netrunnervt

[netrunnervt]

God I hate how normalized not being in control of your own devices has become. My phone updates in the middle of the night without asking me shit or getting my consent for anything and its like "Oh hi I'm your new AI, please enjoy this forced overlay that you can't exit out of until you go through my tutorial"

"Great fuck you, I would like to uninstall you" "Oh I'm sorry you can't uninstall me! I'm a core system application and if you uninstall me your phone won't function correctly despite the fact that I did not exist yesterday and your phone worked fine" "....." "You can disable parts of my functionality but I will always be here and I will pop up notifications asking you to re-enable me unless you figure out how to disable those too! Then I will still show up in a different color at the top of your settings application telling you that you need to 'fix" a 'problem' with your phone, that problem being that I am disabled. Does that help?"

Like, you know what I can do on my desktop? "sudo pacman -Rdd linux" , this will just fucking remove the entire linux kernel. Fundamentally breaking my computer until I boot up a live disk and chroot in and reinstall it or whatever, and the computer will go "Are you sure (y/n)" or whatever and i'm like "y" and it will just go "Ok you got it boss"

But its mine, I get to do what I want with it. I control the computer, the computer does not control me. I refuse to cede control to my phone or anything else. The thing is a lot of people will joke that like "Oh I love just letting the machine tell me what to do, I don't know what I'm doing, it knows best" or whatever but the thing you have to realize is that when you say that you are abstracting away that "the phone" or whatever is not some value neutral logic driven robot like from sci-fi, it is a collection of the the capitalistic and fascistic desires of the tech oligarch fuckwits that are burning the world to the ground right now. You aren't submitting to the phone, you are submitting to Musk, Bezos, Nadella, Pichai, Cook and all those other evil bastards.

Fuck them, fuck their little AI toys, and fuck this.

[netrunnervt]

GPU undervolting around stupid limitations

I've spent the past few days playing with undervolting settings for my RTX 2060 Super.

TL;DR of the results: Around 15-20% performance loss vs stock, double that vs my usual overclocked profile. Power draw has gone down anywhere between 35-55%, depending on the benchmark. Synthetic benchmarks tend to have smaller power draw savings while games show bigger improvements. This is NOT a stable setting, more tweaking is needed. More details (and how to do this!) under the cut.

Just to be clear, this was an attempt to push voltage as low as possible with absolutely no regard for performance. I just wanted to see how low I could go while still technically running above stock clocks. I tried Steel Nomad and Time Spy for synthetic benchmarks, and a couple of games I frequently play for game tests. DLSS/FSR/XeSS were always OFF, all these tests are at native resolution.

-- IMPORTANT CAVEATS --

This is NOT a well controlled environment, this is me firing up games off my library, letting the temperature and framerate stabilise in a location that performs worse than average, then taking screenshots.

I do NOT have a good performance logging solution configured, nor do I have preset benchmark runs for these tests. They are quick and dirty and should be taken with more than one grain of salt.

The only thing that changed in between test runs was applying my custom profile on MSI Afterburner and returning to stock settings.

I expect the margin of error to be large, well above the 1-2% we usually see in professional benchmarks and reviews. I cannot verify exactly how much it is, so assume the worst.

Whenever "my overclocked profile", "overclocked" or anything with the same meaning is mentioned, it means the following settings in MSI Afterburner:

-- SYNTHETIC BENCHMARKS --

All tests run at default settings.

In 3DMark Steel Nomad, the card peaks at around 110 W for a decrease of 37% from stock, while performance drops by 13%. Compared to my overclocked profile, power draw went down by 41%, and performance went down by 18%. Results links: Undervolted (110 W), Stock (175 W), Overclocked (185 W). Note that the Undervolted run still has the VRAM overclocked for this test.

3DMark Time Spy had similar results. Performance loss was 14% vs stock and 17% vs overclocked, with power draw reduced by 43% and 46% respectively. Results links: Undervolted (100 W), Stock (175 W), Overclocked (185 W). Note that the Undervolted run still has the VRAM overclocked for this test.

