Mr. Fox

You two have some things in common, not the least of which is owning a PC technology-focused forum.

Brothers @jaybee83and @Raidermanmaybe when you have a few minutes to spare you could help out my friend here. I am sure he would appreciate it. So far nobody has responded. https://extremehw.net/topic/3009-am5-overclocking-help/

The year's worth of monthly premium is more than I would typically spend in 5+ years on games.

Could be. I sure hope not. If they do things will not recover. It will turn out like the thin and light turdbook filth if they do. Console will become the only medium for gaming. The only effective thing would be to boycott digital gaming of any kind and turn both PC and console inside-out. More affordable is not superior, it's just cheaper. If console gaming doesn't have to compete with PC gaming it will not stay cheaper. It will become more manipulated and far more expensive, and everyone that enjoys gaming will suffer because of it. NVIDIA doesn't care and AMD would love that. It would make life so much easier for AMD, and things would never be right again.

Cool video for their new release. Another new release... Not a new release...

It really starts hurting performance when CPU and memory resources are consumed. But, less is generally better. It is hard to go wrong by eliminating anything that isn't doing something you care about, and there is a crap ton of garbage that shouldn't be cared about in Windows 10 and even more in Windows 11. Even if a process is using little in the way of resources, it is something extra the CPU has to manage. To put it in oversimplified terms, if you are playing babysitter to a well-behaved group of kids that don't involve themselves in mischief, it doesn't take a lot of effort. That being said, you can't leave and go to something else because they warrant your attention. It's your responsibility to look after them. Now, if you are babysitting one kid that is a brat and have to burn a lot of calories to keep him from wreaking havoc or tearing the place apart, you cannot allow yourself to get distracted. That one brat is harder to manage than a half-dozen good kids. If you could, you'd force that brat into submission or even get rid of him, (never agree to watch him again,) but you can't at the moment. He is sucking the life out of you. Some services and processes are like the group of good kids and others are like the brat you would like to strangle. You can manage a dozen of the good kids and just one or two of the brats makes you want to break out the belt and show them what forced compliance is all about.

It seems like a long time ago (don't remember for sure when the last one was) that there was a game release that I was actually super-excited about. Sadly, those that interest me the most now are nothing but remasters of old games from back in the day when games were still great. Almost every time I open one of my game clients and browse their stores I end up disappointed that they have absolutely nothing that looks good to me. Once in a great while there will be something I think might be good that I add to my wish list and wait for the price to fall to $20~ or wait until I can find it that cheap on a cd-key seller site. My kids used to give me Steam gift cards for birthday or Christmas presents, but the last time they did it was more than 6 months until I found something good enough to buy. The money just sat in my Steam wallet for what seemed like forever.

Dad gummit, that's insane. That would make me feel sick, too. I probably haven't paid $150 in the aggregate for all the games I have purchased in the past 5 years, LOL.

Very true. I don't like that either. Very irritating. If I cared about the story I would wait for the movie, and then wait for it to come out on Netflix for free, or watch in with commercials for free on Vudu, LOL. No reason to pay $70, or even $20.

There's no way in hell that I would pay $70 for it. Maybe I will see if I can find something to like about it when the price drops to $15-$25. I think I can count on one hand how many games of the hundreds that I own that I think are worth what they sold for at the time of launch. That approach generally works out really good for me. If it turns out that I think it sucks I didn't waste a lot of money on it. If it turns out to be something I like, then I paid what it was actually worth; not what suckers paid for it when it was a new release. A lot of the games I own that I paid $20 or less for aren't even worth what I paid for them and I regret wasting any money on them. (And most are very popular titles.) A good number of them were purchased only for the in-game benchmark and I knew I had no interest in the game before I bought it for the benchmark.

To be fair, I haven't used a "stock" NVIDIA driver in years. Before NVCleanStall I manually did my own mods, or used j95 mods, because I didn't want the garbage "features" mucking up my system, like Ansel, ShadowPlay, GeFarts Experience, automatic driver updates and what not. Part of what I loathe about the Adrenaline GUI is it has a similar payload of filth and I don't know how to eradicate it. With the GeFarts software it is not all combined into a single interface, so eliminating the trash might be easier.

I don't really have any complaints about the 6900 XT at a hardware level. It is a lot more powerful than the 3060 Ti it replaced (which I was very content with) and does an excellent job at some things. Software and drivers issues are, indeed, fixable. But, they sometimes never get fixed. Firmware, drivers and software made me hate my X570 setup. Driver bugs aside, in terms of software I felt Ryzen Master was a trashy and bloated-feeling GUI and I don't care for Adrenaline's GUI for the same reasons. Layout is chaotic, somewhat illogical and overall unintuitive and it feels bloated.

I haven't had my 4K monitor long enough to get used to it, and I haven't started liking it on the desktop. I hate using more than 100% scaling and text is smaller than I would like it to be on even a 27-inch screen. I think with more time the smaller text won't annoy me as much. But, yeah... gaming is like... wow... major improvement. Way better and more noticeable than I expected it would be. (If I am honest, my expectations were very low and that might be jading my impressions.) It is like the video rendered on my display has a more chromatic and less cartoonish quality than before. It was kind of trippy at first, but it didn't take long for me to get used to how much better games look.

