• 6 Posts
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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2024

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  • The flipside is: why the hell doesn’t any game work on eight gigabytes of VRAM? Devs. What are you doing? Does Epic not know how a texture atlas works?

    It’s not that they don’t work.

    Basically what you’ll see is kinda like a cache miss, except the stall time to go ‘oops, don’t have that’ and go out and get the required bits is very slow, and so you can see 8gb cards getting 20fps, and 16gb ones getting 40 or 60, simply because the path to get the missing textures is fucking slow.

    And worse, you’ll get big framerate dips and the game will feel like absolute shit because you keep running into hitches loading textures.

    It’s made worse in games where you can’t reasonably predict what texture you’ll get next (ex. Fortnite and other such online things that are you know, played by a lot of people) but even games where you might be able to reasonably guess, you’re still going to run into the simple fact that the textures from a modern game are simply higher quality and thus bigger than the ones you might have had 5 years ago and thus 8gb in 2019 and 8gb in 2025 is not an equivalent thing.

    It’s crippling the performance of the GPU that may be able to perform substantially better, and for a relatively low BOM cost decrease. They’re trash, and should all end up in the trash.


  • Anecdata, but SSDs will last longer than you want to use them in terms of write endurance.

    My NAS OS SSDs are 500gb hynix drives from about 8 years ago, and they’re pushing 150 TBW.

    150TB is a LOT of write cycles on a small drive, and they’re still reporting 94% endurance remaining.

    The controller will die or I’ll upgrade well before that breaks at the rate it’s going.

    Also keep in mind that you can read flash all you want and that doesn’t wear anything (unlike a HDD, amusingly), so for most consumer use cases, they’ll load the drive up with their data, and then only slowly modify or add to it, but have lots and lots of read access.


  • HDDs will draw around 4W idle each, 8W in total

    Whether your drives are idle is also a very use-case specific thing and I wouldn’t spend any time trying to generalize based on that math as a “oh this is how it works for everyone”.

    In my case, I’ve got 5 drives all spun up at all times because of torrrent clients, Jellyfin users, and just general media acquisition and public content serving.

    This thing would dramatically reduce my power footprint and save me giant buckets of money over it’s lifespan while being smaller/faster IO performance/lower noise.

    (My current nas sucks down about 120-140w 24/7, so…)














  • Ah HP printer drivers, my favorite form of self-inflicted malware.

    My favorite HP sucks story happened many a year ago. The boss’s shitty HP multi-function POS died, and we got him a nice Brother instead, and then went to uninstall the drivers.

    Somehow, and the reason for this is totally unknown to anyone other than HP engineers, the driver ‘uninstaller’ decided that today’s hilarity would be that it was going to uninstall… everything.

    After about 15 minutes of the drive churning away I got concerned, rebooted it, and found that nearly 75% of everything on it had been deleted by the uninstaller.

    No fucking idea, but that was a fun thing to explain and then fix.



  • Yeah, for sure. SCSI died when SAS emerged, and that’s been basically 20 years now.

    Any SCSI stuff left laying around is going to be literally a decade+ old and yeah, unless you have a VERY specific need that requires it (which really is just trying to get another few years out of already installed gear), it’s effectively dead and shouldn’t be bought for anything other than paperweights or for a coffee table.


  • nothing of value will be lost

    I’d argue the opposite: there’s actually a lot of stuff out there that’s actually interesting: old-school lets-players who’d have done actual informative playthroughs of games. It’s kind of a dying art, but it’s also exactly the kind of content that’s going to get purged by this kind of action.

    It’s interesting to spend, say, 10 hours watching some guy play Sierra games and actually talk through shit about the game and whatnot, and it’d be a shame to have that vanish.

    But not entirely unexpected since that’s not profitable content in the way that the current morons babbling about bullshit reaction videos, totally-not-camgirls totally not showing their tits, and whatever other brainrot nonsense most of twitch is. (Also alt-right propaganda, but eh.)