Topic: PC Gaming

@BruceCM
Turns out, Azeron has an incredibly loyal following of ppl who swear by it and can't go without it now. My order # was 5,300 and change, which is quite a few of these they've sold, especially being 3D printed.

Their Discord is awesome, from both the devs and community all working to provide suggestions for future model improvements, troubleshooting, feedback, etc.

I'm very excited to get mine. In April. Could have ordered a Compact or Classic and gotten it now (even sold on Amazon, but without the customizations like Medium/Large or Palm Rest Curved/Flat, Color Choice, etc, better to buy from their website) but the Cyborg has too many great improvements and enough keys to make one profile that never changes and use it for every game.

This is beating a dead horse a bit and not at all a surprise given the current state of things. I was just looking at some of the performance reviews of the RTX 3050. My typical upgrade cycle I usually go ~4 years between GPUs and I usually go for somewhere in the ballpark of the 50-to-70 tier cards. So as someone who got a 1660Ti in 2019... 3050 is... maybe a tad early but theoretically interesting. In usual times this would effectively be one tier and one generation behind what I'd probably upgrade to

But when I look at the performance graphs? It's basically equivalent to a 1660Ti but maybe a tad over in some workloads and a tad under in others. But you get tensor cores so DLSS which is nice, 8GB vs the 6GB VRAM that I have in my card and marginally lower power consumption. All ok but nothing really worth upgrading for. Then you look at the pricing. The cheapest SKUs are $200AU more than I paid for my 1660Ti................

Two and a half years into my typical ~4 year upgrade cycle and new cards are still worse value than my GPU was when I brought it..... depressing.....

The only argument for upgrading to the 3050 is that that it's offering ray tracing and DLSS. In that sense it's at least offering a couple of things that the 16 series won't do even if there's not much of a performance bump overall.

That's more than can be said for AMD's equivalent offering, the RX 6500 XT which makes even less sense as a sidegrade.

Ah well, at least both cards are available - albeit somewhat above their manufacturer's prices - which is more than can be said for anything else vaguely modern at the entry tier of gaming, so they'll probably see a lot of service in new builds even if those looking for an upgrade aren't too interested.

@skywake stick to the 1660ti. buying new gpus right now is just awful. everything is overpriced.

@6ch6ris6
Oh I definitely am. I'm just grumbling about the state of things

@skywake me too. im stuck with a 1060 6gb that i got with my new pc in 2018. 2022 was suppose to be the year where i get a new pc, but i guess i have to wait :/

@6ch6ris6 @skywake Still hanging on with a GTX 970 from 2015, lol. Which is actually still performing marvelously, limited VRAM aside, but I'd intended to upgrade years ago. At least my other components are up-to-date: the Ryzen 5 3600 is a marvelous CPU, I have 16GB of speedy RAM, and the SSD makes everything on my PC so much snappier.

I think what really disturbs me is that I don't think we'll be going back to pre-pandemic norms in terms of GPU pricing. NVIDIA and AMD have been gleefully exploiting the desperation for new components and now know that people are willing to pay way higher prices for even decent mid-range cards.

And, tbh, I feel like I've been hearing mixed messages about the chip shortage for so long that I have no idea when, if ever, we're going to go back to something approaching normal. I guess the bigger issues, miners aside, is that it takes years for production capacity to increase to meet the uptick in demand, but it just feels endless.

There’s a lot of factors playing into the difficulty in obtaining GPUs. Mining is definitely a contributing factor, but only one small piece of the puzzle. The labor shortage, the global chip shortage, the pandemic has disrupted supply pipelines and throughput, opportunists are scalping to make a buck, yields are low and as Ralizah mentioned, expanding supply takes years.

I too was lucky to get a 2080 ti and i9 9900k with my PC, which was still marked up but not nearly as much as they are now.

Im definitely getting a prebuilt again when I upgrade. The 4xxx series cards are rumored to hit 90 teraflops with the 4090 ti, vs 40 on the 3090 ti and just 13 on the 2080 ti. That’s insane. I’ll just wait until the 2080 ti can’t do 1440p 60fps and then buy a new prebuilt and sell the old. Cause by that point GPU’s will need massive power supplies, motherboards will have way more NVMe slots, CPUs will be much better, etc etc.

