Welcome to Off the Console, the hottest new podcast that's all about gaming tech news and anything nerdy.
This week we're covering the biggest news, including Computex, a bunch of, ah let's just say the AMD Nvidia feud is continuing with some Intel injected in there.
uh don't, yeah, we'll get into it.
I'm not gonna make any jokes about Nvidia yet on that, but we're also gonna be doing some Switch 2.
leaks on it being uh maybe not as good as the Steam Deck in some ways and uh various other topics that we always like to talk about.
With us is a special guest.
That's uh what, your second time now, the Fox?
Welcome.
time I've been here, yeah.
Thank you for having me back, guys.
Really appreciate it.
Welcome.
yeah, it's...
always welcome to join us whenever you'd like.
I learn so much every time.
Yeah, is truly an OG when it comes to these handhelds.
The PC-handled world.
Yeah, there was dozens of us in the long, long ago.
nine years ago, there was dozens of us.
Nice.
Yeah, I've, man, I remember senior episodes from back then are your videos.
So um,
I think we all, I don't know when you all found him, but I found him when he was doing reviews on the old GPD wins.
The really old ones are based on Intel.
despite knowing that they weren't technically that good compared to my game piece or whatever, they looked really cool, I will say.
I think they opened up a lot of eyes for a lot of people.
They thought that it would not have been possible at all to do that in a handheld form factor.
So I think that was the start of seeing the light.
Yeah.
Yeah, I love pushing little small, like the little things to do as big as tasks as I want it to do, like with games and stuff.
It's always fun.
ah Also with me is Gardner and Hi-Tech.
And then, of course, I'm James or you can also the brink, whatever else.
So.
Well, let's dive into what we've been doing this week, what we've been playing, starting with the Fox.
Anything like what have you been doing this week?
So I've been this week was actually pretty productive for me for the amount of videos that I have uploaded this week So I got a fair amount of stuff done Video game wise it's been
falling behind I have been wanting to play doom the dark ages for about ten days now and I haven't been able to Actually start playing it, but that's because I was playing
blueprints and oblivion
So I've been kind of going back and forth between those two games, and I still want to play Doom the Dark Ages right now.
But Oblivion is where I'm kind of firmly seated.
What is blueprints?
Blueprints is yeah, man like the genre of blueprints is like a bunch of stuff if you could imagine like uh a card a card based board game that you are shuffling a deck of rooms and
you are placing those rooms down in This grid like pattern the thing is that there it's it's a rogue like it There's just a bazillion things that they just tacked on to this as
like you can go on and on for
what it is, but essentially that's what it is.
It's a rogue-like deck builder, house builder, mansion builder, and as you are building that out, there are clues to figure out and piece out.
It's a little bit brutal with regard to RNG, and you can't see your deck at all until you're ready to deal.
Basically, so you go up to a door and it's like here's your three cards and you're like, well I you know Sometimes you're get like if you had the foresight to know there was like
something some of them you need resources to be able to lay down and You may or may not like every room that you go to you start exhausting how much energy you can go to so
there's like all these uh Points of contention that every move that you make
to be decisive because there's a limited amount of moves that you can make.
largely it's a roguelike puzzle game that has all these elements to it.
It's a lot of fun and I totally recommend going in blind ah because if you go in with like reading guides and stuff you lose all of the fun of discovery like you know that you had
from the long long ago and that's something that I most love most about video games is like when you had that sense of discovery and the euphoria figuring stuff out.
Versus when I've done stuff where I'm just looking at a guide.
It feels like a chore at that point.
And I'm just doing a checklist of stuff without really engaging with it.
And uh they Blueprints I'm a huge fan of.
A lot of people were talking it up.
And it's somewhere in between there.
I still do recommend most people play it.
uh But it's just a very interesting conceptual game that I'm glad exists.
Yeah.
Huh.
You know, I don't know why, it kind of, but I know this isn't like a horror game or anything like that, but for some reason, describing like a game about houses, it kind of
reminds me of this book called House of Leaves.
I don't know if you guys have ever heard of it or not.
It's a very unusual book and I can't describe it that well.
I'm not very good at describing books, but essentially what happens is a guy and his wife moves into a house.
And then he finds that the house is like one inch bigger on the inside than it on the outside.
And so like the house is like continuously evolving or some shit.
It's insane.
You guys, you should read it.
yeah, so exactly like that and every time the day resets the house starts brand new.
So that's what blueprints...
Yeah, so that's basically what it you're like, there's not like you're constantly building and you're like, good, it's like that.
No, no, no, it changes every day.
And you can really just get effed by RNG real hard, which is a little bit brutal about the game.
And you really have to invest time into...
exploring each room because there's lots of nuggets of hidden stuff to them.
um It's really.
No, you basically run out of it, so you either will trap yourself where there will be the last room that you could possibly put down.
You need to make like a left and there won't be a left in your deck, so you basically made a dead end for yourself and then OK, days over.
Just say the days over or you did have enough.
going on but you run out of energy you have like 50 rooms that you can go through at any given day so you can increase that by like eating food inside of the house there's lots of
different things that that happen but there's also buffs that you can do to the rooms as you go on so those buffs are permanent as after after they happen so there's lots of stuff
like that uh it's it is a really cool game it it's what i love most about it is that you can
compartmentalize your playthrough of it.
So it's like, okay, day one, you played through it.
Once day one finishes, it's about like a 20 minute amount of time to go through like each house, each time you build out the mansion.
So you can figure that the game is kind of containerized inside of these 20 minute chunks, which makes it great for short playthroughs.
Because like, I have like 20 minutes, let me get in another day.
And like, okay, let's put it in another day.
And that's like another reason why I like the game is that you don't feel
like there is like this necessity to keep going.
You can kind of like, OK, finish up the day or you know, like if something's coming up, you like, all right, well, let me just finish up this day.
It's it's nice that it works like that.
This looks really fun.
I'm looking at it on Steam.
I have it wishlisted already.
I'm gonna give that.
Isn't house of leaves like what the uh my house dot wad is based on um like that yeah Yeah, that's cool Yeah, it was super cool
Yeah, really awesome.
I think like that one dude that they always, YouTube keeps showing me that same video.
So you want to watch it again?
And I'm like, not really, but it was a good video.
Yeah, it's fantastic.
Like the whole bit of it technically wise, like how the map was built, that WOD was built.
Hmm.
and going through that, it's a very fascinating uh piece of Doom stuff.
non-Euclidean geometry.
Yeah.
Okay, so Hi Tech, what have you been up to?
So I've been playing two games.
The 100th...
This is like...
I'm gonna keep mentioning this.
The 100th line.
I'm striving to get all 100 endings to this game.
And it's keeping me from playing Expedition 33.
Which game is this?
I'm sorry, I missed it.
The 100 Line Last Defense Academy.
Yeah, it was actually featured on one of the next Fests.
Like, a few back then.
It was pretty cool.
It's hybrid turn-based RPG mixed with a visual novel mixed with tower defense.
And it's a...
So I've been playing that, but I've also been playing Capcom Fighting Collection 2.
And because I have a fight stick that Canva sent me.
I think some people say Kwon, but there's no W in it, so I don't know how to pronounce it.
just do Q, QA for, so even the quick access menu on Steam Deck, I say QAM.
So whatever, I get what you're saying, Q-A-M-B-A, the Arcade Stig manufacturer.
I'm following, I'm with you.
yeah man I've been kicking ass as a because I'm a grappler main and so I so I I know a little bit about playing fighting games I know that's what fan in the deck and I have in
common we play fighting games and have you guys ever built your own fight stick the Fox carry?
no, so there's these are two things uh gyro and fight sticks are two things that I can look at from afar and grapple with the idea in my head of them being superior, but I'm so
either set in my ways that it is literally like asking me to uh pat my head and rub my stomach at the same time when I use them, that it starts just breaking.
Like I feel like I'm like turning left when I'm using them.
uh It's just like one of those things.
Like gyro, have not.
I have seen people be super nasty with gyro to the point of like, okay, that is as good as mouse.
And I know it, I can see it.
But every time I use it, it's I'm doing one or the other.
uh for the life of me, can't, can't.
I have to just keep on pushing myself to use it is basically what it comes down to.
It makes sense.
know some people have more fun building fight sticks than they do actually using them.
You know, kind of like mechanical keyboards almost, or building a PC.
Yeah, that's how all enthusiast stuff is, right?
Like, especially for like, there's a whole segment of like on my discord and stuff for like, uh handhelds, know, seldom do we play video games, we just run them and see how well
they run.
That's it.
That's that's what you do.
But I think it'd be fun, you should build your own fight stick.
It's a lot cheaper than you'd expect, though I think the hardest part is finding a box to house the PCB and whatnot.
Mm.
Yeah, I mean, I've built a barcade and I have, you know, I bought all the parts in and put it all together and I just appreciate traditional arcade sticks.
uh I will not say that I'm opposed to fight sticks as they are.
I think I see the value in them.
I just really have to start using them.
That's all.
Fair enough, fair enough.
Don't worry, we're gonna train- Rich and I are gonna train you, man.
You're gonna be the next EVO champion.
easy.
Evo moment 45 or whatever.
That'll be my time to shine.
nice.
Gardner, what are you giving up to?
I've been playing a lot of like uh Wii games with Emily uh We have been going we actually just beat I'm sorry
sorry, you were saying we have been- I just had to throw that in there.
yeah, we actually beat WarioWare Smooth Moves the other day, and that was a lot of fun.
And I actually kicked ass at the dancing boss level where you had to like dance and tap to the music.
I totally smashed that.
I'm just more of a party game kind of guy.
And then Emily was being really mean and she made a me of me and I just dropped it in the chat.
and uh, she named me Grumpner.
She actually kinda nailed it.
Oh, God.
Nice.
It needs glasses, but...
Yeah, well none of the glasses matched my glasses so what uh, you know, I figured go without them But yeah, we've been we've been having fun and then and then i've been uh
installing steam os on literally every piece of hardware that it will be installable on and uh It's been fun.
The one the one I found that doesn't actually work is the b-link gti 13 this is an intel gpu, but then it has like a 66
Yeah, 6600 XT, and it doesn't work, at least not normally.
what's funny about that Beelink thing?
I sent them that idea when they asked for ideas and I put the GPU in the front and they were like, no, we're not gonna use that idea.
And then like six minutes later they came out with that.
And I was like, that's fine guys.
You should have put the GPU in the front.
you're missing out here.
Yeah.
Wait, so what does putting the GP in the front do for us?
Because I'm trying to conceptualize what that would do for us.
be you're blocking not a ton of airflow in front of it But it's just you're going to be having it I don't see the point of having the beelink in the front It's especially if
you're going to have this on your desk having the GPU in the front just looks nicer Like I have my oculink GPU and that's like front and center So it becomes a nice desk accessory
for lack of a better word uh and you're just kind of like hiding it and I I'm a big fan of what what they what they've done uh
I actually have that as my living room PC.
uh That's where I made a uh video on how, what is that, Windows failed you.
uh basically showing you how to use an Xbox controller to wake the machine, switch over HDMI to it, uh do everything through a controller only.
uh But yeah, I'm a big fan of uh that unit.
Yeah, it's super nice.
I think it's like throwing a kernel panic because it doesn't have the XT drivers or something.
I haven't deep dived into it because I just started doing it today with this device.
um But like it doesn't even get to like plasma loading in the installer stuff.
yeah, but it is pretty neat.
Like SteamOS works really well.
I installed it on um my office.
gaming mini PC over here, the HX100G from Minisforum.
And it works super great.
Doom the Dark Ages on low settings runs at 60 FPS.
I didn't try unlocking it, but it runs at 60 solid.
It's super, super nice.
uh And I have the Sony Trinitron Vega over here, and I have the mini PC plugged into that.
And so, and it looks...
phenomenal on a CRT.
It looks so nice.
Yeah.
still can't believe we got a Trinitron for free.
Yeah.
got it for free, man.
It was awesome.
Sometimes you get that.
People don't know what they have, man.
And they just want to get rid of it because it's a big 300 pound TV, you know?
I, I, I, I got a CRT, a Sony CRT from someone that was supposed to be a 32 inch and it wound up being 36.
And you wouldn't think that four more inches adds all that much weight, but it went from like 220 pounds to 360.
Yeah, so me and my brother were going there and we lifted up and like, what the hell are we like weaker something going?
And it's smooth.
Right, like, it's, there's nothing to grip onto.
It's like, who designed this thing?
Yeah, my gosh.
Do you have the the is it the flat like widescreen?
uh
This is a 4x3, but yeah, it's a flat Trinitron, right?
And it's just smooth as can be.
And the only thing you can grip onto is the bottom base, which just eats into your hands.
That's it.
This one is 30 inches diagonal.
It's a 16 by 9, and it has an HDMI port, like a HDMI 1.0 port on the back.
It's super nice.
I have all my retro consoles going into a receiver, like an AV receiver, and then that AV receiver goes into a retro tank, and the retro tank goes into an HDMI switcher, which then
goes into the TV.
I gotcha.
And it's, Emily is just learning how to actually like switch consoles and stuff, but they're all set up and ready to play at one time.
So it's pretty neat.
that's awesome.
had, yeah, I had a setup like that at one point.
I'm going to be retrofitting it into like, think a wall mounted, like collectors kind of console thing.
That's going to be fun.
That's my next project, I think.
always fun that that desire exists, right?
It's like, there's gonna be these cubicles of all of these consoles that I will just turn on, and they will automatically go to the TV.
Yep.
You know, Gardener, I've been super curious since you have a CRT, what happens if you enable a CRT filter in a game and then play it with the CRT filter on a CRT?
oh
I, to be honest, I haven't tried that, but that's something I should look into.
Yeah, you probably you probably gonna split earth.
It's just like uh
happen, that's why I asked.
I'm gonna predict.
would this, sorry, go ahead, James.
I'm going to predict it's going to be like extra fuzzy.
Yeah
Yeah, well with this TV, it's like, it's displaying like a 720p progressive, like, image, so it's not really showing scanlines.
So if I enable scanlines, you'll see them again, which I, and I'm kind of curious now how it, like, displays that.
I think it'd be pretty neat.
You can have that true feel of a CRT.
Right now you don't have a true CRT experience yet.
really wish that CRTs would make a comeback.
really do.
It's like once we lost it, we didn't know what we had.
Yeah.
And now we know and we can't and they don't make any CRTs anymore now, huh?
There was that brief moment where they were called SEDs.
uh Canon, I believe, had a patent on them and they were basically uh flat-er CRT-like.
uh And they never got traction.
never came out.
And that was 25 years ago at this point that I saw those at CES 2000 or whatever.
uh So a long time ago, this is when CRTs were obviously still around.
And this is
Maybe 2002 2002 because the plasma was also like a thing.
LCDs sucked but existed.
It's crazy to think like how long LCDs have been around and how far they've been improved.
But yeah, when you really get down to it, the the benefits of CRT are clearly understood only now when.
We have been like everyone I guess thought that like, well, technology will just make these better.
And eventually they're to be better than CRTs.
But there's like so many things about CRTs, especially with just how when you just have scanning that that foster over it that someone will what's his name?
Oh, good.
Lots.
I think his last name is lots.
He's a GPU programmer.
He made a CRT beam simulation that you can do in a shader.
and can do it on uh OLEDs.
And effectively, have you ever guys ever used like BFI, black frame insertion?
So.
your video on it once, but I think you took it down at one point, didn't you?
For the BFI one, may have, or just temporarily, in any event, BFI inserts a black frame.
So if you go on 120 hertz, you have a black frame that's inserted in between every other frame.
Effectively, you have 60 FPS, but you're basically putting this black frame to simulate a CRT.
The problem with that is that you are massively going to diminish your brightness because you're injecting this black frame into them.
So black frame insertion, it effectively works similar to how BFI does without any of the brightness diminishing stuff.
uh And you have to witness it to see it.
you can't take a picture of it.
It's like taking a picture of, like, look at how good this HDR is and showing someone a picture of that.
And you're like, well, that's not going to work.
uh You have to witness it to experience it and the motion clarity that comes from it.
Is stuff that you know CRT stuff we used just get for free like there's like a bunch of things that CRT do that just are Pleasing to the eye ah So yeah, we we lost a lot when
when we left CRTs and I wish somehow uh Some way they would come back, but it looks like you know now we're just really you know OLEDs are just gonna have quad layers in them and
just Running them in tandem and doing a whole bunch of other stuff
Nonsense stuff.
