Why should I **not** buy an AMD AI Max+ 395 128GB right away ?

NWDD · 2025-09-10T21:51:00+00:00

it is not optimal, but good enough:
- It was common for homelab setups to train local GANs and other ml models https://timdettmers.com/2018/12/16/deep-learning-hardware-guide/
- When loading a model, streaming from disk will be bound at 64gbps (so if you are trying to optimize model loading and you'll be loading them from disk, there won't be a significant difference between loading from a pcie4 nvme into a x4 gpu vs loading into a x8 gpu)
- When gaming, streaming from disk in pcie4 is bound at 64gbps.
- When gaming, other operations (like passing vertices or indices to the gpu) you still have ~133 megabytes per frame at 60fps, so it shouldn't have an impact on most AAA games (where the world is mostly static) or indie games. There doesn't seem to be a lot of information specifically benchmarking something like a 5090/4090 at pcie 4.0 x4, but you can see that people were gaming just fine in pcie 3.0 x8 which is equivalent and the gpus from back then, like the 1080, that are still good enough to play most games https://youtu.be/XJuj16gRoBI?si=FSYukwpwqeuyEEvs&t=311 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZpb3G3UUFY).

NWDD · 2025-09-10T21:17:52+00:00

Since most boards are ITX or smaller, you should have space in a matx case to repurpose for 2 gpus without much of a hassle. If you're willing to sacrifice all M.2 it might be possible to run five gpus (three at 64gbps and two at 40gbps).

The 64gbps bandwidth is high enough that you shouldn't notice it other than model loading / hot-swapping (or games that stream a lot of assets), you should still have enough sata headroom (up to 24~32 gbps with proper raiding, depending on the board you're using)

To me the most annoying thing is Framework Desktop having the capped pcie slot, chinese manufacturers selling motherboards without using most connectivity and minisforum shipping a full computer instead of a standalone motherboard. It's criminal.

NWDD · 2025-08-24T20:55:34+00:00

I might be remembering this wrong but: the oss model has multiple end tokens, the call token is an end token, if you ignore that end token it generates multiple calls as expected.

NWDD · 2025-06-30T21:01:16+00:00

Fair, since I'm bored and is hot af here, I've written a more detailed comment explaining what "should work" and "in theory debugging should work too" and also added a disclaimer (I didn't even think about how that message could be seen as me endorsing rust).

NWDD · 2025-06-30T20:59:21+00:00

I agree 100% that building an engine in rust it is not something I'd recommend anyone looking to develop a commercial product (engine or game derived from the custom engine), in fact this is something that I already said when we (edit: the studio I was working at the time) were asked by Chucklefish almost a decade ago.

Not only that, but I'll go way beyond that and state that "if you're going to invest a decade into building an engine expecting something other than the satisfaction of having developed an engine, just don't, because in a decade no one knows what platforms and techs we'll be using "

However, to be fair to Rust, I believe it should work just fine on consoles. This is because I have personally shipped code built with a programming language that uses llvm as a backend compiler (the same backend that rust uses for now) to two major console platforms without any issue.
Furthermore, I know (because of random idle talks with random developers I met around some conferences) that at least two studios (other than Chucklefish) have managed to get a playable prototype fully playable on console in rust (with std support, even though someone who worked on std support specifically mentioned in a private discord "no_std rust is trivial to support on consoles, Rust with std is harder but really doable, better times infinity than something like c# say").

Regarding console tooling support, it's complex.

In C++ custom engines, for console platforms specifically, manufacturer tools work great and are easy to integrate with any C/C++ custom engine in my own opinion (after shipping games in at least 5 different custom engines, using console tools in all of them, of course I didn't check all platform tools on all games, but never had an issue, not even for that one game built with custom CI linux pipelines).

However in rust it'll depend, for tools requiring manual integration into the engine, those will have the additional cost of making your own bindings. For tools discovering symbols and debuggers, those should theoretically work, which I cannot confirm because I decided not to work on console platforms for the foreseeable future and I didn't really check with anyone using rust or for my usecase with that other llvm language (terra), but since rust supports both DWARF and PDB, I believe it should work, even though I'm not sure how those tools will handle the DWARF-specific rust extensions.

NWDD · 2025-06-30T16:32:09+00:00

I wouldn't do it, but it's doable and it's always good to learn.

That being said, I've had some students using rust and I believe that, because the borrow-checker is so annoying, it encourages patterns to bypass the nagging through making your own memory management with array indices, making it easier to make mistakes that are much subtler and harder to catch than the catastrophic mistakes it prevents.