-- GAME BENCHMARKS --

All settings and spots where screenshots were taken can be found here.

Assassin's Creed Mirage, custom Medium settings. The undervolted profile consistently draws 85 W or less even in more crowded areas. At stock settings the card draws between 175-180 W. That being said, this does come at the cost of significantly less stable frametimes, meaning this undervolt is probably on the absolute edge of stability and a bit more voltage would be necessary for a long-term setting. Note the over 20% performance loss alongside the nearly 500 MHz frequency drop.

Redout 2, max settings. Stock does incredibly well here, delivering over 100 FPS in most occasions. Tested at Neo-Tokyo, which tends to be one of the more performance-heavy tracks in my experience. Undervolting here dropped performance by up to 20%, and reduced power draw by 42%. Note that the overall frametime consistency has worsened here too, but it's fast enough that it doesn't detract from the experience.

Cyberpunk 2077, custom Medium settings. Stock settles in at around 60 FPS with my settings, while undervolting drags down to 50. Power draw drops below 100 W as a result.

-- HOW IT'S DONE --

Since Nvidia doesn't let you directly control the voltage of your GPU, you have to find a different way around it, and there is one:

Setting a maximum clock speed using MSI Afterburner's Curve Editor means your GPU will aim for that clock speed at the lowest voltage that matches it.

What this means is, if you make your V/F curve completely flat from one voltage onwards, your GPU will never try to go above that voltage. Thus, you effectively cap your card's voltage and select a target frequency for it.

For a visual example, here's my card's stock V/F curve:

And here's the undervolt setting:

There's a quick way to do this, so you don't have to set each little point manually. Select the leftmost point (lowest voltage) you want to try, set it to the frequency you want. Then, hold Shift, and drag across all the other points to select them together. Finally, hit Shift+Enter twice, and Afterburner will flatten the rest of the curve for you. Hit Apply and hope you don't crash.

-- THOUGHTS OVERALL --

Averaging out my results, power draw went down by 44% vs stock settings and 47% versus my overclocked profile. At the same time, the performance change was -18% versus stock. I didn't keep record of my overclocked gaming results, but the performance bump seemed to be around the same as that in synthetic benchmarks, if not a little less.

This makes for an efficiency improvement of 24% overall versus stock, accounting for performance loss versus power draw reduction. Not fucking bad, though again this DID really mess with frametime stability, so be mindful of that when trying this yourself. Frametime stability is just as (if not more) important than average frameratees - A game running at 100 FPS with frequent stutters will usually not feel as good as a game running a rock-solid 75 or even 60, depending on the severity of said stutters.

My next attempt will be running stock clocks undervolted, though of course that's probably not going to be anywhere near as big an efficiency improvement. I wanted to go as hard as I could for the start, and 0.712 volts was what it settled down in.

[netrunnervt]

we need to kill whoever invented onedrive

[netrunnervt]

Can't wait to see this fuckery come to an end.

I felt uncomfy with two ports open, I can't begin to fathom having twenty THOUSAND of them open.

i know very little about computers in the grand scheme of things, but i know enough to know that every single tumblr post about technology has at least one thing wrong about it.

most posts which are just about "heres a tip on how to do something on your computer" either is entirely unnecessary, or straight up makes things worse.

[netrunnervt]

Agreed.

No matter how much you know, how hard you try, how much you double check - Any piece of advice on computers can and will become outdated even if it's correct right now, and it usually isn't even correct right now.

Don't disable important Windows security features for "free performance". Don't forward every port on your network cause the Switch's troubleshooting guide told you to (on that note, what the fuck, Nintendo?). For the love of Talos please don't use "game performance optimizer" software.

Many things in a computer are set correctly by default and are best left untouched.

i know very little about computers in the grand scheme of things, but i know enough to know that every single tumblr post about technology has at least one thing wrong about it.

most posts which are just about "heres a tip on how to do something on your computer" either is entirely unnecessary, or straight up makes things worse.

