GasBandit
Staff member
Sounds like Volition is circling the drain.
https://www.bluesnews.com/s/184235/volition-layoffs-reported
https://www.bluesnews.com/s/184235/volition-layoffs-reported
I wanted it...Nobody wanted Agents of Mayhem.
As well it shouldn't. But it does affect recommendations that gamers will make to one anotherBitcoin miner money,gamer money, makes no difference to AMD.
I didn't. It's not that it didn't look good. It just looked like Saints Row IV with a new paint job and a few new bells and whistles. Plus, as Yahtzee pointed out, they carried a LOT of assets over from Saints Row IV, including the Saints' logo.Nobody wanted Agents of Mayhem.
I've considered getting a new video card during, say, a Black Friday sale or something similar. Right now, I have an AMD Radeon R9 200 Series. It's served me well but doesn't run games like Witcher 3 at the highest settings. I wouldn't mind seeing what the game looks like maxed out. If I got an Nvidia card instead, though, I don't understand the difference between AMD and Nvidia's numbering systems.TechSpot rates the best current video cards.
TLDR:
Best Entry Level (<$100): Nvidia GT1030 ($70)
Best Mainstream(<$200): Nvidia GT1050Ti ($150)
Best Mid-range (<$300): Nvidia GTX1060 3gig ($210)
Best High-end (~$400): Nvidia GTX1070 ($420)
Best Enthusiast-grade (~$500): Nvidia GTX1080 ($530-$560)
Best Money-is-no-object: Nvidia GTX1080Ti ($700-$800)
AMD would have done better in their rankings if not for the bitcoin miner fad causing massive price inflation in the GPU market right now, which is affecting AMD more than Nvidia.
Let me introduce you to https://www.videocardbenchmark.net/ .I've considered getting a new video card during, say, a Black Friday sale or something similar. Right now, I have an AMD Radeon R9 200 Series. It's served me well but doesn't run games like Witcher 3 at the highest settings. I wouldn't mind seeing what the game looks like maxed out. If I got an Nvidia card instead, though, I don't understand the difference between AMD and Nvidia's numbering systems.
So, sounds like I should just hold onto what I have for now. If I went by your 30%/$150 rule, which sounds reasonable to me.Let me introduce you to https://www.videocardbenchmark.net/ .
This site will be your best friend in picking a new video card.
Specifically, the section for "best value."
https://www.videocardbenchmark.net/gpu_value.html
The fact of the matter is there's a lot of overlap between the numbering systems of even the same manufacturer, much less across different manufacturers. A GTX 1050 gives you about the same performance as a GTX 480 and a GTX 570, despite those being cards from 5 or 6 series ago. So it's best to just compare price and power directly.
That said, here's a table that indicates what card models are comperable across the manufacturers.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gpu-hierarchy,4388.html
I don't think the R9 200 series went lower than 270, so you probably have about the equivalent of a GTX 1050. It's still a good entry level card, and you'll be hard pressed to do better for less than $200. You could upgrade to a GTX 1050ti, but you'd be getting about 30% more performance and spending $150. Really, for me, I need to at least double my current performance before I'll think about upgrading.
It could long-term. One big knock against AMD for years now is how well games are optimized for AMD (especially at launch), and the fewer gamers are running AMD cards, the less incentive there is for developers to make sure their games run well on AMD.Bitcoin miner money,gamer money, makes no difference to AMD.
I feel real good about getting my GTX 960 on sale for under $100 now.Let me introduce you to https://www.videocardbenchmark.net/ .
This site will be your best friend in picking a new video card.
Specifically, the section for "best value."
https://www.videocardbenchmark.net/gpu_value.html
The fact of the matter is there's a lot of overlap between the numbering systems of even the same manufacturer, much less across different manufacturers. A GTX 1050 gives you about the same performance as a GTX 480 and a GTX 570, despite those being cards from 5 or 6 series ago. So it's best to just compare price and power directly.
