Godot isn't a threat because consoles are a huge chunk of the game industry, and a FOSS model doesn't work well with the NDAs requirement for consoles.

Unity went public not that long ago, and did what a lot of companies do in that situation. Their stock price was very high after the IPO and they used that to their advantage. They used the stock to buy about 26 other companies with the hopes of it creating a faster path to profitability. Now the stock price has come down to a more realistic level, so it's time to focus on sustainability over growth.

The cuts are a little bit of "We don't need 26 HR departments and 26 support teams" and a little bit of "We're under pressure to become profitable sooner".

The 4070 gets a price cut. The 4070 Ti and 4080 are getting discontinued and replaced by these new models. In the end it's just one additional model to worry about in the supply chain. It's only going to be confusing to consumers for a couple of weeks while the older models are discounted to clear out the inventory. Nvidia stopped production on the cards in question a few months ago, so there probably isn't a ton of excess inventory. The changes are all in the higher end of the market, so it's mostly going to be enthusiasts impacted, so they should be able to figure it out.

As far as software development goes, it's fairly trivial. The new GPUs are based off the already existing designs. Each generation they make a few chip designs, and then each GPU released has a different number of cores enabled on the chip. These new models enable more cores and are clocked slightly faster. The driver changes are likely just a couple lines added to a table specifying the parameters for each card.

It's likely because the game was designed around the Xbox 360, which has 3 CPU cores. The business people decided it should support low end dual core laptops, so compromises had to be made.

I also suspect they had an audio pipeline that used one format for all audio. The Xbox 360 had a hardware decoder for WMA audio, so most games used WMA format for all audio. On platforms without a hardware decoder, the decompression time can add up if you compress all your sound effects. It's pretty common to compress the music but not the sound effects to get a good tradeoff between disk space and CPU usage. If their tool chain didn't support this, it makes sense why they went all uncompressed.

Look at the 4070 Founder's Edition. It's the same size as cards from a few generations ago. Way smaller than the 4080/4090.

Some of the 3rd 4070 models are larger with bigger cooling systems, hence the Founder's Edition recommendation.

It's quite the opposite - one of the key design goals of the PS5 is an extremely a high bandwidth, low latency bus between the SSD and the video memory. You've got 1 frame latency on the texture load, so the games are designed around constantly streaming textures. PC architecture doesn't have the direct path from the SSD to video memory and can't stream textures as fast. Developers have to compensate for it by preloading more.

Came here to say that. Speaking as a game developer, it's patent free and well supported. And if your tool setup doesn't support it already, the standard decoder is BSD licensed and it's only about an afternoon's worth of work to get it working on a game console.

CPU usage is negligible too - it was unnoticeable when I used it on the 3DS with it's 266 MHz ARM chip. Any modern gaming device is going to be at least an order of magnitude faster than that.

Basically nails the sweet spot unless you really want uncompressed audio.

He's worth about $240 billion dollars. For most purposes, that's essentially unlimited money.

I was referring to his tendency to go ahead with SpaceX launches after the FAA told him not to due to the risk it posed to nearby homes.

His orders to skip brake testing on Teslas because too many were failing the test was also on my mind. And really, how he handles Tesla development in general.

Here's the thing about that... gas powered cars are about 30% fuel efficient. Most of the energy released by burning the fuel is given off as heat. Burning the gas at an electric plant and charging a car with it is about 90% efficient. Even if we don't improve things from where they're at now, we can get a huge emissions win by moving to electric cars.

Elon Musk is a crazy idiot. In certain situations, if you combine that with nearly endless money, it's a huge asset. Tesla and SpaceX work because he's really bad at understanding risk assessment and is willing to take on a lot more risk than most business people are. He's got the resources and attitude where he can invest billions of dollars into an experiment and not care if it blows up and kills people. It's morbid to think about, but it opens up paths to success that most people wouldn't even consider.

That profile is also really bad when it comes to more mundane things like running a website, which is why Twitter is crashing and burning.

Go to the search box on Slashdot and type "commercial real estate". You'll find a new story every couple of weeks about the problems with empty commercial real estate. Mortgages defaulting, companies that rent space going bankrupt, companies not renewing their leases, cities struggling with the empty space, etc.

The most interesting part of Apple Silicon is the RAM is inside the CPU package, located directly adjacent to the CPU/GPU. This lets them run the RAM way faster than you can with socketed RAM on the motherboard.

It's still DDR5, so it can't compete with GDDR6 based designs, but it comes a lot closer than you'd think.

For starters, the PS5 has 16 GB RAM and a more powerful GPU than Apple devices.

More importantly, everyone buying a PS5 is buying it to play games. People buying a Mac are buying it for some other purpose, and then maybe also using it for games.

You'd have a point if there were better storefronts for selling Mac games, but there aren't.

If you're using a major engine, yeah, Metal's a non-issue. If you're rolling your own tech or using a smaller engine, a Metal port is a big pain. It's not easy to port to the modern, low level graphics APIs like Vulkan & Metal, so it's a deal breaker for some devs. The shaders are trivial - all the shader languages are pretty similar, so unless you're doing something with bleeding edge shader tech, it's usually easy to port them.

But yeah, the market size is the real issue. It's not a question of whether or not people can port to Metal. Even if you're using an engine that handles that part of the job, it's still usually not worth the time and effort to do the port.

It's even worse than that. A Samsung 980 Pro 2 TB is regularly on sale for under $100. That's a premium brand. You can get cheaper brands for even less.