OT: Video Games VI

[CapitalsCupReality]

The PlayStation VR2 will get a drastic price cut, but that might not be enough

This could revitalize the platform—or demonstrate that things aren’t going well.

arstechnica.com

Starting in March, the main SKU of the headset will drop from $550 to $400 in the US. Europe, the UK, and Japan will also see price cuts to 550 euros, 400 pounds, and 66,980 yen, respectively, as detailed on the PlayStation Blog. Strangely, the bundle that includes the game Horizon: Call of the Mountain (originally $600) will also drop to the same exact price. That's welcome, but it's also a little bit difficult not to interpret that as a sign that this is an attempt to empty inventory more than anything else.

Anyone have one of these?

 

[Drake1588]

Embargoes have lifted, and the $550 RTX 5070 is dogshit. Hardware Unboxed, Gamers Nexus, KitGuruTech, Hardware Canucks reviews on YouTube all roast it. Gimped VRAM of just 12GB really hurts it. It's a 4070 Super. The $750 RTX 5070 Ti is a much, much better option. That said, it's practically impossible to find either one anyway, and none at MSRP.

The AMD embargoes are about to be lifted on March 5 (today), for the $550 AMD RADEON RX 9070 and $600 RX 9070 XT. Both should be available, and at MSRP. We'll see how they perform.

 

[Kazer]

Embargoes have lifted, and the $550 RTX 5070 is dogshit. Hardware Unboxed, Gamers Nexus, KitGuruTech, Hardware Canucks reviews on YouTube all roast it. Gimped VRAM of just 12GB really hurts it. It's a 4070 Super. The $750 RTX 5070 Ti is a much, much better option. That said, it's practically impossible to find either one anyway, and none at MSRP.

The AMD embargoes are about to be lifted on March 5 (today), for the $550 AMD RADEON RX 9070 and $600 RX 9070 XT. Both should be available, and at MSRP. We'll see how they perform.

I have not seen anything from the 50XX generation that makes me want to upgrade. I'll probably wait at least one more generation.

 

[Jags]

Speaking of 4070 Supers, here's a PSA for undervolting...

I visited a friend for the Super Bowl who had recently upgraded to 1440p gaming on a 4070 Super. His home office is a 15x15 room, 8ft ceiling, and he has to keep the door closed. So he hadn't anticipated how severely a gaming system would heat up the room. The temp would jump as much as 7 degrees after an hour or two of gaming.

At load in two modern titles, his CPU would peak and hover around 70C and the GPU at about 62C. Hold your hand over his exhaust fans and, yeah, he essentially had a space heater in his office.

While I knew undervolting would help, I didn't oversell it because I wasn't positive that the difference in heat generation would be huge.

I went with safe, easy undervolts for both that I knew wouldn't cause crashes. For the CPU, I bumped his 5700x down from 1.1 to 1.025, and upped the frequency from 3.4GHz to 4.0GHz to compensate a bit. And for the GPU, I flattened the curve at 900mV/2600MHz, and added 1200MHz to his memory clock for a little balance.

In the two games we tested, his CPU temp dropped from 70C to 43C, and his GPU from 62 to 46. So not only was the heat generation under control, but fan noise was way less, too. In the month since, he says the heat issue in the room is gone; that it might jump a couple degrees if he games for a long time, but not enough that he feels it.

I used NovaBench and ran an identical encoding job before and after the changes. While the benchmark reported an overall performance drop nearing 10%, his FPS in the games we tested were only down by 4%. His encoding performance (CPU only, no NVENC) slightly improved.

Undervolt your stuff, boys and girls. Worth it.

 

[Drake1588]

I have not seen anything from the 50XX generation that makes me want to upgrade. I'll probably wait at least one more generation.

I'm on a RTX 4090 and still really happy with it (I should hope so, given how pricey it is). Definitely waiting until 60xxx and then we'll see. The 50xx cards are definitely not for 40xx owners. For 30xx owners or earlier, it gets more interesting. Going from 3080 to 5080 makes a lot of sense.

It sounds like reviewers either mostly like or really like the AMD RX 9070 and AMD RX 9070 XT. AMD might have finally figured out how to take away market share from nVidia at a really important price point. Gamers win, if there's a viable option close enough to $500.

 

[usiel]

I'm still totally fine with my 4080. I might build a second smaller form factor desktop gaming rig to replacing the alienware m15 which is having some issues and I truly switch between two gaming rigs regularly depending on the game and the monitor form factor I want. Sigh, reminds me I've been lazy and still not swapped in the Odyssey for the QD Oled.