Daily Tech News 23 January 2023

• Can California's electric grid handle a 15x increase in electric vehicles? (Cal Matters)
  
  No. Are you stupid? It can't even cope now. Flee while you can, before they close the border.

• If you're looking to build a new PC, the price increase for mid-tier DDR5 RAM over DDR4 is now close to zero. One less reason to favour Intel over AMD. (Intel chips still support DDR4 with an appropriate motherboard; the new AMD chips don't.)
  
  
  
• If you want a graphics card to play games - and you're spending your own money, and you didn't just win the lottery - the best value is to be found in AMD's Radeon 6600 and 6700 families. If you don't expect to run the latest games at 4K at over 60fps, those should do just fine.
  
  What if you want to run something that uses the graphics card as a compute engine, like Stable Diffusion? Then things get a bit more complicated. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  In the first test here, the fastest card on the market - Nvidia's $1600 RTX 4090 - comes in sixth place, behind AMD's 7900 XT, and also behind Nvidia's own RTX 3080 from 2020. The 4080 is slower than a 3070.
  
  Intel's cards are at the bottom of the heap, but AMD's previous generation is also pretty bad.
  
  I think the answer is don't want that. Failing that, soldier on with a 3060 Ti until this mess gets sorted out.
  
  
  
• Amazon ran Comixology into the ground and now it's laying off staff. (Android Police)
  
  Comixology is the leading digital marketplace for comics - the comic version of Kindle - and Amazon naturally bought it back in 2013. They left it alone for a surprisingly long time before ruining everything last year, and with the current round of staff cuts they've apparently laid off everyone who might have fixed it.
  
  The article is a justifiable rant about Amazon's mishandling of the service, but it completely ignores the elephant in the room: Comics suck and nobody is buying them.
  
  DC and Marvel were approaching bankruptcy before - basically - being rescued single-handed by Robert Downey Jr's performance in 2008's Iron Man. Now, many, many billions of dollars in box office receipts later, they are still approaching bankruptcy because they are being run by lunatics.
  
  Manga, meanwhile, is doing just fine. Actually manga mostly sucks too but it doesn't blame the reader for that.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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