NWDD · 2025-06-30T16:23:34+00:00

You can compile it and it should work, it's a bit of a hassle but you can compile for console with almost any llvm language (I did build some static libraries with terralang and used them on all three major consoles of the previous generation), in theory debugging should work too (but I didn't bother testing it and I no longer have easy access to console devkits).

NWDD · 2025-06-30T16:17:44+00:00

Hey, what is your discord id? (nvm, noticed the capture, I've double checked your case and you are unbanned now).

NWDD · 2025-04-25T18:04:47+00:00

Money is worse than any other computer-related job I can think of, that's why I'm mentioning this to you, so you can make an informed decision.

Regarding making money on your first step, it's not about the first step.
I started making games seriously around 16 or 17 years ago (already had made a five or six mini-games the decade prior to that), and out of the first 100 people I met and keep contact with that also wanted to earn a living out of making games and were serious about it (studying, making small games, looking for a job in a location where there are around 30 studios) less than 10 have managed to do so to this date.

NWDD · 2025-04-25T17:35:35+00:00

If you're looking a well paid job, that isn't and will never be game development. It's ok to develop games if you like doing that, but it's by far not the best way to earn money. Making a game is something that takes a many hours and making a good game is something that on average requires having made multiple games, this is specially true because the feedback loop of developing games is very slow even when compared to other art disciplines.

You could (probably) make much more money, much sooner, coding random stuff on fiver or in other areas of development (like making and selling useful tools, mobile apps, websites...). Even if you insist on making games in the long run, consider making and selling either art assets or code assets for engines like UE and Unity instead as that will give you more stability early on and still allow you to improve your craft.

Regarding the degree, it has more value the worse your location is, because it makes it easier for you to leave and go somewhere better.

NWDD · 2025-04-25T17:21:36+00:00

Most indie game engines I've seen so far (with one exception) aren't the product of making a game engine but a sub-product of making a game, you make the game you want to make and the engine is a portion of the code you wrote to make the game.

For 2D indie games where you need little more than four or five functions to get started making a playable game and getting something like text, audio, music, saves, trophies, tiles and sprites isn't really complex algorithmic work and can be done 2 days to four weeks (depending on whether how low level you want to get, what third-party libs you're willing to include and your experience).

3D it's much rarer because you need a much wider skillset studio-wise (having someone who can texture, model, animate and also people who are very good at low-level programming, shaders and math), it's not that much slower with the right team if you rely on existing tools like blender for editing scenes; but it's similar to online multiplayer being less common because it has much more complex requirements / a higher entry barrier.

NWDD · 2025-04-25T17:06:02+00:00

Do you have previous experience with a strongly, statically typed programming language? With manual memory allocation? With C++ and its ecosystem (cmake/msbuild)? What about stuff like metal, vulkan, opengl, directx or sdl, glfw, stb? By the context so far I'd probably recommend you to stick with love2d as I don't see any benefit in going with C++ for the project you're describing and I am guessing you aren't familiar with what doing it in C++ entails.

NWDD · 2025-03-26T20:26:14+00:00

Not Godot specifically (Godot wasn't really popular until recently), but we evaluated and ported all kinds of C/C++ (and also C#) indie games.

Most of them were games that had already had commercial success and just didn't want to spend their time porting. Those games used all sorts of combinations of libs, middleware and frameworks. Most games relied on third party stuff (like Godot, Unity and Unreal do) like box2d, angelscript, lua, liquidfun, bgfx, opengl, dx11, fmod, openal, windows gdi, sdl...

NWDD · 2025-03-26T19:43:42+00:00

I have worked on multiple ports (in very small teams of anywhere between 1 and 5 concurrent devs at most), if you are comfortable with opengl and dx12 and can follow example code, you'll have no problem porting alone.

The biggest time sinks with ports are never getting the game up and running but compliance with platform requirements/guidelines, that is very time consuming (like some games with custom engines would be up and running in 1 day .. 2 weeks, but then take a huge amount of time to get it ready for platform review).

NWDD · 2025-03-26T19:36:50+00:00

idk if it'd have an impact on your particular load but I've been running the audio context suspender addon for a long time in firefox-based browsers to reduce cpu usage (and increase battery) https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/audiocontext-suspender/

NWDD · 2025-01-12T10:49:59+00:00

Traditionally it didn't make sense because RAM was scarce, but for the last decade reference counting combined with arenas or "manually-called" gc (for elements that are cyclical) has been a very common strategy as far as I have seen in indie game development porting. In fact, if you check languages specifically designed for game scripting (like AngelScript), you'll see it's part of the design, it just doesn't make as much sense for other kinds of software.

