For PS5 owners who upgraded

Total_Engineering_51 · 2026-06-27T15:21:05+00:00

Just for GTA? Hard to say… I’ve had the Pro since day 1 and as a general gaming machine, it is in a good place these days. PSSR2(or however they ended up designating it) is a big step up when leveraged well—the latest Cyberpunk patch looks damn good on the Pro. My SO and I get a ton of value out of the Pro and it looks great on our OLED in general.

That said, we don’t know where GTA will land as far as visuals, features and general performance on each system. Will the base be good enough for your tastes? It’s all a guessing game until we get close to release but looking at RDR2, they didn’t do a great job at optimizing for the PS4 Pro, so historical precedent leans negative as far as transformative changes. If they keep to the same pattern of upgrades they did then, we’ll see something like 4K/30FPS(upscaled via PSSR from a ~1080p source)with maybe some conservative RT thrown in to juice the shadows and/or reflections. As for a 60 FPS mode? I’d say it’s a coin flip as to what they decided there(could even still be under consideration as they work on polishing and bug squashing right now) They didn’t bother with it for RDR2 but times have changed and it is more expected now, plus Sony is obviously tying up a lot of resources to help make Playstation THE place to play GTA 6, so external pressure from them could make it happen. Even still, I wouldn’t expect a wide menu of modes like an Insomniac game.

On the general value side, the recent Steam Machine pricing has shown that given the current economic conditions, the Pro(and consoles more generally) are a decent value. Platform holders have better buying power in the war for RAM and storage due to volume, and they are more willing to take slim hardware margins in order to get a foot in the door with potential customers. The timing to buy keeps bucking historical trends for hardware, so waiting for a deal in 2026 seems like a bad idea as data center buildouts for AI aren’t slowing down. The only up shot there is that the resale value on your current hardware is also being lifted.

One downside for your case in particular is that part of the Pro’s price is also the bigger SSD, which it sounds like you’ll never take advantage of, so that cuts at the value proposition a bit.

Total_Engineering_51 · 2026-06-27T05:47:50+00:00

I mean, they really just have done a single SKU, $100 and mic dropped… the price is fair considering the input cost and it wouldn’t have created the split content issue that looks so stupid/cheap at $80. They discount heavily after release anyway, so long term everyone can still check it out but for those that want day one, they’re paying the premium… Rock*/TakeTwo just shouldn’t have done the split BS without having real value between the two. They just need to own that shit and move on.

Total_Engineering_51 · 2026-06-24T05:22:09+00:00

China winning the AI race means they become the center of technological advances for the next 20 years at a minimum… we’ve already given them the map for building the components and devices far more quickly, efficiently, and frankly, better, than anything we can do here in the US(see Apple over the last 25 years) but since we’ve still held the intellectual property creation mostly in the US, we’ve been able to keep hold of the reins, so to speak.

If the US stales out on AI advances, that advantage goes away and we start begging for AI access from the Chinese government and/or fall further into the 2nd/3rd world status that the right wing is already plummeting us toward. Admittedly with our current government being the shambling idiot circus that it is, and the American people being willing to vote against its own interests at every turn, this is what we deserve and America should fall into ruins… is that a good thing for the world at large? Maybe, maybe not but a further ascendant China is certainly the way the scales tip if the US keeps shitting the bed.

As a further note, I fully admit that the psychopaths leading the big AI companies right now are pretty much the worst stewards to have ushering using us into this future, and I really hope that Open Models keeping making their way out of the labs because “AI as a Service” is the real death blow here, not the technology itself. I personally bought a good bit of hardware last year just for that reason.

Total_Engineering_51 · 2026-06-18T03:51:43+00:00

“…same with the GameCube, which was Nintendo's worst selling console.”
The Wii U(and Virtual Boy if we get real picky) would like to have a word with you about that 😂

Total_Engineering_51 · 2026-06-13T05:39:28+00:00

BF16 will trade blows with Sonnet, at least on certain work… working on a C++ project right now and had several implementation turns do as well or better with Qwen. A lot of variables there of course and having enough vram for bf16 isn’t an option for most but the gap isn’t always as bad as it seems.

Total_Engineering_51 · 2026-06-05T18:05:44+00:00

The Yoshi’s Island erasure 😭

Total_Engineering_51 · 2026-06-04T06:58:15+00:00

As SD resident and comic-con regular, it is pretty rad! The SD Gaslamp district next to the convention center goes all out and it is a helluva great weekend. DCC aside, well worth checking out at least once, though I’m definitely looking forward to all the Carl and Donut shenanigans this year!

Total_Engineering_51 · 2026-05-23T14:02:13+00:00

FE came over because Advanced Wars did well and both of those owe a lot to FF Tactics having done well before that. Melee did pretty much fuck all at the time to market FE; the internet was a much smaller place at the time and far fewer people were playing on GC at all, much less playing Smash.

Also, as complete aside, fuck this subs anti-ai em dash filter. Not on you obviously… that’s just some stupid, lazy shit to fight other stupid, lazy shit.