They have to get somewhere.
Like, they're going to run into a...
Well, they're going to only be able to improve so much to where they're going to be like, you know what?
We need CRTs back in space stations, just like an alien or something.
You know that the funny thing is, like, you, so like high tech low life, right?
Cyberpunk.
For me, Cyberpunk, you go back to it, when you go back in time to like the 1980s, lots of fascinating documentaries, apologies for going on a tangent here, guys.
When you look at like the 1980s and everyone had a genuine fear that...
Japan was going to come for the computer industry like they had come for consumer electronics, like they had come for automotive.
They were genuinely afraid that Japan was like they had not made a presence here yet.
But once they were GG game over, like they won.
uh But the biggest impediment for Japan was apparently their character set.
uh And there's a Computer Chronicles episode from a long, long ago that covered it was like a jewel of information.
ah But basically at the time, because they were doing everything in uh Katagana, they have three different symbols that they use.
In any event, to create one of those characters effectively on the CRTs that they had because they were so low resolution, they were doing three words per minute typing out.
So they're just going so slow to just formulate words that they would never.
catch up.
So NEC and stuff that they had in Japan kind of stayed in Japan.
And I don't know.
I don't know where NEC is right now.
But you look at that, especially with the golden years of Japan, right?
Because they dominated in automotive, they dominated in consumer electronics.
You have the birth of cyberpunk and the idea of cyberpunk.
And it was part and parcel with Japan being a dominant force in the future that
Every part of cyberpunk has Japanese influence and CRTs everywhere.
And it's funny because like you look at Johnny Mnemonic, right?
Like the movie Johnny Mnemonic is very cyberpunk movie.
There's like a cone of CRTs that are like there's like certain distinctive cyberpunk elements to me that we will never really have that cyberpunk.
But it is something that I desperately still wish to happen uh in a way.
Minus the dystopia.
But there's just a lot of stuff in there that is endearing to me that I find fascinating.
Sorry for the digression.
It's all good man.
You know Korea is a lot closer to this vision of cyberpunk minus the neon of course.
You know especially with Samsung being as big as is in Korea.
Yeah, Samsung's huge.
I didn't realize how big Samsung was until I learned that they also made tanks.
uh Like, here's our Samsung tank.
Like, oh, all right, you guys are doing that.
Geez.
Where do I order that?
They probably do everything.
They're so massive.
cyberpunk way man.
I don't
get back on this track.
I.
Because I want to talk about myself, I have been playing Expedition 33 still.
I never got to Doom.
I want to get to Doom.
Gardner scared me and now I'm taking comfort in Expedition 33 still and just enjoying this French RPG.
It is so fun.
And.
Hmm.
FRPG.
The music is it's not JRPG, but it's like a JRPG.
it's just it's it's fresh.
I like it.
Yeah, I think what sold me most like I was always looking at clerics here.
33 Expedition 33 and I was looking at I was like, oh, this looks pretty cool.
And then one of the not not so long ago, because we had seen it like a year or so ago.
I like, oh, that looks kind of cool.
And then the one the latest gameplay update that they showed like eight months ago or whatever, they showed the overworld map of them running around on it.
And I was like, oh, snap like that.
That felt like the proper evolution of JRPGs to me that somehow I
missed and um that is when it really clicked for me and then I'm just glad that the game has taken off and has found an audience and people are enjoying it.
That's another game that I really have to get to but that that's going to be further down.
have to I have to get to Doom sooner than later.
There's so many games coming out this year, it's crazy.
So, Gardener, have you progressed through Doom the Dark Ages?
Has your opinion changed on that a little bit?
Uh, to be honest, I have played more of it, but it's really kind of...
I'm using it to kind of benchmark games and not really...
I mean, benchmark hardware.
I'm not really enjoying Doom the Dark Ages like I wanted to.
I'm a huge fan of 2016, I'm a huge fan of uh Doom Eternal, and it's just a completely different game, a completely...
It feels like a totally different genre to me.
And,
I have warmed up to it a bit, but it's still just not what I want from a Doom game.
Yeah.
That's why I feel like with uh Legend of Zelda Tears of the Kingdom, I don't feel like that's a Zelda game in the slightest.
That's Banjo.
Breath of the Wild.
So I like Breath of the Wild a whole bunch.
The dungeons suck terribly.
But what Breath of the Wild does versus all of the previous games is have the same
uh They they spark the same level the same sense of wonder and curiosity that I had when I first played the original Legend of Zelda when I was like seven years old and I'll give
you an example when you go in, know, because it's a screen based legend.
You guys have all played Legend of Zelda the original Legend of Zelda, right?
So when you go into like a new area, right?
Some areas you go into will be a dead end and you'll see three rocks or like three trees.
And it's like, well, that's an oddly specific amount of things there.
And it's a small amount enough, a number of things that you like push into it, put a bomb on it, light it on fire.
And something happens, something magical happens where they didn't, they didn't, you know, fill a bunch of stuff on the screen that you have to try every one of them.
They put three there.
And the number three comes up a lot in Legend of Zelda.
And Breath of the Wild has that same thing where you'll just be running and off in the distance somewhere you'll see a cliff that has three trees.
And I'm like, hang on a moment.
I have to go over here now.
And I would just run.
And because you could explore anywhere in that game and nothing really stopped you outside of your own stamina bar.
That is what I.
I find to be the closest connection to
A Legend of Zelda game and Tears of the Kingdom.
Basically how it worked out was I was no longer.
To give you an example, there's like sometimes when you play in like Zelda games, the puzzles that you figure out aren't terribly difficult if you really think about like you
just told somebody like, that's simple.
But when you're in the moment, right?
Like for example, like spirit tracks, right?
Or like a DS Zelda game, it's like press the map against your your map.
and you're like, press the map against my map.
So I'm like using the stylus to draw the map.
And I'm like, what the hell are you talking about?
And you're like closing the lid to like press the map on your map.
And you're like, and then you open up the DS and it's like, do, do, do, do, do.
And you're like, oh, like that sense of euphoria that you figured that puzzle out and tears of the kingdom.
You don't figure out puzzles.
You just build something until you brute force your way into a solution.
And that is not a Zelda game to me.
That's just.
Banjo-Kazooie Nuts and Bolts and that's not a bad game, it's not what I like to to Gardner's point.
I'm looking if you're looking for a Doom game and it doesn't feel like that, it may take you a moment to like kick in the gear of like what's going on here.
And for me, even when I beat the game, I was just like, all right, well, you know, I wanted to beat the game because of the story.
But that's like I can find a relation to where Gardner might be coming from with Doom, the Dark Ages.
Yeah, I think that's a good way to put it.
I mean, there's just some, mechanics of like the bullet hell stuff going on, it just really just takes me out.
Like, I know a lot of people are like praising that and it like draws them in.
For me, it just pulls me out.
Like, I want the glory kills back.
I want like the constant forward momentum and it feels like there's too much defense, uh defensiveness.
You put the shield up, you dodge the thing, you parry and it's like, that's not...
what I want when doom.
Right.
I can feel that.
Yeah, that makes sense to me.
It's like if you're if you stray too far from the formula, you know, if you like the ship of Theseus, right, like how many parts can you remove before it's no longer the ship?
Like, yeah, so yeah, I get it.
Yeah.
Yeah, some of it also feels a little incomplete.
um the biggest thing is like, when you encounter the other, like, knights or whatever you call them, like the other slayer.
They're not slayers, I don't know what they are, but like your team mates, essentially.
um They literally are just sitting there, like they're kneeling at a doorway like this and holding their weapon and just repeating this, you know, idle pose and they're like
kneeling ready to go and never actually moving.
And every time I've encountered those enemies, they're never fighting demons.
You're the only one doing it.
And it's like, that pulls me out.
And like, I don't know, there's a lot I could go on and on about this game.
I've played a ton of it now and I...
I'm 100 % with you.
Actually, I have it on Twitter a long time ago because everyone was talking up the last of us AI.
And uh I'm playing on the hardest difficulty.
And I'm pressed up against this stairwell that is see-through.
uh They can clearly shoot me, but they're not.
They're shooting my friends.
And those friends aren't shooting back.
And they're just screaming.
And I'm just panning back and forth between what's going on.
And it's like.
a minute and it's just this is not smart AI by any stretch of the imagination.
Yeah, sometimes that could really draw you out.
I was playing earlier on uh my office gaming mini PC and I was like, uh there was probably, there was like a ton of like low level fodder demons and um none of them
appeared until after like a higher level imp showed up or whatever and he threw one bolt at me and then.
All of a sudden all these low level guys came in and then the guy, the big boss guy stopped attacking because there were too many other demons around me and I was like, that
is so lame and I was like sitting there like staring at him, watching and waiting for him to like shoot his stupid green bolt at me so I could parry it and because there were so
many other demons that he wasn't attacking I was like, this is totally pulling me out of the game.
Anyway, I could go on and on.
So, sounds like you need to play Expedition 33.
It's very chilling, it's very relaxing.
It's one of the reasons I've been playing is cause that.
tells you to parry instead of dodge attacks.
I don't care.
I think it's a relaxing, it has very peaceful music.
The enemies are, everything's like very French artistic kind of thing.
And yeah, I just gotta say, even-
told me one of the first enemies you fight in the game was like a mime or some shit and like no way that's real, right?
Technically, yeah, actually.
Yeah the first and if you want to fight besides the the just a uh fun sparring match with the your I'm not gonna ruin anything but with someone like a friend you do run into a mime
Yeah, and then that's actually a collectible throughout the whole game is where uh you get uh collectible gear from them everywhere.
They're really hard um Kudos to anyone that's beat the mime in the beginning part
Like it wasted me.
ah But even if you don't like turn based RPGs, there's still some real time elements to it.
I definitely would recommend at least trying it out.
But I set up the VR also for my son and I am about to start a Half Life Alex again.
I might be playing Half Life Alex again before Doom.
Because ah I finally.
What's that?
would like to get the Deckard.
I would like to get the Deckard too, ah if that ever comes out.
How long has it been now?
Like four years at this point since they announced the Deckard?
I have no idea.
I'm not sure.
But I mean, I'll just keep waiting.
I mean, I have an index, which I what I played on it initially first, I played through the first two levels and then for whatever reason.
I know I do know what reason my area here got clustered and then I couldn't have space to actually play anymore.
uh And then I just time went away.
But yeah, I'm looking forward to replaying Half-Life Alex when Deckard eventually comes out.
You know, James, when you mentioned VR, I thought you were going to say you were playing Expedition 33 in VR.
I was like, why are you playing a JRPG in VR?
I could, guess.
This just would be like on a screen.
Not, not, yeah.
there there you know.
Sadly it's Bradley.
I follow him a lot and he seems like super hardcore into VR stuff and he like lives.
He's like genuinely inside of the VR space and.
I don't know if he genuinely is trying to do it or just doing it because.
Of some other reason, but I know he's taking video and pictures of him existing in virtual reality often and.
I feel like that is the level that VR more or less needs to get at um to actually make headway, make some traction.
if it's a...
It's kind of like Dungeons & Dragons.
And what I mean by that is like Dungeons & Dragons is an awesome idea that you and a bunch of friends can play, but then getting all of your friends to have the exact moment of same
time to play Dungeons & Dragons, if you can't arrange that to happen,
Well, you're not going to be in VR, right?
Like it's like it needs to be on at all times and like, you know, just kind of on your head so you can slip back in.
And if that means augmented reality for a computer, whatever you have, so you just have like a Bluetooth keyboard that you are now looking through and a virtual screen comes up.
So it's in effect augmented reality, extended reality, but full on VR.
So there's there's multiple things that are, you know.
competing there, how long battery life is going to last and all this other stuff.
I can see it.
I can see the idea and appeal to it.
And I wonder if Decker will get there.
ah I like the Quest 3.
I don't know what kind of your headsets you guys have.
I have the valves index.
Yeah.
see you guys on after Quest 3.
I don't have an index.
My brother has a quest too and it's pretty cool.
Yeah, so Quest 2 is also pretty cool.
Quest 3 takes it up to another level within so far as uh exiting and entering into VR while keeping the goggles on.
So you can just tap on the side and just the camera comes in and then you have the inside out tracking.
you can see it does a lot of cool things.
There's games that you could play.
Like my son, he would go into our living room and you can scan the room.
And it'd be like, OK, these are all.
things that I'm now spatially aware of.
So you'll have like zombies coming through the windows and you're shooting them and you can like, you know, run inside your own space, but having stuff be there.
And that's really cool.
um But the visuals from a Quest 3 are not good enough.
I have not tried a Vision Pro from Apple yet, but I heard that's very good.
But that's like to me the level that Deckard really needs to get to, to really take it to the next level.
And I'm just hopeful that they do.
You know, I think most people are just waiting for something like, uh, have you watched Sword Art Online?
Fox?
No?
But like, but like, you get the idea, right?
Like it's a like, it's like a...
Or you could do The Matrix.
Yeah, or you could do The Matrix.
You're literally stuck in The Matrix as well.
Where like your mind is like in VR space almost.
Where like, you know, it's connected to your brain.
Right.
Yeah, that's sadly, it's probably also brought that up yesterday or today.
It was uh Gabe's other company for neuro input.
uh Yeah.
So uh cool stuff like there's, you know, there's neat things and applications of like, how do we bridge that gap?
And if you could jump into the matrix, like plug in like legit plug in, I would be interested in doing something like that.
But it would have to have assurances that I wouldn't die.
ah But as long as those assurances were there, I would totally jump in.
would totally be plugged.
I'm already plugged into the internet as is.
So it's not that far removed.
But yeah, I think that there's a if you could be actually inserted into a virtual world and exist in there outside, like, you know, virtual reality is just trying to make that
happen with external stuff.
I think it's cool, I think it's a really cool idea and who knows if we ever actually get there.
I'd only do it if I could self-host it.
Right.
Yeah.
mean, no, totally.
Right.
Because like, I mean, not to get all like, oh, man, it's like this whole like, kind of upsetting part of me where I feel like the need to like start, you know, I'm already there
where I'm like, well, I'm going to have to start doing everything myself.
I can't like I'm legitimately at the point where Google sucks.
Search engines suck.
I can see AI.
uh
Helping search for me and decrapify like I want to make my own local AI my own local LLM that would just search for me and decrapify Google That you know, it's like but I like I'm
I'm in agreement with you like you have to be at the position where You know, even where LLMs are right like Google used to have that Golden Age, right where?
everyone use Google and you search and it would be like, that was exactly what I was looking for.
And that happened for years.
And then in the past, you know, three, five years that has started to decline where it's just not been as good.
And I feel like AI does that in some sense.
It gives us that, whoa, look at that.
That's awesome.
And you have to wonder how much longer until like you type something in AI and it's like, well, have you considered buying this product?
And it's like, no, no, no, no, no.
I'm not looking for whatever sponsored link you have at the top here.
Give me what I want.
Don't give me the crap.
have you seen that leaked internal Google video called the selfish ledger?
Look it up because it will creep you the fuck out uh It's essentially uh Google's idea of like how we can monetize every single aspect of every human interaction and make people
want us to do that for them and it's
absolutely wild.
Like, um yeah, it's crazy.
No, I totally get it.
mean, like, see the you can you if you just take a step back and just take a look at whatever you're doing and saying, OK, this is no longer what I'm searching for is no
longer of concern to Google.
What I'm looking for is no longer a concern to Google.
Google put whatever whatever I am looking for and find something slightly adjacent that they could sell to me and or that someone could pay them to show put in front of my eyes
and.
You get that feeling, but the problem is is that there's a lot of people that don't get disconnected where they don't realize that isn't what they were actually looking for and
don't also accept that Google is only showing you what they want to show you.
And it goes in that whole vein of like, you know, for also YouTube content and stuff, right?
Like if a tree falls in the forest, but there's no one to hear it, does it make a sound?
And it's like if you make a video, but YouTube doesn't show it, did you actually make a video like?
if YouTube doesn't show your stuff, know, all of that is, is, you know, gauged and, um, that, you know,
very scary...
I saw your post on Twitter.
You mentioned a very scary possibility.
You know...
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So you know how like...
Yeah, so like...
I don't know if you guys...
you other guys have seen it, like...
Essentially, you know how like lot of channels are using AI to make content?
What if Google just cuts out the content creators and just makes YouTube entirely AI-generated where you just type shit in like your quote-unquote search bar?
and it quote unquote searches for you, but it turns out it just makes a bunch of videos.
it's just gonna gen...