You're forgetting I rarely game and maybe didn't notice what I said about the 6900 XT (and have previously posted about it). Their drivers suck. They way they work (or don't work) sucks and the GUI to manage them sucks. Blurry text, disappearing text while typing and DWM desktop rendering graphical glitches just trying to do my job. Nice, huh? Maybe if they burned as many calories on a $900 GPU as they do on a $500 console their PC drivers wouldn't suck. We might be giving them too much credit though. We don't know that they actually produce the drivers for consoles. It might be something Micro$lop and Sony have taken ownership of to make sure it gets done right. I have not ever seen an example of good AMD drivers or software before.

To be clear, AMD is their own worst enemy. A lot, maybe all, of their shortcomings are self-inflicted damage. AMD continually hurts itself with lousy drivers. They have never been good at it... for decades now. Crappy drivers keep me from enjoying the 6900 XT to the extent I would be able to with good drivers. Just simply using it for work, where performance really doesn't matter, it delivers an inferior experience due to driver crap. Deja vu for me. Their drivers sucked when I gave them their last chance (2012) and they still do. They need to get a clue. Had they been smart, they would have used GDDR6X. Opting for the slower/cheaper GDDR6 hurt them in the GPU war. Whether it was a mistake that reflects poor judgment or they actually wanted to help keep the price down by using cheaper memory matters not. They slit their own throat opting for cheaper.

They don't know any better and because they do not they simply believe what they are told. Or, they haven't paid close enough attention to notice any difference. When people use something until it gets too old and slow, they get excited that their new system seems better. It might not be as good with a simple part upgrade or two and a fresh OS install. But, they don't measure the difference. They rely on what they were told and how it feels compared to the old system.

Newer is always better newer. Newer is often only better in the minds of those that stand to benefit from the use or sale of the newer product. That is the case with Windows.

That simply isn't true. If you optimize your system and disable or delete all of the unnecessary services and background filth that is running and doesn't need to be you will immediately notice a difference. You'll be able to see it and feel it. Even when you disable everything in Windows 10 and 11 that is unnecessary garbage it's still smaller than Windows 7 due to wasteful overhead that steals CPU clock cycles. It's actually very simple and boils down to a matter of operating system overhead and wasteful use of resources. The latest versions of Windows 10/11 behave in a way similar to a computer that has been infected by malware or running buggy software with a memory leak. When you're used to it you likely not notice. The degradation has taken place gradually over time due to the incremental addition of garbage. The difference is the equivalent of opening 10, 15 or 20 programs that are not being used and expecting system performance to be the same as if they were not running.

All you have to do is measure it. The biggest hit is on something that requires a swift reaction from the CPU, such as wPrime or a 3DMark Physics test. Huge hit on performance due to lag that you can actually see and feel. I posted side by side comparisons more than once and it's true. Numbers don't lie and neither does the seat of your pants. That's probably why the most recent few releases in the 3DMark suite don't even have a CPU test anymore. It would raise too many questions about why CPU performance has gone down and continues to decline and more and more performance hindering updates occur. If all you're doing is web browsing and poking around with an office productivity application, or anything like that, you probably won't notice because those tasks don't require a swift, low-latency reaction and you're not trying to figure out why performance has taken a nose dive. And, people that limit the use of their computer in that way are generally not performance enthusiasts.

I can't speak for anyone else, but I'm willing to go there if it means giving the support to Intel. And, who knows if 3090/4080 level is where its performance ends. Look how far ARC has come just with drivers... massive performance increases... Plus, if they are successful, who knows how Battlemage Gen2 is going to look. Might get pretty interesting. And, if we are honest, there is nothing wrong with 3090 or 4080 performance. It's not 4090-level, but it's also not nearly as severely overpriced. But, some of us get hung up on feeling like having the top performance GPU is imperative. I am starting to rethink that. I hated how much I paid for the 3090 KPE and hate even more how much I paid for my 4090. Big performance, little value... not necessary. Yeah, that would not surprise me in the least. NVIDIA is unmatched in their ability to misrepresent things for secondary gain. They are masters in the art of deception.

Yes, in no small part, that is one of the reasons I am looking forward to seeing how the Intel Battlemage GPU turns out. I don't like supporting the Green god of Greed and its goblin minions, but I also can't see myself being interested in buying an AMD GPU at this point. It wouldn't surprise me if there are a lot of people thinking this way besides me. One of the things I like most about Intel is their attention is not distracted from PC by consoles like AMD, nor are they distracted by the things NVIDIA is/has been distracted by (crypto, AI, medical science technologies, etc.).

Check out this free GPU benchmark on Steam. It's pretty cool visuals and audio. It pulled up to about 480W from my 4090. There are two different scenes and you can choose no DLSS or the range of DLSS settings. https://store.steampowered.com/app/770170/EzBench_Benchmark/ https://www.ezbench.gg/

I think if we began making a list of all the things that suck because of consoles it would be a long one. When you start lowering standards and accepting compromise it has a way of spreading and dumbing down other things. We start allowing caveats and making exceptions. Accepting mediocrity and tolerating less becomes too easy. Today's turdbooks are one of the most popular symptoms of the bar being set too low.

Maybe for some folks. Not for me. Not my cup of tea. I think computers would suck less if there were no consoles lowering the bar. But, I don't hate them as much as a handheld POS like the Steam Deck. That is about as low as the bar can go. It's in a hole on the ground, LOL. A joke like that makes a sucky turdbook seem like something special.

I can't see myself ever gaming on a console. I barely make any time for gaming on a PC and if I had to use a console and controller I would probably never play any games. The thought of it disgusts me. But, your point isn't lost. If you don't count the sloppy crap, the minimum system requirements of most games allow the use of weak and antiquated components.