@gamerbum: Calling a site biased, then judging a 2017 remaster of games made from 2008-2011 based on your experience with a 1996 game. Then naming two Nintendo games, one of which isn't a futuristic space racer. Who's biased?
@TheEternalGamer: Ryzen was aimed at everyday consumers. The i9s are aimed at people in the creation industry, such as rendering. Two completely different markets with different prices. You're going to catch your left field gamer that builds one of these into a rig for bragging rights, but that small niche is hardly going to drive a company forward with its sales.
@ello432: It's because Intel uses the X-99 series chip sets for its top CPUs, previously the i7-Extreme. This is the second such chip set, thus the X-299.
I hope this isn't the top model that's been the focus of all the rumors and hype. That has been building too long to be placed against the 1070, which is the same card the last two cards were pitted against. AMD has been toeing that line for over a year with their cards holding up with price for power.
Vega needs to come out in a big way. AMD fans have been waiting. The industry has been waiting. Non-loyal PC gamers have been waiting for this to break nVidia's price choke hold. If the 1070 is the card they're going to go up against, then I have to say the wait was all for nothing. I believe this isn't the case, but AMD has really disappointed before.
@akassassin11: If all you want to do is relax and game, then consoles are just fine. PCs offer a lot more for the competitive gamer, or for people that want easy access to things outside of the game. I enjoy the social tools available on PC. As far as consoles have come, they are limited compared to PC, and light on options.
For new experiences, PC and consoles both offer a lot of the same games. If you want to play an MMO type game, PC is the only way to go. Every other genre is well covered by any option.
PC hardware still lasts quite some time. I gamed on a 480GTX until finally upgrading to the 1080, and was satisfied with its performance. It couldn't give me smooth frame rates on high settings, but was serviceable. Honestly, it's main draw back was being as hot as the sun. I think building a 5 year rig is very reasonable. Now is a pretty good time to get into it if you're not into pushing into 4K, because 1080p has been completely mastered by nVidia and AMD with even their cheap card options.
You are also correct that SLI tech has basically faded out. As cards became more and more expensive it became less and less of a focus. DX12 might bring it back into the light a little if it does indeed allow any cards to work together and to actually utilize all of their RAM.
@djwood84: That reminds me of Ephemeral Phantasia and it having load screens at random points in towns and during conversations with NPCs. Totally ridiculous.
@hinzkunz: A game isn't a single file that a HDD can just blaze through at full speed. It's made of thousands of files that need to be accessed one by one. The access time per file is what's going to kill the load time.
@mushywaffle: Everything sounds easy on paper, but the actual execution isn't just drawing a line. Load times exist because of the amount of data being pumped into games is ever increasing. The textures are getting bigger and bigger as resolution increases.
No matter how much a dev tries to mask their load times, it's never going to truly go away. The demands on data is just too great. On the flip side, they could just simplify their visuals by a huge amount to make it run like melted butter.
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