I mean...
don't think they can replace everyone, but they'll start doing what they can.
look, if you look at Google Vio 3, has been someone like a lot of the Google view.
was like, that's kind of interesting.
But then someone made interdimensional cable for that.
And I don't know if you guys have ever watched Rick and Morty.
So they just had real life characters, just like six seconds clips and then go to some other really bizarre internet.
And it was the problem is, is that I genuinely found it slightly fascinating.
and I was actually watching it.
And when I started watching it, I was like, oh wait, this is AI slop.
And it was just like, oh, this is it.
How?
Yeah.
I mean, that's why I started my blog because I was like YouTube is heading for self-destruction or like social destruction or something and I just need my own outlet
where I can communicate with people, you know
like it's like, it's the eventual process, like where you start to like become aware of what's going on.
You like, I just need to have a farm and I need to generate my own electricity and I need to host my own stuff and take care of my own stuff.
don't, I don't want any of this anymore.
you know, thankfully even in the post-YouTube era, this podcast will hopefully live on, because it's on other platforms.
Yep.
And it's also like on, uh, what are the platforms?
Apple podcasts, Spotify So should we talk about Computex now?
I think it's about time we get into that because I know things have been very
I was so I was looking at my LM studio, which is I can run my local LM like AI stuff and just seeing what I could do search wise See if I can already do what the Fox can do
uh house AI right?
Yeah, yeah, you just say home.
getting closer.
Can you say, house do this for you?
House, make my dinner for me.
I used to have it automated.
need to get back into it.
That's right.
You have those specialty devices.
Yeah.
Home Assistant's pretty neat, but yeah, let's get to Computex.
Let's let's well.
Well, hold up guys before we do that.
Anyone that's watching, especially watching, subscribe, you know, get a follow us, do all that good stuff if you have not done so.
You can also if you're listening, you know, uh follow us on your favorite podcast.
ah
leave us some comments too.
I want to hear what you guys think.
to them.
Mm-hmm.
And then the RSS feed just I'll say that real quick the podcast podcast dot subscribe to dot me and so yeah that
enabled.
You can comment with your Mastodon account.
Hmm very nice
Okay, let's get on to the Computex stuff now.
oh yeah, since the last time you've been here, Fox, we've started sharing screens now.
Or at least the host has.
In this case, it's James this week.
But essentially, Computex happened this week, and it's wrapping up tonight.
In fact, it might already be over in Taiwan, since it's Saturday already.
But essentially, what's going on is Computex happened, there were a bunch of stuff.
know, lots of stuff.
toms hardware has so much
like Intel unveiled a new GPU or professional GPU and they unveiled Panther Lake I'm not super sure what to do with Panther Lake I think that's more the Fox's territory
Yeah, Panther Lake is Panther Lakes interesting They claim that it's gonna have the same type of efficiency that lunar Lake had which is really good while having the core design
of arrow Lake H um So that's fascinating the problem for me like so insofar as the handheld game the biggest detriment that we have like CPU wise were were Cores aplenty
frequency aplenty we have been too much CPU on the handheld side of things for nine years now uh seven years now
We don't need more CPU.
We need more GPU and uh There's g3 GPU uh core Potentially interesting with they are still LPDDR5 on that platform and so far as the mobile side of things which means that we're
effectively topping off at uh 8533 megatransfers, which if it's only 128 bit wide I didn't see anything that was different for bit with differences on there uh aka like Strix Halo,
uh so
It remains to be seen how cool this will be for a handheld and so it with regard to the differences between lunar lake as it is like on the claw 8 right?
So is it cool?
It's neat, but because we are so GPU.
If because we're so bandwidth served on less a GPU comes along that is so fundamentally better at doing more work with the same amount or less memory.
We're pretty much stagnant.
We're stuck in the water.
ah So from a handheld perspective, not potentially interesting until I could learn more about it, what maybe G3 does, uh or if there's cache that they have that could facilitate
for the GPU as well, that would be a big help.
we have to wait and see.
ah It's interesting, but I couldn't tell you more without actually using it.
I couldn't really quantify anything for you.
valid and I was looking to the new ARK pros and for one these are a lot cheaper than like the thousand dollar like graphics cards that Nvidia will sell you for professional use but
also they won't restrict what drivers you can use with these so you can use gaming drivers with these if so desired in fact I think Maxon is selling a dual GPU variant which is like
those old like the 50 like the 590s like the Nvidia used to make back in the day I think that was like two 5080 580s I don't know
It's been a while though.
And on the topic of Nvidia released the 5060 this week, and there's been lot of controversy surrounding that, especially in regards to the fact that they released it
within the same week Computex is happening.
As to drown out that, and a lot of reviewers, like Gamers Nexus and Linus Tech Tips, have both agreed, and they both state that Nvidia is most likely doing this, allegedly.
to try to drown out the negative press, given that, A, these aren't great, big, well, what's the word I'm looking for, improvements over the 4060s.
And also the fact that they're super expensive and that no one can buy them even if they wanted to.
I mean, it's a shit show for Nvidia.
Yeah, I have a 56 DTI right next to me right now.
I'm still reviewing it.
did you pay?
How much did you- how much over did you pay?
No, I have to send it back to ASUS by next week.
So I don't have that much more time with it.
uh So I'm just kind of running through it real quick and seeing where it starts to break down.
But mostly it's just so like, it's fine for me because once I collect my data, whatever, I'll have whatever driver set and Windows version that I'm using when I have my data, it's
still relatively in the ballpark for me to compare to like other things and stuff.
uh But yeah, it's, know, the NVIDIA
NVIDIA is a crazy thing to say, It's also like you could, I'm stumbling along here.
Xbox is in third place, right?
In a far third place and they're getting beat up by everybody.
It's hard to feel bad for Xbox when it's Microsoft because they're a $3 trillion company.
like, boo, that $3 trillion company is in third place.
Likewise for NVIDIA, they find themselves to be in a bad spot.
Perhaps there was brain drain because their stock shot up so much and all the employees that had stock options and were like, you know, peace, like I got my parachute, like pull
the rip cord.
And there has been, there's like driver problems that they're having.
And the Blackwell series is not terribly captivating.
This entire GPU generation is not very captivating, especially for like AMD's uh 9070.
It would have been if there was enough stock.
where you could buy the 9070 XT for 600 bucks, that's a fantastic GPU for 600 bucks.
Likewise for the 9060 XT.
do have a question with that.
Didn't they have like more stock though than Nvidia when they released?
Just not enough still.
did, just not enough.
Basically, they had a fantastic deal that all of their businesses, they were like, all like ACES, every company that all the AIBs that they were working with that had made 90,
70 XTs had stock and were sitting on it for like since mid January.
And RDNA 4 didn't go on sale until sometime in like March.
So there was stock sitting around waiting for AMD just to talk about it.
And AMD was like, well, what do we do?
What do we price it at?
And all this other stuff.
And they priced it at $600.
All the AIBs were expecting it to be $750.
So AMD is like, oh, we'll give you a rebate for selling this.
And those sold out.
There's a big hollow blue.
It's near impossible to find that thing for $600, the MSRP for it.
And now you have the 9060 XT, which is supposed to be $350 the 16 gigabyte version.
That is positioning itself to be a 5060.
TI competitor and they're saying they're slightly better than a 5060 TI and hundreds of dollars cheaper.
So again, you're in a situation where like, wow, AMD is looking like a really great buy.
Can you buy it for $350?
Who knows?
think there's, is it because there's there's so much demand in Nvidia's, really, like, artificially limit their GPUs.
So, they've mentioned they don't care about gamers multiple times.
And so, I'm shocked that people still trust them, and they do piss me off.
mean, I don't know.
But.
is that like people associate AMD with being shitty in terms of GPU because I mean for the longest time they have been trailing behind Nvidia for like how many years has it been
now?
NVIDIA always had proprietary stuff that was always better or ahead of the curve of on AMD.
No matter what it was, when 3D was a thing, NVIDIA had a better solution.
AMD had an open source solution.
uh AMD's solution still works, whereas NVIDIA's thing doesn't.
uh So there's things like that that were going on.
And then obviously, they went into uh upscaling.
uh
machine learning upscaling and stuff and they had a lead on that and now the FSR for is finally good enough for that but we're you know you're at a point where Nvidia for I don't
really blame Nvidia all that much because Nvidia was always looking for the next big thing you they were I mean like in 2010 2008 you could have bought bought their stock for like
on a five bucks it was like five dollars shares like nothing because no one valued gaming and even gamers.
were buying it, but then they weren't selling enough of them.
There was set amount of PC gamers and all this stuff was in console stuff and that's a whole other bag of noodles.
So it's a weird thing for me because you could argue the fact that Nvidia is in the position they are for machine learning because of gamers, because of enthusiasts paying
that top dollar stuff for their stuff.
for them to get to the point of that.
In 2010, Nvidia got beat up really bad because they were trying to enter the mobile space and they were getting beat up.
one was buying anything from Nvidia and everything that Nvidia was making, they were literally developing chips.
They taped them out, got chips, were trying to sell them.
They acquired a company that was a software-defined radio company for cellular so that they could be in mobile.
They were legitimately trying to
get wins in cell phones and having zero wins at all.
And uh when they made these chips, no one was buying them.
So what do they do with those lemons?
They make lemonade.
They make the Nvidia Shield.
Nvidia Shield comes out.
that's all the reason that that product ever existed was to make use of the garbage that no one wanted.
And Tegra X1 was also garbage that no one wanted until Nintendo comes along.
And that story is that.
Nvidia is not in mobile.
They don't care about it anymore.
They don't technically care about gaming anymore because, I mean, they tried getting in cars with automotive and, you know, doing auto stuff for cars.
They had no wins there.
The reality is that Nvidia is a terrible business partner.
And you look at all their history, look at what they did with the original Xbox.
They were in the original Xbox.
There was a GeForce 3.
What did they do?
Microsoft wanted to make a, know, like, hey, you know, the Xbox has been out for two years.
Can we get a good deal on this?
And Nvidia was like, no, you can pay top dollar.
And they're like, what the hell?
So what does Microsoft do?
They fast track the Xbox 360.
They're like, screw this, we're making the Xbox 360.
Let's go to ATI and IBM.
So they leave NVIDIA.
The PS3 comes along.
Cell is a monumental failure.
11th hour, NVIDIA comes in.
Is NVIDIA still in PlayStations?
No, they're a terrible business partner.
Every time NVIDIA gets involved with a business partner, it doesn't work out.
You look at the Switch 2.
It's $450 and $500 versus $300 now.
Why is that?
Nvidia wanted their money.
Like, and Nintendo helped them out with the X1.
You know, they bought their lemons.
But now that Switch is a big thing, Nvidia is like, you like our stuff, right?
And you know, now they want their money.
you know, they're a bad business partner and you look at all the things that they've done and it just turns out that...
with all the CUDA stuff that they developed and the machine learning stuff that everyone uses it.
Everyone uses CUDA and a lot of, uh lots of things just, CUDA was the one thing that NVIDIA developed for GPGPUs that really solidified the foundation of a lot of GPU work.
And because all that work was there and foundationally done, they became rigid and anyone that had to do any work for GPUs, you automatically bought NVIDIA.
And that was like the catalyst for them to do stuff.
So I don't know, you look at a lot of the things that Envy had done and they're selling out of their top end stuff for like $50,000 a card or some other nonsense, right?
Like why make chips for gamers even if you charge them $3,000?
it doesn't make sense for them.
this entire G.
I.
thing is, I just, yeah, yeah.
I guess.
I didn't really think about Nvidia being the one with Nintendo's balls in the vice grip to be honest I love the I thought it'd be the other way around because you know Nintendo
right but like
Yeah, so like you look at both of those companies.
Yeah, Yeah, when you look at the when Nintendo first came around, uh Nvidia was going to Nintendo for business 100%.
I don't know if you guys know, but uh Nvidia was selling the switch concept before the switch even existed.
I actually saw it at PAX.
They were like I was Nvidia was there like hey, check this out.
It's an Android tablet and like you can plug it in and it becomes the thing I'm like.
Yeah, all but what was making Android games for that?
Like, no one's doing this.
So I just kind of like went away.
And then I saw the switch.
I was like, holy moly, that that's exactly so Nintendo just bought exactly what Nvidia had wholesale.
Like the the idea of a switch like system was Nvidia's like thing that they pitched to them and they they got.
But they were behind me.
Who?
needed an out of the Wii U.
Like, the Wii U was a failure.
Right, but the idea of Nintendo going to a platform that was portable and console together as one was, in my opinion, not Nintendo's like ultimate decision like they that might have
been like something that was like on the wall somewhere.
Nvidia pitched that exact idea because I saw it like I literally saw it at a convention.
So.
Right.
I find it hard to believe that Nvidia is like here, look, you can have an Android tablet, but you can also have a console.
And then like a year or so later, Nintendo has it.
I'm like, whoa.
Yeah, so I'm sure Nintendo saw this and they saw that their portable line is super popular.
Their Wii U is not.
And they're like, look, we're dividing our resources here.
Why don't we just do both?
Because of this thing and it works and it's cool.
and they bought Nvidia's lemons because Nvidia was dying for someone to take it.
I mean, it was so bad that the only company that was literally using the X1 and the K1 was a company called JXD, is a Chinese company uh that was making like, you know, handhelds,
you know, back in the old days, right?
JXD was using them.
They designed the whole thing.
They make a deal.
Nvidia makes a deal with Nintendo.
So sorry, JXD, you can't use this anymore.
And JXD basically evaporated as a company.
They stopped to exist.
So that like demolished their entire company.
But they're small potatoes and no one knows about them.
But at the time, Nintendo was dominant in that business relationship.
After the Switch became such a success and everyone wants that Nvidia juice, Nvidia came to the table.
Nintendo still wants to make money on their hardware.
They made money on the Switch One and Nvidia didn't.
And now they are.
And that's why the...
They're on they're on Samsung 8N, so it's not like that's a super expensive node.
They're not like on an advanced node.
They're using a chip that was from 2021 so.
You know it.
It's just a business way again.
I don't like Nvidia just business like how they do stuff, but they just I mean they're doing stuff to what's best for their business and at the detriment to everyone else and
and like whatever fine, but Blackwell itself is not.
terribly exciting for gamers at all.
And the thing that they're pitching for everyone was like, we boosted.
Like, how do you have 80 % more bandwidth?
80 % more bandwidth.
And you're only 20 % better than the 4090.
Like, a 5090 is 20 % better with 80 % more bandwidth.
The number's staggering to me.
And it's like, oh, it's just for feeding for the AI stuff.
That's multi-frame generation stuff.
And it's like, ah.
You know, and that's the other thing that soured a lot of people and Gamers Nexus was doing it because they got the the notice from them.
They're like, you know, you show all these things and Gamers Nexus is like, well, screw that.
If we're getting this, we know you're sending it to other people.
So if anyone just shows like bogus data, which there were some outlets were like, look at how good the 5060 TI is.
And it shows, you know, five times better.
And it's like, that's multi-frame generation, right?
Versus not like that's stupid.
uh It's just a
I don't know, it's a dumb thing.
I can go on and rant about this forever and I already have gone too far.
yeah, let's get on to this Nvidia NV link, but I will have to say I do think Nvidia shouldn't themselves in the foot and I think they're I just most companies they usually
will have multi.
Multi markets that they go into, especially once they get as big as a trillion dollar company, so there's no real reason why they're doing what they're doing, except for.
Money.
making mistakes, why stop them?
Well, you have to understand that I'm sure Nvidia would love to make everything for everything, but the reality is that if TSMC is booked and their schedule time is all
scheduled out, you're basically at the whim of how much TSMC can produce for you.
So your output is only equal to whatever they can produce.
And if that is a limited quantity, you're only going to do your biggest stuff.
I that, but there's ways around getting new partners and stuff like that to build stuff.
It just amazes me what's going on.
uh I haven't seen anything on this.
Have you, Hi-Tech or Gardner or The Fox on this Nvidia NVLink?
This is their infrastructure for connecting stuff together.
custom stuff.
I mean there weren't too many announces within video I just put it there kind of just to have it and I mean
to join GPUs so that you have a larger VRAM pool and yeah that's it's all all ultimately this comes down to just B-switching.
I mean, to be honest, I kind of made this topic the way it is because the news was kind of light when I did the outline for this, but then we had some much bigger news come out like
yesterday.
As you know, SteamOS, yeah, 3.7.8.