[netrunnervt]

Revisiting a Classic: The Virtuoso Spring/Summer '25

Three weeks ago now was the private launch for the Virts' latest two (yep, two this time) decks: The SS25 Spring and SS25 Summer. For these, they're revisiting the SS15 colour scheme, applying a minor remaster on the Spring version and bringing it to the more modern Virts identity on the Summer version.

Promo images and some of my thoughts below the cut. This one's gonna be a bit long - And yes, I did ask whether I could publicly talk about these and got the OK from them directly, so we should be alright.

Here are some of the promo images I was sent, and a few words about each. Forgive the heavy compression, I did get these over email.

The tuck cases. Oh man, the tuck cases. Of course they do the usual connecting thing that Virts tucks do, but this time the SS25 Spring and Summer tuck cases connect with each other as well as with themselves, forming different designs each time. Check it out:

I absolutely love the idea and the fact that they managed to pull this off. The Spring deck looks like the tuck case from the SS15 except starting to break open, and the Summer case looks like it has already blown up.

All this yapping and I haven't even shown you the cards themselves. Here you go!

SS25 Summer on the left, SS25 Spring on the right. The Summer deck is reminiscent of the P1/P1 Foundations/P1FX in its style, which I'm pretty happy with. The partial border was kind of a hit for me when I first saw it.

The Spring deck looks a LOT like the SS15, just with slight adjustments, the red and blue swapped, and a black internal ring to replace the previous red one:

It's basically a remaster, and in a way as much as I'm a little sad that I got into cardistry after the SS15 was already out of production, I'm glad I'll be getting my hands on this new 2025 Spring variant instead. It's not at all an original design, but it's a decent homage.

Finally, the face designs - These are taken directly from the P1 and P1 Foundations style for both decks, with the Summer deck not being numbered at all:

My opinion? I dig the Summer design. I love non-numbered faces, on Virts decks or otherwise. I love my Virts P1FX and Sea Glass, I love my Touch Origin, I love my Bicycle NEON, and this looks just as pretty to me. It does make the deck much harder to play with, but for a cardistry-oriented deck, that's a sacrifice I'm willing to make. Hell, the aforementioned Bicycle NEON and Touch Origin decks are completely impossible to play with as all the faces are the same, and they look absolutely gorgeous.

Overall, I love these. I ordered two of each for myself and for a friend of mine, and if I end up disappointed I'll be posting about that when they get here. If not, you can assume around late May to early June that no news is good news and I've loved them just as much as I'd hoped.

[netrunnervt]

Pretty good, if you can find one: The RX 9070 XT

Let me start by saying this: I fucking love how the 9070 XT turned out in terms of performance and I'll probably be buying one when I get the chance.

If you can find one at its MSRP of 600 USD/570 GBP, it's actually pretty solid. Not "shut up and take my money", but solid. Almost reasonable pricing for a GPU for the first time in however many years, relative to its build and performance class.

Nerdy details under the cut.

In short, the 9070 XT is maybe a tiny bit slower than the 5070 Ti, but also $150 cheaper.

In long:

(Image credits in order: Gamers Nexus, Hardware Unboxed)

It's within *earshot* of the RTX 5070 Ti for raster benchmarks, which is more or less what I was hoping for. With undervolting, Der8auer even managed to squeeze past the 5080 in 3DMark Time Spy Extreme:

Not bad. I don't expect the 9070 XT to win against the 5080 in any real-world benchmark (and it doesn't), but for $150 under the 5070 Ti? Not fucking bad.

There is one segment, however, where Radeon still gets absolutely pummeled: Ray tracing. The more RT heavy a game is, the worse the 9070 XT will perform.

It's immensely better than last generation was in this situation, don't get me wrong, but don't expect Black Myth: Wukong or Cyberpunk with Path Tracing turned on to run well.

