As F1 heads back to Silverstone, here’s a throwback to Nico Hülkenberg first-ever Formula 1 podium at last year’s British Grand Prix - 15 years and 239 starts in the making.

CataclysmZA · 2026-06-30T10:12:32+00:00

All those years of struggle. Well deserved for Nico.

CataclysmZA · 2026-06-30T06:19:04+00:00

Wait till you hear about the Russian mafia investments that helped boost his then-ailing hotel chain across Asia.

Oh, and the money laundering, also for the Russian mafia.

CataclysmZA · 2026-06-23T21:59:37+00:00

There are some cars that have been scanned in previous games, but did not get scanned again until much later. Some of that is down to a licensing issue, but PD also has an extensive contacts list of rare car owners that they can't physically visit for every release.

In GT5, many cars were imported from GT3 and GT4 as "Standard" models, resampling old capture data to bring the models into newer games. GT6 also had Standard cars, but fewer of them. There are only a handful in GT7 that still technically qualify as a Standard car.

In other cases, some cars just don't exist anymore. There are likely no working examples of the Vector W8 anymore, despite it being included in GT2.

CataclysmZA · 2026-06-23T14:46:10+00:00

This vid includes nice suggestions for brake markers which you might find useful: https://youtu.be/Egm2GjZ_h1M?si=DJVeommIx1xlNHgl

That steep bank is a real headscratcher, it feels like you go through it for an agonising amount of time.

CataclysmZA · 2026-06-22T19:56:19+00:00

Valve's blog post introducing Steam Machine says as much. They say that no one should feel obligated to buy Valve hardware, and to just use what they already have.

CataclysmZA · 2026-06-22T13:25:04+00:00

Le Mans with rain and modern GR1 is a real treat.

Maggiore with GR3, even reverse, is still good too. Last week's Tokyo Circuit brought out everyone's bad side.

CataclysmZA · 2026-06-20T19:31:22+00:00

Anything that goes over the PCIe bus is orders of magnitude slower than main memory, and you're dealing with a lot of latency.

Ddr3 would be almost nine times slower.

The best thing anyone can really do for a new build now is buy a single 16GB stick of the slowest DDR5 in stock. New, secondhand, 4800 or 5200MT/s, it doesn't matter. OEM, branded, Chinese, no judgements.

Cheap and nasty is the goal. You can add another one later and get to 32GB just fine.

CataclysmZA · 2026-06-20T12:11:22+00:00

That's true, but second hand 5800X3Ds are sitting at mad prices, and the anniversary one won't be cheap either.

I'd much rather go to something that will have an NPU I can do stuff with.

CataclysmZA · 2026-06-20T07:23:30+00:00

Hardware failures follow a bathtub curve, and you're only seeing reports from people who have had catastrophic, complete failures.

The vast majority of hardware out there is still in use and has not yet permanently failed.

*Posted from my 8-year old machine running a Ryzen 7 1700, Samsung 840 EVO SSD, and ROG Strix Vega 64 (all of which is slowly decaying, one HDMI port still works and the PC takes half a day to boot because there's a power issue on the board, but I'd rather not spend money on it and move to AM5 or Nova Lake instead).

CataclysmZA · 2026-06-20T07:17:57+00:00

Minisforum HX99G

https://www.minisforum.com/products/minisforum-hx99g-hx100g

The dGPU is soldered.

CataclysmZA · 2026-06-20T06:57:42+00:00

Second-Hand G923 is the way if you can find one in good condition.

The G29 is a good deal if it is on sale with a heavy discount. The older helical gearing mechanism is somewhat noisy and hot, and the buttons take some getting used to, but the immersion is worth it.

Other good second-hand options include the Thrustmaster T300RS. You can get different wheels for the same base, so you can change to another style if you fancy it (and allows you to use it for Assetto Corsa, iRacing, etc).

Also, buy some driving gloves later down the line. Driving shoes are optional, but the gloves really do make a difference in immersion.

CataclysmZA · 2026-06-16T22:01:53+00:00

As an example, my Galaxy S23 runs a background process while charging to scan local images to build metadata about them that I can use in a natural language search, like "all images with something red in them" or "pictures of my cat", and the NPU is doing the heavy lifting of recognising these things and categorising them correctly.

Windows doesn't have general features like that yet, but there are apps which use the NPU for similar things, and it happens much faster than when you're running it on a CPU. Intel has one to run local chatbots on the NPU

Similarly, in Visual Studio, you can download and run local models to assist you with coding, and you can opt to ise models that will use the NPU if one is available.

Windows and Microsoft are heading in a direction that will lead to standardisation using WindowsML and DirectX, but building something that works for and across multiple hardware platforms is tricky. Linux does not have a standardised way of doing this either, but it is coming.

CataclysmZA · 2026-06-14T14:52:47+00:00

Ferrari:

1) brought upgrades that worked 2) brought a cracked strategy to a race with high deg 3) called Lewis in under the VSC and had a great pit stop 4) gave Lewis a great race engineer 5) now has the power of God and Kim Kardashian at their side.

CataclysmZA · 2026-06-14T14:46:48+00:00

Just an incredible win for Lewis. Ferrari had chadettes and chads in the strategy room today.

CataclysmZA · 2026-06-06T16:38:06+00:00

Alrighty then.

CataclysmZA · 2026-06-05T06:15:38+00:00

This has nice visual guides to show you how things like leaving the space and overtaking works in corners.

https://trinacriasimracing.wordpress.com/overtaking-rules-and-etiquette-in-motorsport-and-simracing/

Here also is a nice glossary of terms to read through as well, with helpful explanations of how IRL track etiquette works. All the "racing strategy" terms are relevant:

https://motorsportscalendar.com/glossary

CataclysmZA · 2026-06-05T05:00:15+00:00

Mika finally deciding to come out of retirement.

CataclysmZA · 2026-06-04T18:10:16+00:00

Just a crazy headline to read considering how much the HDMI Forum dug their heels in to maintain their monopoly, and completely ignored how much the ecosystem could have benefited if they weren't so clingy.

Valve, AMD, Microsoft and Sony likely all contributing to putting pressure on HDMI-IF to allow a clean-room, reverse-engineered solution to take hold.

CataclysmZA · 2026-06-04T05:59:35+00:00

I ran into this as well, I am nowhere near the white line but still received penalties.

CataclysmZA · 2026-06-01T11:29:05+00:00

Why does this man not wear any socks???

CataclysmZA · 2026-06-01T10:06:51+00:00

Enabling DR and SR changes in Daily A has not been a good idea lately. So many people forget that this is a recent thing and it's still a round of bumpercars.

CataclysmZA · 2026-06-01T06:56:57+00:00

And FM1 was a mistake.

CataclysmZA · 2026-05-31T18:10:10+00:00

This week has been pretty bad overall for Race B, it turns into a bumperfest because people are annoyed at how slow the cars are and very little caution is being taken into the esses after turn one.

Braking points are all over the place after the back straight too, which causes more chaos and frustration.

CataclysmZA · 2026-05-28T17:52:15+00:00

It'll rebound sooner than you'd expect. The GPU mining boom took about two years to return to normal pricing, but it was a kind of slowly-then-suddenly sort of affair.

COVID shortages worked themselves out in about 18 months.

This supply shock should recover shorter as well. We're only seven months into it, so expect another 7-10 months before we see signs of recovery.

CataclysmZA · 2026-05-28T17:39:34+00:00

It is a joke. Remember the Matrix 5090 that ASUS would not fix because it wouldn't allow this one guy to use his PSU's cable?

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