This is to work with other um types of hardware.
I mean, it doesn't seem like it's big, but this is probably a pretty big deal within the AI sphere of things, especially with how chipsets are specialized anymore.
So.
but given how Nvidia is running it, I'm almost certain it's not gonna be as easy as it sounds.
There's gonna be some bullshit stipulations and whatnot, because, you know, it's Nvidia, right?
you you have you have lots of companies like Coreweave came out and they're doing gangbusters right now.
And that's all about interconnecting a lot of these things as well.
So Envy Link isn't terribly new.
um But like ultimately, that's all it comes down to.
And this is effectively just, you know, PCI, PCI over over network over copper.
Right.
So that's what this all basically boils down to.
uh Yeah.
How do you
How do you get AI to grow?
How do you get those inferences to do?
How could you do more?
And it's really just joining all of these together so that they can work on massive data sets faster.
And that's all it really comes down to is just the scalability issue.
And they're tackling it.
It's really cool stuff, but it's not for us in the slightest.
It's for feeding the AI monster right now.
it's going to be for everyone once they don't have a job.
This is what's coming for your jobs.
OK.
m This website refreshes, I think it's because it's in live mode, it refreshes every like, um I don't know, 30 seconds, so I have to keep on jumping around.
It's really annoying.
um Do we not?
have the claw in here let's do claw
MSI brings AMD-based AMD gaming handheld, updated midrange, yadda yadda yadda.
I mean, to be honest, it's a Z2 refresh.
I don't think it's super interesting.
What's more interesting, I think, is a Zotac 2 zone, uh which comes with a Z2 Extreme, yes, but it also runs Manjaro, which is interesting because it's not SteamOS, but it's not
Windows, either.
Yeah, honestly, Manjaro is probably it's one of my favorite Linux distros and uh I know a lot of people have valid criticisms of Manjaro, but like when it comes to just setting it
up and not having to worry about your distro and like I think Manjaro is probably one of the best out there.
uh And so I'm really excited to see this.
I was like really keen on the Orange Pie.
um What was it called?
The Orange Pie Neo?
Yeah.
And but like that, I don't know what's going on with that.
I haven't heard anything about it for ages, but this uh has kind of captured my attention for sure.
What I do find fascinating is Zotac used to be one of Valve's partners back in the Steam Machine days.
I remember, they had that tiny little cube.
It was a mini PC almost.
SN, was it the SN90 or something like that?
don't remember, but there were a lot of partners.
mean, fuck, Falcon Northwest made a steam machine, it was like $5,000.
Yeah.
The interesting thing about this is that it's got the Ryzen AI uh HX370, which is what I think that's the same CPU as what's in my Minis forum AI whatever this is, AI X1 or
whatever.
And that CPU and GPU combo rips.
It is so performant like
my God, it blew the pants off the Steam Deck, it blows the pants off the Legion Go.
It's so fast and it can play games like nobody's business.
So uh that'll be cool to see in a handheld.
What I hate...
sorry, go ahead.
Well, I was just gonna say, I hate the naming scheme of the fuckin' Ryzen AI process.
It's abysmal, at best.
Yeah, so what's really nice, this is the same one like what the Switch 2, why the Switch 2 has a benefit on its APO arrangement, is that you have 16 CUs of RDNA 3.5 and that's
really again where you're going to be getting a lot of your performance.
It's still limited to 7500 megatransfers.
So you have a real hard cap into what you're going to be able to achieve.
You're better off...
leveraging lower resolutions and lower settings to achieve higher frame rates that the CPUs can help out on.
If you start upping resolution, you're going to find you're going to have a hard ceiling fast because you'll be just massively GPU bound and the CPUs aren't going to just do
nothing for you.
So uh HX370 is nice with 16 CUs, but it's just an expensive part.
uh Typically HX370 machines with like 32 GHz RAM run you around $1,300 on average.
uh
I the cheapest one I saw was like $1,200.
So that's definitely on the super high end for as far as handhelds are concerned.
And the Z2E is a variant of the HX370 with four less CPU cores, same GPU though, and faster memory.
So the Z2E should outperform the HX370 considerably.
That's, there's so many good options coming up.
I'm really, because I want to do what you're doing, Fox, is that I want to really replace most of my, like my uh least gaming side of things with a more portable slim down.
it's super freeing, especially with some of the solutions that they have there.
The newer stuff that's coming out uh with Thunderbolt 5.
Thunderbolt 5 is looking like it's going to be kind of okay.
But then like there's newer ones that are using MCIO, which is the successor to OcuLink.
So that can make use of PCIe5 uh over wire.
So that type of stuff is, what, you know, like that, at that point when you go MCIO, MCIO, Mini CoolEdge, you can do PCIe5 and
Even if it's only 4x lanes, you're going to get double the bandwidth of what the previous gen was.
So you're really going to be cooking at that point.
where I am right now, even only on 4x lanes, I have a 4090.
uh There is no real issue bandwidth-wise.
uh I can match.
Yeah, so if you were to design a GPU-bound scenario, one game that you can do that on real easy is Returnal.
It's just a heavily demanding GPU game.
Yeah.
max settings, the CPU is just going to be waiting for the GPU to just crunch all this stuff.
And what I found is on my system, I can match performance to a friend's desktop 4090 with a way faster CPU and a CPU can go up to 200 watts.
And I match performance then indicating it's a GPU bound problem.
But also the bandwidth that I have is also fundamentally just good enough.
So even right now at 4x PCIe 4,
That's enough for a 4090 interactively with what you need for gaming.
So doubling that will fit you comfortably with wherever you need to be uh in all sense and purpose.
So I find it freeing.
Go ahead.
no.
But what you're not saying is that you're using DLSS and your friend isn't right.
I'm just I'm just making a joke, by the way, I'm kind of referencing back to like.
Multi-frame generation.
Yeah, yeah.
No, uh it was fascinating to me because I was I was certain that my friend would have uh a clear advantage.
in a he does have a clear advantage when uh it's no longer GPU bound when you don't have it because the 4090 is is genuinely a GPU monster that seldom will you be in a GPU bound
scenario and you will very rapidly be in a CPU bound.
And because he has a desktop CPU that can ramp up all core to higher frequencies than I'll ever dare hit on a mobile platform where I'm living it by 40 watts and he's chewing up 200
He's gonna outpace me by a bunch, but even inside of that same thing, you know, I'll get like in Tomb Raider The Shadow of the Tomb Raider I'll hit like 150 FPS and it'll hit like
180 FPS.
So it's not Terribly, so he's like 20 % better than I am But you know, I'm using
five times less power than he is on the CPU side.
So, but that's to be expected, right?
With the VF curve of how that whole stuff works, you're just going to use exponentially more power to hit those higher frequencies.
So to be expected, but still it's a very freeing type of mentality because you can have, especially with the GPU and Macs, I'm a huge fan of this type of thing, especially if
you're utilitarian, is that you could have that.
And then when you need to go,
you just disconnect that and then you you have whatever.
So now like you have the HX 370 which is still a very performant chip like gardeners talking about.
But now you have that mobile when you get home you have an HX 370 CPU side but then a 4090 on GPU.
So it's like you can have the best of both worlds and like having this baller mobile setup you know 64 gigs of RAM on real good CPU very good GPU when you're mobile and then come
home and just like ramp up your GPU to like.
You know, have the PC switch equivalent, right?
Like be baller mobile and be super baller when you're desktop.
So I love it and I've used it tons of times when I went to Computex last year.
I took my WinMax with me.
So my entire editing suite was on that laptop.
You know, I didn't have to, you know, I'm not having my laptop.
That's not my desktop.
So it becomes this really cool thing.
I haven't had a desktop.
I've been on OcuLink now for over two years.
haven't had an issue.
Are you using is that the?
Wood Max 2 is that the?
am not, no, so the WinMax 2 I can...
this is the WinMax 2.
uh
one of those.
I loved it.
Yeah, so uh this is a thing that straddles of the apex of how big of a handheld you can go.
uh then this becomes like, OK, this is netbook territory with a decent enough keyboard and mouse that you can take with you.
Right now, I use a GPD Duo, which is their two screen thing.
uh And that has OcuLink on it.
And that's what I use.
Nice.
Yeah, no, good stuff there.
Anything else we want to look at here, high tech or any, I know there's so much like $50,000 cooling solution.
That is crazy.
but a lot of them are like engineering samples because you know, they're all prototypes.
Yeah, so I mean.
and Computex and a lot of these places.
Some of the stuff you see here won't be, might not ever come out actually, or it won't come out for a while.
Which is unfortunate, but you know what did come out though?
stimulus.
What?
Let's do it.
3.7.8.
Go country!
this is getting me excited.
It has been a long time coming, right?
Like a super long time coming.
Yeah, it's been like several months.
Because I remember talking about some of these updates in my Steam Deck news videos in the betas for SteamOS and like this has been quite like I think maybe since December or
January we haven't seen a new stable.
Kinda reminds me of Steam OS 3.5, remember that?
That took a really long time to come out to a stable, and I guess they were prepping it for the OLED release.
But what are we gonna get now, Steam Night 2?
Well, now we got a Legion Go S.
I haven't gone over this yet.
What's so profound about it besides.
Just so that everyone's on.
Yeah.
stuff has made it from the beta staging stuff.
I um don't know if you remember, but I was at January or February when the beta came out and it enabled um the LCD model of the Steam Deck to wake up from Bluetooth devices.
And that's been months and it's finally hit stable here.
um
That's very exciting.
They've also got like, ah hands-free protocol and stuff for Bluetooth, which uh people have been asking for for a while.
Yeah, the, yeah, they have the call, if you click on the last word of the next paragraph there, here, that this actually, they're calling out specifically that this Steam Deck
Recovery image now works on not just the Steam Deck,
and not just the Legion Go S, but also the original Legion Go and the um ROG Ally.
So, like, you can use this image to flash other handhelds and you can play with proper SteamOS on it.
Yep.
Yeah, I installed it earlier today on the uh ROG Ally and just made a quick how-to video because it was insanely simple.
Mm-hmm.
I found that the installation process on my Legion Go S here to be incredibly fast, like blazingly fast.
It only took maybe two or three minutes, like once I got it going.
um
install on my own Steam, on my own lead and go S.
Yeah, I mean I was playing Doom the Dark Ages on this at like around 50 FPS with low settings um And that seemed to work just fine uh Yeah, it's I haven't played anything else
on it yet because I've been trying to get Cmos installed on other non handhelds, but uh Yeah
OS?
Is that your new video?
Does it steam OS?
Is that gonna be your next video?
Just does it steam OS.
it.
Install SteamOS on all the things.
The fridge does the fridge.
you should install on your Nintendo Switch too.
That's definitely a bring a style video right there.
SteamOS.
You know, but here's the thing though.
I see a lot of people waiting for SteamOS for the desktop, but I feel like the way it is right now is it really a good fit given that it boosts directly to like, you know, the
game mode, like.
Is that really a good fit for desktop users?
Because I think people want to replace their entire desktop OS, not just like install on like an HTPC.
Yeah, I mean I like uh I made a video uh yesterday or I posted it this morning and um As like as I was getting ready to finish it uh This news broke so I had to like go and I was
like super exhausted But understanding like what I did like about this release I was like this is steamos is here right like and so I titled the video steamos is here and I got at
least two comments that were like
It is not here.
When it's ready for use on Nvidia on my desktop, then it's here.
And I'm like, I don't think you understand how this goes, right?
Like, I don't know if we're gonna see uh Nvidia support in SteamOS for years.
Like, honestly, I just don't see it happening anytime soon.
I mean, I think we'll be lucky if we get Intel support anytime soon.
Like, I think this is a strictly...
AMD based distro and uh Having focus like that means that they can like optimize things and Man, I just don't see it being like I like I said, I had trouble installing this on uh
my the beelink GTI here with a discrete AMD GPU and it doesn't work and That might be by design.
Like I think they're really trying to hyper focus and make sure that this
is like a beautiful experience for handhelds.
I don't know.
be how long it takes them to get through their backlog of uh all the bugs that are gonna get reported on this.
if once they get to the desktop and Nvidia and anything else, I'm sure it's gonna depend on how well this does on a bunch of other devices.
I would say SteamOS could replace the desktop operate.
uh
OS, but it would need to switch out game mode.
It wouldn't launch into game mode.
It'd launch in the desktop mode, right?
ah That's about it, though.
It's a full-fledged Linux distro, so.
Mm-hmm.
There are a number of really good improvements that they have included.
It's been available in their latest one for a while, but if you go into their main ah stuff and you can do into a super preview build.
So it's been available for a while, but the latest version of Plasma, have uh libcrypt stuff uh that is enabled now so that you can do encryption for stuff for desktop use where
it wasn't really there before.
So they're gearing up to do more stuff on desktop.
to gardeners point for on the AMD side their scheduler uh is moved over from what it was before to that AMD P state.
So I guess they've uh graduated to that where it's now at a good point.
And you're going to find using that, especially with like the HX 370 and their heterogeneous CPU cores going between the P and E cores and having that effectively
schedule on which core is best for it.
You're going to see it pay a huge dividends for that.
And that's stuff that I've covered before because cyberpunk is one game that is
a game that favors many CPU cores and a lot of GPU at the same time.
And that is outside of all of the uh Proton work that has been done to make Cyberpunk even better.
Cyberpunk is a clear cut example of if you want better PC gaming performance, you go to Steam OS.
But pretty much, if you have like an AMD system, you just go over to Steam OS and you'll have a considerably better performance and consistent frame time consistency.
So there's those things.
And then there's some other stuff, especially with regard to like uh Mesa that was updated.
There was, I want to say like a bug that was fixed specifically for like one type of benchmark, but it had repercussions in so far as that basically it was wasting a bunch of
cycles and that got fixed up.
So there's like lots and lots of things that you can see right there enabled the MDP state CPU frequency control uh is up a little bit.
Yeah.
Yeah, right there.
So that thing alone is huge.
if you think of it for, like the stuff that I cover on my channel is always of the mindset of like, how do we get more done on these low power stuff?
Because for lack of a better word, they're not, when these things are designed, they're designed from like a race to finish.
uh So get boost to your turbo frequencies, get that work done as fast as you can, and then try to unboost.
The problem is that in a gaming workload will never happen.
So you're just in this state of just constantly just redlining the system, wasting power.
So a lot of the things that I've always done, you know, it becomes counterintuitive for a lot of people and you have to kind of like walk them through it.
And people were like, oh, I'm on a handheld PC on Windows.
I go to power control and I say high performance.
And it's like that is the worst thing you could do in the world.
And people are like, that doesn't make any sense.
I said high performance and it said no.
What you are saying, you have to remember, Linux and Windows, were designed with CPUs.
CPUs were the only thing on there.
Literally, the memory controller was on.
The memory controller was on the north bridge of the motherboard.
They moved the memory controller to the CPU later on.
And then they moved GPUs onto the CPU later on.
But OSes and how they're designed is still designed from a mindset that when they talk to the CPU, they anticipate it to be the CPU only.
So when you say high performance, you're saying push.
pedal to the metal on the CPU at all times.
because, like I said earlier, we need so much GPU, what you actually want to do is enable power saver mode.
And by power saver mode, it relaxes the CPU and it gives less power to the CPU.
Thus, inside of the same TDP scope of how much power you can go to on the chip, you now allow more power to go to the GPU.
It's counterintuitive in that state.
So like the AMD P State CPU frequency control, all of these kind of tie in together.
And Linux is better than Windows is.
In fact, I also did a video on this.
Basically, you need 25, 25, 31 drivers and the latest the GSA and the latest chipset drivers for the heterogeneous cores on the HX 370 to actually function properly on
Windows.
But they've been functioning properly on Linux for a long time now.
So Linux side of things, kernel side, they do CPU side so much better.
That's where you really start to get to the nitty gritty of this stuff and really get down to like
only give the thing what you want it to give because most times they have no idea uh in so far as what the hell they're doing, right?
So, you you'd be playing a game, I'll end this really quickly, but like a clear example that I would always show is like Hades or Celeste.
It's like here it is running on the ally.
It's using 20 watts.
It's like, why?
It's a 2D game.
What are you doing?
And it's just drilling those CPU cores.
They're going to 4 gigahertz all the time.
And it's like, why in the world are you doing that?
And then if you just go in the TDP, right, and you just throw a wrench, you're like, no, no, you have five watts.
And it's like, oh, OK, I only have five watts.
