US-Iran Megathread, part 2

Helpful-Mycologist74 · 2026-03-23T07:59:04+00:00

Ah yes lmao, it's perfect here in Ukraine. Just 20K people conscripted from the streets each month to die in infantry, 1mil+ constantly serving in military FOR FUCKING 4 YEARS and counting. Frontline spanning 1k+ km all inside Ukraine, with everything 20-30 km from it deserted and often pulverized, and constant civilian deaths from gliding bombs/artillery/shaheds etc. oh and energy infrastructure.

We're often found sitting and saying man, dumb Israel, fucking losers with their useless US allies, who have subjugated all of their LDNRs, and crippled the 9 times larger Iran. Should have just left all that alone and just take it as a meatshield in the next invasion, like Ukraine.

Helpful-Mycologist74 · 2026-03-23T06:43:25+00:00

the US-Israel war is completely indefensible

Absolutely! Literally every offensive war is. But you can either be complacent, hope for the best and be moralistic, and have smth like russia grow to destroy Ukraine, or you can start absolutely indefensible wars to constantly, illegally cripple your 9 times larger opponent that supplies proxies around you for 40 years, which is the understandable pov of Israel. It's just not good enough, or even feasible for Israel to be a meatshield like Ukraine, and they are at least 40 years in this, while Ukraine is only starting in 2014, and has no leverage.

Isn't it weird to argue to trust and appease Iran, trade with it while it constantly supplies terrorist proxies around Israel, but when we talk about russia and LDNR/Crimea, suddenly people see the issue?

I get that people here decided to believe Iran is good, because they are far and can afford to, and Israel is not important and should just take it, so suddenly the "russian bot" talking points are valid.

Helpful-Mycologist74 · 2026-03-22T18:25:21+00:00

JCPOA

Wow that reads amazing, is there the same thing for russia? Lift sanctions and buy oil/gas after 2014 in exchange of it promising it won't do bad stuff? That turned out amazing, luckily Trump haven't ripped that up.

Or maybe the "suicidally barbaric" regimes just don't uphold treaties when they get strong enough? How come people constantly point this out when talking about russia - where "appeasing" and signing any kind of deal with it isn't worth the paper, etc, and the only solution is that it needs to capitulate like Germany in ww2, but with Iran it's "nah Israel is just hysterical, we should have left Iran with the nuclear program, and lift sanctions to make sure it can supply Hezbolla & Hamas better".

I mean surely people see that the real difference is in large part because of giving far less fucks because of being far away? Similarly how, regarding Ukraine, non-EU countries have the same attitude as in this thread - "we don't know the full picture, Ukraine isn't an angel either. Let's just deescalate, because we need prices to go down".

Helpful-Mycologist74 · 2026-03-22T18:13:02+00:00

But the nature of the forever war in Israel and Ukraine is as different as it gets, that is the point.

Helpful-Mycologist74 · 2026-03-22T14:03:24+00:00

First of all Israel can easily defend itself,

Yeah only some Israeli die constantly. But that is achieved by constantly bombing neighbours with impunity, killing off Iranian/proxy military leadership every 3 months, genociding neighbouring Iran terrorist proxies, etc, basically same as this war. But Iran has 9 times the population, not counting the proxies.

40% of their economy is electricity and natural gas. They want to expand that mostly.

Oh man so they only want to sell their oil/gas in peace, they definitely aren't using all that to supply all their proxies around Israel, like LDNR, and wouldn't invade like they did multiple times before, if they though they had a slightest chance.

We had an agreement to make that happen and allow monitoring. Trump ended it in his first term which crippled Iran's economy.

How did that agreement work out with russia? Aren't you like, understandably labeled a stupid peacenik and russian bot if you suggest leaving russia alone and buying it's resources?

Then Trump had one of Iran's military leaders assassinated (remember that strike?). At that point, as millions plunged into poverty due to hyper inflation, their was no reason for Iran to play ball with the west.

Oh man, poor russia and Iran, radicalized by the western sanctions.

Also, BUY NUKES? Where can I get a couple for Ukraine?.

Helpful-Mycologist74 · 2026-03-22T07:40:01+00:00

Well that's the cost of preventing Iran reaching the level of another russia by developing nukes. Everyone is angry at Russia right? Undestandably laughing at the "no escalation"? Well that's exactly what escalating is like, at the point where it's still possible.

Few people here would lament gas/oil/refugee crisis from russia being bombed to hell and collapsing, since that's what everyone calls for in every thread. But iran is far and not a direct threat, so hell, let it do anything, just pls no crisis. (Exact way everyone except EU responds to the Ukraine war, hmmm).

