Daily Tech News 28 January 2023

• You can't play Forspoken on a Radeon 580. (WCCFTech)
  
  The 580 is a few years old now but it was a pretty good graphics card - it was my primary GPU until it got packed in a box in May, and it's still a very popular card in Steam hardware surveys. But it doesn't support DirectX 12_1 and Forspoken requires that as a minimum feature set. Nvidia's GTX 1060 from the same era does support DirectX 12_1.
  
  On the other hand, neither card is fast enough to handle the game; it's very demanding and the recommended hardware - AMD's Radeon 6700 XT and Nvidia's RTX 3070 - is not only much newer but significantly more powerful (and more expensive, of course).
  
  On the third hand, current generation consoles - the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X - are also much newer and more powerful than the Radeon 580.
  
  On the fourth hand, Forspoken is hot garbage and nobody wants to play it anyway.
  
  This kind of thing rarely happens with CPUs - you have to be using a truly ancient CPU for code to no longer run on it. (Unless you have a Mac in which case you're fucked the moment they decide you're not worth their time anymore.) GPUs are fixed-function devices designed to run, well, pretty much DirectX these days, and if they don't keep up with that specification their days are numbered.
  
  
  

• Pioneering English-language Vtuber agency Tsunderia has closed its doors. (DotESports)
  
  They've done the right thing by their talents, at least, releasing them from their contracts, leaving all the existing content up, and handing over rights to continue independently using the same designs.
  
  The smaller agencies seem to be in a tight spot. Vshojo and Phase Connect might be doing okay, but Prism was bought by Sony (which has two in-house vtuber agencies as well as investments elsewhere), and Aetheria (formerly Cyberlive) went the same route as Tsunderia last year.
  
  Vtubing exploded in 2020 when everyone was welded into their homes and Hololive launched its own English-language division (a few months after Tsunderia), but now that people are permitted once more to stumble blinking into the sunlight - and that the global economy has been wrecked by the same people who locked everyone up in the first place - it's much tougher going.
  
  
  
• Speaking of much tougher going toy company Hasbro has laid off 15% of its staff after announcing declining sales and profitability in the last quarter. (The Hollywood Reporter)
  
  The only division of Hasbro that improved sales last quarter was Wizards of the Coast - creator of Magic the Gathering and owner of Dungeons and Dragons - which under the steady hand of Hasbro just burned down, fell over, and sank into the swamp, handing the market to direct competitor Paizo.
  
  The most recent D&D game I played wasn't D&D at all, but Paizo's Pathfinder.
  
  
  
• The Lenovo Thinkstation P620 is a beast but. (PC Perspective)
  
  This system is based on the 64 core Threadripper 5995WX, but is otherwise nothing special in terms of features. It's fast for heavily multi-threaded tasks, but it's a Zen 3 chip and the Zen 4 7950X is not that far behind while being much, much cheaper. It's only really aimed at industries where time is money, where saving an hour on a 3D or video production task means you can bill another client for that hour.
  
  Also, Lenovo has the nasty habit of locking CPUs to Lenovo motherboards and nobody should buy their workstations.
  
  
  
• A tiny but highly radioactive thingy has been lost somewhere along a thousand mile stretch of highway in Western Australia. (ABC News - no, the other one)
  
  Oops. The device is a quarter of an inch wide and Western Australia only covers a million square miles, so I'm sure it will turn up soon.
  
  
  
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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