And then CPUs go down to 600 megahertz.
Frame rate stays the same.
There's no frame time consistency problems.
Everything is exactly the same.
You're just using 15 less watts.
And it's like, why did I have to do that?
Why can't you do that?
Like, you should be aware of that.
And that's what that P state thing helps us get towards is getting to this.
automatic thing and getting away from the type of work that I do and giving it so that everyone can have it without even thinking.
And that's why it's a real big deal.
I mean, it's exciting.
That's definitely going to make things a lot easier.
super awesome stuff.
uh I just went and looked and the first SteamOS 3.7 preview was March 14th.
So this has been almost two months, or over two months in the making.
Right.
Not bad.
I am super curious.
What do you guys think they'll do with the Steam Deck 2 because as you know they made a whole Steam Deck compatible, Steam OS compatible tab for like games that run on Steam OS
and that's basically the only criteria like what's gonna happen with Starfield when that inevitably runs better on the Steam Deck 2 or at least I would hope it would run better on
the Steam Deck 2.
I mean it's considered unplayable because it doesn't run well right on the Steam Deck, right?
Yeah, so like the real question comes down to is will Valve make a custom hardware with AMD?
Will Valve pony up the money?
uh Because it's just sensationally expensive for them to basically go to AMD and say, hey, AMD, for lack of like the HX370, right?
As a perfect example, it's a very good chip.
It's by all accounts, a laptop chip.
It's not a handheld chip.
It's designed for laptops that are just being put into handhelds.
It is CPU heavy.
not it does have a crap ton of GPU, but it doesn't have the bandwidth.
That's the thing that boggles my mind about these things, right?
Like you have so much.
You have 16 CUs at 2.9 gigahertz on the HX 370.
That's absolutely bonkers.
You have something that could destroy a series S in just GPU compute on a mobile platform, but we don't have the bandwidth.
Series S has double the bandwidth that we have.
and less compute, right?
So like that's to give you an idea of how starved for bandwidth we are on these things.
But when you look at these things, Valve is not going to want to have an HX370.
I don't think Valve is going to want a Z2E.
I think Valve is going to want the best of the best, in my personal opinion.
But then it's a big cost.
And does, will they do that?
I don't know.
uh Will they use whatever AMD does with their Z series chip?
Maybe I don't know.
uh I don't know.
I would hope that they design their own chip.
like basically that's what it comes down to is that Valve, for lack of a better word, is our only hope that we would have a handheld that is worthwhile to have sometime in 2026.
Because the reality is that for like general handheld stuff, we won't have the next generation of GPUs until sometime in mid
late 2027.
That's when UDNA starts coming to these mobile parts because the next round of mobile APUs is RDNA 3.5 again and bet your bottom dollar it's only 128 bit wide so we're still
bandwidth starved.
RDNA 4 gets more done and less bandwidth.
uh UDNA is probably as well.
So 2027 is like a clear cut like okay that's a for sure when we have a significant this is what the next generation of handhelds are.
We can get there a earlier, just remains to be seen if Valve uh ponies up the dough, because lots of these things are kind of, not with any, but the tariff situation that they
have going on now is probably making things even worse.
going to AMD and saying, give us this big honking GPU, give us four small, super awesome Zen 6 CPUs, give us tons of bandwidth, and Bob's your uncle, you're gonna have this just
monster.
that will just decimate everything else on the market.
Same thing happened with the Steam Deck.
Steam Deck came out, when Van Gogh came out, there was no RDNA 2 handled at the moment, and it was 2X better than Vega.
So you had the current handouts on the market, and then Steam Deck comes out, and it's like $300 cheaper and two times better.
And it's like, well, this doesn't take a genius.
Like, I'm just gonna get a Steam Deck.
And that had...
Has the Steam Deck really lost its place inside of the handheld market?
There are better handhelds, but is it two times better than the Steam Deck?
No, it isn't.
Not by any stretch of the imagination.
In some weird places, you can get like 50 % better, uh but then you're paying a whole bunch more and you're using a bunch more power.
So it's like, well, where are you really?
What are you actually getting here?
You're not 2X better.
And until we get to that point...
They're gonna have to pay and...
I don't know man.
It's a lot.
I will say.
basically like, you're basically in the territory of where Microsoft and Sony are.
When they go to them and say, we need a chip for the PS5, we need a chip for the Xbox, Valve needs to go to AMD and say, we need a chip for the Steam Deck 2.
Please give us all the GPU and all the bandwidth.
Give us the best one.
think AMD will pull an Nvidia and be like, oh, the Steam Deck was super successful, we want more money.
No?
They haven't done it ever.
They've been, AMD has never been a bad business partner in, I don't know, how long has AMD been?
2013?
They haven't been a bad business partner since Xbox One and PS4.
They haven't been a bad business partner.
It's evident that they haven't been a bad business partner because they have gone to no one else.
The only thing that I could see that Valve would do differently,
is that they could still go to AMD, but they could say, AMD, know what?
uh x86 stuff that you make is baller, but the sleep schedules are terrible on here.
And especially since they went to modern standby, it's even more junk.
We need stuff that powergates better.
We want the ARM CPU.
So then you could have something that's ARM CPU and just their UDNA GPU.
So then you have actual emulation happening that would be needed.
uh
So much of the stuff again is on the GPU side of things that we're starved for that would you guys trade?
I don't know.
Let's say it's a 20 % performance hit on emulation for actual sleep modes.
Like, you know, just press it and have.
Have a.
Guarantee that effectively you're going to use 1 % of your battery in 24 hours, right?
Like you will at the current.
where we are with x86, it doesn't power gate good at all on modern stand by junk.
Maybe if they backported S3 sleep mode to it, we could get there.
um But you know, what is it like time to game TGG?
um That's where the switch switch wins a lot of other stuff wins being able to just press a button and jump right back into it has a lot of value.
um So I wouldn't even discount going them going to an arm.
because they have been doing work on ARM CPU side as well.
So I could see that being a custom chip, the big part of it is they need that GPU and they need the bandwidth to it.
You just give us a big V12 GPU engine and give us a big honking fuel line for it.
And I don't really care what the CPU, like we're not starved for CPU and ARM chips are good enough for 60, 120 FPS, problem.
So yeah, I mean, that's also another avenue that you can do.
that would be a real...
wrench in the works for insofar as competing with other PC gaming handles, because you would be like, oh, now we have actual sleep modes.
Lots of interesting things that they can do still.
uh
love to see Arm as the next one, but we'll see.
We'll see.
it really is just a valve's gonna spend the money.
And that's all it comes down to.
I mean, there's evidence that they're exploring that option with, what is it?
86 bucks or no, it's not 86 bucks.
think it's a F- No, I think it's a Fexemu or something like that.
F-E-Xemu.
Yeah, there's something like that.
It's an ARM emulator for 86, x86 CPUs, yeah.
Yeah.
So there's going to be the overhead for that emulation.
We don't really have much overhead right now with the uh rappers that are happening for Volkan to uh DX stuff.
You lose about like 3 percent.
It's like negligible.
It's like, OK, no big deal.
And largely when you're playing games, it's not you know, you don't really even see it.
And for games like cyberpunk, we actually do a lot better.
uh There has been evidence that with a proton and all the other stuff fossilized and all the other things that they're doing.
that if a company were inclined, they could enhance proton for a game specifically, like Valve has already done for God of War, Cyberpunk, Elden Ring.
uh Valve has done the work themselves and showcased that they can take this to the next level for gaming.
like, Elden Rings has these stutter problems on PC.
And Valve's like, one moment.
And it's like, here, just down the list, latest proton, everything's cool.
So that was like, But they're still.
only five million units sold.
So I don't know.
uh Arm is fine, but it isn't.
Arm is not inherently better than x86.
Arm has the capability of being more performance single threaded in a lower power threshold, which is arguably what we need for gaming purposes.
But then you have the overhead of the emulation
That would be bringing that down.
So uh it's kind of like, know, six and one and half a dozen and the other.
You got to take whatever you can get.
I personally think it would be fine.
I would like it mostly just for uh the sleep state.
I think that would be the killer thing.
Sleep mode works relatively well as it is, but RDNA 2 Van Gogh actually does have S3 sleep mode.
you like you do the ACPE.
uh
If you challenge AKB against it, it S3 sleep.
Whereas all of the newer stuff does not support S3 at all.
It is SOIX only.
Sorry, I was getting a call.
But yeah, that's basically it.
I could muse all day, but really just comes down to.
You know, I I emailed Gaben.
I was just like, please give us a big GPU and a lot of bandwidth.
Signed Fox.
And like, he didn't reply.
But yeah, that's what I was like, I was like, hey, it's Fox.
Say hey, listen.
Please more GPU.
that's all.
Yeah.
But yeah, we get, go ahead.
the custom silicon for the, they're, Gabe's son has that, I don't even remember what the startup is, but we talked about earlier with the uh implants.
Yeah.
And they're doing a custom silicon for that.
So.
be interesting to see if maybe Valve's gonna start investing in more custom silicon, period.
Even though it's different, but.
you know, it really is, it's not like it's terribly difficult to do custom silicon.
It's just that AMD is going to charge a buttload because what you basically do is you pay for the design upfront.
And at that point, AMD, like for Xbox and PlayStation, they go to AMD, they say, this is the solution that we want.
And AMD says, well, these are the parts that we have here, the Lego pieces.
what Lego pieces do you want?
And then you put them all together.
You say, okay, you own this now, here you go.
And now you can go and it out.
But because you own this now and this is all of our part, you pay us this lump sum of cashola.
And uh that's how it works.
So basically Valve would be the owner of that chip uh and they would have the rights to it.
And then they can go to companies to get it fabbed out wherever they want.
And then if they want updates to it, they can go back to AMD.
get it updated and whatnot.
more or less, that's how I understand it to operate.
And that's why Microsoft and Sony go to AMD all the time, because they get to own the chip.
Whereas we go back to NVIDIA being bad business partners, they never own the chip.
NVIDIA own the chip.
And whenever they want to renegotiate, NVIDIA is like, well, pound salt.
How about you just pay us money?
And then they're like, OK, well, how about we just pull the rip cord and make a new system and just leave this old one behind?
uh
Yeah, so that's really where comes down to.
Okay, well.
Speaking of all this in the Steam Deck, the Switch 2 is supposedly weaker than the Steam Deck, getting into this next topic, I'm really curious.
So, Hi Tech, you're the one that introduced this.
Do you wanna?
So there was a YouTube video by the name geeker one.
I think the only issue here so he supposedly has a PCB that is in fact the switch 2's PCB.
I'm not sure how he managed to get a hold of this.
But he ran some preliminary benchmarks and.
According to his three mark tests.
The quote simulated switch 2 docked is faster than the steam deck, but the handheld version.
Supposedly is a little weaker than the steam deck.
I guess it's not that big of surprise given that the fox has been, you know, saying this for He's been shouting at the top of his lungs this for a while now
lots and lots of Twitter fights about it.
Like, it's got so many people just just fighting me about this thing.
So, yeah, I mean, I've been trying to say it for a long time, but it's not like I'm saying when you say this out loud, right, it's you could take this from two sides of the same
coin.
There's one side of it.
It's like, OK, the Steam Deck is going to outperform the switch to just because it's running at 15 watt, right.
And
We already know like we know the switch one right.
Let's just back up a little just so it gives some context.
The switch one total system power was basically five watt.
That's the original switch.
And then when they went over to what is that why is it the name escaping me when they went to their updated one they went from a 20 nanometer planner to 60 nanometer FinFET.
That was a redesigned chip.
that they went to and there was a because they went to 69 million FinFET obviously the design is much better but they went from using five watt total system power to three watt
total system power this is total system power okay so it's the APU the LCD the RAM the fan the Wi-Fi everything okay to put that in context it was running the Witcher 3 inside of
three watt the latest like switch OLED right the Steam Deck cannot run Witcher 3 at three watts total system power
It can do it at six watts total system power and pretty poorly, but it can't do it at three watt.
And that's where the switch one is.
The switch two is in the same ballpark.
You have to remember that, you you look at the original steam deck, right?
It's a 40 watt hour battery.
The original switch and even Swole-led is a 16 watt hour battery.
So less than half.
The switch two is a 19.3 watt hour battery.
And because we have that information and Nintendo cites it themselves that battery life is 2 to 6 hours, that means that the worst case them saying two hours means that total system
power for the Switch 2 is somewhere around 9 to 10 watts, somewhere in that area.
So double what it was from the original Switch 1.
But that's still total system power.
And the Steam Deck uses 25 watts total system power by default.
So when I'm saying this,
You could take this in two ways.
You can say, OK, the Steam Deck is going to outperform the Switch, but the Steam Switch 2 is using less than half the total system power and approaching the performance of a Steam
Deck, which is a big win.
That is me complementing the Switch 2, but no one saw it as that.
I just said Steam Deck better, and then they're like, like no one actually read the context of what I was saying.
uh Now.
in this thing that Giger one did he simulated the performance and how we did that is with a 2050 mobile part from a laptop which is ampere and it's a different architecture but
everyone gets caught up on this like it's going to be something wildly different and it isn't that simulated bench is a good approximation like it's 90 % as good as what it's
going to be the real sauce comes down to
what our game developer is able to extract more out of this in terms of specific settings that they're going to use.
They're going to dial things in to get as best of a possible situation as they can that they're not going to be doing that work on the generalized PC build of anything that the
Steam Deck's going to run.
So there are going to be certain examples that people are going to dangle and say, hey, look at how good this works.
Cyberpunk is going to be one of them.
Cyberpunk is going to be game that is an Nvidia title, it favors Nvidia GPUs, and it favors more physical cores.
And this is apparent because when I got the preview build of the Steam Deck, when you just looked into GameScope, there was a whole comment block from Valve.
They're like, we say to uh Cyberpunk that we actually have eight physical cores and not four core, two thread.
So that gave them a speed boost just to advertise via GameScope to Cyberpunk that it was actually eight cores physical and no hyperthreading.
And they got a speed boost that way.
So the Switch 2 is an eight core CPU with an Nvidia GPU.
This is a system that is as best as it possibly could be for Cyberpunk.
So on day one, we're going to see examples where people are going to be like, I told you Switch 2 is better than Steam Deck.
But as time goes on and you start seeing other games come out to it, you're going to see that there's developers that are not putting in the work to make a better version for
Switch 2.
And you're going to see that difference.
You're going to see where the Steam deck comes out ahead by a bit.
But it's using more than double the power.
So, yes, it is better insofar as it uses more power.
But the reality is that Switch 2 is still very performant.
because it has such a really good wide GPU uh and the caches on it that it has.
It's a really good mobile platform.
uh I wouldn't talk down on the Switch 2.
It is going to be good and it's going to be great.
Initially, like if Steam Deck 2 comes out in 2026, game over.
Like, oh, that was fun, Switch 2.
You had your moment in the sun.
It's been a year, but let's move on.
and the targets are a little different too.
Nintendo tends, well, they're actually trying to move that, but Nintendo tends to family-oriented games.
Now they're kind of getting into the family plus adult games.
yeah, like I mean, the interesting thing, right, is like the Switch 2, the Joy-Cons can be used as a mouse.
uh And I learned today, at least, well, someone said it was confirmed, but you can plug in any mouse into a Switch 2 and the mouse will work.
So yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Well, that's what I read.
Yeah, someone said, confirmed, you can plug any mouse into it.
And I was like, that's cool.
um So Switch 2 is becoming a bit more PC-like.
uh with that uh in there.
So obviously there's no keyboard yet that we're aware of that can be used, but it's not hard to imagine that uh there could be that case that comes up.
In any event, it's going to sell like crazy.
It's going to be a good system.
I'm personally going to get one.
I'm going to love it.
uh
As we get closer to these digital-only ecosystems, I don't see any of the closed ecosystems working.
Because why would you want to have digital versions of games that are locked behind someone's platform?
The only thing that makes any sense is if digital ownership is the only thing that we have going forward, you want to be on the most open platform as possible.
uh And that's
have a topic on that here in a little bit.
Yeah, I just think that it just makes the most sense and uh you can see everyone going digital, right?
Like it's a foregone conclusion, but that's a whole other canworms.
What really chaps my ass is that Nintendo has the game key system, Like, you buy it, you get the key, you put it in, you start the download of game, right?
That's one thing.
But it's another thing for games to still have codes in the boxes as well.
It's ridiculous.
Why have both?