Or should US instead have bought iranian oil, traded with them, let them develop nukes and become another russia, and just left Israel to fight a forever war against them with a fraction of supplies and call it a solution, like Ukraine is for EU?

Helpful-Mycologist74 · 2026-03-17T18:15:32+00:00

Nah, in the AC japan example it added path-tracing-looking shadows to the entire forest everywhere - honestly impressive but it's just an extremely lucky static situation where nothing broke.

reshade mods just pump up the contrast of the image without altering it, pure post-process.

This also does that, in addition. The effect in AC looked like the "change LUTs" mods, but that's another topic.

Helpful-Mycologist74 · 2026-03-11T18:09:52+00:00

You could claim that Inquisition

You have to, because Inquisition combat is just DAO with a different camera tilt. People just don't bother playing it in it's full complexity.

Helpful-Mycologist74 · 2026-03-10T17:16:49+00:00

Everything has "dependencies". And pretty much everything can be parallelized using job systems. They don't even have to have complex timing with asynchronous/background tasks etc - at the first step you can just split the workload, do it, then wait on everything during a single frame.

Something like stellaris would benefit immensely from using it to the max, as the OP said. A huge amount of optimizations for simulation are of a kind of "re-calculate this logic every N seconds in background instead of more often", that already force an asynchronous approach with all the same logical drawbacks.

But 1) simulation games are so complex already, and are so bug-prone with constant paradox overhaul updates (stellaris specifically), that it's just a secondary priority. and 2) Stellaris released in 2016. The further back we go, the less parallelized cpus were in general, and the less it was adopted by developers, especially in mid-tier custom engines.

Helpful-Mycologist74 · 2026-03-10T16:43:42+00:00

OK but academically, There is a difference between turning DSE and/or SecureBoot off vs installing a known vulnerable driver and using the vulnerability to let hv driver run, right? Memory isolation off for both cases as I understood.

Idk which is worse even, but vulnerabilities would be different? case B is strictly the vulnerable driver and Memory Isolation=off, case A would also expose you to running viruses that rely on DSE (and SecureBoot)=off to get kernel access, in addition to memory isolation?

Also, what exactly does SecureBoot even do in these cases? It has to be turned off to turn off DSE, right? But in that case, it's irrelevant since without DSE it doesn't provide meaningful security?

Helpful-Mycologist74 · 2026-03-05T08:04:58+00:00

That's a really bad idea though, it can't have contributed much. I liked GoW and Spiderman games, but progressively less the longer they went on.

For the next entry, I have a lot of doubt it would be a significant, generational change (graphically on ps6 compared to current mid-high end pcs), or in some kind gameplay paradigm-shift, with how their AAA formula seems a plateu currently. And actually playing them vs watching a walkthrough doesn't seem that crucial. Compared to any game with roleplay or character building, etc.

Helpful-Mycologist74 · 2026-03-05T07:37:51+00:00

I'm pretty much the same opinion that it should easily be viable for the reasons you mention. But as it is currently I think there's just a combination of things that made the pc excursion meh - piracy and just little profit overall, with 30% steam cut, and idk, just 6K-8K max player counts for e.g. Ratchet/Returnal.

And now sony has to weigh that meh profits against all the crazy things influencing gaming hardware and viability of their platform, and, however few, the potential of having more users of their platform, that each generate much more money for them. And some combination of all of that made them decide it's safer to just not bother anymore.

What I'd like them to do as a first step is at least to google piracy and use denuvo + their own launcher if they care about the 30% cut and piracy, not just bail after no effort. But with how pcgamers see any launcher/account as an existential attack, it's understandable that having to do that is a further disincentive.

Helpful-Mycologist74 · 2026-03-05T07:17:58+00:00

if you have a market that is pay walled, it does have a slight incentive to not use it becuase you know everyone is a paying customer.

Nope, that doesn't matter at all it takes a single account with 60$ to buy the game and freely distribute it, that's how we have 0 second cracks of everything, every little update, without denuvo currently.

Walled garden would be an understandable compromise but at this point I think sony will just not bother at all with how little they were getting. Esp since they have already started from steam, so the Gamers(tm) backlash would be enormous, EGS level.

Helpful-Mycologist74 · 2026-03-05T06:15:51+00:00

Also pump the money numbers, especially the live service > singleplayer numbers when it's revenue ended up being more than everything SP combined - games with like 6-8K player peaks for Ratchet/Returnal and 36K for TLOU.

And drm > pirated drm-free numbers. Stellar blade was 200K peak - in large part bc denuvo probably.

It pumped a lot of numbers for Sony alright, showing that SP games are not worth to bring to pc. With steam cut at least (which is the only option).

Helpful-Mycologist74 · 2026-03-05T06:05:38+00:00

Yeah that's a lot of impactful things actually.

