“The complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year.”
A key part of Moore’s law which is often omitted is that Moore was not just talking about transistor density but about cost. When people say we’ve reached the end of Moore’s law this is not because we’re no longer able to increase semiconductor transistor density (just look at TSMC’s roadmap) but that the “complexity for minimum component costs” is no longer increasing. Chips are still getting faster but they’re now also more expensive.
We continue to be able to make faster chips, both via smaller nodes, but also via advanced packaging and architecture improvements.
But the costs of every new generational increase is rising faster than the % performance improvement.
I am personally hoping this will eventually lead to a culture of total optimization (similar to what we saw in the 90s on both PC and console), but there are likely significant barriers to implementing such a new development culture at scale.
I think the Raspberry Pi 4 -> Pi 5 is a very clear demonstration of this.
The power requirements went way up, and therefore the needed cooling, after years of the 1->2->3->4 being pretty similar. And most importantly, the prices for those were similar (35 USD MSRP I think, or usually around 60 USD here). The new one is much more expensive than that and that hasn’t gone down without controversy.
Maybe consoles are more visible to most people but the different versions of Pis are much more apples to apples and are designed to be drop-in upgrades.
I think I’ll still be using Pi 4s for a long time personally.
The PS5’s price is higher than it was 4.5 years ago at launch, a device with identical function. While we should be seeing a lite version at 30% the price, we see a pro version at 50% more. Crazy.
We’ve been up against the 5Ghz thermal wall for over a decade. We can keep adding cores but we need significantly improved design (less nanometers) for these gains - and these are now running up against another wall, namely quantum tunneling which begins being a problem at around the nanometer scale.
I assume only a radically different architecture (light instead of electricity?) will be able to smash these barriers.
Very long story short- Trump crashing oil prices in 2016/2017 more or less ‘killed’ GlobalFoundries and which left TSMC as the only leading edge pureplay foundry. (Intel isn’t pureplay, Samsung is no longer chasing leading edge)
There is a lot of content on semiconductor manufacturing (both in context of gaming and beyond) on !hardware, in one way or another anything related to semiconductors does impact both PC and console gaming (since CPUs and GPUs are key).
I just started playing this remaster, and only played to Skyrim before. And I really love this title! I feels the same waves than when I was on Skyrim. I think this release is the best occasion for newcommers and younger players
I think oblivion was the best RPG of the series. And the remaster just made it more enjoyable to play. The original had some…interesting ideas that ultimately flopped (that god awful levelling system they bastardized from morrowind).
The quests are peak, quirky, and actually have rewards at the end since you can’t make god tier equipment right out the (oblivion) gate. Levelling feels good again, and you don’t have to cry into a pillow because you ran too much and leveled your athletics and now you HAVE to take a speed point as an attribute on level up even though you wanted strength.
Don’t expect a 2025 game in terms of mechanics and level design. For it’s time Oblivion was a very good game. This is a polished version of the original with updated graphics and somewhat modernised combat and movement. They ironed out a lot of clunky mechanics and bugs too.
As far as remasters go the GTA ones were absolute dogwater just like warcraft 3 remastered. This one is very good and imo comparable with the command and conquer remasters.
I dont think they could have done much more without making the game completely different.
the doomed king and his armed guards need to escape through a secret passage that just so happens to cut through my jail cell seems a little too convenient
I remember playing it for the first time in 2006 and I had completely forgotten about that guff by the time I got out of the tutorial. My character went on to ignore the main quest for many dozens of hours.
Of course several of those hours were spent struggling to defeat boars that started appearing on the road at level 5. They were insanely tough since I'd accidentally made the most difficult possible custom class. At least the remaster doesn't have that problem. Instead the combat is very easy — unless you go up one level in difficulty in which case you'll probably be killed by a mudcrab.
Tbh, I actually think this ends up being a win for Skyblivion. I think a lot of first-time Oblivion tryers were hoping for more dramatic changes, as opposed to basically unchanged Oblivion with a weird facelift running on top.
I like it. I think if I had been a first time player (far from it — I played it at release), this would be a worthy way to experience the game. That said, playing it again just feels deeply discordant for me. It’s drop-dead gorgeous with the visuals, but the sound effects, NPC models, and so much more just remind me of the original jank, and it snaps me back and forth, lol. Going back to KCD2, cus it’s new to me.
I finally started playing the original release on Steam since I don’t have a powerful computer.
It is fun, but it’s much smaller than I imagined. People always complain about the drauger ruins in Skyrim as being repetitive, but damn those oblivion gates are just the same thing again and again. Hardly any variety between them.
I’m pretty close to just dropping this game and starting up Skyrim again.
Yeah, but you really don’t have to engage with every oblivion gate you see. There’s a lot of really great quest lines to engage with, but the main story is one of the least interesting the game has to offer.
100% agree. The thieves guild, dark brotherhood, overall mages guild (minus the recommendations and lackluster manimarco) are all better than the Skyrim faction questlines. Even some of the standalone quests are just a master craft of storytelling
The Oblivion gates are super boring. Before dropping the game, try the Shivering Isles expansion - it’s a really different experience from the base game and I personally like it much better. It starts here:
If you limit yourself to only going into dungeons that quests send you to, you’ll have a better time. Legend tells it all the dungeons in this whole game were made by one person, so blundering into random ones tends to be really underwhelming compared to Skyrim. While that is charming for me in its own right to wander into a random dungeon and not know whether there will be anything interesting about it at all, all my best memories of this game are of the quests and the dialogue.
It’s a product of its time. Oblivion’s game size was right at the 4.7G limit of what would fit on single layer DVD-5.
Oblivion Gates
Ugh, arguably the most boring and repetitive part of the game. Such a wasted opportunity too as they could have made each Oblivion gate be a hellscape mirror of the area that it spawned in (including towns). That would have been a fairly small amount of additional data for a huge gain in game play.
They suck, don’t do any more of them then you have too.
Yeah I definitely remember oblivion gates being a drag, but I only ever did the main campaign on one character so I never bothered with them on subsequent plays. Anyone know if the new version modifies the gates at all?
As far as I know, the new version didn’t change a single thing other than graphics and maybe some bugs. Right now, I am doing an oblivion gate and I am just running through without fighting anyone. I actually just turned my steamdeck on and was in the last room. It was too easy and much better that way.
Yeah, Bethesda loves to ruin their game worlds with weirdly repetitive additions. Morrowind constantly spawns assassins on you, Oblivion does the Oblivion gates, Skyrim has the dragons. In the latter two, I think, it’s best to just not start the main quest, which prevents the Oblivion gates and dragons from appearing, at least if you replay the game.
I remember a similar story some time ago, of another map that was just a big arena filled to the brim with all the enemies. Part of the strategy was circle strafing the whole place while enemies killed one another, then using the ammo to deal with whatever was left. Can’t remember the map name
The YouTube algorithm has been real weird lately. It suggested a video to me and I had no idea why until now. I watch a lot of Doom stuff, so it wasn’t off base, I just didn’t have context for it.
It’s Coincident (the streamer this is about) commenting over a “lost” demo of Okuplok playing the map themselves. Spoiler: they do not finish it! But it was neat hearing Coincident discuss his own strategies for the map in comparison to how the creator (allegedly) approached it.
What I like about this image is that this is probably the biggest object that I can compare to something I know, that I can “comprehend”. With 6 km wide, it is about the same size as Grenoble, a city I have seen from above while hiking. I can understand how far the picture looks from it, how small a human would be on it
arstechnica.com
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