Yeah, yeah, I don't you know, maybe it's gonna be growing pains the game key key card thing is interesting in so far as that you could resell it ah And then you know, there's
not the actual game on there.
The game key cards don't Potentially interest me at all.
I actually have a Nintendo switch collection and I will have a switch to collection But i'm only gonna buy non game key cards.
I there's no
makes sense.
what just really gets me is that Nintendo introduced this system that people hate, but then game developers are still going towards this even worse system of the code in the
box, of course.
all comes back to money, right?
I mean, like, it probably costs...
It's not free to do a game key card, but it's a lot less expensive to do uh a card in a box, you know?
So, I don't know.
Like, the money factor is always gonna be the biggest consideration with that.
Damn it.
be nice for certain titles, though, to be if they want to up the price, then do I know it's going to cost more to do two skews.
But if you're going to do maybe collector's editions and stuff like that, maybe really maybe just up the price, because I would personally I would rather pay an extra few like
five, 10 bucks and get the cards than, you know, game cards instead of just a redemption, a key.
um
for sure.
Yeah.
I think most people would so I think if they just sold it that way I think it would do better so I don't but then again this is the average gamer with Nintendo so maybe people
are just looking for the best game price but
average gamer to make a good decision.
No, but that's who you're going to sell to.
You're going to market to the average ah person.
Typically, you're going to make more money.
you can't trust the average gamer to make an informed decision, and that's why we need regulation.
Well, I mean, that's that's true with anything though, and that's why regulation exists because you can't trust any party that yeah, we that's a whole other deal.
But yeah, you can't trust uh this slice of the community or a party to maybe always have everyone else's um goodwill and insight.
So.
discussion about that whole thing that I you know, you could see Microsoft going there uh If Microsoft is ahead of the curve or they're just betting on this because you take a look
at what they've done uh You know a lot of people could say well Microsoft has given up their third party now.
They're putting their games on PlayStation they're putting the games on the switch and There's a part of that where?
uh There they have like this mobile
platform that's ready to go on iOS, but they're waiting for all the epic games and other stuff stuff to like die down before they can do that.
So there is this overarching idea that uh Microsoft is of the belief that there is coming regulation that says it doesn't matter if you're the platform holder, you have to allow
third party stores to exist on your platform, which would mean that Microsoft is trying to get ahead of that by just being open on everything.
is what they believe and that you know if you call it go so far as like beyond on Android and Apple okay that's on mobile and it kind of makes sense but then if some weird thing
this whole thing comes into PlayStation and Nintendo that's gonna open up a whole can of worms where how do you allow third-party stores on those platforms because they owned it
right and they're like say hey you just made new rules for us but there is this overarching idea that there's regulation coming uh
to stipulate, hey, you guys are all digital now.
You're not doing physical.
You're screwing everyone because you have this monopoly.
This is no longer, like when it was physical, you had Walmart selling it, Best Buy selling it, other people can resell it.
But now you guys own everything.
This is crazy.
You have to let people resell their digital games, and you have to let other third party stores exist.
And this is what is this overarching idea.
And it's like,
OK, so is if that is what Microsoft sees and then you also look at this like Microsoft rumor to be testing steam integration within the Microsoft store.
This is a part of that whole idea of Microsoft saying this regulation is coming.
We're going to get ahead of it.
We're going to abide by this regulation before it even exists.
And oh it's interesting to think about because then that's a not so bad digital future.
As opposed to like what we're like barreling towards right now.
uh So you know, maybe the thing that gets me about this started like segue into like what you got here.
uh Please also jump in at any given time.
I'll stop speaking, but uh the the idea of Microsoft.
Including Steam on an Xbox, right?
I can see.
On PC side, it makes it makes sense because it's already there, right?
They're not losing anything because people can already do it.
The only thing that they're going be doing is integrating it into a front end, right?
Like, so the Xbox PC side is going to have a front end for Steam integration.
That already makes sense.
And people aren't like, OK, no big deal, because that was already possible.
They're just making it convenient.
But there's also this thread somewhere that people are really believing that an Xbox Series S and an Xbox Series X will have Steam integration as well.
And that I can't buy for a few reasons.
I think AMD themselves would push back on that.
And again, if you're going to be selling custom hardware to people, you are doing so under the guise of, well, you're only doing this on your platform and it's not even a PC.
So it doesn't really compete with us.
Like AMD making Xbox chips and PlayStation chips, that doesn't compete with PC chips that AMD sells.
But if all of a sudden every Xbox Series S and Xbox Series X runs PC games, that means that now AMD is competing against chips that they had made for them years ago.
Right?
And it's like, man, you guys have super awesome gaming stuff and we've been doing super crazy CPU stuff and all of our GPUs suck in these things.
And that's what we've been selling to people.
So I see AMD pushing back on that.
And on the opposite side, if Xbox Series S or Xbox Series X had Steam integration, that means that they have to support 60,000 games that Steam has.
And if whatever driver and other stuff that they have running in there starts breaking,
Now they have this whole support thing that they have to take care of and that's a big goddamn problem.
So there's a few reasons and pushback that I see it not coming on the console side of things and the PC side is kind of like whatever.
It's like, OK, it's a front end.
uh So that's my mind on this particular thing and that's the only two cents that I really have to add on.
So here's my thing though, you say that AMD might not like it because then all of a sudden the Xbox hardware is competing with their own CPUs they sell.
But could that same logic not apply to pre-builds versus custom built?
Because like I'm sure AMD would see more money if you bought like a CPU directly from them instead of like a pre-built.
You know what saying?
So here's the deal, Like Microsoft sells, well, used to sell them for $500.
But even now that the new tariff version of them, they make no sense.
The Xbox Series X 2TB is like $730, which is just a stupid cost.
No one would buy that.
No one was buying many Xbox Series Xs before, and no one's going to buy them at $730.
But if all of a sudden that same system
can also play PC games from Steam directly, that's actually a pretty good gaming system.
And $700 is like, well, that's actually not too bad.
And now AMD is like, crap.
We can't sell you the latest stuff that we have because this thing is now not so expensive gaming uh pre-built.
That's where you have this nice living room ready thing that AMD has no real answer for, even when it has an inflated cost of $730.
At the before cost when it was like $500, forget it.
It's a hard thing for them to compete against.
Like the Series X is very performant.
Yeah, it would be very interesting to see if they integrate and if Steam and Valve want to partner up with Microsoft.
know Gabe Newell is one of the, isn't he a founder or at least oh some of the originals of Microsoft back in the day and then broke off with someone and created Valve.
he worked on the NT kernel.
Yeah.
I mean, like he they started on Steam OS because they were afraid of Windows 8 and Windows 8 like like removing them from being able to actually have a store.
So Steam OS like Proton and all that stuff kind of sprung about because of Microsoft and.
Yeah, but then since.
Yeah, but then as time has gone on, Microsoft has been like super cool with Valve.
And like putting their games day one on there and being better business partners.
And since then, like those whole things have kind of simmered down a whole bunch.
uh So I don't know where it is, but as long as like they remain good business partners, Valve, Gabe is fine coexisting.
I don't think there's anything wrong there.
But if you said the same thing during Windows 8 days, I don't think you'd find Gabe like no, go pound salts.
I just, I remember that.
It definitely seemed like they didn't want anything to do with it.
But I will say, if they can...
Gabe said that Windows 8 was a disaster for the entire PC space.
Yeah
so uh yeah, it's just the yeah, I don't know.
It's it's interesting to consider at the moment.
I basically consider this for the PC front end space and we already had.
We have tons of front ends that integrate a bunch of crap already.
So I mean hell Armory crate on the Acer Sargi ally is a front end that integrates game pass Steam epic.
It already does that now so.
Who cares, right?
Like you already have it.
Yeah.
if if Xbox because they are having trouble selling and competing against PlayStation and they're putting more and more of their games onto Steam and making that a better deal.
And I'm sure they're making you know, they own so many game companies that the more that they can cozy up with Steam, the better.
And if they can get Steam onto Xbox, and yes, they wouldn't have to be every game they could do a specialty.
filter or maybe even like an Xbox approved badge on it for certain games or at least games that they release could really like what you mentioned like that's a really good price for
a steam machine is getting an Xbox so they're in a world of if and it's really hard to get all these big companies to work together sometimes but in a world like that that could be
a huge deal and help compete against PlayStation again
Yes, I'm totally in agreement.
I think that like there are there is no doubt in my mind that there is millions of people that will only play on console because they got burned by PC somewhere in their life and
they just find PC to be this inscrutable Rubik that they can't solve and consoles have been this thing that they plop in like a toaster and it just runs and
gives them toast.
So if you were to say Xbox now plays PC games and you're like wait like is it still an Xbox and like oh I just use it like an Xbox but it plays PC games.
I see the value for a lot of people in that and then all of a sudden the value proposition for that goes like bananas like it becomes like that $730 price for the two terabyte model
right now is like stupid.
You'd be dumb to buy that but if it all suddenly started.
Xbox.
I would buy one.
I don't have the newer generation, but I'd probably buy one for my uh home entertainment system.
Yep.
exactly it like what I'm saying is like $730 right now for an Xbox.
You'd be like, oh no, that's dumb.
And it's like, oh, but it also plays Steam games.
They go come again.
Say once more, please.
Seven hundred and thirty.
That's it.
You say like it becomes a gigantically different value proposition.
Not, you know, RDNA to at 12.
Terror flop is monstrous for for what it gets done.
So.
Yeah, I mean it's it's super compelling, but again I see a lot of competing interests saying don't do that.
But then again, Microsoft has so much like.
Sway ah that maybe people don't really see, but like you look at MPUs right all the rise in AI 9 Max thing.
What do know that stupid name that it has right?
The the reason that it has AI is because it has an NPU on it and that NPU does nothing.
Like effectively it's inert, but there are wasting silicon space on those mobile APUs, so they're spending top dollar and top silicon for this wasted die at the current moment
because Microsoft was like, hey, we need this thing because we're doing copilot.
We're doing all this other stuff.
We need an MPU on all these processors.
Go put it on there and then Intel and AMD and even Qualcomm are like, yes, sir.
And they just did it.
And what sucks for me is like this is at the
of when everyone finally sees the light of how awesome PC gaming handles were.
Like I was back in 2016 just like, oh, this thing's awesome.
And now like, know, Steam that comes out and it's like, oh, this is pretty awesome.
And then at the same time AI happens and we don't get bigger GPUs and we don't get more bandwidth.
We get these hunks of MPU blocks that do nothing.
I don't know.
It's almost like it's a cursed situation that happened.
I've digressed again.
I apologize.
is me just venting out love.
no, no, no, that's what we like to hear, man.
We like to hear, let the hatred flow.
Speaking of that, unless you want to talk about some more stuff, Gardener, on this topic, we do have some hatred coming up.
I have one thing that I want to add to this.
I'm curious if Microsoft, if they do have Steam integrated into the Xbox platform, will they do kind of a switcheroo deal where you, or like a, not a switcheroo, like a Steam
play deal, where it's like you install Steam and you, if you have like any Microsoft games that...
are available on Steam.
If you own them on Steam, you can play the Xbox version.
ah I feel like that would be a very smart move for them to do because then, you know, they could have like, they could basically pop up, look at all the Microsoft games.
You know, if uh you get them for free and then all the PC games that aren't Microsoft that you have through Steam, they don't perform as well as the optimized Xbox versions.
And that would be like,
And they might not even call that out specifically, but just to kind of like be like, look, Xbox gaming is so much better than PC gaming.
I feel like that would be something Microsoft would do.
I mean that that is a honestly also a very compelling thing again.
We still don't have game pass proper on Steam Deck.
How many more people would subscribe to game pass on their Steam Deck if they could just like I'm going to get game pass, but I'm going to download the Steam versions of those
Microsoft games that I have like not for nothing.
You look at Starfield right?
Starfield is like we had a PC update that came out and said OK can I get on Xbox PC app?
They're like no no it's just on Steam is like.
But you guys own Bethesda and you own the PC app.
Like how does Steam get the update first?
And it's like, it's still going through validation.
Like what the hell are you guys doing?
Like why is Steam moving so much faster than you guys?
you could literally be in a position, like you're saying, Gardner, where you could have the best of both worlds.
You could have your cake and eat it too.
You're like, no, have the I have Microsoft games, but I get them through Steams layer, which is way faster and they iterate faster on.
uh So, yeah, that also is super compelling.
For me, I would love it.
I think everyone would love it.
I just find like there'd be a lot of competing big business interests that are like, oh, slow down.
You're gonna screw things over for us.
Exactly.
That's why I think they'll like they might even do a uh swap on like, hey, ah let's Xbox.
We're going to do our uh game pass on your on the Steam deck.
But in return, you need to be on Xbox.
They might do so.
Maybe they'll do some type of deal where, you know, it will benefit both of them.
But we'll see.
That takes a lot of for big companies.
That takes a lot.
right.
Yeah, mean, Valve obviously moves faster on whatever the bureaucracy engine that they have, like there's certainly a reason like, you know, Valve can be like, well, Game Pass
can be allowed, but you know, we're going to need 30%.
And it's like, on.
we, Game Pass is like, we have the revenue coming in from Game Pass and that is like already distributed to like these projects, right?
Like we.
We can't just shave 30 % away and just give it to you so that we can put it on Steam Deck, even though we know it would increase subscribers and people would love it.
We just can't afford that.
So, yeah, I'm sure in the scenario that, you know, whatever is getting cooked up, it's like a little, you know, I'll scratch your back, you scratch mine and we'll just let the
chips lie as they may.
So Game Pass can exist on Steam Deck, but people can buy Steam games on Xbox and Valve gets the money from people buying it on Xbox.
But
Microsoft gets game pass on Steam Deck without having to lose 30 percent, right?
Like there is that possible arrangement that could happen.
Yeah.
yeah.
if they if they want to try to sell more Steam decks and more Steam OS, they could help that too.
But we'll see.
I'm not Valve's an interesting company when it comes to that type of thing.
Yeah, I mean, I think there was like a Steam deck on Reddit thread where was like, uh Game Pass is like the one thing that they, like especially because Game Pass has just been
baller since November, Game Pass has just been banging on all cylinders, like every month.
They get Indiana Jones, Blueprints is on there, Doom Dark Ages, uh Clare Obscure, like there's like every month there's been two games that have been like, wow, I really wanna
play those games.
uh So I,
Perhaps through happenstance, they fell into this five-month baller period of just crazy goodness.
uh Oblivion, the Oblivion remake coming on, it was rumored for a while, but how that came out and that was awesome.
So there's just lots of cool stuff that they're doing.
Yeah, it'll be interesting.
It'll be interesting.
This is going to be the one episode where we're actually praising Xbox.
Sorry, Gartner.
uh
so much comments like we're like clearly anti Xbox.
It's not that we're anti Xbox.
It's we're anti stupid decisions.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, the thing is, for me, it's like the original Xbox and the 360 are two of my favorite consoles of all time.
So I'm critical of Microsoft for the way they have mishandled the Xbox One and the series.
And it's like, you know, people say it's hate.
No, dude, I actually genuinely like two Microsoft products as a Linux user.
You should be like congratulating me on that.
the 360.
I'm like the 360 is the last console generation that I loved.
I moved up PC full on in 2010.
So the tail end of the 360 generation when it started winding down anyway and Microsoft was on cruise control.
But the teams that made Xbox and the 360 were gone by 2010.
And then you just had suits that were there and they cared zero for
any social capital, any cool capital.
They only cared about actual dollar capital.
And I mean, how could how in the world could you imagine if you had Fortnite before Fortnite happened and you were just like, how about we just let that just spittle out?
Like, how do you do that?
How do you have something like Halo and get it to the point where it is today?
and it was just fantastic mismanagement.
The Halo TV series was just
I almost threw up a little when you said that.
remind me.
it I don't know how a company could possibly like mistreat an IP.
had Neil Blomkamp on the hook to do an actual good Halo and they just let him go.
They just mismanaged him to the point where he was like, screw this, I don't wanna do it.
Neil fucking Blomkamp, dude, like one of the greatest directors of our time.
Ugh.
Yeah.
the only good news is that the Fallout TV series, I mean, you people can rag on Todd Howard all they want, but, you know, thank goodness, Tom, you know, Todd Howard was like
there for Fallout to like just be like, no, no, no.
Yeah, the Fallout TV series, that's canon.
That whatever happens there, that's canon with the, know, have respect for whatever the hell you're doing.
And then the Halo TV series comes out, it's like, no, no, they're they're blue team.
