Ambient Irony

Monday, April 14

Daily News Stuff 14 April 2025

Snake Eggs Edition

Top Story

Facebook recently announced its new Llama 4 AI platform, with industry-leading scores. They lied. (Neowin)

The test results were from an unreleased experimental version. The actual scores put Llama 4 in 32nd place.

Tech News

You can now melt your power cable and destroy your video card cheaper than ever before. (Notebook Check)

Latest victim was an RTX 5070.

This problem is predictable with the RTX 5090, which draws 575W over a connector rated for a maximum of 600W. 5% out of tolerance and your card is fried.

It shouldn't happen on the 250W 5070 though.
Meanwhile the upcoming 5060 Ti could be better than the 4060 Ti. (Tom's Hardware)

The 4060 Ti was held back because the relatively powerful chip was being throttle by the 128-bit memory bus. The 5060 Ti still has a 128-bit bus, but appears to use 28Gbps GDDR7 memory rather than 21Gbps GDDR6.

This should also give it a lead over AMD's upcoming 9060, which still uses GDDR6.
Bungie's new shooty-game Marathon (no relation to Bungie's old shooty game Marathon) looks set to be Sony's next $400 million write-off. (Hot Hardware)

It looks remarkably unappealing.
Jack Dorsey is an idiot. (Tech Crunch)

That's it. That's the message.

Musical Interlude

Disclaimer: We don't not speak Americano either.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:24 PM | Comments (5) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 222 words, total size 3 kb.

1 My slightly arthritic hands are going to hurt for the rest of the day just from watching the video.

Posted by: bob in houston at Tuesday, April 15 2025 12:01 AM (YBLgY)

2 My new GPU replacement technology involves metallic lithium and thermite, because I misunderstood the value in the new GPUs. (Depending on where I would have it set up, I am pretty hesitant to put together a computing machine with GPUs producing 100s of watts of heat.)

Posted by: PatBuckman at Tuesday, April 15 2025 03:20 AM (rcPLc)

3 Well, I've seen them demo[nstrative] videos where they show the _rradical_ difference that raytracing makes, and I'm definitely impressed with how it looks pretty much the same. Wow. That slight difference in how some game I have no intention of playing appears certainly justifies spending upwards of $800. Meanwhile, I still play a MUD that has exactly zero graphics and is far more entertaining than any nonsense I've seen reviewed lately.

Posted by: normal at Tuesday, April 15 2025 11:12 AM (bg2DR)

4 I thought about waiting for a 9070 instead of getting the 7800 XT in my new PC, but there aren't really any games I want to play that are demanding enough to need it.

Cities Skylines 2 was one I was really looking forward to and would have bought a high-end card for, but its release was a complete shambles. Cities Skylines 1 is still great, but that runs happily on a $90 RX 580. Or probably just with integrated graphics now.
Other than that there's Minecraft (I get 80 fps on my laptop on integrated graphics without mods, but only 30fps with my modpack), and indie and strategy games which aren't particularly graphics-intensive. Nothing really pushing me for anything faster.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Tuesday, April 15 2025 07:05 PM (PiXy!)

5 The current state of the tech matters if you have a niche interest in one of the use cases where it is important. Also, if you are otherwise set up to pursue that interest. My interests should include some of those niche interests, but I am rarely equipped to do anything that requires my computer for long.

Posted by: PatBuckman at Tuesday, April 15 2025 10:41 PM (rcPLc)

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