Upcoming NVIDIA RTX 3060 purposely cripples mining performance

[abacab]

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/graphics-cards/gtx-1650/

These were in stock for $150 last year. https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1585942-REG/asus_ph_gtx1650_o4gd6_phoenix_geforce_gtx_1650.html

Edited February 22, 2021 by abacab

[Bruno de Souza Lino]

1 hour ago, craigb said:

My NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 is long in the tooth and starting to cause me issues.  The current state of GPU's thanks to crypto-mining is making me nervous should my card finally die!

Just buy a used 10 series card. With the RTX craze at high, there's still plenty of Pascal cards in the used market with plenty of life left.

[Bruno de Souza Lino]

12 minutes ago, Shane_B. said:

I found a GTX1060 in opened but never used condition on eBay for $250 plus $15 shipping. It's been there for a couple days and nobody is jumping on it and I don't know why. It's exactly what I want but I'm afraid to get it because it's been there so long and I wonder what's wrong with it that I'm not seeing. The guy has 100% positive feedback. And yet the same card type is being bid up for more than that in other auctions and most have a buy it now for well over $300. This one seems like a great deal but as you know, there's no such thing as a great deal. Something is wrong that's why nobody is pouncing on it.

I've been looking for this stupid card for months just to play a few 5 ~ 10 year old games.

Why would they? People that are not tech savy usually look at used electronics and think they're only on sale because they're broken or something like that.

[bitflipper]

Yup, most buyers are just chasing the latest shiny thing. A GTX1060 will handle almost any game, even if you have to turn off high-res shadows or something equally trivial. Nobody wants it because it starts with a "G" instead of an "R". There's no real-time ray tracing in Skyrim.

[Jim Roseberry]

11 hours ago, bitflipper said:

Yup, most buyers are just chasing the latest shiny thing.

That sums up the whole tech industry.  ?

[Shane_B.]

I just checked and that brand new PNY GTX1060 6GB is still there for $250 + $15 shipping. That's the cheapest I've seen a 1060. Makes me wonder if there's something about this PNY non/oc'd version that miners and gamers don't like.

Speaking of shadow and ray tracing, I think it's getting out of hand. It's like they are striving to turn games in to real-time lifelike filmed movie productions. Most of the big name studio games that I've seen demo's of are just cinematic cutscenes with a few minutes of the gaming here and there just to tell you what to do to advance to the next cinematic event. I wouldn't want Fallout or Skyrim to be that way or look any better than they are now, just perform better in regard to framerate. Heck, GL Quake still looks great to me. So does Unreal and Half Life. All those games ran fantastically on affordable hardware that came several generations after they were released. Things started to change around the time of Prey though imo. They all started to focus on lighting and higher res textures. I never did play that. I installed it only to find I was forced to create a Steam account and update the game before I could register it. It was a 2Gb update iirc and I was on dial up so it didn't happen. And at the time they were cracking down on CD Check cracks and I couldn't find one to hack my own freaking game. So, sadly the disc was defective (nudge nudge wink wink) and I had to exchange it for a new unopened box, and then return the unopened box.

That's when I got out of gaming because that's when I noticed that the cost of hardware to run these new games and Steam were getting prohibitively expensive and in fact impossible for me on dial-up. Then I made the mistake of jumping to the PS3. For those of you who tried to run Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas on a PS3 you know what an absolute abomination it was.

I've been watching some of these gaming streamers on Twitch play COD Warzone. Some of them show their specs real-time on screen. These guys are running Warzone in 4K at 170FPS with a <30ms Ping and 0 packet loss against 150 other people in a live battle royale. What kind of alien technology do you have to have to do that?!

Edited February 23, 2021 by Shane_B.
Added screenshot.

[Bruno de Souza Lino]

2 hours ago, Shane_B. said:

Speaking of shadow and ray tracing, I think it's getting out of hand. It's like they are striving to turn games in to real-time lifelike filmed movie productions. Most of the big name studio games that I've seen demo's of are just cinematic cutscenes with a few minutes of the gaming here and there just to tell you what to do to advance to the next cinematic event. I wouldn't want Fallout or Skyrim to be that way or look any better than they are now, just perform better in regard to framerate. Heck, GL Quake still looks great to me. So does Unreal and Half Life. All those games ran fantastically on affordable hardware that came several generations after they were released. Things started to change around the time of Prey though imo. They all started to focus on lighting and higher res textures. I never did play that. I installed it only to find I was forced to create a Steam account and update the game before I could register it. It was a 2Gb update iirc and I was on dial up so it didn't happen. And at the time they were cracking down on CD Check cracks and I couldn't find one to hack my own freaking game. So, sadly the disc was defective (nudge nudge wink wink) and I had to exchange it for a new unopened box, and then return the unopened box.

As it still stands, the improvements nVidia did on raytracing performance are insignificant to games in general. It still is a gimmick. If you do 3D rendering, those gains are significant. Doing a raytracing calculation pass in only a few seconds to a minute instead of several minutes to hours depending on complexity.

