AshleyAshes Posted October 16, 2015 Share Posted October 16, 2015 (edited) Or at least that's the sentiment I normally encounter in the usual circles that talk about technology and I kind of find it frustrating since it's short sighted. have an iPhone 4? You're a loser, heck, we barely tolerate the iPhone 5 people! 1080p? You need a retentive display! Nvidia GTA 980? You need at least a Titan, preferably FOUR of them.I get that new purchases and big numbers are what push the various tech industries. No one is here to sell you what you've already owned for two years and that you don't have to replace. No one is going to read blog articles about 'Old stuff that is still pretty super!' but the sentiment when it gets amongst consumers is something I feel frustrating. In reality, a lot of tech is kind of at a plateau.My biggest grief is with PC consumers. CPUs only inch a bit farther each year now, that i5 2500K you bought in 2011 is still awesome and you just need to keep your graphics card up to date. Frankly, any quad core is just fine for 95% of PC games. Those monster builds with SLI'd Titans and 6-8 core Intel chips are only useful on an extreme minority of PC games, when run on their highest settings and with a 4K monitor. Most people really are just playing Star Craft II, Team Fortress II, Counter-Strike, DOTA2, LOL, HOTS, or Minecraft. When the few blogs do touch on these topics, they generally find that the weakest link is the graphics card, even 6-8 year old hardware is found to perform pretty well with a decent midrange graphics cards. In modern terms, there have been blog builds of current dual core Intel Pentium's paired with midrange GPUs and some pretty impressive and very enjoyable performance is pulled out of them.But the sentiment remains; If your system isn't new and expensive, it's lame and so are you.I guess I'll end with this, a contest between two dorks who have https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1JA24KCAjE00 CAD, 48hrs, and the challenge of building the best gaming system they can out of used parts:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1JA24KCAjE Edited October 17, 2015 by AshleyAshes Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Augmented Husky Posted October 17, 2015 Share Posted October 17, 2015 (edited) Could not agree more on this.Its all to often someone on you-tube brags about needing to have his awesome gtx 980 to have good frame rates and there for fuel the illusion that you need a very expensive gaming PC in order to make games playable. This is so very far from the truthMost people these days simply don't need ludicrously powerful hardware to get a good experience. As you mentioned hardly anyone plays Crysis 3 or the like to make those part choices sense-able when most actually play titles like Counter-Strike, Battlefeild 4, Smite, WOW, or even Minecraft which is known to play well on most systems because it uses Java code to run not Direct X 12 . Hec, my system totaling about $700 can play 95% of games on very high setting on 1080p.By the way love those guys Linus Tech Tips they have very honest to goodness and real reviews without any biased marketing except for maybe square-space to help support the channel but still. Edited October 17, 2015 by Augmented Husky Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Irreverent Posted October 17, 2015 Share Posted October 17, 2015 I think its a hold over from the Atari400/C64 days. Gamesmanship (because other than a very niche set, few people build a 16-core/4K web terminal), and the desire to compete drive the most of this. And it goes both ways. The minimalist hardware set are just as bad...although the gear tends not to be quite as expensive. Lets face it, if you're not running Windows 10 inside a VM running under Puppy Linux hosted on a re-purposed Timex digital watch....you're crap! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Onnes Posted October 17, 2015 Share Posted October 17, 2015 Yeah, it's been quite a while since upgrading desktops regularly was worth it outside of the occasional GPU. The exception is probably drives. SSDs were an enormous upgrade in performance over HDDs, and the yearly decrease in cost per Gb has definitely led to me buying increasingly larger SSDs and moving more of my stuff onto them.I think mobile devices are another animal entirely, though. Even when performance doesn't change, there's still been substantial improvements in size, weight, power efficiency, and screen quality. My work machine is now my 15" laptop. It weighs less than 5 pounds, has a sufficiently good screen to let me run a two-column layout without going blind, and the battery lasts forever when not under load. At the same time, it has a quad core and a discrete GPU so I can still use it as a workstation. It's actually faster than any of the office desktops I'd be able to commandeer, although I think that's more a reflection of the NSF's support for capital equipment computer purchases being a joke. You don't have to go back all that many years for my current use case to barely even be possible, let alone efficient. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Wolflich Posted October 17, 2015 Share Posted October 17, 2015 My 1TB SSD cost ~AU$700 back when I got it. No regrets. At least I know by the time it drops dead it won't be that bad to replace it...Would have been happy not upgrading the rest of my stuff, except maybe the GPU eventually, but things still keep being phased out so when something dies and I go to replace it suddenly I realize it's hard to come by in stores already. Kind of sucks. