Look at How Unhinged GPU Box Art Was in the 2000s (2024)

I genuinely don't believe this to be true for AMD. I bought a 6600xt on Release Day and by the time I was able to build my complete PC, it had upstream linux kernel support. You can say what you will about AMD but any company that respects my freedoms enough to build a product with great linux support and without requiring any privacy invading proprietary software to use is a-ok in my book.

Fuck NVidia though.

To me, this is a continuum with the box art of early games, where because the graphics themselves were pretty limited the box art had to be fabulous. Get someone like Roger Dean to paint a picture for the imagination. https://www.rogerdean.com/

The peak of this was the Maplin electronics catalogue: https://70s-sci-fi-art.ghost.io/1980s-maplin-catalogues/ ; the Radio Shack of UK electronics hobbyists, now gone entirely. Did they need to have cool art on the catalogue? No. Was it awesome? Yes.

A reminder: Even years after inventing CUDA, Nvidia, the top GPU manufacturer, was fighting for survival. I'm not sure what saved them - perhaps crypto.

If you ignore the money, they appeared quite strong. But they struggled financially. Intel famously considered buying them around 2010 because they knew they could buy them cheap - Nvidia might not survive and weren't in a position to negotiate). Thankfully, the Intel CEO killed the idea because he knew Jensen wouldn't work well with Intel.

Nvidia may not have been saved by "bean counters", but they do have a place in the world.

They're also great value; a couple months back I went to a local store and bought 100 or so "old" game CD/DVDs for less than $35, none scratched. For the price of one triple-A game, I'd probably have been able to get 250 at least.

Besides, in Skyrim you eat souls of hitherto immortal beings in an act of metaphysical cannibalism, and, among other things, get to witness firsthand exactly what happens to those souls you trap to fuel your fancy sword of zapping.

Meanwhile, in the background, Vivec might or might not have been kidnapped to be on the receiving end of that spear thing, and fascist elves are trying their hardest to undo the universe (it's not plot pertinent though), and also briefly did (or claimed to do) something to the moons (that are not moons, remember) that terrified an entire race into submission.

The point is, the lore is still there. You just have to pay attention, because it's not always spelled outright.

From full cases [0] including the CPU cooler in general, to themed components[1], when it comes to gaming makers are going beyond and above to create cool visuals.

[0] https://www.dospara.co.jp/gamepc/kuzuha.html

[1] https://www.yodobashi.com/product/100000001009108157/

Here's one of their mice: https://www.lofree.co/products/lofree-petal-mouse

Anime is certainly weird, but I wouldn't say in the right way.

Crazy contrast to me having spent the past weekend wondering if cloud gaming services like Geforce Now are matured enough that I can fully move to a thin client - fat server setup for the little bit of gaming I still do.

Compared to my CPU (9950X3D), it's got a massive monolithic die measuring 750mm2 with over 4x the transistor count of the entire 9950X3d package. Beyond the graphics, it's got tensor and RT cores, dedicated engines for video decode/encode, and 32GB of DDR7 on the board.

Even basic integrated GPUs these days have far surpassed GPUs like the RTX 970, so you can get a very cheap GPU that gets power through the CPU socket, at MSRP.

I'm not in the market for a 5090 or similar, but the other day I was looking at a lower-end model, an AMD 9060 or Nvidia 5060. What shocked me was the massive variation in prices for the same model (9060 XT 16 GB or 5060 Ti 16 GB).

The AMD could be had for anywhere from 400 to 600 euros, depending on the brand. What can explain that? Are there actual performance differences? I see models pretending to be "overclocked", but in practice they barely have a few extra MHz. I'm not sure if that's going to do anything noticeable.

Since I'm considering the AMD more and it's cheaper, I didn't take that close a look at the Nvidia prices.

In fairness, the graphics card has many times more processing power than the rest of the components. The CPU is just there to run some of the physics engine and stream textures from disk.

There was also this[0] video posted recently here of a Turbo Pascal tutorial which has some interesting intro :-)

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOtonwG3DXM