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Quote:As to your first point, see the recent threads regarding fab problems both AMD/ATI and Nvidia have been having with their new chips. While historically the price drops have been there.. Until the folks doing the fabrication of the actual chips get their acts together, I don't expect that to be the case, at least for a little whileone point also, graphic cards drop in price quickly when new cards come out, as GR is slated for Q2 next year ,that is 6 months or so,by tht time the ATI 5XXX will have had at least 1 price drop and maybe more,Nvidia,is suppose to come out with the 300 series of cards if so the high end 295 will be reduced in price.
and also the new GPU can't do much for you if your CPU can't feed it fast enough.
As to your last point.. very very valid. The overall system performance is going to tend to be constrained by the first bottleneck. Improvements outside of that area will result in very little if any change in performance. Improvements TO the bottleneck will have a very direct and measurable result, right up until something else becomes the bottleneck. This is basic "Theory of Constraints". The tricky part is figuring out where the constraint is, especially when it's not always easy to instrument things like how busy the GPU is.
My general rule of thumbs are:
1) if most of your memory is used when CoX is running, you ought to close down other stuff that's running, or get more ram. (up to the limit of what your OS supports, which is just over 3 GB for most 32 bit OS's)
2) If at least one CPU core is at or very near 100%, when CoX is running, then getting a faster CPU will probably help.
3) If neither CPU or Memory are maxed when CoX is running, the faster video will probably help. -
Quote:So if TSMC has so badly messed up with both AMD/ATI and Nvidia, it sounds a lot more like a situation where the first of them to come to agreements with a new Fab partner might be the winner in this whole debacle. Or is TSMC the only game in town for cranking out silicon in the 40nm process?Yes, that was me. I'm not quite ready to order a funerary floral arrangement for Nvidia, but they are in a very nasty position.
And that's where Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company's bungling becomes important... The new 40 nm resolution manufacturing process that both Nvidia and ATI are using from TSMC has turned out to be more problematic than advertised. ATI was getting very low yields of functional chips per batch of silicon. Fermi, being half-again more complex than Cypress, is even more vulnerable to random fatal defects. Reports were that the original test production runs resulted in 1.7% functional chips. Those that functioned turned out to do so at much lower clock rates than expected. If you have a chip with massive capabilities that works at a relatively low frequency, it may not outperform a less elaborate chip that can run faster...
Nvidia is in better shape than ATI to take a(nother) financial hit. The question is what, if anything, the company will be able to do *afterwards*?
So yeah, Nvidia? Deep trouble.
Great info BTW thanks for taking the time to type that up. For the un-initiated, the material for silicon chips is basically a giant crystalline structure that is 'grown' by being pulled out of molten doped silicon material (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Czochralski_process) and there's pretty much a limit to the diameter of the stuff (currently around 30cm). That's then sliced into thin polished 'wafers' that are the raw material used to produce the chips. The smaller the traces on the chip (currently measured in Nano-meters) the smaller each chip will be (and also the less power it consumes, heat it generates, etc). The more transisters on the chip, the larger it will be. And of course the smaller scale you are trying to work at (e.g. 40nm vs 55)nm, the more precise everything has to be and the smaller the margin of error in order to produce working chips.
The 'per wafer' fab expenses and fab time tends to be relatively constant, so the more (working!) chips you can get per wafer (yeild), the cheaper your production costs per chip, and also the higher your potential output . So the drive to get to a viable 40nm process is huge, but doesn't pay off pricewise (and capacity wise) until your process is reliable enough to get more working chips per wafer. Especially when you consider that you have to test each chip, and don't get paid for the ones that don't work. 40nm has thus far 'backfired' because the yeilds have been so low, that the costs have been higher, and output lower, something nobody is happy about.
Both Nvidia and ATI need 40nm process chips in order to keep cards inside reasonable limits for power consumption and heat output, and the new stuff has all been designed around that, so it's likely very impractical for them to 'punt' and just use 55nm process stuff until the bugs are worked out of the other fab lines.
OTOH, the older 55nm stuff is reliable fab wise, and since that process is mature, the yeilds per wafer are pretty good, meaning it's probably a lot cheaper (until those 40nm yeilds get better) Especially if you've managed to pay off your investment in the design of those chips.
The result of that is that I'd personally expect both companies to hold the prices of newer stuff that uses 40nm process a lot higher, especially if there's not currently capacity to generate those parts in quantity anyway (no point to lowering the price to sell more, if you don't have the 'more' to sell) Meanwhile I'd expect the prices of the older stuff to stay low, and represent a majority of their sales. -
Quote:I think you mean AMPS where you say Ohms.. an Amp is a measure of current flow, or in the case of a power-supply the amount of current it can support and still maintain the proper voltage etc.May have to consider how much ohms your PSU puts out depending on what card you get. I bought a NVidia 280 and a PSU with 300 more watts that it recommended. I installed everything, powered it up, and it kept using on-board video. Typically, it would use PCIx16 automatically with the card in place. Lights on the card came on and thought to myself how quiet it was 'cause I couldnt hear the fans.
