Yepp, 117 billion estimated total humans born ever and about 8 billion alive today.

If you train AI models then you probably rely on CUDA and you're really left without any meaningful choice. It also wouldn't matter if AMD jumped 100% on AI even 5 years ago because CUDA has been so intensely adopted by the industry and AMD would need to do something completely novel and extremely impressive to have any chance of making a meaningful dent in just 5 years time.

As such I don't really blame you, as I said in my above post as well. I blame the gamers, the people that don't use CUDA and just play video games, the people complaining about how expensive GPUs have become while still fucking buying nVidia cards. The fact that AMD can deliver a product that costs less at the same performance point (without RT) is pretty impressive given their miniscule volumes compared to nVidia.

Yeah interesting thought there actually. In absolute numbers I wager more people believe in mythical beings of some form today in Europe than the 1700s. But as a share of the total population it's going to be a lot lower, of course.

Since XeSS can run on AMD cards I feel that point is a bit moot. Further the best Intel can offer (in discrete GPUs) is miles and miles behind AMD even. As for Price / Performance the 6600 XT is neck and neck with the ARC 770 at basically the same price, depending on card and the day. Where I'm at the 6600 XT is generally the cheaper one. And that's not even talking about the 7600 XT which demolishes the ARC 770 at also the same price point...

Nothing, rumor wise even, is indicating Intel will bring anything to the table to challenge 4070 or up.

To sum it up in my opinion it really is only the ARC 380 that I've been impressed by. Very cheap card with excellent server performance for stuff like Jellyfin. But for gaming? No AMD is by far the better option from a value perspective.

As for laptops it's not that AMD doesn't make the chips, the laptop makers know consumers want the Nvidia part.

Jesus, they really are one of the most egregiously lock-in focused and monopolistic companies around. It saddens me deeply that consumers (gamers) just don't give a flying fuck about this and continues to pay a premium for Nvidia cards. 90% market dominance in gaming and probably at least that in GPGPU workloads.

All the while AMD tries to sell their cards on supporting / creating open standards like Freesync, FSR and Vulkan but because they don't have CUDA (since it's proprietary) they virtually can't be bought by prosumers that want to do some GPGPU stuff as a hobby and gamers buy Nvidia for brand recognition, Ray tracing which they are stronger in (but I argue isn't really all that outside a few notable exceptions like Alan Wake 2) and DLSS being ahead of FSR. But look at non-RT $/FPS and AMD wins easy at all price points and they don't shaft the people who bought their cards by not giving them the new version of DLSS like Nvidia do. It's just sad.

Vote with your wallet they scream, while everyone votes for the alternative that openly wants to squeeze every penny out of them because they are slightly better...

Isn't this the good thing about open source? You can just fork and revert these changes? That AMD wants to limit your ability to potentially damage your card is completely reasonable, and since they provide the source code for the drivers you should be able to circumvent this and take that risk if you want. This only stops low tech / low skill users that really have no business tuning their card outside of the spec.

Wouldn't you be refunded for the original ticket purchase?

No one wants a 20 hour empty game. A 20 hour game needs to be dense, like a good book of equal length. It needs a compelling narrative and interesting immersive gameplay. A 20 hour game can get away with immersion adding limitations to parts of it that an 80 hour game can't, stuff like not having quick save is annoying in an 80 hour game but perfectly valid in a 20 hour one, same with point of no returns, very grating in 80 hour games but perfectly fine in a 20 hour one.

Also I don't consider Open World to be a type or genre of MMOs, I'm exclusively talking about Ubisoft style open world games like Assassin's Creed and games obviously inspired by that open world approach. For MMOs busy work is good because the point really is to socialize and all content is good basically. If the game has co-op then I'm much more lenient on the busy work aspect.

Further I'm also only harping about story less or with very limited story tied to it type events. Like the cop events in Cyberpunk 2077 which is basically an ongoing crime and for whatever reason you have them marked, can go there and kill everybody, get some small reward and a thank you message. But it more or less clashes with the story overall and there's no point to it. Having enemies to kill and things happening in the world is of course a good thing but drawing player attention to it with an icon and interaction like the thank you message creates expectations about a payoff or it actually being meaningful outside of "clearing the map". But it's not. It's also a fact that crafting all of it takes time, time better spent on making the content that is meaningful even better. Basically give me one 1 hour mission rather than six 10 minute ones.

Seems like it could be interesting but they way it seemed like he thought the UI spam was the problem with their Open World approach in Assassin's Creed makes me nervous. I hated that shit from day one. It's just busy work to add play hours for no real reason. Kinda like filler episodes in Anime or that "welp we're out of budget so we'll do a recap episode" that StarGate pulled every season. It's just a waste of time. What really bothers me though is how that was somehow allowed to become more or less the expectation and definition of an "open world" game. Games like Cyberpunk 2077 were made worse by it, killing pacing and clashing hard with the story. Now I'm not saying there shouldn't be anything of course but make it fit into the game and story, have bounty contracts that are formulaic to streamline making them but at least have some variation like for one you need to chase them, one they've set a trap for you, one their friends come to free them during transport etc. Small things like that keeps it fresh and keeps you on your toes and makes it interesting to see what will happen during this bounty hunt.

What an absolutely crazy bar story that surgery team has. "You know I saved the life of a King of the North once..."

Yeah, I think the real exception here is Dragon Age: Origins. It has a lot of interesting choices, many matter and they impact the end in complex ways. Sure some of it is slideshow based but that is completely fine IMO. And all choices made can carry over to the final game in the series, actually altering the experience there in noticeable ways. First Mass Effect also had a good ending variation but it was far more subtle, small differences that ultimately didn't have much impact on later games (though I applaud them doubling the voice lines by allowing your choice of leader of humanity to stand in subsequent games). Mass Effect 2 however had a very interesting take on ending given that the ending is basically the whole of the final mission were all your choices impact how that mission plays out. It's interesting how you can "fail" that mission and it's a viable ending. Kinda like a "bad ending" in a visual novel.

So I'd go with DA:O if we're talking strictly multiple endings as we normally think about it and ME2 if we want to consider the final mission as a way to do a new take on multiple endings. Maybe "dynamic ending" would fit ME2 better.

He looks like a member of the banking clan in Star Wars. That or a Star Trek Ferengi in a poor disguise...