@JaxonH fullsize. I like weighted mice in general but since I started using a trackball and I have long fingers, a full sized mouse is easier to just rest my hand on. My mom uses small mice and I dread working on her computer.

@Ryu_Niiyama
I'm still feeling out my preferences.

The Glorious D- is so light and comfy, not too small, not to large. Feels great, especially with grip tape making it easier to lift without slipping.

But the Logitech G502 is so comfy, I actually think I prefer it. It's heavier and larger but it's so good. Even comes with weights to customize it heavier if you want, though I think it's heavy enough as is

Wow.

A gamer broke their neck from VR use

https://nypost-com.cdn.ampproject.org/v/s/nypost.com/2022/01/...

@JaxonH People crash into their TV, broke their hands when hitting their table, beat up other people, knocked themselves out on the wall or slipped and died.
I am more surprised if that is the first time something like this happened
edit. grammar

@Solaine
Right, but those were mishaps and accidents.

This was just from stress on the vertebrae from playing.

@JaxonH Dang, I knew you would get some type of stress on the neck but breaking it? good reminder to take breaks.

I'm glad there alright.

iBuyPower Prebuilt Gaming PC with Nvidia RTX 3060 GPU on Amazon right now, shipped and sold by Amazon, for $1199

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B09DHTWR5N/ref=ox_sc_act_image...

These $16 magnetic charge cables and micro USB adapters are some of the best bang for buck I've ever gotten for USB related items.

I got my mice and keyboards set up with these magnetic tips, so that I don't have to push a cable into a crevice every time I charge. It just magnetically clasps and it's charging. It's sooo nice.

It's amazing how the little things can improve your experience so much.

Tiny Tina's Wonderlands is a game I've had my eyes on for a while, but I have always felt very mixed on it, as it looks like more of a Borderlands' 3 DLC than necessarily a full title. And I'm not even saying that is necessarily a bad thing, Borderlands 3 is one of my favourite games ever, but if they were going to charge me the full price I was hoping it would be more than what looked like just a reskin.

And thankfully now we're getting closer to release and more info is being released, we're starting to learn what sets it apart and I must admit, I am getting pretty excited. There are some really interesting classes which apparently you can hybrid together, a proper melee focus including tiers of melee weapons with different buffs, arsenals of spells rather than grenades and a bunch of crazy companions. I am hoping this will be a lot of fun.

The next COD game from Infinity Ward will be great because Infinity Ward always makes a great COD game

Man, I dunno if it is because of the i-frame framerate link or maybe the hit boxes are messed up due to the higher resolution or behind the scenes twiddling or because I am using a different weapon or whether it is because I am playing with a mixture of friends and randos, rather than the kanji Gods, but I am finding Rise much harder on PC than I did on Switch.

I remember absolutely blowing through this game on Switch. I remember finding the earlier parts of the game the hardest, once I had some decent gear/weapons, my momentum always seemed greater than any monster thrown at me (up until the Apex Event quests which were so rough).

I personally loved that, as I felt like I only ever had to grind out of choice rather than necessity and got a continuous sense of progression.

However, in Rise PC, we seem to constantly hit walls. I think it was around 6* hub it just became completely unfun to try and beat any of these monsters with a party of less than four, so we opened up the party to randos for the first time to fill in missing slots. This certainly made things easier for a while, but it does sorta feel like every other monster is some kind of wall that takes a good couple of tries to best.

Like I don't remember on the Switch version monsters just doing such insane amounts of damage. Like two hitting you when you are in fully upgraded, best gear at that point of the game, stuff. And hitting attacks that can literally take all the faints in one attack. That stuff was common in World, but I don't think I'd ever seen a team wipe on the Switch Rise? But it has happened multiple times during the PC playthrough.

And for the record, I still absolutely love this game, but if you are one of the "the game is too easy" fellows, please play the PC version and enjoy it pummelling you into the ground.

I also uploaded some more screenies if you'd like them: https://postimg.cc/gallery/wLnhxzF

Muah muah muah muah MUAH!

muah!

Now this is how PC gaming is meant to be enjoyed!

Ended up going with the smaller included mousepad since it was self adhesive, and I put velcro on my keyboard to keep it from moving, as well as velcro on a wrist rest to keep it from moving.

Ohhhh it's so good. So so good. I love it!

Played some Gears 5 and wow, what a blast that was