Nuclear Monster

  • Nvidia (and their partners) advertised last year’s Geforce GTX 970 video card as having 4 gigabytes of memory and earlier this year we found out that the memory was on a lower-speed path after the first three-and-a-half gigabytes in addition to other limitations which didn’t match their advertising. There’s now a proposed class-action lawsuit from people who bought the piece of crap and today we have the official blog post from Nvidia founder Jen-Hsun about the mistake:

    Some of you are disappointed that we didn’t clearly describe the segmented memory of GeForce GTX 970 when we launched it. I can see why, so let me address it.

    We invented a new memory architecture in Maxwell. This new capability was created so that reduced-configurations of Maxwell can have a larger framebuffer — i.e., so that GTX 970 is not limited to 3GB, and can have an additional 1GB.

    GTX 970 is a 4GB card. However, the upper 512MB of the additional 1GB is segmented and has reduced bandwidth. This is a good design because we were able to add an additional 1GB for GTX 970 and our software engineers can keep less frequently used data in the 512MB segment.

    Unfortunately, we failed to communicate this internally to our marketing team, and externally to reviewers at launch.

    Since then, Jonah Alben, our senior vice president of hardware engineering, provided a technical description of the design, which was captured well by several editors. Here’s one example from The Tech Report.

    Instead of being excited that we invented a way to increase memory of the GTX 970 from 3GB to 4GB, some were disappointed that we didn’t better describe the segmented nature of the architecture for that last 1GB of memory.

    This is understandable. But, let me be clear: Our only intention was to create the best GPU for you. We wanted GTX 970 to have 4GB of memory, as games are using more memory than ever.

    The 4GB of memory on GTX 970 is used and useful to achieve the performance you are enjoying. And as ever, our engineers will continue to enhance game performance that you can regularly download using GeForce Experience.

    Shut the company down and give the money back to the shareholders or properly admit you made a fucking mistake and make it right for the people who bought these cards by taking back the 970 and upgrading them, for free, to the GTX 980 which doesn’t have the problem. What damning buffoonery it is to pretend that the people who bought the GTX 970 are wrong and are just disappointed and misinformed. This explanation is both inaccurate and does nothing to fix the mistake. For the people who spent $300-$400 on a video card that doesn’t match the specifications advertised, Nvidia needs to make it right.

  • The developers behind Battlefield 4, DICE, have put out this video titled Create Your Own Battlefield 4 Map

    Watch it and if you haven’t had your coffee yet this morning you might miss that at no point do they mention players getting access to a map editor. Okay, well, the video description links to a blog post maybe they’ll mention it there:

    Ok. This is something we’ve never done before. There’s a piece of content coming in 2015 that we’re really excited about. We will build a Battlefield 4 map together with you — the community. Together with our development team, you will get to shape a playable map based on your input and expertise on what makes a fun multiplayer level. This map will then be tested and tweaked in the CTE (Community Test Environment), available for Battlefield 4 Premium members.

    …

    As part of this CTE testing you will be providing feedback* on the map, and creating the final thing together with us. During this process we’ll be sharing behind-the-scenes details of what the development process for making a multiplayer map looks like.

    As a thank you to the Battlefield community for sticking to your Battlefield 4 guns and giving excellent feedback to improve the game, we want to show our appreciation by releasing the “Community Map” on all platforms.

    All that players get to do is provide feedback on the map that DICE designs.

    While it would be a huge hurdle at this point for DICE to shoe-horn a public map editor into the game along with a method for players to get access to player-created levels, and it is difficult to summarize a DICE-developed-with-community-feedback-map into a video title, Create Your Own Battlefield 4 Map isn’t accurate. No players watching that video at home will have access to the tools to do so. Disappointing.

  • Ben Kuchera writing about turning the Samsung and Oculus’ Gear VR into a portable movie theater:

    The rewards are great, even if the resolution is slightly lower than you may be used to on your standard HDTV. With a good set of headphones I’m completely isolated from my real environment. I look around and all I see is the theater and the movie. There is no Twitter, no Facebook and no background noise. No usher will ever come in and start cleaning. The floor is never sticky. There are no distractions.

    This is the power of portable virtual reality; the ability to find yourself alone in a huge space using a device that fits into your backpack. The illusion of watching a film on a giant screen is complete, and being alone for two hours is amazing. Isolation on demand feels almost luxurious, as having your own personal movie theater isn’t something possible for most people, and the fact this virtual version requires no physical upkeep is even better.

    Gear VR isn’t very exciting as a product because of the limited hardware capabilities and how unlikely it would be for Samsung to continue in VR. Altogether it seems like a complete waste of time for developers to target that platform and a derailment for Oculus. Maybe there is some advantage to it that I’m not seeing yet, but it just feels like another feature on the endless list of things that Samsung attaches to their mobile products in order to pretend to be innovative. I hope that Oculus got something really good out of the deal.

    However, I am super excited for the ability to replace your environment at-will. Also please join me for an “Activation” We’re all doing it. Please remain seated while the VR matrix takes hold. You will experience a tingling sensation as the VR spike gently pierces your cranium and then we’ll be watching Sneakers in a theater like oldsters used to  do back before the sharing economy destroyed the world.

    You’ll be a little groggy after the movie ends and you return to realspace, but we’ll worship the Divine Bomb afterwards and take off our masks to reveal that we’re really irradiated monsters to the camera. It’ll be fun!

  • InstadoomDoom’s stalwart champion, Linguica, has put together Instadoom. It’s a Doom mod that, as you can see above, allows Doom Guy to take selfies and apply filters similar to those popularized by Instagram.

    Thanks to Ensiform for the tip.

  • I need to get better at Rocksmith.