(Image credit: Gamers Nexus)

With a less RT-heavy workload, the 9070 XT finds its footing again, but still doesn't beat the 5070 Ti:

(Image credit: Gamers Nexus)

The new media encoder also seems to be doing well, with image quality in H.264 not quite where the competition is but really close:

Meanwhile, in AV1, it's almost the exact same:

Considering that Twitch lets you stream at 6000 Kbps (and they won't stop you if you set your OBS to 8000), while YouTube lets you hit 10000 Kbps, this encoder is completely acceptable.

Overall? I love it, it's more or less three times as fast as my RTX 2060 Super and it has double the VRAM, which means I should be able to stream Redout 2 and Ghostwire: Tokyo without Unreal Engine being a bitch about it.

Looks good enough to me.

[netrunnervt]

"lol, lmao": The RTX 5070

TL;DR

It's basically a 4070 Ti or maybe a little bit faster sometimes. Of course they fucking lied.

Don't buy it.

[netrunnervt]

Close Enough - AMD RX 9000 pricing

Right out of the gate:

RX 9070 XT for $600, RX 9070 for $550.

Now, these SHOULD have been $400 and $500 respectively, but it's basically known at this point that AMD GPU prices drop to more normal numbers soon after launch.

Opinions under the cut.

Pricing the 9070 XT at $600 is acceptable, and really nicely undercuts the 5070 Ti. Considering rumours show the 9070 XT being just a tiny cut under the 4080 Super (and thus 5080) on average, at $150 cheaper it's gonna fight well even if it isn't the "shut up and take my money" that it would've been for $500.

For the 9070 on the other hand... They didn't try at all. It'll just have to be faster than the 5070 since it's launching at the same price, but if it's not, it'll be a miss. This card would've absolutely murdered at $400 and it's a shame seeing AMD just forgetting to undercut the competition at all.

Nvidia has had the absolute worst launch possible. Cards failing on driver installation, cable current imbalance leading to melting connectors that's unfixable without a hardware revision, absolutely no stock, the entire 50 series stack occasionally missing physical hardware, prices not being real at all and partners scalping their own cards, it's an absolute joke. AMD had an opportunity here to come out swinging and storm the market by undercutting both their lower offerings by $150 flat and steal MASSIVE market share, but they chose not to.

It won't be a massive swing over, but at least it'll move more people away from the growing monopoly that is Nvidia.

I'm probably buying a 9070 XT, especially if I can find one for under $550. We'll see.

[netrunnervt]

Google did a fucky wucky.

hey folks if you have an android phone: google shadow installed a "security app".

I had to go and delete it myself this morning.

[netrunnervt]

The 5090 Failures Will Continue Until Morale Improves

I thought none of them ever being in stock was gonna be enough. I thought "it dies when I install the driver" was gonna be enough.

It was not.

As reported by der8auer and elaborated upon by Buildzoid (and PLEASE watch both videos for details as they are way more qualified to explain this than I am), as it turns out, the six 12v wires feeding power to the RTX 5090 have no current balancing whatsoever.

What does this mean?

It means that even though these wires are rated for 8 amps each, you can have a situation where most of them are maybe doing 2-3 and you have one or two wires running twenty fucking amps each.

In simple terms, that means those two wires will hit 150 degrees C and rapidly become a fire hazard.

Why is this an issue?

Because Nvidia has only placed one shunt resistor on the 5090 behind the power plug, so as far as the graphics card itself is concerned, that's one wire, not six. Translation:

You could cut five of the six 12v wires in your 5090's power cable. It would still try to run, then try to draw 575 W off one wire, and subsequently fucking catch fire.

Sweet.

[netrunnervt]

Yeah, stock has been incredibly low - A few hundred 5090s and a few thousand 5080s from what I've seen. There's probably more stock going around that's just not publicly available, but every retailer worth buying from has weeks to months' worth of backlogs. I did link the GN video back there as a citation for the "Microcenter got <250 5090s" claim.

