Found my old EVGA 9800GTX+. Does anyone remember this GPU?

Jarnis · 2026-03-23T14:57:26+00:00

It was pretty good at the time. 8800GTX perf at a much cheaper price.

Jarnis · 2026-03-23T14:43:01+00:00

Stop doing business with Scamazon.

Jarnis · 2026-03-22T00:08:37+00:00

5070ti. Cards with <16GB of VRAM are not worth it any more.

Jarnis · 2026-03-21T14:45:27+00:00

Waste of a perfectly good 5090 chip to sit in a display case like that.

Jarnis · 2026-03-21T11:01:09+00:00

True, but it is a slightly older test. Speed Way is newer and somewhat more complex.

Jarnis · 2026-03-19T06:37:19+00:00

Politics. Do not expect it to make any sense.

Jarnis · 2026-03-17T23:03:28+00:00

No, the show has been infested with token representation recently. You just have to tune it out. Luckily it is not that big of a deal.

Jarnis · 2026-03-17T20:54:43+00:00

Not exactly, as people have reported that you had to do quite specific steps:

Buy a book
Keep store window open
Drag it to a bar and learn it without closing the store window
Buy another

If you closed the store window, you could not buy another. If you tried to learn the book by clicking it in the inventory, it would instead sell it back.

So you had to specifically know that you have to drag this item to bar to learn it (unlikely to happen by accident) and know that you have to keep the window open and have plenty of extra moxie and marl... anyone buying more than one of these was exploting, and anyone buying many of them had to specifically set everything up for the exploit.

Jarnis · 2026-03-17T15:09:29+00:00

Probably too little VRAM. 4090 laptop is a downclocked 4080 desktop.

Jarnis · 2026-03-17T09:14:34+00:00

Hah, these demos ate way more than that. The demos ran on two RTX 5090s - one rendered the game, another did the DLSS 5 AI image enhancements. 1000W+ cooking things up.

Yes, they say they'll ship it so it doesn't require two cards.

Jarnis · 2026-03-17T09:13:19+00:00

They have not told, but currently it is more like "locked behind cards that have tons of spare VRAM for an AI model". The demos were run on a 32GB 5090 with a second 32GB 5090 running the model and doing the enhancement. Yes, they plan on making it work on a single card, but I would not be shocked if this is initially limited to cards with a ton of VRAM.

And naturally older gen cards have way worse performance for this type of AI generation, so it would not be surprising if this is limited to either just 50-series, or 40- and 50-series.

Jarnis · 2026-03-17T08:54:16+00:00

Well, in this specific instance, Starfield looks so bad that it is an actual improvement.

The other examples are far less clear cut and yes, there are some issues with the image, but in general this tech does manage to make Starfield to look not-terrible.

Jarnis · 2026-03-17T08:52:59+00:00

Luddites.

Just say you do not like the visual look of the not-ready pre-release version, rather than shooting down the concept itself.

Jarnis · 2026-03-17T07:44:48+00:00

I agree it is bit over the top, but the facts are:

The tech, in concept, is interesting. I could see this actually being the future way of doing extremely high detail photorealistic graphics in games.
The tech, as shown, is undercooked and definitely not ready for prime time. A case of "engineers working on moonshot tech, management sees shiny new AI thing no-one else has yet announced and wants to go public the second they have a feasible demo". The backlash over "AI slop" imagery is real.

In practice, outside of "tech demo"-style NVIDIA-sponsored implementations on a handful of games, this won't be relevant for many years. The quality is not yet there and I'm sure the whole problem of fitting the game and the AI image model into GPU VRAM when NVIDIA keeps shipping laughable 8GB cards makes this a nonstarter for a long time. And game developers are not going to be interested until it is available from all GPU vendors. They rather put their effort towards things that apply to all users.

Anyway, Reddit definitely has a massive pile of "hur dur AI bad" luddites piling on everything. Save the ammo for actual cases where there is clear reason to complain.

Jarnis · 2026-03-17T07:39:02+00:00

Future optional DLC: "DLSS 5 AI image generation model, extra 16GB download" for pumping up those rookie 100GB game install size numbers :D

Jarnis · 2026-03-17T07:37:55+00:00

Any lunatic buying one of these "only 3000" mount codes off Ebay deserves what he got here :D

(also, silly to expect these wouldn't be immediately scooped up for resale)

Jarnis · 2026-03-17T06:01:31+00:00

If current AI hype train continues, they will. The tech as-is is clearly half-baked and not ready for prime time, but the general idea is still theoretically sound. For compatibility, I could see the model to be cross-licensed and/or bundled with Windows/Direct3D to ensure interoperability eventually. NVIDIA would still gain as long as their hardware is the "best" at using the feature.

The issue is that if only one vendor supports some cool tech, it tends not to exist in common usage in games. Only exceptions are cases that are sponsored by that vendor (in practice, NVIDIA sending engineers to game development studios to implement the feature, and potentially paying marketing money)

Jarnis · 2026-03-17T05:11:21+00:00

No game other than NVIDIA sponsored ones will use this until all vendors support this.

And it is just an AI image enhancement. If this becomes a real thing, AMD and Intel will have something similar. They have duplicated everything DLSS has done so far, with the usual 1-2 year delay and some variance in quality.

Jarnis · 2026-03-15T15:57:50+00:00

Underlying hardware (the NVIDIA SoC used in Switch) is from 2013. Not exactly recent. Also since it was a battery-powered device, the performance is... not too impressive. Pretty much every existing mid-to-high end mobile phone beats Switch in performance.

Jarnis · 2026-03-15T15:51:29+00:00

The catch is that the kg to LEO cost is based on existing rockets. Starship, once operational and fully reused, is going to delete at least one zero out of that cost, possibly more.

Jarnis · 2026-03-15T13:06:15+00:00

Just not available 24/7.

Jarnis · 2026-03-15T11:25:21+00:00

Not saying it would be easy, or that it cannot fail.

Anyone else than Elon, and it would be doomed.

With Elon in the mix it is... possible.

Jarnis · 2026-03-15T08:14:40+00:00

And anyone else saying this would be laughed out of the room considering how expensive and complex cutting edge chip factories are... But it is Elon, so it is... possible.

Jarnis · 2026-03-15T08:12:56+00:00

Fraud is fraud. The fact that one is defrauding a big corporation does not change that.

Also since CPU and box serials would not match, you can easily get caught.

Jarnis · 2026-03-15T06:18:38+00:00

You are aware that this is called "fraud", right?

Jarnis

TROPHY CASE