That said, here's a table that indicates what card models are comperable across the manufacturers.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gpu-hierarchy,4388.html
I don't think the R9 200 series went lower than 270, so you probably have about the equivalent of a GTX 1050. It's still a good entry level card, and you'll be hard pressed to do better for less than $200. You could upgrade to a GTX 1050ti, but you'd be getting about 30% more performance and spending $150. Really, for me, I need to at least double my current performance before I'll think about upgrading.
Well, I've been breaking it lately (Darn Terrik, Dei and Snuffles ) but yeah, I usually wait until a game is 75% off or $10, whichever happens first (not necessarily which is cheaper).So, sounds like I should just hold onto what I have for now. If I went by your 30%/$150 rule, which sounds reasonable to me.
(Heh, you also taught me to the "75% off or under $10, whichever is cheaper" rule, which I often follow)
That was a pretty darn good deal.I feel real good about getting my GTX 960 on sale for under $100 now.
FTFY
AMD did try to combat this by selling cards as part of bundled "packs," so that people who were buying them for just the cards themselves would pile up a useless (to them) pile of add-ons. Trouble was, these add-ons weren't as universally desired by gamers as AMD thought.Bitcoin miner money,gamer money, makes no difference to AMD.
This is one of the Passmark sites, which are very handy not just for rating GPUs, but also CPU comparison.Let me introduce you to https://www.videocardbenchmark.net/
Right now, I have an AMD Radeon R9 200 Series.
The 200 series was really just a rebadged 7000-series with (mostly) software tweaks, but it was still AMD's first GCN-based card (i.e., their first serious GPGPU architecture), and top of the line back in early 2012. My main PC is still using a 7970, which incidentally was the last card that AMD officially supported for WinXP. I'm probably going to be stuck with this setup until the whole cryptocurrency thing dies down enough for gamers, which probably won't be until 2019 the way things are looking now (Supposedly, video cards with 3GB or less RAM will be useless for Ethereum after April of 2018, and surpassing those with 4GB or less RAM after mid-2019).So, sounds like I should just hold onto what I have for now.
Its main value (I think) is that it is decentralized. If you want more Dollars, you can only get them from America. If you want more Euros, from Europe, etc. But if you want more Bitcoins/Ethereum/etc, you can literally make your own out of math...math done by video cards (or ASICs in the case of Bitcoin these days). Nobody exclusively owns the right to manufacture them, they are out there for anyone to discover, much like discovering a gold nugget (which has value no matter where you take it), hence the term "mining."I keep hearing about this crytocurrency thing but I have no idea what people are talking about.
That only leaves me more confused.Its main value (I think) is that it is decentralized. If you want more Dollars, you can only get them from America. If you want more Euros, from Europe, etc. But if you want more Bitcoins/Ethereum/etc, you can literally make your own out of math...math done by video cards (or ASICs in the case of Bitcoin these days). Nobody exclusively owns the right to manufacture them, they are out there for anyone to discover, much like discovering a gold nugget (which has value no matter where you take it), hence the term "mining."
--Patrick
If you are saying to yourself "why would this have value?" It doesn't, but then paper money doesn't either, not outside of what we say they do. Crypto currency has value because it is a unique piece of mathematical data that takes a long time to create, hence has scarcity and thus can be attributed value among those who wish to use it. Like bottle caps in fallout.That only leaves me more confused.
In extreme layman's terms, "mining" bitcoins is done by computers working on math to build something called a "blockchain." The blockchain is an encrypted digital ledger that is constantly compared by "miners" against each other, that don't trust each other. Thus, the integrity of the "ledger" is maintained. Encryption of this magnitude takes a lot of computing power to perform, and the decentralized system rewards those who do that work with bitcoin in their "wallet."That only leaves me more confused.
This is why the most successful bitcoin farms are almost universally done on the down-low using someone else's juice and AC. It's not exactly hard to sneak a rig or two into your company if you work IT and basically tell anyone who asks "Don't touch it or the entire system goes down".I tried mining bitcoin for a couple months back in the day. I made about 12 dollars' worth. I'm pretty sure I used more electricity than $12 worth.