Found that I needed 42 ohms and I had 35 ohms on the 12V-rail. So I had to take back the PSU and find another with enough ohms and watts.
Just something you should think about before buying like I didn't.
An Ohm is a measure of resistance or impedance, You're more likely to run across that when selecting speakers for a home theater system than you would be looking at ratings of power supplies.
Also be aware that many higher end power supplies have a PAIR of 12v rails, to try and distribute the load. That can be really handy for folks with a lot of hard drives, with draw high power when spinnng up. I'm not sure in that case if you can (presuming the card has two 12v connectors) connect both rails to the video card in order to provide it with enough power, of if that would be a 'bad idea'.
Used to be I had to worry about he power drawn by the CPU, and keeping it cool. These days that's small potatoes compared to the power and cooling needed by the video card. Of course most video cards currently represent a massivly parallel computing capacity that would put many older mainframe systems to shame, so i guess that's not entirely unexpected.
(Times like this I shake my head and wonder how the hell I ever got by on an 8086, 640K of memory, and a 20Mb hard disk. Then again my little Sansa media player probably has more computing power than that old Compaq Deskpro did. It's enough to make a geek feel Ancient it is.. _ -
I'm in also. Lookin forward to it.
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Arachnos Local #1138
-fighting for better working conditions for minions everywhere- -
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I see a lot of good changes here, but one thing I'm not getting... under what's proposed above, how is a tray full of BF's not an instant "i win" when facing a dom in PVP ?
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I was thinking more like arena matches and such.. but yeah in open field conditions like the pvp zones I can see where you'd eventually run out.
but still it seems like pop a few BF's and you've nullified anything a dom can do to keep you from blasting/pummeling in his pretty little mask
Even a whole tray won't last you long.
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I see a lot of good changes here, but one thing I'm not getting... under what's proposed above, how is a tray full of BF's not an instant "i win" when facing a dom in PVP ?
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Full Access to City of Heroes and City of Villains®
All players with City of Heroes retail* accounts will now have access to City of Villains, and all City of Villains retail* accounts will now have access to City of Heroes. Players that didn't previously have access to "the other side" will find that they do now. Just log in to check it out!
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So can I get my $30 back since you don't have to own both now?
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Sure pick one of the two games you 'would not have bought' give them back all the chars and refund them for all the playtime you spent on that side, and oh since you got a month of play time, the $15 for that also...
what? can't/won't give all that back? then what the frack are you complaining about, you GOT value for the money you paid..
or do we need to call the 'whaaaaambulance' for all you cheapscate crybabys?
Yeesh you are like the whiny babies who go splurge $3K on some fancy plasma screen and then moan that it's cheaper a year later and someone owes them a refund.. after they've been watching the thing for a full year... as if they didn't know the price would come down.
Hell I bought COV at first, and the COH just before GVE came out.. nobody heard me gripe about it because I'd gotten a full year's play time out of COV that I would not had, had I not purchased it. I even bought the GVE 'goodies' which was money well spent since it got me the jump-pack and pocket D tport powers..
Frankly I just cannot see ANY basis to gripe about having paid for both games and deserving some kind of refund (and even then you should only get a partial refund since you got a free month of play time didn't you?) unless one of the following is the case:
1) you never played one of them, and never made use of the extra character slots, costume parts, etc (e.g. got no value for that purchase) but in that case I'd have to ask why you got the companion game
2) just recently purchased both games (which seems a bit weird given that GVE has basically replaced them, and it's hard to find just COH or COV on a store shelf unless the price is highly discounted...
(actually saw like 4 CoV at a half price books today... almost bought them because hey there's a free month of play time with each one.. so I would have been ahead on the deal even after paying sales tax.. (yes the price was below $15)but I figured better to leave them for someone who might be interested in playing the game.. ) -
OK I hope you people are happy with yourselves.. I'm sure all of this is giving A.S. one joygasm of a sendoff..
My wife is a writer, I mentioned this whole thing to her, and her response was as follows.
We writers love that stuff. Having readers obsessing over every detail and possible intrepetation of the trail of breadcrumbs we've left them.. watching them swallow the red herrings hook line and sinker, seeing them go off on half baked lines of reasoning that make a conspiracy theorist seem entirely rational? that stuff? IT'S LIKE CRACK FOR WRITERS when your readers do that! -
two things:
1) safeguards seem rather easy to complete compared to mayhems..
