Absolution and Mistborn

Good Morning Folks! On Tuesday night I started a brand new character and last night I got it into maps. This has been one of the faster leveling characters I have played, but that was in part because for most of it I was using a bunch of uniques to speed up the process. As I talked about yesterday, I created a Necromancer and started working towards a Vaal Absolution build. Last night I did my normal build testing routine of running a T1 map, a T5 map, a T6 map, a T10 map… and then ultimately trying a T16 map. Shockingly I survived very well in a T16 “alch and go” Crimson Temple with red altars turned on. Did it feel amazing? Absolutely not, but it does feel pretty solid when I drop back down to T10 “barely red” maps. I think more than anything I just need more levels to make this build feel a bit more comfortable as I just dinged 76 this morning.
I am sure I will do a full write-up at some point, and I recorded a brief video this morning of how it looks currently. Essentially you can see my POB from level 73 and just starting maps, and I am making a few “choices” that differ from the standard spiel. Most of it is stuff I had lying around like using a +2 Minion Geofri’s Crest just because it had a boost to minions and really good resistances on it rather than its actual purpose of scaling up Holy Relics. I am still not entirely certain what I think of this build but in the grand scheme of things it seems to be pretty solid. I think it falls in the category of so many of my alternate builds where if I put more time into it, it could feel amazing. More than anything this was a test case to feel how absolution plays, and I think I have gotten a decent idea at this point.
I also wrapped up the second book in the first Mistborn trilogy by Brandon Sanderson and plan on starting the third book tonight. This novel was a wild ride, and I realize I have said that before… but no really… this was a wild ride. It went in a bunch of directions and wound up with a very “Empire Strikes Back” type ending where everything is bad for our protagonists. However, that makes a lot of sense given this is the middle book in a trilogy. I just did not expect the direction things went, many of the actions that were taken, or the resolution that came out of them. I am still very deeply invested in most of the main characters so of course I will hungrily begin consuming the next bit as soon as things have settled down tonight.
Lastly, my order for the Gamecube Purple Nitro Deck came in yesterday and I had a bit to play with it. Essentially it is a controller dock of a sort for the Switch where you take the central tablet portion and click it securely into a wrap-around controller base. The end result is something that feels significantly more solid and balanced in your hands than the default configuration of a Switch. It features rumble and gyro with the only lost functionality being NFC but given I rarely if ever use Amiibos… this was not a big deal to me. The buttons and dpad are maybe not as high quality as I would have liked, but the thumb sticks are Hall Effect which should stop drift. There is an added benefit of having four buttons on the back in a similar arrangement to the Steam Deck. The entire package is a bit lighter than the Switch with native Joycons attached. All in all I think I am going to like it quite a bit.
While I was writing this post, the video of Vaal Absolution gameplay finished uploading, so check that out if you are interested. Today is my Friday, so quite honestly I have no clue if I will be making a blog post tomorrow. If I do not… I hope you all have a wonderful day. We are going to get our Flu Shot and latest Covid booster so I have no clue how I will be feeling in the morning. The post Absolution and Mistborn appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Intentional Downgrade