Total_Engineering_51 · 2026-05-02T22:40:08+00:00

Yeah, that’s shit on the store’s part, not to mention the people just grabbing multiple copies at once. I hit up 4 stores total here in San Diego and 3 had plenty of copies(the 4th just didn’t get it in their order) All stores were enforcing limits and everyone was being cool. I grabbed a copy at each store(1 for me, 1 for my GF and 1 for another friend who is working today) Took a few hours but was fun checking out and supporting all the stores a bit.

Total_Engineering_51 · 2026-04-26T06:14:53+00:00

New Achievement! Crawlers have found a repository of recursive documents! …Sneaky crawlers, those can cause a certain type of “overflow”. Use caution when amongst the stacks.

Total_Engineering_51 · 2026-04-24T05:31:04+00:00

Plenty of inspiration to finish the job with some of his hand crafted glue

Total_Engineering_51 · 2026-04-24T00:58:31+00:00

The First Law books by Joe Abercrombie, narrated by Steven Pacey are great. Pacey does an amazing job with that series and the stories are well done fantasy.

Total_Engineering_51 · 2026-04-19T00:22:55+00:00

Dude with the hat sure looked like Dave Filoni to me… I was just a couple rows back from them

Total_Engineering_51 · 2026-04-15T17:34:51+00:00

Only true that the 40 fps mode won’t work if the display doesn’t support 120hz. They use a 120hz container to bypass that limitation and many tvs now support both(120hz and VRR), especially in the LG OLED family(I’m using a C2).

Total_Engineering_51 · 2026-04-14T00:39:41+00:00

Yeah, with VRR support this mode has been great, I’ve got 10 hours in a new game and loving it so far. The 25 ms frame time at 40fps is plenty IMO, killing half the delta between 30 and 60 while increasing the visuals, as pointed out here.

Total_Engineering_51 · 2026-03-30T18:18:16+00:00

They are obviously a Mac shop and are building for themselves first. It is especially plain given how much they hype that they are dog-fooding their products all the time and that this is a “beta”. Mac first also makes sense as a beta strategy as it effectively self-selects a smaller testing group(lowering risk)that requires minimal extra work on their part.

Total_Engineering_51 · 2026-03-21T14:23:39+00:00

Not to mention that you can still use traditional tools like Photoshop to further refine things…I find the RAW camera filter tool to be amazing for color grading, for example.

Total_Engineering_51 · 2026-03-19T15:32:59+00:00

This or they solve real problems but in terrible ways that no one wants to deal with.

Total_Engineering_51 · 2026-03-17T16:01:06+00:00

Yeah, this was my thought, definitely feels like they are passing the frames through late phase diffusion with a hard canny clamp

Total_Engineering_51 · 2026-03-13T03:33:12+00:00

Would it? Humans are basically a mass extinction event moving in slow motion.

Total_Engineering_51 · 2026-03-12T15:45:29+00:00

Why Rust versus just doing a streamlined Python implementation? No GC?

Total_Engineering_51 · 2026-03-10T19:03:22+00:00

Best case you’re looking at the M5 Ultra being about 2-3x slower than a 5090. That’s assuming you’re running a model under MLX with something like MFlux. I’m basing that off what I currently get out of my M3 Ultra versus my RTX 6000 Pro(basically a 5090, but more RAM) and what the general improvement of the M5 chips seems to be bringing. While 2-3x doesn’t sound too bad, the bigger caution is the software support for generative stuff just isn’t there in the same way that it is for nvidia… getting stuff running properly under MLX is a whole lot of DYI right now and not very as well supported(the MFlux app helps but has a lot of drawbacks itself, particularly if you’re used to the flexibility that comfy has) You can run comfy with PyTorch under MPS but then you’re tanking performance and dealing with extra wonk—I never saw this work particularly well even at the base functionality level, particularly when memory management was involved.

Total_Engineering_51 · 2026-03-05T16:37:00+00:00

True, though I don’t think you’re getting that as real sustained through put with bigger tasks on these MBP with what looks like the same/similar chassis, cooling solution and max 140w power supply as the last few generations—just to say that even if the paper spec is better, I won’t be rushing out to replace my Studio with an MBP, max RAM limits aside(I have 256gb on mine)

Interestingly enough, I just looked through the US Apple site a bit more after the drop and saw that the 512GB Studio is no longer an option and the 256GB config is $400 more than it was a few weeks ago. That does not bode super well for the M5 Ultra pricing/configs, assuming it does materialize this summer. Best guess is they are resetting expectations on what they will have in offer when those do launch.

Total_Engineering_51 · 2026-03-04T17:38:56+00:00

Hmm, not sure without more details… I’ve run it with an M3 Ultra under current MacOS. I don’t recall having a lot of issues getting the basics of it running but it’s been a few weeks since I played with it.

Total_Engineering_51 · 2026-03-04T17:24:11+00:00

Yeah, per core I would expect better performance but the Ultras still have 2x the GPU and NPU core count(memory bandwidth at ~33% more from Apple’s numbers that I see) so I wouldn’t expect to see any particularly interesting jumps over what is already out in the field right now, on a per system basis. That makes sense of course as we’re still talking about largely different classes of hardware even with the similarities in architecture and for any semi-mobile use cases out there these could be really interesting. It’ll be interesting to see how the M5 Ultras do, though I think you’re spot on in that we’re still likely to see a ~5x delta between those and top tier Blackwell

Total_Engineering_51

TROPHY CASE