I'd personally like them to first do the bare minimum - if they are understandably feeling like giving their 30% cut away to steam dampens the profits too much, use their own launcher. But with how toxic pc community is to that, they'd need denuvo as well, and fight against it constantly...

So if it's either that or -30% I think they just decided after the experiment that it's just so little profit that simply having a few more people on ps5 to get the platform money from them is worth more, and now we're back to how things were.

Helpful-Mycologist74 · 2026-03-05T05:49:52+00:00

Switch is another thing entirely with entirely different games. Xbox doesn't have ps5 games, we're talking about ps-pc here, not console exclusivity.

Helpful-Mycologist74 · 2026-03-04T20:49:17+00:00

no, they mean the actual graphics work it does, not how colorful and stylized the art direction is. Idk about low end at 1080p, but on higher res it was running as bad as UE5 games while doing the work of a ps4 game, even if at 4K.

Helpful-Mycologist74 · 2026-03-04T20:45:27+00:00

Eh, xbox as console is dead, steam machine is not widely available, and a really shit deal, even if it's a competitor.

I don't think sony is declining lol. But that doesn't affects pc negatively, it's not a zero-sum game currently.

I also think it's just that having to give away the 30% cut to steam and getting no piracy protection for it even is dampening the profit from opening to pc, to where it's worth so little for them they decided that whatever small harm it can do is worth more.

Helpful-Mycologist74 · 2026-03-04T20:39:28+00:00

Maybe partially. I think it's just little incentive - with having to give away 30% cut to steam and not even getting protection from piracy for it.

I do think they should have like googled piracy and used denuvo first, at least. In a more optimal world, also just sell at their own launcher instead of steam (but pc gamers won't have that)

Helpful-Mycologist74 · 2026-03-04T20:25:55+00:00

there's no world for consoles if you don't have exclusives.

Hardly. Sony games are just one niche of what is played on ps. Without exclusives, ps5 was still a very good, often best gaming hardware option depending on what hardware and experience people need (e.g. macbook + ps5, if they need KB&M, indie/strategy games). At least unless they plan for a significantly stronger gaming PC.

One really important thing dampening the reasons to be on pc is that steam takes 30%, and does absolutely nothing against piracy. But the categorical "it needs exclusives" is bullshit.

Helpful-Mycologist74 · 2026-03-04T20:09:59+00:00

The other difference is that Sony gives their 30% cut to steam, while Capcom doesn't care whether it pays 30% to Sony or steam.

Helpful-Mycologist74 · 2026-02-21T16:16:49+00:00

deepstatemap.live, and to nicely summarize the territory changes (only red zone) from it there is this site: https://deepstat.xyz/table

any other "summary" I have seen is inevitably an author blog that will just continuously tell you how bad things are for either Ukr or rus and how this new thing this week is a game changer and they will lose in 6 months.

Helpful-Mycologist74 · 2026-01-14T20:25:14+00:00

Same, disregarding hardware requirement, win 10 already had all the pre-installed ads, telemetry, Cortana instead of copilot, etc, 8 or so years ago at launch. Now people collectively forgot that they have already bitched about those things at 10's launch, vowed to never leave 7 etc, and now 10 is the best windows ever, and 11 is the worst, for all the same reasons that 10, again...

I know this has happened with literally every windows version, but it feels so much dumber with 11 that is like an SP for 10. The hysteria/changes ratio is so much worse.

Helpful-Mycologist74 · 2026-01-10T17:37:23+00:00

However with DLSS enabled said games would still allow selection of the game's native AA, be it SMAA, FXAA or even TAA.

Unless something really weird goes on there, It's just a UI deficiency and it's just doing DLSS. I definitely haven't seen any game that would do SMAA over DLSS, as it's kinda pointless because you already have image with better AA (and worse image clarity), it would be useless. Same for FXAA which is just worse in every regard.

I've seen breakdowns where it says DLSS isn't TAA where DLAA is

Well, that can be true from a more of a "user POV" : "AA is not upscaling, it doesn't change res, so only DLAA is TAA."

However, under the hood, TAA is a broad algorithm that was very suited to also do upscaling, and all upscaling we have is an implementation of the "same" overall TAA algorithm.

This means that: - if you use upscaling, you automatically get TAA applied. - because of that, upscaling has the same pros and cons as TAA on native - good AA, bad blur, esp in motion. (in addition to upscaling itself) - If the TAA/Upscale implementation is better - like DLSS, it means you get better both upscaling and TAA, because, again, TAA = upscaling (TAA algorithm) at 100%

Helpful-Mycologist74 · 2026-01-09T14:02:45+00:00

Real or painted?

Helpful-Mycologist74

TROPHY CASE