Good Morning Friends! This is going to be a bit of a hardware discussion. For the last six years, I have been using an LG 43UJ6300 43″ 4k 60hz television as my main gaming display. In the grand scheme of things, it was an economic way of getting a large display and since I specifically shopped for the lowest latency panel I could find, it was a pretty solid gaming experience. I would not shy away from using a television again in the future because it had a lot of benefits. Firstly the price of a reasonable 43″ 4k 60hz television is roughly 1/3rd of the price of a similarly sized gaming monitor. The other massive benefit of a large 4k display is that it is effectively a 2×2 grid of 1080p monitors, so a ridiculous amount of productivity space.
For gaming purposes, however, I honestly found little difference between running a game at 4k resolution and running a game at 1440p. So while I had the horsepower to run games at 4k 120hz due to my RTX 3080, I never did because I did not have the display to support that. Instead, I was far more likely to run at 1440p 120hz which my display did a fairly good job of supporting even though it seemed to be an “unofficial” mode. The other thing that I noticed over the years is that 43 inches is a wee bit too big to comfortably use at normal monitor distances, and by the end of the day my neck would end up getting sore from gazing upward to see anything I had at the very top of my screen.
Then there was the color accuracy problem. I had been running my LG TV next to a bog standard 1080p monitor, and whenever I moved windows from one screen to the other there was a massive difference in colors and clarity. For a while, my wife had been telling me that my screen was blue, and it was super noticeable any time I attempted to take a photo in my room. However, I had gotten used to it and was seemingly adjusting in my brain to the color shift. What I was noticing however is that my screen kept getting dimmer and the only way to adjust for this was to essentially wash everything out. Modern televisions are just not designed to last anywhere near as long as their tube-based cousins, and eventually, there are going to be problems be they dark spots, color shifts, or in my case global dimming. Last week it was finally time to move on when several times a day the display would just blink off for a few minutes and then go through a series of flashes as it finally woke back up to work again.
So when I got my replacement, I unintentionally chose another LG product not necessarily for any real reason other than the price to specs seemed to be the best deal. Instead of going with another 4k display, I “downgraded” to 1440p 165hz which could be debated as an upgrade instead. The higher refresh and supporting Freesync are both big bonuses. Having HDR10 which is a published standard instead of the jank HDR support the previous display had. The thing that I was not really prepared for is just how sharp and crisp everything looks. I am not entirely certain I realized how fuzzy everything was on the television and that everything essentially had a bit of a halo around it. There were a lot of times I had trouble reading things, and I just assumed it was my old man eyes getting the best of me… but instead, it seems that maybe the text itself was nowhere near as sharp as I thought it was.
The thing that I was not quite prepared for is just how my screen real estate I lost. Remember before I said that a 4k panel is an equivalent of having a 2×2 grid of 1080p monitors. The above image is the proportions of a 1440p screen with a 1080p black square in the upper left corner. I have more height and width than a normal 1080p screen but it isn’t a ton of it. My hope is that I can get used to this, but it is going to be an adjustment. I was used to having three or four windows open and arranged on screen at the same time where I could see and work from them all. Editing the podcast this week was the first time I noticed the big difference because often times I would be working on something in photoshop while my audacity window was sitting beside it and hot swapping between both of them while each was visible. It does make me wonder if I am heading towards just adding a second one of these 32″ 1440p panels and calling it good. The post Intentional Downgrade appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Maybe Skip This Generation

