Lego Voodoo GPU kit, DDR5 RAM, and so many people are staying home now that the Earth is actually shaking less.
Lego Ideas, has a recent submission in the vein of 1996 GPU tech from 3Dfx. The 3Dfx Voodoo GPU was indeed the first accelerated graphics processor for the mainstream public and I had one. I remember playing the still awesome Hyperblade fully 3D tech demo sports game that came with that video card -man someone should really remake that. The proposed Lego Kit would let you build your own piece of nostalgia so you can remember the glory days for yourself. Of course it's a Lego kit so it's non-functional, just to be clear. But it's pretty cool as an idea and I support it. It's actually funny, looking back on it. I got that video card because I could use it to play Quake at a staggering 800x600 resolution with those smoothed textures and my friends and I all just ended up turning off all the texture mapping and resizing the screen to a barely visible 3 inch square so the frame rate would be more playable over LAN. Anyway, check it out here if you're interested.
The folks at Gamers Nexus have some information about DDR5 RAM coming soon despite the specs not being finalized by JEDEC. Currently DDR4 has a functional out of the box frequency of ~3200Mbps with 16 banks. Putting that in perspective compared to DDR3, we've seen a big jump in performance over the past couple of years. DDR3 bandwidth was around 12.8GBps while DDR4 raised the bar to around 25.6GBps. The DDR5 spec shown by Hynix is starting the frequency around the top end of current DDR4 DIMMS, 3200Mbps, but will increase all the way up to 8400Mbps and doubling the bank structure from 16 to 32, bringing bandwidth up to 38.4GBps.
Sounds pretty impressive yes? I think so. But even though it's scheduled to go into production soon that doesn't really mean we'll see it available for at home use cases. It will likely take some time to roll out to the masses while it will first hit servers and the like. We've come a long way from single channel 256 DIMMS. Watch the hardware news corner video here if you'd like to see more for yourself.
With about half the world's population staying at home these days the Earth seems to be happier. Pollution levels have decreased, animals have come out of hiding to check it all out, noise pollution has also reduced, and according to CBS News, the Earth's crust is also shaking less. With so many less feet and machines constantly clamoring about the background noise in seismology reports has dropped a ton. This is a phenomena usually only seen around Christmas time when lots of people are off work and at home. It's interesting to think we have so much impact on the surface of our world just by walking around and performing every day tasks. Here's where I read about it.
It's a weird time out there guys, stay safe and stay home.
Games are good when you're home and done being productive
Greywolfe: i have made a tactical decision: i'm going to play secret of mana alongside assassin's creed: origins. i'm doing this for my own sanity. secret of mana is too full of combat and weird/awful design, while assassin's creed: origins is just SO BLAND. [and full of combat and towers and ubisoft nonsense.] - at least this way, i can be looking at something different every day. also: evoland 2 is finished. next game coming up soon! [that's star wars: knights of the old republic. but shhhhh! no one told you.]
Scrooloose: Thinking on starting a higher difficulty run through Doom Eternal than Ultra Violence. Yet more Farming Sim 2019, and I've picked up World War Z with friends, which has been pretty fun.
Yoda: The New Warframe event has been really fun. They've finally got Squad Link in the game where teams in ground missions are helping teams in space. Can't wait to see that implemented in other areas of the game later on!Need to hop back on the drum set though as well.
AJ: I picked up Granblue Fantasy - Versus, so that, and also probably some Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.