> SimCity 2000 was an isometric city-builder game. I'm not sure if it was well received,
Hah, it's probably considered one of the greatest games of the 90s.
11,059 karma · joined December 5, 2016
Hah, it's probably considered one of the greatest games of the 90s.
It's pure Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory[0] in action.
[0] https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19/green-blackboa...
And not because it failed, but because I was doing a system overhaul and replaced all my storage with M.2 NVMe drives.
Right...and none of those are America, there's part of the Americas.
When speaking English, "America" is the USA. If you mean the continental land mass of North/South/Central America, that's "The Americas".
To argue otherwise is just culture war bullshit. "Well, in Spanish-" fuck off. We're not speaking Spanish, we're speaking English, and in English, it's clear.
I use exactly 3 exceptions between saves:
1. First generation ship to just get me to space
2. Second generation ship to get me to the other planets
3. Third generation ship to get me to the Shattered Planet
Everything else, I'm with you. I don't use blueprints between saves.
With how much of a pain it is to deal with building in space, I'd rather just use the same blueprint.
I feel like people who don't get it immediately are just being deliberately obtuse.
> Not everyone bought a GPU to run LLMs on. That is quite a bit of VRAM, especially for non-desktops
So you're extrapolating "I bought a budget tier system in 2018 and it plays a 2016 game just fine" to "Nobody needs more than 4 GB of VRAM unless you're running an LLM"
Mid-tier laptop GPU in 2018 would have been a GeForce 1060, which came in either 3 or 6 GB variants. GeForce 1050 Ti came in a 2 GB variant, but I wouldn't classify that as mid-tier. The x050 variants (1050, 2050, etc) are budget tier.
I'd dispute that last part. At the very least, it depends on the game.
Cyberpunk 2077 with 4x frame gen is wonderful. With all the detail settings cranked to the max, it's a gorgeous game, but at that level, it even brings a 5090 to its knees. In 4K, without MFG, I often only get ~40 fps. With 4x frame gen, I get around 140 fps which is a significant improvement to the experience, and I don't even notice the artifacts unless I'm looking REALLY hard for them.
On the other hand, MS Flight Sim 2024 with 4x frame gen looks great unless I enable labels on landmarks and other aircraft. During camera angle changes, they get very noticeably distorted. The cockpit looks fine, though.
That was a typo. I meant 8 bits per channel.
4 GB is nothing. Mid-grade GPUs from 2013 had 4 GB. Budget GPUs from 2016 (10 years ago!) had 4 GB.
People formed their opinions on LLMs in late 2022/early 2023 when ChatGPT was first released and taking the world by storm and then never updated them after nearly 4 years of improvements.
Hell, just being able to search the Internet did MASSIVE things for reducing hallucinations.
Of course, maybe I'm wrong. Maybe you DO need to use a calculator to quickly tell me what 8 * 6 is. But I would be highly surprised if you got a degree in math and still needed a calculator for that.
And has since killed it for desktop gaming CPUs.
Which makes some sense, I suppose. It was pretty expensive to use, which made it uncommon. These days, GPUs are so power hungry that'd you need a MASSIVE power supply to do it, unless you're SLI'ing low-end GPUs, which is kind of a waste. You're better off with a mid-grade GPU.
...they would still have fumbled it.
3dfx failed for a single reason: Failure to design for the future.
They had a hyperfocus on brute force rasterization and fill rate that became detrimental. They dropped the ball on 32-bit rendering because they thought having a higher fill rate was more important. They dropped the ball on implementing hardware transform because they considered that the CPU's job.
And then they blew up their own business model buying STB Systems and manufacture cards themselves, rather than selling chips to other manufacturers. That ended up being a gift to NVIDIA who adopted the opposite strategy of providing chips, reference designs, drivers, etc. and let a large number of board manufacturers compete to sell them.
And then there's the fact that NVIDIA was allowing themselves to create new architectures, while 3dfx was basically just saying "Let's make the same GPU, but with more texture units". By the time the Voodoo5 came out, NVIDIA was already on the GeForce 2.
3dfx lost because it kept optimizing for yesterday. NVIDIA understood where the industry was going and 3dfx didn't, and there's little reason to think AI would have gone any differently. If 3dfx had somehow survived another 20 years, I'd expect them to arrive at the AI boom with the world's fastest rasterizer.
The high quality sprites are 64 pixels across per tile. With each tile being 1 meter, 1 pixel is 1.56 cm (About 0.63 inches) across. By today's standards, that's a very low texture resolution, though they can get away with it when your camera is so far away.
But if the game was 3D, you could expect players to put the camera closer to your objects. You'd need significantly higher texture resolutions. And you'd need a texture for each part of the object.
Meanwhile, consider a 3x3 object. That's 192x192 = 36,864 pixels. Assume it has a 60 fps, 2-second animation loop. That's 4,423,680 pixels. With 8 bytes per channel and 4 channels (RGBA), that's about 17.7 MB, which allows you to store 56 objects per GB.
Which doesn't sound like a lot, but we're making some huge assumptions. Not all objects are 3x3 tiles. Most don't have 120 frames of animation.
And as I mentioned in another comment, you don't need to store ALL the game's art in VRAM at once. Only what's on the screen. And you can certainly fit an entire screen's worth of animations in a 2 GB GPU.
The game doesn't consume that much VRAM. It plays on 4 GB GPUs just fine. The GPU only needs to keep resident what's currently on the screen. Even including every animation frame, that's 1 GB tops.
Hell, the minimum requirements are a GeForce 750 Ti, or Radeon r7 360. Those are 2 GB GPUs.
And those people are often bad at math or grossly undervalue their time.
Some people drive 10 minutes out of their way (20 min round trip) to save 5 cents/gallon. Even if you have a 20 gallon tank, that's only saving $1.00. I wouldn't take 20 minutes out of my day just to save $1, even 15 years ago when I was living paycheck-to-paycheck on $10/hr.
They're definitely not. At least, certainly not any time within the next 10 years.
Encourage building upwards to increase housing supply. This can be done via tax breaks or subsidies. Especially encourage multi-use buildings to make cities walkable. Stores/restaurants at the street level with apartments above.
Alternatively, they keep the house, but get either a reverse mortgage or a cash out refi to survive until they die, at which point their kids can't afford to buy it from the bank.
No you don't. 20 minutes at a DCFC will get you to at least 80% for most EVs.
You need several hours to charge it at home, but it's gonna be at home for several hours anyways. With an L2 charger, you can go from 0-100% overnight.
EVs end up with unique brake problems because they get used so little.
> Then there's tire dust particulate considerations with the heavier EV with all that torque.
This part is slightly true. EVs are heavier and will wear out tires faster, and if you actually use the extra torque, that'll contribute.
Sadly, I might have to settle for the Porsche 718. Polestar 6 got me excited, but that project is basically dead, especially with Polestar being effectively banned starting with model year 2027. If the US government got its head out of its ass regarding Chinese cars, I'd REALLY like a BYD Denza Z Spider.
The sad thing is, the Venn Diagram of EV enthusiasts and sports car enthusiasts is almost two separate circles.
...was also incredibly slow.
A pitiful 70 horsepower motor assisted by a 44 horsepower motor that combined to an anemic 104 horsepower [0] on a car that weighed ~2,800 lbs.
I had to borrow my in-laws' car once, which is a first gen Prius, and I found the extremely sluggish performance to be outright frustrating. I felt like I had to floor the accelerator to reach highway speeds in any reasonable amount of time.
[0] Not a typo. The numbers don't add to 114 because they can't both deliver peak power at the same time.
Otherwise, you're gonna need an electrician to put a 240v outlet or dedicated EV charger.