Yesterday was the big Keynote from GTC… which is a conference that Nvidia essentially made up in order to have a venue in which to sell their graphics cards. One of the hot debates from yesterday was whether or not CEO Jensen Huang was an AI character and rendered in real-time… seeing as the last generation he did the entire demo in a virtual environment. The larger talking point however was the price tag associated with this generation. As is often the case Nvidia focused entirely on the highest end of their graphics cards, namely the 4080 and 4090. For those who don’t remember the “90” series came on board the last generation and has effectively replaced the Titan nomenclature for their extremely high-end cards that are not necessarily targeted at gaming. The products announced yesterday:
  • GeForce RTX 4090 24GB – $1599.99 MSRP
  • GeForce RTX 4080 16GB – $1199.99 MSRP
  • GeForce RTX 4080 12GB – $899.99 MSRP
From there you can expect board partners to release variants ranging from lower ram versions that are likely cheaper and cards with extra features that will cost more than the founder’s edition cards. One thing that will be interesting to see however is how the lineup of third-party cards shakes out now that EVGA has decided to stop producing Nvidia cards… and graphics cards entirely. Based on some very terse comments released around that news… it seems that board partners are often losing money on the higher-end graphics cards due to the chip costs set by Nvidia, and the price ceiling placed on product families.
If you compare the pricing of the last several generations, you can see that the lowest-end version of the 4080 is an almost 30% increase over the cost of the MSRP of the previous generation. Unfortunately, as we all know too well, it was almost impossible to find a graphics card during most of that generation for anywhere close to that price point. The pandemic happened and made the market go wonky… with issues in the supply chain followed by an increased demand brought on by a boom in gaming. This was only increased by the fact that so many set out of the 2000 series completely due to a similarly high 16% price increase over the previous generation.
I lucked into buying a reasonably priced prebuilt system for my birthday last year. It was a good call for me personally because I needed to completely refresh my system, as I was still using a 5th gen Intel platform. However at least part of my logic behind the purchase was that if anything went really wrong, I could at a minimum flip the graphics card and make more money than I paid for the system. At that point, I had checked Ebay and the 3080 was selling through at around $2500 each. However, a lot of things have changed since then. Firstly the supply chain issues have cleared up a bit, and the demand for chips has lessened to the point where most card manufacturers have cards in stock. Combine this with some very public crashes in cryptocurrency and the recent move of Etherium from proof of work to proof of stake… and the third-party market is deluged with used cards. If I were careful I could probably pick up a 3080 right now for under $500, which is a significant change in the market.
There is also the problem that a lot of the features that are being added to these new RTX cards are not actually being used by the bulk of gaming. Ray tracing has yet to really take the world by storm, and Nvidia banked during the 2000 series that gamers would favor higher resolution gaming as opposed to higher framerate gaming. In February of 2021, Steam passed 50,000 games listed on the platform and available for sale. There is a curated list of all of the games that feature “RTX On” support and right now currently that list only contains 132 games. While Nvidia keeps pioneering new AI features on their cards… it is highly unlikely that we are going to see the benefit of them anytime soon. Sure I love the AI ability to knock out background noise on my microphone or clip out the background when I am on a video call but I am not running any heavy processing routines on my card. Instead, I am still spending most of my time running games at 1080p or 1440p at which point I favor framerate over raw rendering detail.
Don’t get me wrong… I think a lot of the things demonstrated in the keynote were extremely cool. However, I also think that most of those things don’t really factor into my usage pattern for the cards. Nvidia has gone hard on AI research and simulations, and the vast majority of its presentation was focused on that market. Gamers are no longer the key demographic that they are chasing as a company and likely have not been for a very long time. So my advice would be that unless you are one of those folks who just have to have the newest and shiniest thing… maybe you should skip this generation of graphics cards entirely. The price point is tied to an artificial anchor of demand that is not going to hold up in the long run. That price is anchored to the eBay highs of the pandemic and a desire to squeeze more profit from the consumer as a result.
You can snap up some pretty reasonable deals in the after-market right now on 3000 series cards, and that is honestly more cards than is needed to get you through to the next major graphical update. If you follow the trends, 4k gaming has not really taken off as anyone had hoped for either. As I said before gamers tend to be favoring running games at a lower resolution but 144hz or higher frame rate. Right now mining cards are flooding the market because it is no longer profitable in the least to run a graphics card setup. There have been numerous videos covering the fact that so long as the cooler is still functioning properly, it is perfectly fine to buy a mining graphics card for gaming performance.
The 2000 series was the last time that gamers largely gave a generation a hard pass, and it was not necessarily for the same reasons. While there was a much larger jump in price point, it was more a case that the performance increase was not all that significant over the 1000 series. The 4000 series on the other hand seem to be a pretty massive leap in performance over the 3000 series… but it isn’t performance that we really need yet. The price point of 4k high refresh gaming is still pretty steep when it comes to monitors that are largely still in the $700 range. Whereas you can pick up a 1440p panel for around $200 and at the most popular sizes of around 27-inch displays… there isn’t much noticeable difference between the two. You really need to get up into the 40-60 inch display range before 4k has a clear advantage over 1440p. Basically I think the 4000 series is really cool, but way to costly for what it is giving us. Get a cheap/used 3000 series card and call it good and wait this generation out. The post Maybe Skip This Generation appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.