Well the entire idea is based off of the Seti@Home crowd-sourcing thing that started in the 90's (which basically created the idea of the torrent too), which actually DOES do good by crowd-sourcing excess computer time into something that allows people to assist the SETI program in analyzing the massive amounts of data they collect in their pursuit of intelligent alien life. The problem here is that folks who have massive amounts of data to analyze and massive amounts of money don't overlap much, so any... benevolent organization looking to take advantage of something like this doesn't really have the backing needed to reward people for it or they'd just be hiring out people to analyze the data.Has anyone figured out how to make a cryptocurrency with mining that actually does something productive? Like, folding @ home except you're not just helping medical research, you're mining currency too? Or is there just no possible overlap in the math between something that's both productive, but also verifiably has the qualities needed to be a cryptocurrency?
Yes, this could totally be done.Has anyone figured out how to make a cryptocurrency with mining that actually does something productive? Like, folding @ home except you're not just helping medical research, you're mining currency too? Or is there just no possible overlap in the math between something that's both productive, but also verifiably has the qualities needed to be a cryptocurrency?
Adding a confirmation step would stop that, but it would also make people wonder if you were just going to take the data and run. On the other hand, without it, you have no assurance that the data is correct and properly decoded until it's in your hands.Yes, this could totally be done.
However, once you attach a monetary reward to the amount of work done, people will optimize their clients to maximize the amount of money generated...and the first step to that will be to strip out all of the "productive" code that is competing with the money generating routine(s).
--Patrick
But, if it were working like any other cryptocurrency, it wouldn't be backed by any capital, unless I'm misunderstanding where the value behind a Bitcoin comes from. It's not like when you're mining a Bitcoin you're actually extracting money from an account somewhere, or am I misunderstanding?It also creates the problem that suddenly 100k people are competing for the 100k that used to constitute a single data analyst's salary.
That would assume that the money generating routine and the actual work were two different things. That's what I was asking, if someone found a way to make the money generating routine actually produce useful data at the same time. It wouldn't necessarily even have to be charitable data. I mean, right now whatever numbers produced by coin mining are merely proof that you mined a coin, but what if the proof that you mined the coin had value as the answer to some mathematical problem as well?Yes, this could totally be done.
However, once you attach a monetary reward to the amount of work done, people will optimize their clients to maximize the amount of money generated...and the first step to that will be to strip out all of the "productive" code that is competing with the money generating routine(s).
That's the thing, though. These "coins" are the answer to some mathematical problem. That's why they have value. They possess unique mathematical properties that make them ideal for blockchain processing, and as such are used for just that purpose.whatever numbers produced by coin mining are merely proof that you mined a coin, but what if the proof that you mined the coin had value as the answer to some mathematical problem as well?
No, you're right. I fucked up there. Again though, I would argue that the coin's "value" is derived from the fact that I can exchange it for dollars and not anything else (outside of very few stores that accept bitcoin). If I couldn't, it wouldn't have a fluctuating value. Therefore, bitcoin is defacto backed by other currencies in the way that dollars used to be backed by gold. If it wasn't, the value of the cryptocurrencies would be stable and not fueled by speculation.But, if it were working like any other cryptocurrency, it wouldn't be backed by any capital, unless I'm misunderstanding where the value behind a Bitcoin comes from. It's not like when you're mining a Bitcoin you're actually extracting money from an account somewhere, or am I misunderstanding?
Ash, you need to read this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiat_moneyNo, you're right. I fucked up there. Again though, I would argue that the coin's "value" is derived from the fact that I can exchange it for dollars and not anything else (outside of very few stores that accept bitcoin). If I couldn't, it wouldn't have a fluctuating value. Therefore, bitcoin is defacto backed by other currencies in the way that dollars used to be backed by gold. If it wasn't, the value of the cryptocurrencies would be stable and not fueled by speculation.