But hey, it doesn't matter since neither card is worth buying anyway. The 5090 is priced like a halo product, and everything else is scaled almost 1:1, meaning the *entire series* is halo-priced.

In a normal world, the RTX 5080 being just under half of what the 5090 is would've gotten it a 70 class name and price.

Paper Launch Saga - NoVideo Strikes Back

So the RTX 5090 is out and it's basically zero architectural improvement vs last gen (+30% core count, +30% power draw, +30% price, +30% performance) - but that isn't the point of this post.

The point is that something unfathomably funny has happened.

Some RTX 5090s in the wild are frying themselves just by driver installation.

More info below the cut.

Yup, you heard me. TechPowerUp reports that users are having trouble with RTX 5090s straight up dying with seemingly burnt circuitry after just installing the goddamn graphics driver.

Not only is supply for these cards extremely limited (The TOTAL amount of units shipped to all MicroCenter locations across the US was below 250), not only did those cards get scalped to hell and back, but now they're also just completely impossible to use.

Congratulations, Jensen. You've taken the piss so hard that I'm going back to calling your company "NoVideo" instead of just "NShitia".

I just hope AMD doesn't disappoint - though part of me knows they probably will.

[netrunnervt]

Paper Launch Saga - NoVideo Strikes Back

So the RTX 5090 is out and it's basically zero architectural improvement vs last gen (+30% core count, +30% power draw, +30% price, +30% performance) - but that isn't the point of this post.

The point is that something unfathomably funny has happened.

Some RTX 5090s in the wild are frying themselves just by driver installation.

More info below the cut.

Yup, you heard me. TechPowerUp reports that users are having trouble with RTX 5090s straight up dying with seemingly burnt circuitry after just installing the goddamn graphics driver.

Not only is supply for these cards extremely limited (The TOTAL amount of units shipped to all MicroCenter locations across the US was below 250), not only did those cards get scalped to hell and back, but now they're also just completely impossible to use.

Congratulations, Jensen. You've taken the piss so hard that I'm going back to calling your company "NoVideo" instead of just "NShitia".

I just hope AMD doesn't disappoint - though part of me knows they probably will.

[netrunnervt]

What did Dell mean by this

So the brand whose name sounds embarrassingly like mine has revealed the design of its new Alienware laptops.

I don't typically care about this sort of thing, but there's one Big Funny™ under the cut for you, alongside images in general.

So, they look pretty alienware-y, right? Standard stuff:

And then you look at the bottom.

Wait, what's that there? Computer, enhance.

ENHANCE

Dear god, that's glass. That's fucking GLASS.

Glass at the bottom of a laptop? Yeah, and apparently it's so that you "can see the components".

Except there are heatsinks on them.

And they're on the side of the laptop you don't see when you're using it.

And you can see the fans, meaning there's no direct intake path.

Meaning that this laptop has the revolutionary new feature of breaking regardless of whether it's placed right side up or upside down!

It's like watching a rat in a cage trying to learn how to design a machine, and you give them a lil treat every time they make something that doesn't catch fire.

Learn how to build a fucking computer, you guys. Come on.

[netrunnervt]

Nvidia thinks you're a footnote

I'm just off the Nvidia CES keynote livestream. They casually mentioned four new GPUs, in passing:

Image source: Nvidia

That's literally all the info they gave us. Prices and AI TOPS. To not waste your time with more info (like they didn't), the rest is going under the cut.

I feel thoroughly insulted by their complete refusal to list any specs at all in the actual announcement. The entire keynote was "here's a bunch of stuff about AI, oh also we're releasing these GPUs that you can do AI with, and here's more AI stuff".

They also claimed the 5070 has "4090 performance", except with a twist: These new cards now generate three fake frames instead of one. So, assuming frame gen on for both products gets you roughly the same framerate, when you turn frame gen off and only get the real frames, the 5070 is roughly half the 4090. At least it costs a little over a third of the money. That's the only semblance of "improvement", if you can call it that.