Poor Driving and Change

Poor Driving and Change

Last night I largely spent the night playing Rage 2 and doing a really poor job of driving around the wasteland.  In theory I should use this as an opportunity to test out the little 3D Printed controller wheel that I have…  but instead I am just suffering through the mouse and keyboard controls.  It is funny how even when they do not feel amazing… I will still gravitate towards mouse and keyboard in part just to keep from having to switch between controller and keyboard all the time.  I will always be of the firm opinion that shooters are just better with a mouse…  and then many of those shooters also want you to control vehicles which work best with a controller.  So either I suffer with the shooter gameplay or I suffer with the often side content that is driving.  The problem with Rage 2 however is you spend a lot of time in your vehicle as you cross wide swaths of territory between missions.

So while I did not get a screenshot of this because I was enthralled by the combat…  one of the random events that happened in the world is that I encountered an enemy vehicle convoy…  which I followed around trying to take out.  There were roughly 3 car type vehicles, 3 or 4 motorcycle type vehicles and one giant Semi sort of hauler vehicle that was the primary objective.  I managed to whittle down the convoy to just being this big massive vehicle…  and chased it around through the landscape for a good fifteen minutes slowly plinking down its health.  Often times I would drive poorly and get way off track forcing me to jet booster thrust my way back into gun range.  Unfortunately I only managed to know it down by about half health before I got a verbal warning that I was almost out of ammunition.  I am guessing I need some of the vehicle upgrades to realistically fare well in vehicle to vehicle combat…  but I gotta say… I was completely hooked by the experience.

Poor Driving and Change

Every town seems to have a major problem that you need to deal with for them… before they can turn around and help you.  Last night I made it through one of those missions…  which unlocked another sequence of events that I am going to need to do before they can actually help me.  That is fine… like I said yesterday there isn’t a lot of back and forth in the dialog so I more than expected to keep going on fetch and assistance quests until the storyline culminates in a battle with the big bad of the world.  It is the moment to moment game play and the exploration of new areas that make the game interesting to me personally.  I like checking enemy camps off of my list, especially when they happen to be hiding an ark full of goodies.   As I move forward into the game I keep encountering newer and tougher groups of enemies…  and I have to say…  Authority soldiers are already a pain in the butt because I don’t have an amazing answer to their energy armor yet.

Poor Driving and Change

Last night during the quest I was speaking of in the previous paragraph, I picked up my first new weapon…  which is a really amazing shotgun.  Shotguns are a weapon that I always find deep kinship with, because they are sort of the no-nonsense killing machine option that have been pretty much something I gravitated towards since Doom.  The most recent Doom game had an awesome design as far as shotguns go with some interesting mode switching, and Rage 2 does something very similar.  If you are firing the weapon blindly you end up with a fairly rapid fire short ranged blast option.  However if you hold down the right mouse button and aim the weapon, according to the in game dialog, the weapon melts together all of the shells into one large high powered slug that knocks targets back and has a satisfying thump when it fires.  When it says it knocks things back…  you can get some interesting situations where you hit a single target and it ends up knocking a whole line of enemies down if they are approaching single file through a choke point.  So far this weapon really is my only answer to the Authority troops, and you end up getting it in a mission where things are constantly leaping out of the walls so it also does a great job of twitch reflex killing.

I’m still very much enjoying the game and look forward to playing more of it as the week goes on.  However there is one more topic that I want to bring up.  I will be over the next few weeks moving all of my sites from my current host over to a different host.  I’ve been with my current host for the entire decade during which Tales of the Aggronaut has existed.  Initially I used them because a good friend of mine was one of the system admins, and I could always poke him if I needed something weird done.  However after he left the service has not exactly been that stellar.  Additionally there has been a pretty constantly series of blips in server up time and I am getting tired of it.  I needed to find a good host to use for another purpose… and instead of doing a single one off… I bought a big enough hosting account to hold everything of mine and even do MP3 hosting if I choose to do so and move away from Libsyn.  I will go into more details later as I move everything over depending on how positive or negative the experience is.  I’ve moved a single non-gaming site over and it went pretty smoothly.  This weekend I plan on moving AggroChat and depending on how well that goes might move Aggronaut as well.

Mostly I just wanted to give my readers a heads up that some changes will be coming in my infrastructure and it might wind up with me being down more than I intend to.