Good morning everyone, welcome to another WRUP. It's a beautiful weekend here in CA and I hope the weather holds a little while longer. I have some front end work to do on my truck and no garage or covered work space to it in. But I can't do the work until next week at the earliest, I think. Anyway, it's a very lovely day out and I'll likely be cutting and clearing more dead brush away and making burn piles for when the conditions will allow for safe burning. I've actually already been able to burn a significant pile of dead stuff as of last weekend after the rains we had here. Good start at cleaning up. Okay let's look at the WRUP...
Intel has released Alder Lake in the 12900K and 12700K and KF SKU's and performance looks good. Alder Lake uses two different core types "P" cores and "E" cores, that power and efficiency. Windows schedules the use of P cores for demanding programs, like games, and E cores for background programs that remain open while you're gaming, like Steam for instance. The catch is that the scheduler works only with Windows 11. Performance is still great in Windows 10, but much less stable with the P and E cores sometimes handing off work loads that shouldn't be handed off. This is causing issues with both versions of Windows, in fact, and games with DeNuvo (no surprise here) are having major issues with such hand-offs as it appears to recognize the core change as different hardware and trips the protection in the DRM. Performance is still great and Intel seems to have finally been able to get away from the ++++ mode of CPU refreshing and made something more worth looking at. The fixes for DeNuvo games are in the works already for Windows 11 and even though there's no reason at all to keep them away from WIndows 10, that's exactly what's happening as they won't even begin fixing those until at least this coming January.
AMD CPU's are being targeted by miners of a new crypto called Raptoreum. AMD's Ryzen, Threadripper and Epyc processors have very large L3 caches and Raptoreum uses CPU's to mine so if you're looking for a new Ryzen chip you'd better get one while you can because if the new crypto takes off then you may as well bet on scalpers and bots snatching all those up as well as our damn GPU's. Luckily for now at least Ryzen 5000 prices have been coming down since Alder Lake's release. Here's a better look from Extremetech
Elden Ring is coming in February. The official game play video from Bandai Namco shows quite a bit of the open world and "dungeons" and things look fairly cool. Here's the video in case you've not seen it yet. It looks like it'll be a kind of cross between Skyrim and Dark Souls showing the exploration while mounted on a fantasy steed encountering dragons in flight and caravans in fields. As a Souls fan I'll definitely play Elden Ring, but as of yet I can't say that I'm seeing anything ground breaking or particularly special to look forward to. Opinions online also seem to be varied from folks saying how great it looks to how they aren't impressed, to complaining about graphics etc. Typical internet. Take that with a grain of salt. There's time yet for more content to be officially released and for the time being let's just temper our expectations. After all, we've learned that the hype doesn't always lead to complete satisfaction, I.E. Cyberpunk 2077 (I still very much enjoyed CP 2077).
Okay what's on our gaming agendas?
Scrooloose: Deep Rock Galactic has made it's way solidly back into my regimen with the release of the latest update. I've also installed and started a -cute so far- RPG called Pine and I think I'll keep on that a bit. My SnowRunner bones are tingling again as well and I'm ready to get back to the slog that is Amur so I can finally get to the next season.
Greywolfe: i'm being boring and doing game dailies. so mostly that's just magic: arena and sometimes tooling around in the crew to earn the last of the money i need for the most expensive car. i liked that game when i picked it up the first time around and played around in it for a month. but i also hate it. the map is pretty cool. the car handling is very awful.
Trulegendkiller: Man, it's been a long and emotionally draining week. I'm not sure what I'm going to play as my backlog is pretty huge now. Here is some possibilities:Alan Wake: Remastered: I'm still working my way through it and trying to collect all I can in one go so my run through on Nightmare mode will be, sure, intense but more about surviving the story.Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy: I had fun playing it a few weeks back but put it down to finish Alan Wake, so I may go back to it.Metroid: Dread: Love having Samus back, just haven't had much time to play it.Monster Hunter Rise: I'm an Amiibo guy. Couple weeks ago at Gamestop they had some Monster Hunter amiibos. One was a Ninja Dog and the other a Ninja Cat... So I was like, I should try out Monster Hunter because I've never done so... Well, maybe I should try it this weekend.God Eater 3: Know nothing about the game but my friend randomly bought it for me on Switch, wants me to try it out.Warframe: A new update is coming and I have some grinding to do, I'll see if a friend wants to grind with me. Sadly, @yoda0vgs is 100% done with the game so I'll miss my time playing with him.I have a way bigger backlog but those are the ones I'll be most likely to get to.