2) LOVE the obscure references in some of these.. as an old fan of Firesign Theater I about fell out of my chair when Audrey Farber said "Call me Nancy, everyone does" I mean what maybe 2% of your players are gonna get that? Great stuff..
Now if you pardon me I have to knock the cornstarch off my mucklucks and set them down by the celophane.. -
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When I9 goes live the Inf trade window will support values in the billions. Why did the Devs expand this window unless they felt that it would be needed for some reason? Either they feel that some characters are going to have billions of Inf (which they don't seem to want) or they believe that something somewhere in the game will cost a billion or more Inf. Now assuming that my Brute has 10 million Inf by the time he hits 50 (just grabbing a round number here...) why on earth would he NEED the ability to carry or trade a billion Inf?
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Wait, didn't you claim in an earlier post in this forum to have worked in Quality Assurance? <looks back... yep>
But you actually ask the above question, not once but at least three times I've seen, as if it actually MEANS SOMETHING... Oh AND you also have no interest in spending any time on the test server?
what the hell kind of QA person are you?
I work in Software QA, and have for over 10 years, and the answer to the first question is fricking obvious to a first year software tester.. BECAUSE THEY ONLY WANT TO PAY THE COST TO MAKE THE CHANGE ONE TIME.. it's not because they through anyone will need to trade a billion inf, now or even in the near future.. But obviously the current design was in need of change, and they only wanted to pay the cost of making and testing that change once.. So when they made the change they didn't up it a mere digit or two.. They upped it well beyond any forseeable future limit so they didn't get stuck making the classic "640K of memory will be enough for anyone" error and have to go back and ever touch this bit of code again. To read anything more into this is donning a tin-foil hat and looking for black helecopters in the shadows..
And a QA person that doesn't want to get on the test server even for a little bit???? I SERIOUSLY doubt you have a natural aptitude for QA unless your work just totally burns you out.. -
My main complaint with mind/psi is that while I can lock down huge amounts of stuff (especially with hasten running) my damage output is very low. I'm playing with the slotting a little there, and now that I have SO's I'll be backing off on twin acc on attacks (I hate missing).. A few notes..
1) I like slotting some sleep durations on the basic mez, probably not that critical for a team situation where people always wake them anyway but for solo play it lets me juggle a larger number of balls at once.
2) TK thrust rocks.. Some here have called it worst power ever, but frankly that's not been my experience. yeah to a degree it's a total guilty pleasure due to the animation. but there's some real utility to it.
a- great as a single mob delaying tactic. during initial lockdown phase. If a hold misses, or something runs up to you, and both Mez and Dom are recharging, use Thrust to buy a little time, before they've picked themselves up, one of the real holds is usually recharged and you can lock em down.
b- the greater utility however is that it's also highly useful for moving mobs around. getting low on end? mobs all spread out? hit one with your hard hold (Dominate) place yourself accordingly and THRUST them where you want them to go.. apply a sleep, wash, rinse, and repeat until you've assembled a nice little pile of sleeping zombies, and then kick off drain Psyche. and get a fillup. This is great for those darned missions where stuff is on two sides of the hall, and too spread out to get an effective drain on them.. or to keep all stuff in view so you know who's under and who needs mez or dom love.
c) gets my vote for best stylistic finishing move of any of the sub 22 powers.
3) Hasten is IMHO a must.. when you really got to work fast to lock down a bunch of stuff, or when you need to stack rapid repeated holds to lock down a boss, or psy-resistent mob, hasten really helps.. Also helps you to spam those attacks when you need to rebuild domination.. or along with domination, and drain psyche, it's near god mode for a few minutes.
I'm amazed that the psi attack set is so weak, especially compared to what defenders get! but it is poorly resisted by most things, and it's fast and fairly low on the end.. so it can be made to work. -
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I'm admittedly sick of all the people who WHINE about the "bugs" of Transfusion, Transference, and Fulcrum Shift!
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Furthermore, kinetics is a skillset. Part of why it's my favorite is because it requires the practitioner to PAY ATTENTION. {snip...snip}
So no, don't change it. Keep all the lazy and inept people off my set. You are not welcome.
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Bravo, well said.
Yes there is an 'art' to playing a Kin, both in terms of target selection, character position, etc. We are IMHO the ultimate force multiplier when used correctly.
We are NOT the class for someone who just wants to float outside of melee range (or run into the middle of melee) and cycle through their attack keys over and over.. and frankly I like it that way. The only class that IMHO requires more heads-up play is the Dominator, the play of which is a bit like those plate-spinning acts in the circus..