This is like a this is just a multiverse.
It's like, are you telling me that the Halo TV series is essentially fan fiction?
why the hell do I, what do you, how could you possibly mistreat this?
Imagine making like Harry Potter movies that weren't based on the books.
And it's like, are you, are you all there?
Do you even know what you're saying?
It just bothers me to no end.
I think we can all agree, hashtag bring back Peter Moore.
Yeah.
Dude, he actually gave a shit about Xbox.
I as a CEO, yeah, like, mean, like, yeah, I mean, there once was Don Matric once they moved to Don Matric.
That's when they went full suit and.
uh
never really recovered, it?
Not from his, uh
No, mean Phil, you know Phil Spencer gets a lot of shit but
Yeah, perhaps it just took too long.
don't know.
They just like, you you can blame a bunch of stuff and you can blame a bunch of things, but I don't know.
I see.
Microsoft just needs to put me in charge of Xbox and I'll bring it back.
I'll bring it back.
Microsoft into a Linux company, dude.
Dude, they already love Linux, come on.
They made Windows a subsystem for Linux open source.
like they actually, I mean, I don't want to give them too much credit, but yeah.
Yeah
hell does that- what does that entail for us though?
I don't know what that would actually entail to be honest.
actually do contribute a lot.
They're one of the biggest contributors to open source.
It's wild.
So yeah, it's, there's a point where, I don't know, the only thing that I would wish, like I have a small stupid wish that I wish that they would do, and this is like one of those
things where it's, uh you invest in your cool capital, you invest in your social capital, you don't plan on it making any money.
And it's just like, we bought Activision, we have Bethesda, we have all these old IPs, we have Blizzard IPs, like let's make a new rock and roll racing.
Let's make a new Space Quest.
Like, I'm not even talking about making like, you know, I'm talking about making Rock and Roll Racing 2 as if it was still on Super Nintendo.
I'm talking about making a new Space Quest if it was still on a 1993 PC.
have the same, give a $1 million, give a $2 million budget, which is nothing to them.
It's a rounding error.
And just make it.
Who cares if it doesn't do anything?
Just have, you have Game Pass, have one cool thing every month, nonstop, just to build up your social capital because you squandered it.
Yep.
Yeah.
Speaking of squandered, let's let's get into the next topic because we're running out of time, guys.
We got to get through this.
can go all day.
We can go to three hours if we want.
I have a bedtime that I have to get to at some point.
I've been sick all week and so I'm like, yeah, my sinus headache is not liking it.
Okay.
So.
uh
We talked about this last week, yes.
uh So yeah, the Fox wasn't here.
So last week we talked about Fortnite's like AI Darth Vader.
Have you heard about it, Fox?
I have, yeah, they're using James Oldron's voice.
Yeah, so SAG-AFRA is fighting back against Fortnite, claiming unfair labor practices because, know, Gardner mentioned this, I forget which one you two mentioned it, uh
mentioned that this essentially robs a possible opportunity for like a Darth Vader replacement voice because now all of a sudden no one's ever gonna voice Darth Vader ever
again.
He's gonna be entirely AI from here on out.
Right, yeah, they're just going to source uh a bunch of the stuff that he has said and just give that as the model and say, say these lines.
And it does.
uh Yeah.
um
uh I'm of two minds on this.
uh I agree with where they're coming from in so far as there is a fundamental problem that AI and companies using AI must eventually face is that it needs to have some idea of what
it is using.
It can't just use it and not have any idea of what it's using and it needs to know like, OK, I'm borrowing some of this.
I'm borrowing some of that.
if, you know, like remember when Studio Ghibli stuff was just getting spit out images like nonsense, like from OpenAI.
Like it's like make a Studio Ghibli thing and it's like, okay, five cents go to Studio Ghibli.
Like it has to have some thing inside of it where royalties are automatically divvied out.
There needs to be some regulation structure that AI has to have, you know, know what it's using and then.
pay accordingly to whatever because you can't just because it's a zero sum game eventually when you just kind of get get all this done down and then you just have this AI model uh
doing stuff on the other hand uh I don't I don't like so like one thing that I plan on doing myself I don't know when but it's gonna be like one like stupid passion project that
I have I don't like the new voices of Rick and Morty and I would rather AI them back to the
uh Rick and Morty voices that but I'm gonna do that for myself right like I like the idea of Having something that sounds authentic because I can hear if you found someone that was
like spot-on Darth Vader then cool There's totally people that I know that you can do that with but the people that they found for Rick and Morty were not are clearly not Rick and
Morty and it it it bothers my ear when I hear it it's like it brings me out it like
I can't get invested in what I'm watching because my brain is constantly being pulled out of what I'm engaging with.
Whatever, no big deal, right?
And those people are still getting paid, so I just want to choose myself to alter it, and not what these guys are doing.
So that's where I am in my head.
I love the idea of personally being able to do that.
It's less cool when they're able to just wholesale do it with
without any, feeding back in to the system that fed it.
So here's the thing though, so we all know that James Earl Jones signed legally in 2022.
Do you think he could have predicted that Fortnite would just like put his voice wholesale in there and just let people do whatever they want?
Like have him say like slurs and shit?
Cause that definitely did happen.
uh I don't know that anyone...
I think that everyone anticipated AI to first do all of the manual labor that no one wanted to do and not all the creative cool stuff that everyone wanted to do.
Like no one saw that coming.
No one's like, oh it makes the stuff I wanted to do in my spare time.
It doesn't do the stuff that I do for work.
I think he wanted his voice to continue on, right, within the movies and other art, but yeah, I don't even think he knew what Fortnite was, so probably not.
it's like what's his name, Roger Ebert, right?
He, uh he'd like that of lot of voice stuff so that his voice could still be used to do stuff in the future as well.
uh Yeah, possibly maybe, I don't know.
uh Regardless of whichever way you slice this apple, the reality comes down to that uh you can't just feed a model wholesale all this stuff and then crap out.
whatever you want in the style of whatever you want and not have that person be even like credited, right?
mean, just like, goodness gracious, like even if it was like for personal use, right?
Like as like a, a funzy thing, they're like, okay, well, whatever, this person's not gonna sell it for commercial reasons.
But like, you know, there's like D and D artists that I really like.
And that when AI stuff was first coming out, I'm like, dude, in this style.
And it would do a reasonably good job.
And I was like, wow, that's amazing.
And then, you have I respect artists and I have my my avatar that I use to this day is from an 8-bit artist that I commissioned to get done.
And, you know, I I want artists to be paid accordingly.
So uh initially, when it first came out, there was no taste to A.I.
There was zero taste to A.I.
But it feels like we're on the cusp of that.
kind of going away.
uh Give it a few years because it's been alarmingly fast how good the whole generation process has been.
uh
It's, think end of year for a lot of support roles.
They might not replace a lot of main, like, I use a lot of AI tools to help support some of the stuff I do, partially because I'm just tired of writing boilerplate stuff.
Does a really good job, if you know what you're doing.
Like someone that doesn't know AI and writes code is gonna write shit.
But if they know what to do,
Right.
a completely different thing.
atomic operations are things that, small atomic operations are things that AI can reasonably do well.
And then when you start having it, know, it's, well, some of the, I never, I would like use some of it and it was just like, well, you just erased most of the code.
Like, I just broke everything.
What the hell did you do?
If you like, if you just, yeah, so you really got to like, you know, have.
And there's so many like, you know, vibe coders.
Like, they've done some like...
joke about every week right now is I'm in my villain phase.
I'm vibe coding, but I know what I'm doing.
I know the code I'm writing and I haven't fixed it.
I've done semi-project management roles and so I know what I'm doing, but it's still funny to see people that don't get onto Reddit and like...
this thing's happening or there's more and more attacks happening, like sites getting taken over because they don't know how to write secure code.
It's interesting.
if you had one AI write the code and then separate AI correct that code and then you had the first AI correct that code?
I wonder what would happen.
Code Singularity.
actually writing some of that right now.
It's kind of interesting.
ah Because if you give it good contacts and good prompts, you can end up with an interesting ah end result.
But the problem is, I still don't think we're at the place where you can't have a human review of the stuff that it does, whether it be artwork or code.
you did this as a person that didn't know how to code?
I would be su-
yeah, you see, you really have to be careful because if it loses track of wherever the hell it was and just starts hallucinating new stuff, it really needs to have previous
context of what was going on as your, especially the code base as it uh is.
really, really short, small atomic things are things that it'll just bust out fairly well.
uh
tip is you have a project MD file in your whatever you're doing and you have it read from it and record to it what it did in short little things.
And it does a really good job, but it can still hallucinate.
It can still get off at times.
Not as much now, but it still can.
So it's not autonomous.
that's what I mean is you like you can't allow anyone that is not aware of what's happening uh or have any insight into how things work using this uh at all.
And especially in production environments, uh this is I would like it's like a full stop.
Do not enter.
Do not like.
But like when you go for like other things, small things.
uh
And these are just plain text that you just want to enter in.
It's fine.
uh But I still ultimately think that we have to go into a regulation phase for.
uh
it'll happen at some point.
mean, we've already seen some legislation in regards to AI and AI-generated sexual imagery.
We've seen that.
That's probably the biggest uh regulation that's happened so far, and I think there's more to come.
I think both parties wanted it though.
Like that's a very rare.
Trump is pushing this huge AI thing.
He has a lot of donors, a lot of people that are in the AI sphere that don't want regulations.
There is no way we're getting regulations on AI until we have a essentially government like in the like who's running the government because it's just not going to happen.
I don't think it's going to happen to where
The regulation is gonna have to be something, if your company is replacing workers and not hiring more and your profit's still high, you're gonna have to be taxed on an AI
percentage of what is being replaced or some type of profitability that you're gonna have to or else we're just doomed.
yeah, soapbox, I'm off my soapbox.
It's all good, man.
Soapboxes are what this podcast is all about.
uh
you thought that we weren't gonna mention anything about for anything but yeah, Anything else you guys want to mention on this AI thing like uh I did we even get to the main part
of it sag sag after
I mean, not really.
They didn't really do anything besides condemn Epic Games for doing this.
At least not yet, at least.
There's a good chance that maybe they'll take action.
Who knows.
But they have been going at it.
Yeah, I mean...
and they're very concerned with it, which makes sense.
I can see why.
The problem is that voice actors don't really get as much uh love from SAG-AFRAS like actual act like normal typical like in-person actors do which is unfortunate.
True, but sometimes the actors, the regular or like in-person actors or uh in real life actors, whatever, they do speak up for them sometimes.
like, yeah, hopefully, I don't know, it will be interesting to see where it all goes.
um For historical reasons, sorry.
yeah I mean no go ahead you go ahead
No, I was going to transition to the next topic.
if there's, okay, then do it transition.
way and just steal and plagiarize work instead of the old-fashioned way, not using AI.
So have you heard about the marathon situation, Carrie?
Uh, I have.
Yeah, so it looks like, so there's been an update.
Morale at Modern Bungie is at an all-time low.
Player feedback was not great with the gameplay itself, because, I mean, who wants to play a game where you lose everything?
You'd have to be a sadist to play something like Tarkov.
But at the same time, though...
is it where you lose everything in the game itself or because their servers only ran for a certain amount of time and then it's because they had reset it?
Well no, it's an extraction shooter so you get gear and if you make it out alive then you keep it.
But if you bring that gear in next time and you use it up or guess die, you lose that gear forever.
So it is like Tarkov kind of thing.
Okay.
Cause I know there's some extraction stuff where, well, maybe it's all based on that.
Yeah.
I mean.
also does like resets every season as well.
I haven't played the game yet.
It does seem pretty cool.
do like extraction shooters.
Or at I would like to like extraction shooters.
I haven't tried out any because honestly Tarkov has a lot of...
Oh?
is a better one, I think, than Turkov.
Hunt Showdown is pretty good.
I like that one a lot, but it does suck to lose all your stuff.
Yeah, but like, you know what feels even better?
Making other people lose all their stuff.
You can tell I'm a troll.
I'm a greaper.
I've played too much Dark Souls.
yeah you probably would like something like this then so okay marathon is confirmed it's it's a high tech game okay from the stolen artwork to briefing
So for me
play Dark Souls, Dark Souls 1.
I love invading people in Dark Souls, it's awesome.
Basically, yeah.
So basically in Dark Souls 1, you can choose to invade other players.
And you can actually stop their forward momentum in the game by ambushing them.
You probably would have loved to ultimate online in the 90s.
my gosh.
Yeah, you probably would have.
my gosh.
That was so bad.
No, it's not.
I didn't like it.
low level.
Dude, it's not about winning, it's about making other people lose.
Ha
gosh.
Yeah, you need to go play Tarkov.
I've saw Little Shop of Horrors when I was a kid.
I saw it in the movie theater.
And I did not realize I had no context to understand.
You guys ever watched Little Shop of Horrors?
Martin?
All right, so Steve Martin, Bill Murray's in it for a short moment.
Rick Moranis.
It's a great movie.
You should watch it.
It's kind of weird, but it's awesome.
Anyway, there's a scene where Steve Martin is a sadist and he's a dentist.
So.
It's a great job to have because you know they're strapped down and they're getting drilled and he's enjoying it He's enjoying it because they have to take it and they're
paying him money, so he's loving it Bill Murray comes in and he's a masochist ah and he goes there and he loves it because he's getting pain and the sadist hates it because He's
the masochist is enjoying it and I didn't realize that when I was a kid I was like what the hell is going on and only until I became later on in my life, and I was like oh
You
are sadists that makes sense and that all of this didn't come into my head Speaking of you being a sadist, know, just griefing people in Dark Souls.
I was getting a uh root canal done of Ruka I was getting I was getting a wisdom tooth removed and The guy put Novak in in my my mouth waited like a minute and then started
going to work and I was like, I feel that and He went like this.
not even joking uh like
What the hell dude like and when he went it was like Little Shop of Horrors is like I was like oh dentists are sadists this all makes sense now he hated Bill Murray because Bill
Murray was enjoying that oh so it's like all of it came rushing back to me anyway you should go watch Little Shop of Horrors you probably hate it because you're a sadist
will.
Love.
though, it's pretty good
Yeah, it's really good.
Yeah, but uh anyways modern bungee, you know, we were talking about how halo Like fell hard under the stewardship of Microsoft but to be honest it would probably have felt it
probably would have fallen anyways under the stewardship of modern bungee because I mean
of sadists...
Hahaha!
This, unfortunately, I take no pleasure in because I actually kind of like Destiny.
I do play a lot of Destiny.
So Destiny just felt like Halo to me in a different world.
all the physics and gunplay in it were Halo-esque.
uh
it's based on their internal engine.
Tiger Engine, I believe it was.
But with certain modifications, like the ability to use other weapons with stats and perks and all that shit.
don't know, but Bungie isn't doing so hot.
Morale is at an all-time low because, like I said before, not great impressions with the gameplay.
And, you the art theft.
Like, you know, like, you know, art raiders came out the alpha, also came around the same time, and it was much better received.
And because of that, and also the plagiarism accusations, they started calling marathon art raiders.
Dude.
Dude, it's kind of fucked up if you really think about it, but it's really funny.
Yeah, I mean, it's back to that, you know, we mentioned Shephadesius, uh you know, if at what point does the studio, like, are the original team members that made Bungie Bungie
still there and in force?
Are they still present?
And, you know, there's lots of companies like that, like, you know, there's like InXile.
Yeah, so it's...
uh
You kind of have these studios that have done all these things, but none of the people that made it what it was are really there.
And yeah, we're you know, we're there's things that are getting lost and.
I don't know, you know, it's all in the value of like again, they don't value the social capital.
They don't value anything.
It's.
Complete tangent, but it's like if we're talking to regulations before private equity firms should be regulated against.
It is a monopoly in all sense of names.
It's like one step removed from being a monopoly.
It's like the dumb thing that they do in Japan with like pachinko parlors where it's like, no, no, no, they're not gambling.
They're just they they bought the balls.
It's like, yeah, but they take those balls and they walk five steps outside and go into a parlor and then they cash out those balls and like, yeah, well, that's something that's
another store.
They buy those balls like they're the same place.
They're just you're just one step removed.
And the private equity firms to me, man, are like the absolute worst of where we are right now.
And then they just buy up all this stuff, condense down, uh get people to like work like crazy and then offshore whatever they can.
And it's just this crazy go nuts thing of like taking all of these like the point of where they are right now.
I don't know if you guys are aware.