Well, good story telling, characters and such require good soft skills and abilities...which no ray tracing algorithm can do no matter how sophisticated. Which is why you focus on game graphics instead. It's funny that many developers live in a bubble and that was demonstrated recently with the horrible performance people got from Cyberpunk 2077, as the game was developed with a hardware target that the vast majority of gamers don't have or cannot justify having.

I know people that are still playing modern games fine with 10 series cards down to 1050 Ti without a single worry in the world.

[Shane_B.]

2 hours ago, Bruno de Souza Lino said:

It's funny that many developers live in a bubble and that was demonstrated recently with the horrible performance people got from Cyberpunk 2077, as the game was developed with a hardware target that the vast majority of gamers don't have or cannot justify having.

I've always wondered what hardware developers use? Are they developing while viewing and editing on the maximum graphics settings the game can run at? Higher? Lower? Are they using consumer grade video cards or something more powerful that isn't even marketed for home use.

Streaming the graphics from a server is becoming a thing now too. I tried to stream Fallout 3 on my PS4 via PS Now. They want $100 to download it so I just tried to stream it. You need a really good connection. I have a 30Mb/20Mb and it just barely kept up. Amazon is in the beta testing stages of a game streaming service. So eventually it may be that if you have a fast enough internet connection you just need the bare minimum GPU to display an HD or 4K stream, which even the embedded intel GPU's do now.

Edited February 23, 2021 by Shane_B.

[craigb]

5 hours ago, Shane_B. said:

Heck, GL Quake still looks great to me. So does Unreal and Half Life.

Now THAT'S my gaming time history!  Back when I lived in Irvine Kalifornia, I used to run the second-most popular game servers on the West Coast for Quake, Half-Life and Counterstrike (called "N2O's Gas House").  I had a dedicated T1 line and five separate stations for my friends to use (I lived half-a-mile from work, so we'd all go over to my place at lunch or after work to either play in my music studio or play online games).  At one time, there was a database of all Quake 1 players and I was in the top-25 out of over 340,000 (my game name was, like the servers, "N2O" which is the chemical formula for Nitrous Oxide or laughing gas - my tag line that I could spray in-game was "You'll die laughing!"?).  We played on two League Republic teams for Counterstrike and, eventually, ended up taking the first and second-place positions before quitting.  Being right next to the server REALLY helps your ping!  We always had to film our matches for the referees because whiney little punk kids half our age kept thinking we MUST be cheating - LOL!  Needless to say, we didn't have to rely on running a communication server when we're all sitting in the same room.

One of my friends created a popular set of bots for Quake and I had two Half-Life maps that I made that got a lot of playing time (one called High Dive and another was a very compact version of a 2fort2 map).  Those were good times... ?

[Bruno de Souza Lino]

34 minutes ago, Shane_B. said:

I've always wondered what hardware developers use? Are they developing while viewing and editing on the maximum graphics settings the game can run at? Higher? Lower? Are they using consumer grade video cards or something more powerful that isn't even marketed for home use.

That largely depends on the developer. It's safe to assume a good portion of them have high end to enthusiast level hardware. If we're talking AAA stuff, they all have to target consoles, no matter how good their hardware is, as consoles will always exist and they're still more convenient than computers.

[craigb]

Ironically, that's one of the main reasons I stopped playing games.  Except for an Atari system back in the 70's and a Playstation that was only used to keep my friend's kids busy while we were in the music studio, I never played console games.  I only played on PC's and, one of the biggest advantages my friend and I had was our skill with a Kensington Expert Mouse trackball (see below).  We would use these at work too (we were both programmers for Verizon Wireless through Accenture) and could zip to any area of the screen in milliseconds!).  I still have a few buried in storage...

[Shane_B.]

50 minutes ago, craigb said:

Ironically, that's one of the main reasons I stopped playing games.  Except for an Atari system back in the 70's and a Playstation that was only used to keep my friend's kids busy while we were in the music studio, I never played console games.  I only played on PC's and, one of the biggest advantages my friend and I had was our skill with a Kensington Expert Mouse trackball (see below).  We would use these at work too (we were both programmers for Verizon Wireless through Accenture) and could zip to any area of the screen in milliseconds!).  I still have a few buried in storage...

I'm horrible at gaming on the PS but it's cheaper than a PC and I would just be miserable with a PC that I knew could run games properly if I only dumped another grand or 4 in to it which ain't gonna happen, per my wife. I don't know how these guys on Twitch are getting all these kills with PS4's. You can't cheat on console.

