radeon cards must be mere weeks away from having details and benchmarks released? An Excavator APU with a significant jump in clock frequency, two more cores on either half withe have me altering my next purchases. A six CPU core APU with a GPU that would go dual graphics with a Radeon R9-260 or even R9-270? Now that would be cool! Very cool. Still it will be merely a year before the Zen lands and I feel this time around a bigger difference will be made?

After spending twenty years plus scoffing at others, including conker science degree students, due remarks like you won't need that much power, 1Ghz Pentium, or that big a hard drive at 4GB I now find myself ten years after lady hearing this line asking myself the same question.

Oculus Rifts and 4K is about the top end you can go short of having 3 4K monitors at 50 inches each? At 1080p there was only a loss in screen quality going from around 40 inch to 50 and higher. A 55 or 65 inch 4K monitor would look far sharper than my old Samsung Series 5 LCD TV.

The point is that with a lithography of 16nm even an increase in core counts and better architecture might have me wondering where it goes next?

I anyways stated that the obvious next stage one resolution limits the eye cannot detect any longer is reached is holograms. I stated that at university back in 1998 and I stand by it. I now wonder if I am just a coyote of years away from seeing the vision I had that events featured in films like Minority Report and Iron Man?

Ooh uber cool!

I better look out for nan coated waterproof motherboards? Well ask that drooling I will end up doing as there week bound to be some fetching, clever and impressive demos doing the rounds when the time comes?

Can't bloody wait.

http://wccftech.com/breaking-amds-gen-x86-high-performance-core-code-named-zen-debut-k12/