Hey guys, sorry for no WRUP yesterday. I had something come up and couldn't write one up. But here's one for today...
Well here in (most of) the States time changed over night and not in the good way. An hour of sleep lost, but more day light for the economy! Ugh. I really wish we could abolish day light saving time, because it's effing annoying, but also because because there's no reason for it any longer. With internet shopping outpacing brick and mortar store fronts the extra money hitting the economy because of a little more day light is pretty minimal now-a-days. There are probably other reasons but honestly, I'm just sick of having to adjust to the switch twice a year.
More to the point of the usual WRUP - AMD is changing how it's reference GPU's are cooled. Yep, they're losing the crappy, loud, hot running blower cooler and releasing some axial fan/cooler designs for the next GPU drops. Also coming with the new RDNA 2 GPU's will be hardware accelerated ray tracing. That should help the tech become a little more mainstream which is great for folks who care about real time ray tracing. I don't, but I would definitely try it out. This may be the first truly high end GPU that I'm interested in. It's going to depend on the cost though. AMD has generally been about cost/performance value. However, high end tech is pricier and I'm not sure I'm into spending a thousand dollars on a new video card. Performance is expected to be an addition 50% above current RDNA architecture, per watt. Speaking of current architecture, AMD are also promising a current RDNA refresh. So keep your eyes peeled. Hopefully they'll also manage some decent release drivers.
We're only a couple weeks away from Doom Eternal. Seems like minimum specs required to run it at 1080p 60 FPS are a bit higher than the 2016 Doom. Check out the details below.
Minimum Settings:
- OS: 64-bit Windows 7 / 64-bit Windows 10
- CPU: Intel Core i5 @ 3.3 GHz or better / AMD Ryzen 3 @ 3.1 GHz or better
- RAM: 8GB
- GPU: Nvidia GeForce GTX 970 (4GB), GTX 1060 (6GB), GTX 1650 (4GB) / AMD Radeon R9 290 (4GB), RX 470 (4GB)
- HDD: 50GB available space
Recommended Settings:
- OS: 64-bit Windows 10
- CPU: Intel Core i7-6700K or better / AMD Ryzen 7 1800X or better
- RAM: 16GB
- GPU: Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 (8GB), RTX 2060 (8GB) / AMD Radeon RX Vega56 (8GB)
- HDD: 50GB available space
While I don't see the requirements as outrageous, they're certainly not super low. Especially for 1080p. I would expect though that like the 2016 Doom, we'll see some exceptional optimisation with the Vulkan API. If they're still using Vulkan, that is. I'm not certain of that.
How about games for the rest of the weekend?
AJ: March is Mario month for me. So, Super Mario 3D Land and Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island.
Greywolfe: i completely forgot. it's WRUP TIME. anyway. i started a new game of evoland 2. i'm streaming that. i'm also slowly moving my way through secret of mana. the thing about that game is that it's like, 30 minutes of intense actual plot-and-story movement for every 2+ hours of grinding, because there's A LOT you can grind in secret of mana. [different weapons. different magic abilities. levels.] - it can be a little silly, sometimes.
Scrooloose: For me this weekend it'll more Farming Sim 2019. I still don't know what it is that I like so much about it but it's a pretty satisfying tedium. Wolcen is still there for me as well and other than that it's a board game day and some work.