Only higher end boards tend to have diagnostic lights.

Do you have a firewall? Packet inspection in particular can wreak havoc on speeds.

I live pretty darn rural nowadays. Used to live in a biggish city. Didn't dislike it, it has its upsides like people have pointed out. And I could afford it, even a largeish house if I would've wanted. But the prospect of being effectively turned into a modern day slave by virtue of having to have a well paying job to afford mortgage and over all higher cost of living associated with big city life it just didn't feel appealing. So we bought an old farm in the boonies instead for less than we sold the apartment for. Pretty much no neighbors. 20.000 SQ meters of land, some goats and hens. It's pretty tranquil and peaceful. Still work a stressful IT job that pays well but being able to just stroll through a 100 year old forest by walking out the door does wonders for stress management I feel. Sure the commute sucks when I do need to be at the office but it's a small price to pay and it has meant that I actually take the time to read quite a few books per year during said commute.

The lack of separation between the toes indicating socks stayed on and no grip marks means it could've been worse. When you get that irresistible feel that you have to remove all clothing is when you're in for a life changing experience.

I'd say the problem isn't so much optimization as it is scaling. The FPS delta between low and ultra is just stupid small in many games nowadays. Before dropping to low would make the game look like shit sure but it would also run on 5+ year old hardware. Now you get like 10 FPS+ and still slog around under 60 fps on 2-3 year old 6-series cards (X060/X600). Sure some games are CPU bound as well but that's less common.

Really what needs to happen is devs need to add a potato mode so we can at least play the game.

I'll however say that the source of the problem is of course consoles. On them settings are rather meaningless so it's only for the PC market you need them and given how many gaming PCs outperform consoles and PC gamers generally expect the PC version to look better it's no wonder that's where they put their focus and effort. But a proper low setting that actually scales shouldn't be too hard to achieve.

The only power consumers have is voting with your wallet. Which in this case if this is important for you you need to cancel else they'll let it be and then later down the road they'll push even further. Also this is what always happens when a company gets big and think/know they can get away with it.

The only power consumers have is voting with your wallet. Which in this case if this is important for you you need to cancel else they'll let it be and then later down the road they'll push even further. Also this is what always happens when a company gets big and think/know they can get away with it.

Yes, which is exactly what I'm stating. Showing a forcibly non-upscaled video (or one where you've manually tweaked the upscaling for that matter) is likely not what you want because there are no circumstances where that is what you'd watch on that particular screen. It could perhaps work as an example of how that video would look if you had a 1080p monitor of the same size instead of the 4k one you have, since it scales in a linear fashion, a pixel of 1080p is 4 pixels in a square on a 4k screen. But that's likely not what you want to test. Instead the thing you do want to test is "does it matter if I download X content in 1080p or 4k? How big is the difference really?" And if that is the question you need to let it upscale.

And no helm(et) or lifejacket in sight... Looks like a spectacularly dumb way to die given all the jagged rocks.

Not really possible. A 1080p video smashed into a 4k container (so it can actually represent the 4k part) would look worse than a true 1080p video file since that would get up scaled by your TV or monitor in most situations.

Best comparison would be making a playlist of the same video first in 1080p and then 4k.

Lol wut? Was this guy in a year long coma starting in December 2020? Cyberpunk had one of the top 10 most disastrous launches in gaming history. And in no small part due to botched expectations around quests, mainly because a lot of the pre-release footage was of "The Pickup" which really was the only quest to really deliver all they talked about in those early videos.

Now the game is still a good game. But it's a great "emergent gameplay" game, one where gameplay and level design work together to create something greater than the sum of the pieces. Quest, plot, story wise it's not at all anything special in my opinion. It has high production values sure, but the substance is rather meh, and there is little story agency, outside of "The Pickup", which I think is a large part of the reason they themselves, without announcement, stopped calling it a RPG about a year or so before release.