A Writer's journey into game development

This week at last I received the new video card: an XFX Radeon RX 560. I actually wanted an MSI, the OC model, but my friend decided to buy elsewhere. I have to say that the card really scared me, it's auto load sensing system halts the fan when the load/temperature is low. Son, when I installed the official driver, the fan stopped. Had to ask a lot and try in other PC to notice that it was the intended behavior. The perfomance is not exceptional, of course, I was aware of that before testing it. The 560 is not a high end card, and it's 4Gb memory is a bit more than it really needs. All I can do now I couldn't with my old R7 250 is that I can play at full HD resolution with quality settings at medium or high, depending on the game, and reach 40 FPS. The good news is that also I will upgrade CPU, motherboard and RAM, but still, will keep some money for a future card. My plans are to replace the 560 in a year or so with something much better. Also,  a friend of mine fi...

My current phone is crap. I lost my half decent Galaxy Ace a year ago, in the middle of a long line of unfortunate events. Was a bad year, and I lost many things. I had to buy a DDC E4s, a friend brought it from USA and I paid like $70 USD for it. I liked the design, and the terminal has proven to be solid, with a few quirks. The accessories are total crap,  the earbuds stopped working after using them twice, and the USB cable also stopped chargin after some months. Have you ever seen that? It is a fucking USB cable, they last forever, what can go wrong? And the camera... better not to talk about the image quality. So, I guess that at some point, I'll have to upgrade to a better phone, when I find the cash. And considering that getting the funds will take some time, and  Google is already working in its next generation mobile OS, maybe my next device won't be Android, but Fuchsia? The new Google Fuchsia does not uses Linux as kernel, but a new one based on Little Kernel (...

I have a little sorrow in my life: never have been able to build a PC to my entire satisfaction. Lack of budget, of course. If I were to build my dreamed rig, how it would be? Well, probably I would choose some i5, maybe 4th or 5th generation, something with 4 cores. Nowadays 8Gb seems to be enough RAM to play any game and develop, so I would stick to that. My PSU of choice is a 620 watt Antec, or similar, had one of those that worked flawlessly. I tend to favor Asus motherboards, so, surely that would be my choice. Not sure if I would have an SSD, but the main storage would be some 2 Tb traditional hard drive, plus some external drive. Even when I consider that optical disks are becoming irrelevant, I would include a BluRay drive, and a card reader. Although I have been an ATI/AMD user for years, it is mostly because budget reasons. I have good experiences with Nvidia cards, so I dont discard that my  video card could be a 970. Otherwise, Fury Nano looks good. For sure, it ...

The Oculus price is far beyond expected, because they decided to optimize over cost . Even the previous price of $350 was a bit out of my reach, but now it is completely impossible. First, let me explain that I dont buy my PC parts with my symbolic salary: about $40 USD. I usually do something . Some extra job, some help from a friend, etc. This means that Im behind technology all the time, my CPU is a generation (or two, or three) old, my display is 4-5 inches less than the average, storage is always insufficient and the RAM is the barely needed. So, my PC is far from the minimum requirements to provide a decent VR experience. And, unless some miracle happens, I wont be spending any more money to improve it this year, besides the PSU and RAM Im buying next month. Anyway, this is not that bad. I dont like to be an early adopter, and in this specific case it is good to step aside and see what happens during this year. We have Oculus, but also HTC Vive, which means it is going to be...

Yesterday quickly read Anandtech review of R9 Nano , which is already available (you can find it at Newegg, ranging from $649 to $669). This card seems to offer only good things: the perfomance of its elder sibling Fury X (shares the same specs, with a bit slower clock speed), low power requirement (only 175W), the new HBM memory, and small size. Because size does matters. The price competes with Nvidia's GTX 980 Ti, which can be found (again, on Newegg) for $679-$689, although in perfomance terms, the green card keeps the lead in almost all tests, by 10 or more FPS. More or less, depends on the game. IMHO, the extra $10 (not the extra $20, that Zotac is way too expensive) are compensated by the perfomance gains, plus other factors like Nvidia cards having a nice VDPAU support under Linux. But do not underestimate the Nano, its perfomance, specially in 4K resolutions, are more than enough to hace a decent playing experience. Im just saying that if you can get 10-15 extra frames ...