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Azure Posted October 17, 2015 Share Posted October 17, 2015 i think that this is just a living trope at workpeople are like that with cars, with clothes, with shoes, with anything they can own and be a total shitlord aboutmine is bigger betterer faster expensiver and my mom paid 4 it all Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Irreverent Posted October 17, 2015 Share Posted October 17, 2015 Watches too. Sure Rolex are nice, but if you're not sporting a Sein, Brittling or Patek Phillippe, you're not a proper watchfag. (the ancient otter wears a www.deepbluewatches.ca) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Zaraphayx Posted October 17, 2015 Share Posted October 17, 2015 Wtf is a 'GTA 980'?I'm a huge fucking dork and I don't know anyone who thinks a Titan X is a worthwhile buy for the price point, but then again people don't know what the fuck they're talking about when it comes to tech.Those high-end pieces of hardware that price out at $700-1500 dollars aren't for gaming, they're for professional work that game devs, graphic designers, and special effects artists do that requires the power to support lots of calculations and high definition rendering.Nerds who talk about putting that shit in their battlestations to play League of Legends with are either talking facetiously or are pie-in-the-sky dumb poors who think that the more money you throw at things the better. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Zaraphayx Posted October 17, 2015 Share Posted October 17, 2015 Also an aside, but some of us have to buy the "latest and greatest" in tech if only to fiddle with it and resell it for aftermarket because we need experience working with the devices to make a living, and if we don't know what we're talking about when a client or even our own company has problems integrating new tech into their business or asks for input on what would best suit their needs then what the fuck are they even paying us for? 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AshleyAshes Posted October 17, 2015 Author Share Posted October 17, 2015 Wtf is a 'GTA 980'?Those high-end pieces of hardware that price out at $700-1500 dollars aren't for gaming, they're for professional work that game devs, graphic designers, and special effects artists do that requires the power to support lots of calculations and high definition rendering.GTX, my bad. And in my experience, the high end consumer graphics cards aren't used or targeted at enterprise or professional usage, that's where the FirePros and Quadros come in instead. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Zaraphayx Posted October 17, 2015 Share Posted October 17, 2015 GTX, my bad. And in my experience, the high end consumer graphics cards aren't used or targeted at enterprise or professional usage, that's where the FirePros and Quadros come in instead. It's not very smart to pay 5x as much for something that's marginally worse. I suppose if you were using a workstation that for some reason couldn't use a standard desktop GPU you'd kind have to shell out the cash for similar performance though. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
LazerMaster5 Posted October 17, 2015 Share Posted October 17, 2015 As a thrifty teenager, all my tech is at least 2 years old. Not because I am a cheapskate, but because I like to squeeze the most out of my technology. I use gadgets until either they die or are obsolete and unusable for their original purpose. I built my computer to last, and my GTX 660 still runs the latest games on high settings using outdated drivers (lol). No need to throw away something just because the latest model has a built-in shaver or something. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AshleyAshes Posted October 17, 2015 Author Share Posted October 17, 2015 It's not very smart to pay 5x as much for something that's marginally worse.I suppose if you were using a workstation that for some reason couldn't use a standard desktop GPU you'd kind have to shell out the cash for similar performance though.But the FirePros and Quadros see signifigantly faster double precision floating point performance in comparison to consumer cards which see little need for that. The same goes for OpenCL performance and other features that are more geared towards enterprise and professional applications. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Zaraphayx Posted October 18, 2015 Share Posted October 18, 2015 (edited) But the FirePros and Quadros see signifigantly faster double precision floating point performance in comparison to consumer cards which see little need for that. The same goes for OpenCL performance and other features that are more geared towards enterprise and professional applications. The GTX Titan cards aren't marketed or designed entirely as a consumer card though, and the user can choose to set the double point precision to 1:3 FP32 at the trade-off of reduced single point performance.Ultimately, what you choose is going to boil down to more than "this is strictly better" in a lot of cases but the overwhelming majority of developers are finding even consumer cards like the GTX 9 and 7 series are sufficient for their needs considering the advancements in hardware performance over the last few years.I mean yeah you get optimized performance for industry standard CAD software out of the drivers for comparable Quadro cards but the hardware is nearly identical. Edited October 18, 2015 by Zaraphayx 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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