Have any of you guys been following private equity firms at all?
No, I can't say I have.
yeah, it's crazy.
the bigger stuff, Like Burger King and all the fast food restaurants and they consolidate all.
So now it's like Blackstone or whatever, whatever it is owns all of those.
But they've done all of the easy pickings targets that they're now going into the next level of, uh well, how about we just buy up all the HVAC and plumbers in a certain region
and we'll buy all those and then we'll just shove them all into one place and fire a bunch of people and have them do the jobs of like
80 companies and we'll just keep all the field engineers but all of the administration will condense.
uh And that's like their step that's where we are in private equity firm area is that they're just buying HVAC stuff and there's a joke from like one YouTube channel that
covers like you know uh labor laws and all this other stuff and the video is like uh making a plum making a plumbing business
to be bought up by a private equity firm, like as a joke, right?
Like they, you know, if they say, oh, this plumber doesn't even have a website.
Think of all the money that we'll be able to make like by doing all these things.
And it's just like a shell stupid company to, it's like a, a honeypot for private equity firms.
Like, I don't know you guys have heard of the honeypops that they'd done for AI, where they have these robot.txt files that have recursive links and keep them caged inside, just
like constantly looping through.
Yep.
It's kind of like that.
It's like this is the stage of warfare that we're at.
We're creating shell plumber companies to be purchased by private equity firms.
I don't know, dude.
ah Stuff.
we could do that.
Make a, like a shell plodding company.
Yeah.
Or we could make a uh shell game development company that Microsoft buys.
Yeah, like I don't know we'll call yourself bunjo Yeah, I got this guy on tap
Yeah, private equity is a nasty business.
are parasitic and such a...
does not, they don't.
They don't really do much for society in any way.
ah you like Pizza Hut back in the day, blame them because they're the ones that bought them then made it so that they had worse product ah and they just haven't recovered.
Yeah, Toys R Us, KB Toys, Private Equity firms.
Literally anything from my childhood that I can remember that fondly like going to and having some type of like good time, Private Equity firm came and just extracted, just took
all the juice and left a husk.
Yeah.
crazy how honestly, I don't say this often, like evil it is.
Yeah, it's I don't get it.
It's like monopolies.
No, no, no, you can't do that.
Private every firms are cool.
You're a monopoly, but you're like all those companies still exist.
So you're not one big company.
You're like 13 big companies, but you're just at the top of that.
And it's like a weird pyramid stream.
They're worse than monopoly.
They'll buy everything up and then they just because they want to extract profit.
This is the whole point is to extract profit and not to actually build a business up and improve it and get more profit in an ethical way.
They do it in an unethical way, in my opinion.
So.
yeah, no, it's it is what they do.
They they just min max all of the companies that are in a sector, take all of those companies that are in a sector, move around whatever resources they have to better extract
out of it.
And that's it.
And it's like, well, that that all failed.
It's like, yeah, well, we're full.
My God.
Well, we what else can we private equity?
It's I don't know.
If you're working at a company and it gets acquired, I'd look for another job.
Because usually they're going to lay off a lot of people anyways, so.
other guy down.
Yeah, exactly right.
Yes.
Yeah, that would suck.
Okay, guys, we have one more topic.
Do we want to do it or should we just skip it?
Warhammer Conference?
over it real quick.
We just want to talk about Warhammer.
So Warhammer has gained a lot of notoriety as of recent, primarily because of Space Marine 2, but also because of Secret Level, and also because of Henry Cavill being a Warhammer
dude.
It's like the number nerdiest thing anyone can do, to be honest.
Yeah, I never got into Warhammer just because it was way too expensive.
I could never rationalize.
Like I was like, cool Warhammer.
And I picked up a little figurine.
was like 40 bucks for this and I have to paint it?
Like what the hell?
that's how games workshop is still around man they you pay 40 bucks for a figure that you have to paint yourself otherwise they'd probably be like
You know what's amazing to me?
I don't know how Games Workshop is still around since 3D printers came along because you could totally just be like, I'm going to print myself up a little $40 figure for about
three bucks.
I get it.
You can make some good money if you're really good at painting them.
But then also on top of it, you customize your army and it also gives them buffs and it does other things.
Like there's a whole thing about it.
I am totally like I, like the geek side of me loves it, but the, the, the cost conscious side of me will just not entertain it.
And I just.
yeah, it's exactly the same.
Your work has Henry Cavill told you to do it.
I mean, I am genuinely excited for the TV show that he's going to be making.
like all like I loved all of the Witcher stuff that was out prior.
I don't know.
I appreciate that he is, you know, adamant about being, you know, like, oh, no, we have to keep to the lore.
I want I want to be invested in something.
I don't want to be I don't want to invest in in like fan fiction.
It's like, OK, whatever you do.
I understand that Warhammer is there's lots of stories and there's lots of things and but I don't know.
think a lot of it is like super canony like they just have an easier allowance because it's just such a giganto universe of stuff.
There's like trillions of population.
So it's like well of course this could happen in this world over there because it's a bazillion people.
uh But yes it's you know when.
One thing that I liked that Disney did, not that I liked it all that much, but when they bought Star Wars, they basically said, hey, you know all those books and all those comic
books and everything else?
That's all legends now.
None of that happened.
And it's like, wait, you're saying all of the things that people got invested in story-wise never happened?
They're like, no, no, no.
It's just a legend.
And if you're going to retcon a bunch of stuff and say it never happened, I have a problem with that wholesale.
But they have it as legends now.
m
It's like legends that happen inside.
Like, oh, did you hear that?
There's this guy that did it.
So it's legends that happen inside of the lore of Star Wars, that all of these are tall tales that those people have told inside of there.
Like, OK, well, that's at least some consideration.
it's like, I don't know.
Have you guys ever read any of the Halo books?
I read the Fall of Reesh like in middle school.
Right, yeah, the books I genuinely loved.
uh Eric Nyland did some fantastic work from the first few ones.
And I was so invested in that after I played the game and I loved Halo 1.
And was like, crap, I'm going read the book.
And then that was dope.
uh And then they were just like, actually, know, all the books aren't canon.
Whatever happens in the game is canon.
And it was like, here's the list of precedents for canon for the Halo series.
And it was like, the game is number one.
uh books are like number three.
It was like something like crazy and it was like well you can't have...
basically all you're saying is anything that is in the game is fan fiction and that's dumb and it's gotten to the point that the games are so convoluted story-wise that it's...
they've...
we've already talked about how Microsoft has mishandled this thing.
Yeah.
uh
never been a good story in my opinion.
think the universe and the FPS shooter and a co-op shooter, it's fun.
I don't think the story is like amazing.
The books are actually good story.
I actually like the story.
It really flushes things out in my opinion.
when you like, if you are very reductive for the Halo TV series, it's like, what if the Bible was real and it's sci-fi?
And it's like, what?
Yeah, yeah, you know the arc?
no, yeah, yeah, that's actually aliens.
It's like, huh?
Yeah, it's like, that's all, that's all that comes down to is that it's like Bible sci-fi is what the Halo, if to be reductive, right?
uh I kind of like,
I'm I'm I'm on board with that like with all the things that they did and like the halo rings are to terminate all life but the covenant the covenant.
I that's how they get to heaven like that's how they die and go to heaven they go to their their better life so there's like an idea of an afterlife and all but they don't know it's
an afterlife they're just like if we activate this we go to heaven and they'll die but it's like all of these things are like okay I you know.
dogmatic aliens is crazy.
mean, dude, they call they call Master Chief Demon like it's all just sci fi Bible.
That's all that it really is.
But I still I still like that because it's like it's kind of like Indiana Jonesy type of in that rain like that realm like, OK, I can buy that.
like Indiana Jones stuff just because it features that stuff and it's super supernatural in a number of ways.
uh
So it's the same type of thing for me.
Yes, I will agree that if you're reductive, it's kind of like super like whatever.
still, I used to like it, but now it's just whatever.
I to be honest though, think a lot of what makes Halo so memorable for people is the cinematography.
mean, yeah, it's very reductive, yes, it's just basically the sci-fi bible, but at the same time though, if you're actually watching the cutscenes, it feels more than the sum of
its parts, for sure.
the music is on...
Everything about it was a flash in the pan thing that I don't think...
They were white-knuckling the entire development process of what that was supposed to be, like an RTS into the FPS, going to Xbox.
There's a whole thing of actually landing where they landed, ah and then the multiplayer just be like, whoa.
Ha ha ha.
unreal.
And then when Halo 2 came out, was, by and large, like you look at the lobby system that they created and all the other things that they made, they were in the future.
um yeah, they were like banging on all cylinders.
And I would even say that Halo 3 was like the pinnacle of Haloness.
There's actually a video that someone recorded, like a mini documentary of his own personal thing going to a midnight launch for Halo 3.
And it's like in 720, like gnarly 720p.
And it's genuinely one of the best YouTube videos that exists on the platform.
It just feels like a very YouTube video.
And it manages to capture Halo 3.
And it manages to capture the aura of Halo, the last remnants of it.
uh
to think that Halo used to be like, you know how GTA 6 is like the most anticipated game right now?
Like it's crazy to think that Halo used to be there and it's all gone.
Oh yeah, and speaking of like retconning lore and like turning into Legends, know I've always like, like remember the Legend of Zelda, like there used to be an interpretation
that all the Zelda games are telling the same story more or less.
But given that it's a folktale that's been passed down throughout time, the story has changed up slightly because that's just how folklore changes over time.
I've always really liked that interpretation instead of it being the three timeline thing that Modern Zelda is because it's a- uh
then?
Like Wind Waker is quite a bit different than all the other ones.
ah
Well, you know, probably folklore from like thousands of years later.
It's not even the same story like, you know, you know, like Disney, like, you know how like Disney's interpretation of like fairy tales are like completely different compared to
like the actual fairy tales.
Yeah, like that almost, but like not quite Disney.
true.
True true.
Well, Warhammer, have we set our peace on this thing?
during the Warhammer Skulls event that happened the same time Computex happened.
They announced Warhammer Space Marine Mastercraft.
Yes.
yeah that looks cool have any of you guys played space from me too
Yeah, I have two twos on my list.
I've played the original and I loved it
yeah, I played the original and it was was fine.
It was very three six PS three sixty type of game.
uh And Space Marine two is just way, way better.
I was not into this.
I still have to play through it.
But the first the engine that they have designed for Space Marine two is fantastic.
The amount of enemies that they have on screen at one time while keeping performance consistent is crazy.
It really puts you in this space of whole crap.
know, like on Starship Troopers where you just have this wave of aliens and it's just like there's millions.
I can't even count them.
They're uncountable amount of enemies.
The first level of the tutorial does that for you.
It's just like this swarm that is never ending and performance never really waivers all that much.
It's just a truly fantastic engine to flex that world.
And Space Marine 2 is 10 times better than Space Marines 1.
If you guys are anywhere on your queue, yeah, it's really, really cool.
I really enjoy.
I love the Space Marine games.
I love the RTS games.
I love all the different.
I love that they're so free with like, oh, let's put this in this game.
And it's like, this is a TRPG.
And this is an RTS.
And this is like a third person action game.
I love that they're super flexible and allowing that license to go to all these different companies and it helps it helps that you know making Warhammer.
there was also that boomer shooter they're making another one.
the, uh, bolt gun, yeah, I have that.
That was really, I really liked it.
yeah, Bolt Gun 2 is coming.
Yeah, like I love that they're so free to let their IP kind of dance around.
And I think that helps the Warhammer franchise kind of uh hit people that it normally wouldn't hit.
Because if they just stayed inside of the tabletop game that they were, it would be a super niche thing.
But what they've allowed
is really cool.
I love the idea and more to the point, I would love to get more involved in the Warhammer thing, but I think for me, the Henry Cavill TV show with Amazon Prime is going to be where
the lore sits in my head.
Because I have a general understanding of what's going on, but I'm genuinely waiting for that.
Yeah, 100%.
It's games and maybe some other stuff I read online sometimes about it, but I can't do the game.
Like the tabletop.
a friend that has like a 12 hour Warhammer lore PowerPoint info dump.
I do.
my gosh.
What's removed?
Was it like uh six degrees from Kevin Bacon?
We got one degree from Warhammer Lore.
Oh no.
how many degrees from give it yeah sorry go for it
a couple of, like, last year and, uh, this...
one of my friends was there and he was like, hey, let's go to the board game shop, uh, like, in the downtime between the wedding and the reception.
And so we went to the board game shop and all he wanted to do was explain all the fucking different, like, figurines and what they were and I was like, dude, I...
I'm a nerd, but I'm not that dirty, alright?
Yes.
I'm glad we're all agree that Warhammer is like the number one nerdiest thing.
Yeah.
You know, I don't know.
I've come to appreciate it more when I was younger.
Right.
Yeah, I mean, but no, mean, like I was like I was always a nerd and a geek growing up.
But even for like when I saw people playing Dungeons and Dragons, I turned my nose up at those guys.
Dungeons and Dragons nerds like like look at me on Dungeons and Dragons.
I have chain mail on like like I'm a nerd making fun of those guys.
And I'm just like actually Dungeons and Dragons.
So we gotta make a nerdiest thing tier list.
We can all agree Warhammer's at the top.
What's number two?
Dungeons and Dragons probably.
Star Wars.
don't know man, a lot of normies like Star Wars.
What's the nerdiest thing?
I don't even know man.
I Dungeon Dragons has got to be up there ah
then like, anime's probably up there too, to be honest.
uh
is the, what's the, um, the generic universal role play thing?
Like GERP?
GERP.
No, no, no, GERP.
There's, so like there's D &D, right?
But if we're making a tier list, then, then GERP is a, if you're making your own generic universal role play.
So it's like, it's a framework for you to make your own D &D style game.
Uh-huh.
And that, if you're making your own D &D style game, then you're a tier above, D &D.
Yeah.
right, okay.
I can yeah like DND's DND when DND is pedestrian for you I Know I'm a Gerber Man look at this Gerber, baby
Pfft!
where do think video games lie on that tier list?
You know they've grown in popularity but if you ask that question in the 80s it would be full on nerd.
Growing up I had to hide the fact that I played video games lest I would be labeled you know as full on nerd territory and you did not want to use this.
I remember playing basketball when I was like 12 with someone we're just playing basketball and it's like you know you know we're playing and he's like he's like alright
I'm gonna get going I'm gonna play Diablo 2 and I'm like Diablo 2 and then we get closer.
And they're like, do you play EverQuest?
This is like, you're like whispering at that point.
But that's like where it was.
was just like you did not admit out loud that you played video games when I was young, at least in where I grew up.
I mean comic books used to be the same way too.
I mean before Marvel made it really big I mean you'd have to be a huge fucking nerd to know anything about the comics besides like Batman's parents died like that's like
Yeah, I never saw anyone actually read comic books.
Anytime I ever heard anyone talk about comic books when I was young was like, if I get this, it's going to be worth a lot of money in the future type of type of thing.
never I never actually found someone that read comic legitimately.
I never saw anyone read a comic book, but then they could have been hiding.
They could have been like, you know, sit.
Yeah.
When I was growing up, my dad actually published comic books.
Like, he wrote and published them.
So, yeah.
wait, wait, who did he work for, Marvel or DC?
Or someone else?
an independent comic book artist.
Like, yeah, dude, he he published a comic book.
put he so in the late 80s and early 90s, he had three issues of a horror anthology uh comic book called Fang Magazine.
And then later on, he had a a uh 10 series, 10 issue series called Lobster Man, Maine's first superhero.
And there's like nothing about it online.
I've looked.
eh
now, I don't see anything that looks like a comic book.
That's crazy.
Dude, dude, Lord Drop, dude, we need, dude, Lord Drop this shit, man.
This is interesting stuff.
Well, I haven't read all of it because they're like the books are falling apart because they're like literally 30 years old so
Just put like some like latex gloves.
You know those gloves that they use to like unbox rare stuff like Magic cards?
Like you know if you like come across a Black Lotus video like they're always wearing white gloves.
yeah, Magic is pretty up there too.
I know.
I need to do that.
Anything you want to plug before you head out?
I mean you can just find me on the Fox on YouTube and I cover a lot of PC gaming handles I try to explore you know taking them as far as I can but also to give you a good
understanding of the performance you can get out of them and any of the new news that's coming out and that's what I do
Yeah, this guy Fox.
Never gets old.
stuff, good stuff.
Okay, with that, let's head out.
Have a good one, everyone.
Later.
bye.
Later.