WRUP - It's what's for dinner. For your brain. On the weekend. From Scrooloose. You're welcome.
Good morning everyone, or afternoon, or evening, or whatever part of the day it is right now where you are. I slept in this morning and that's great because lately I've been waking up way too early and hitting that mid day wall at like 11am. Not today, no sir. Today I'm enjoying a cup of coffee at 7:46 in the morning while I type this nonsense into my computer for you all to read later. Not a heck of a lot is going on with me, thankfully. I just finished a deck repair job yesterday which I made barely any money on because it only took seven hours to do in total. But that's the most stressful thing to happen all week, so I'll take it. I'm boring. That's what I'm trying to tell you. At least this week, anyway.
Okay, who cares about all that? Let's look at a couple WRUP related things.
People still play Skyrim. If you're one of them then you may want to take a look at this actually kinda rad mod that adds Kajiit armor to the game. I warn you that this page I'm about link from PCGamesn is absolutely riddled with ads. But the mod seems cool and there's a little video there showing it off along with what versions of Skyrim it's compatible with.
SCORN is coming in October. This is a game I'm interested in playing. It's billed a shooter that's not really a shooter and it takes pretty heavy inspiration from H.R. Giger. Lots of body horror and no dialogue. Just puzzles and exploration with some combat sprinkled in. One thing that makes it kind of exciting from a performance standpoint is that it will be the first PC game to use DirectStorage. What is DirectStorage? Well it's a software that runs at the API level and it helps maximize the use of our sweet M.2 SSD's for faster data processing. This helps not only with load times but will help a ton with pop-in details to increase performance overall. There's no longer any decompression from the CPU, or barely any, and this will help textures and object details load smoothly and much faster while vastly reducing overhead on your machine. The tech has existed for a while in the console space on XBox series X already. Cool to see it come to PC as well. The caveat is that it's tied to DirectX 12. Older games will also be able to patch in DirectStorage. For instance, The Witcher 3 is apparently going to be one of those games. Here's a little about SCORN setting the pace for PC, and here's a much better explanation of DirectStorage than my over simplified telling.
Well, with NVidia's 4000 series of GPU's creeping up quickly and AMD making announcements of announcing announcements about availability of RDNA 3 soon, and with EVGA walking backwards out the AIB door flipping everyone off with both hands, the GPU market stands to have some price drops going on in just a few weeks. I may actually pull the trigger on a video card, finally after waiting for so long. Lots of cards are already reaching near MSRP and that's great news. It's also got me curious to see what the tech giants of graphics rendering have in store for us with the coming generation. We know so far that the 4000 series is going to expensive and really draw the power from those PSU's, starting at ~$900 and going to at least ~$1500 USD and sucking in around 450 watts of electricity from our already stressed power grids. People who buy one may want to consider a new power supply as well. Not to mention a second mortgage or at least a rearrangement of stock portfolios. We can at least assume that AMD will be more power efficient, as they usually are. But if RDNA 2 was any indication, the costs will be similar with biggest difference being the highest end enthusiast SKU. What we're finding out for now is that the 4000 cards are gigantic and the marketing for them is maybe more than a little silly. Here's a video highlighting a stack of up-coming GPU's from various vendors from GamersNexus. As Yoda said in Slack the other day "If it's more than 3 slots, it's 4. Like just be honest." And for those who get one, I hear Generac has pretty good power solutions for when you blow all your breakers playing COD or whatever.
What are we playing?
Greywolfe: my country is being extra dumb. so i'm downloading small, old dos games that i can just play while my country's being silly. i've blown through ultimas 0-2, and am going to start 3 this weekend.
AJ: Just got my Limited Run Switch carts of Mushihimesama and Crysis 2, so likely those.
Scrooloose: Still just working and gaming in between. Destiny 2 is still providing a little bit of escape from the real world. Otherwise not much happening this weekend.