I downloaded Warzone and tried it. 100Gb DL for nothing. Thankfully it's one of the very few free to play online games on the PS. My ping is as good as the guys with the fiber lines. I think their servers are locked or throttled or something because I show the same and sometimes better ping as them. But my CPU lag and fps are far worse no doubt. By the time I see someone and pull the trigger I'm dead. Almost every time. And it takes soooooo long to start. O.M.G.. Quake you would make a custom start batch file to automatically connect you to a server, and you were in in like 5 seconds. On this thing . . . If you are playing single like I have to I spend 5 minutes getting in a game, 30 seconds in the game before getting fragged, and 10 seconds in the gulag where you have the chance to 1 on 1 someone and re-enter where you were on the server so you don't have to go allllll the way back to the beginning of the game and wait to be matched to another server. It's really that bad and it sucks. Plus while you're waiting for a server they throw you in a practice server while you're waiting and if you get killed you have to wait to get thrown back in to it. It's maddening.

I was well known and hated on the East Coast. I was [LEATHERFACE] at Nac.net's server. And you are 100% right, I was only 20 or so miles from their server location. I had a great ping on dial up and could not be beat. I had a 120ms ping which was really good for dial up. I remember doing all the custom modem settings to get it to skip some of the handshakes and make your connection as fast as it could. 56K protocols and all that. Hah. It was extremely rare that I went down. I brought so many people to the server that they made me an admin. There's still a few active Quake servers out there. And you can still get it to run on Win 10 but it's very difficult. I tried just for the heck of it and I gave up.

Those were the days. I wish they didn't screwup Fallout online with 76. It's another abomination and probably a glimpse at what to expect with Elder Scrolls 6 and Fallout 5. It frightens me to think that I'll be hugging 60 by the time those games are scheduled to come out. Finishing a working Bethesda game is one of my bucket list items. hah.

[bitflipper]

Many of the games I've gotten the most mileage out of weren't graphically impressive. Games are about gaming first, visuals second. Civilization was a favorite for a very long time. 

That said, the first game I ran with my new video card was Assassin's Creed Valhalla and it's a marvel to behold with all the graphic options turned up to the max. The first day I was playing it, I was engrossed and didn't notice my son-in-law had come into the room. Then behind me I heard "holy crap, it's like watching a movie!" Yeh, except you don't get to personally decapitate anyone in the movie theater. Not if you ever want to come back, anyway.

[craigb]

3 hours ago, bitflipper said:

Many of the games I've gotten the most mileage out of weren't graphically impressive.

Definitely!  Some of those simple 2D, one screen games were awesome!  Crystal Caves, Commander Keen, Joust, all the Mario and similar types...

 

On the flip-side, I eventually want to get into VR game development, but with Myst-like games.  Immersive with puzzles and awesome background music.  

[Shane_B.]

15 minutes ago, craigb said:

Definitely!  Some of those simple 2D, one screen games were awesome!  Crystal Caves, Commander Keen, Joust, all the Mario and similar types...

Monster Bash 1 ~ 3, Vinyl Goddess From Mars, Jill Of The Jungle 1 ~ 3, Xargon 1 ~ 3, Putt Putt Goes To The Moon, Duke Nukem Manhattan Project was an advanced 2D sidescroller with 3D graphics, Raptor Call Of The Shadows, Realms Of Chaos. I still have all of the original floppies and CD's although some of the floppies were dead the last time I tried them. I have all of them on an old HP 486 with a whopping 100MB (iirc) HDD that miraculously still works. It has to be 25 plus years old. I have it set up with a custom autoexec.bat and config.sys to display a popup menu with custom options to run each game with different memory settings and sound card IRQ settings. I really miss those days/games.

[craigb]

Now you can actually create a virtual machine from most PC's then install one of those old operating systems and play those games from that. ?

[Shane_B.]

23 minutes ago, craigb said:

Now you can actually create a virtual machine from most PC's then install one of those old operating systems and play those games from that. ?

Hey now, slow down there. Remember it took me 4 days to set up a stupid compressor. ?

[Byron Dickens]

On 2/22/2021 at 12:52 PM, Shane_B. said:

I found a GTX1060 in opened but never used condition on eBay for $250 plus $15 shipping. It's been there for a couple days and nobody is jumping on it and I don't know why. It's exactly what I want but I'm afraid to get it because it's been there so long and I wonder what's wrong with it that I'm not seeing. The guy has 100% positive feedback. And yet the same card type is being bid up for more than that in other auctions and most have a buy it now for well over $300. This one seems like a great deal but as you know, there's no such thing as a great deal. Something is wrong that's why nobody is pouncing on it.

Not necessarily.

 

A couple years ago, I bought a 22" Sabian HH Dry Ride for $150. INCLUDING SHIPPING!

I was looking for a drier ride than my Zildjian Avedis and threw a bid up there just for the hell of it, never thinking I would win.

Mine was the only bid.

This is a $445 cymbal.

Only thing wrong with it was that it was like new and hadn't developed a patina on it yet.

[abacab]

11 hours ago, craigb said:

Now you can actually create a virtual machine from most PC's then install one of those old operating systems and play those games from that. ?

I installed Doom 3 on a Win XP virtual machine that ran OK.

[bitflipper]

Sadly, I've never been able to get my old DOS games to work properly within a modern command prompt. I'd love to see Redneck Rampage or Shadow Warrior again.