On that exact note, this series has the same issue as 40 series - Everything except the top tier card is corner cut garbage. The 5070 is packing 6144 CUDA cores vs the 5090's 21760 - so a 28.2% cut of the flagship. Wanna know what other card was around 28% of its generation's flagship? The GTX 1650 Super. You know, the one that launched for $159.

Nvidia's laughing straight to the bank and everyone's still buying their products. Both last gen and this one could've comfortably been as revolutionary as 10 series was (the 1080 Ti remains the GOAT), but Nvidia instead chose to corner cut everything to boost margins.

The only reason they can do this is because the competition is not at their level. We depend entirely on AMD and Intel to do something better, and as hopeful as Arc B580 has made me, I'm not that excited.

In the words of Linus Torvalds, "Nvidia, fuck you."

[netrunnervt]

The Absolute State of (Arcade) Racing Games

A friend recently opened up a conversation with me about racing games and how they think the genre is dying.

After a long think and even longer talk, I'd like to bring up a few of the points we mentioned as a general round-up of what I think is actually going on with racing games, and why it feels like you haven't played a good racing game in ages.

TL;DR? You haven't. But you already knew that, so let's get into the actual details under the cut.

Here's the core issue: Mainstream arcade racers are becoming more like sims. Why is this a bad thing? Because Arcade and Sim racers used to have an incredibly clear divide - One was clean, realistic and meant to actually present a believable driving experience, while the other was meant to be over-the-top fun and style.

What big racing game releases recently have been over the top fun and style? I can't think of one off the top of my head. NFS Unbound has a gorgeous cartoony/graffiti ish style and people are slagging it for being "too much" or some shit, even though it's literally the best NFS since Rivals (Heat was mid and shouldn't even count as an NFS game, I will die on this hill). I can list off a FEW recentish racers that I've had fun with, but none of them have seen mainstream success:

Inertial Drift (banger.)

Night Runners Prologue (BANGER.)

GRIP: Combat Racing (SO CLOSE to being great)

Retrowave (neat little time killer)

Redout 1 and 2 (Anti-grav racing, obscenely good)

Notice anything? There's a non-zero chance that you've not heard of any of them. That's the other big problem - There ARE fun arcade racers, but none of them are being pushed to a mainstream audience.

Finally, one last issue that relates to Unbound's reception: There's a vicious cycle where arcade racers become "safer" in style and more like sims in gameplay, so the more hardcore side of the racing game community becomes a bigger proportion as casuals leave, and then they speak out against any game with even slightly flashy visual identity/style. This goes back to the start and racing games are all encouraged to be more clean looking, clean driving and completely lacking any flashy fun. It's a self-feeding cycle.

The most fun big-name arcade racers in the past few years have been NFS Unbound and whichever Forza Horizon has been available in the year you're talking about. Think about those two, then compare them to things like Midnight Club 3, Blur, Split/Second, CrashDrive 2, Burnout Paradise, Asphalt 4, F-Zero, even fucking Micro Machines.

All of a sudden, Horizon looks fucking boring. And that's because it is. The Expeditions in 5 are awesome, don't get me wrong, but the rest of it... eh. And everyone except Whitelight (awesome video essay btw) praised FH5 as a "10/10 arcade racer". It's honestly insulting.

I miss the arcade racers of the 2000s, and I know you do too. Back when Need For Speed was outselling FPS games and the world was a happier place. I can't believe I'm saying this, but I wish we got games a little more like Asphalt - a series I haven't touched in YEARS.

Until then, check out these personal favourites:

Night Runners Prologue

Inertial Drift

Redout and Redout 2 and of course

Burnout Paradise.

Need more recommendations? Don't mind even older games? Have an emulator or console that'll run them for you?

Midnight Club (any)

Need For Speed (Underground to ProStreet era)

Ridge Racer (any)

F-Zero (any)

Micro Machines II

Crash Drive 2 (old flash game, you can probably find it standalone somewhere)

WipEout (Fury is my favourite, but any)

I'll be waiting alongside you until then.