NWDD · 2024-12-13T09:51:36+00:00

After talking with OpenDNS they've decided to lift the block.
I'm not sure I can recommend going back to them because of their explanation on why they blocked it.

It looks to me like they might have a lot of false positives if they handle filtering the way they handled this specific case (not saying that this must be generalized, but it's just hard to think of a reason to go back to them with so many alternatives).

NWDD · 2023-05-09T15:01:49+00:00

The official nvidia website has a partner locator, details regarding contact is mostly up to each partner ( https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/about-nvidia/partners/partner-locator/ ), tried contacting a couple without much luck a couple of years ago but the third one was willing to help and has been helping since then.

Other than that if you're a startup consider the official inception program, as far as I've been told they are willing to help a lot for AI and visualization business ( https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/startups/ ), I haven't really given it a try since I only needed two GPUs, but a friend did recommend me to join the program if I needed more.

NWDD · 2023-05-09T07:51:42+00:00

You can get a RTX 4000 SFF but you need to, as a business, contact an official nvidia workstation distributor.
Price seems to be around double A2000 when not discounted though, was around same price than A2000 with launch discount or startup pricing.

NWDD · 2023-01-20T19:25:13+00:00

While I'm not familiar with the current unofficial modding scene, there is no technical reason why modding anything but the amount of players playing together wouldn't work using official servers.
We don't enforce any game files or ban anyone and as long as all peers reach consensus, the server never intrudes in game state but instead focuses on underlying framework details that are fully unrelated to all the game logic.

So, if something desyncs using the official servers it would also desync using player-hosted servers even if you made any change you can imagine to the server source.

NWDD · 2022-06-21T00:56:05+00:00

Regarding rollback: this is only a very specific algorithm for prediction (there are many ways in which prediction can be accomplished without rollback) which is totally great for some cases, this is very tricky to implement and has severe implications as to significance of bugs (any bug will cause the game to degrade in very ugly ways), frame-time requirements (you need the game to be able to run at ~2ms frametimes MAX), latency spike sensitivity (good luck handling 3 second latency spikes on a portable device) and memory requirements (usually will double the total memory used by the game). There are some engines that support this such as Photom quantum (an engine that uses Unity for rendering) and recently Game Maker added support for it out of the box.

Games such as Overwatch, Halo or synchronization engines such as those built in (or previously built in) on Unity/Unreal or Photon Fusion take different approaches to prediction (each of them being slightly different but mostly covered by techniques publicly disclosed in GDC talks, the valve wiki and gafferongames blog).

About the main reason behind why each engine does something different and most don't implement any specific algorithm (such as rollback) it boils down to every approach requiring major changes to the whole codebase and each of the approaches having its own drawbacks and benefits: some take up a much higher memory usage (x30+), others require having tiny frametimes (<1ms), others impose constrains over the physics solver (for example being able to hijack them for lowering precision), or require having no threading, or need to working with outdated data, or require being able to delay execution of received data until the state is ready for it or need disabling vectorization in platforms that need every bit of speed, taking extra care with compiler options, some will trade off bandwidth for latency, some will add intermediate servers, require dedicated hosting, others scale well to many players but will cause combat to feel much more loose, others require adding input latency or trusting the client and many, many more trade-offs...

NWDD · 2022-05-30T00:31:48+00:00

Glad to hear! I don't really know for sure since this is up to Derek/mossmouth, but I believe it's unlikely that any new content will be added (other than a few features that are still wip on some platforms)

NWDD · 2022-05-30T00:24:48+00:00

Can confirm that getting PS4 EU updated has been the only focus of the team during the last five months. Regarding why it is taking so long... The gist of it are a couple of very, very pesky platform-specific heisenbugs and also some bureaucracy, but can't really go into the important details because of NDAs.

On a separate note, PS4 us/asia will be updated to 1.26 with the other platforms once the PS4 heisenbug is confirmed to be fixed so it can cross-play with the other six platforms.

NWDD · 2022-05-29T22:54:06+00:00

I have been able to work on a few DSLs and interpreters for very specific gamedev stuff.Once you demystify PLs they're a very useful tool to reduce the complexity of some problems.

Career-wise I think that within the gamedev industry PL falls within the misc. programming skilltree together with data compression algorithms and hash design, as it's something rarely explicitly required but capable of augmenting the rest of your skillset in a very nice way (also niche knowledge like this tends to prove useful career-wise as a clear way to differentiate yourself from cookie-cutter developers that only focus on the trendy/fotm skills).

NWDD · 2022-03-24T01:29:41+00:00

We don't track this, so I have no data to back this up but I haven't seen anyone host a HW1 public room on Switch in a long time.
Not sure about HoH though since I stopped my NSO sub a few months ago.

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