Daily Tech News 23 February 2025

• Nvidia has confirmed that defective chips are affecting performance on 0.5% of 5090 and 5070 Ti graphics cards. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  Which is a strange announcement because (a) nobody had noticed the problem on the 5070 Ti before and (b) the 5070 Ti is much more common than the 5090.
  
  Major national retailers have announced receiving fewer than ten 5090s total, with resupply possibly months out.
  
  So this is a bit like an announcement that 0.5% of Lamborghinis and Volkswagens have an engine defect. That could mean the problem affects 20% of Lamborghinis, because the shipping volume of the two brands is so different.
  
  Anyway, if your 5090 is broken you can return it for replacement, which will happen... Some day.
  
  The other thing is that the 5090 is not a volume product, at least not yet. Nvidia has shipped hundreds of these, not thousands. And they clearly weren't paying attention. This problem would show up immediately in an automated test - and probably did show up. But nobody noticed.

• Avowed, the latest game from storied studio Obsidian, is a success... Says storied studio Obsidian. (WCCFTech)
  
  Obsidian recently said that it wasn't chasing huge profits and didn't plan to expand aggressively. (PC Gamer)
  
  Which is good because Avowed is objectively bad, horribly overpriced, selling poorly, and has fewer players than Skyrim, a game that came out in 2011.
  
  It hasn't stirred up a firestorm like Veilguard, but it's done something worse: It sank without trace.
  
  
  
• Elonnuel Goldmusk has taken only a month to set back the communist poisoning of the American soul by decades. (The Verge) (archive site)
  
  We can only wish that the screeching of the lunatics is true.
  
  
  
• The Moss Landing power plant is on fire. Again. (SF Gate)
  
  Or rather, still. The fire last month has reignited.
  
  A private fire crew is on site providing 24/7 monitoring, because they expected this to happen. So at least they're not idiots.
  
  
  
• Jensen Huang says the advent of Chinese AI platform DeepSeek is good for the company. (Tech Crunch)
  
  He would say that, because the event wiped $600 billion off Nvidia's market cap in just three days.
  
  But the price is almost back to where it was before, so it seems that investors largely agree.
  
  Still can't keep a video card in stock for more than five minutes though.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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