RTX 3080 Is Here: Time to Upgrade

Today is the official launch date for Nvidia's latest graphics card, the RTX 3080. Of course, scoring one of these just by itself seems to be an impossible thing right now thanks to those annoying scalpers. I have been eyeing the card's rumors and developments for a while after purposely skipping all the hype surrounding Nvidia's first generation of RTX cards. When it comes to upgrading your personal computer components, it is always best to skip a couple of upgrades anyway because the boost in performance, for the most part, is never truly worth it. I am however, ready to jump in this time around.

They never have enough available. Of course the scalpers make the situation worse.

My current 4 year old PC is equipped with an i7-6770K CPU and the GTX 1080. It's still a competent gaming PC, able to ace everything at max up to 1440p. It is able to get incredible performance at 4K if the games are not too demanding. The only title I can think of that my system struggles with, outside of those games that are just horribly optimized, is Red Dead Redemption 2. That game is an absolute monster, certainly the most beautiful game to date, though I am able to push my current setup to give me a stable 1440p 30fps performance with only small graphical sacrifices. Thankfully for me, I didn't plan on just replacing the GPU alone for my next upgrade so I am able to skip the availability frustration of those looking to just changing their graphics card and instead, I have decided to just get myself a new pre-built. It just so happens that CyberPowerPC, the guys who were responsible for my current system, is accepting orders for RTX 3080 powered PCs. I have opted for their "Creator PC Ultimate" build, complete with the dazzling Syber Cube case, an i9-10900K CPU, and the RTX 3080. The new PC will be arriving sometime in October. I am really looking forward to playing Control again without settling with the current setup performance of 720p @ 30fps when I turn all the ray tracing bells and whistles on!

It looks so avant-garde. Can't say no to that.

The Digital Age and Bad Internet

It has been a struggle for me these past couple of months, oh yes it has been. Having the global pandemic is horrible enough, but imagine having bad Internet on top of that? Yes, it's more horrible than you think. So you're stuck inside the house and you want to binge on your favorite streaming services but you have a data limit... The horror. It's definitely something you would wish upon your worst enemy. So you may have deducted that I have moved to a remote area, definitely leaning heavily towards the countryside and the Internet options that I can choose from are severely limited. The speed, strangely, is insanely fast. As a matter of fact, it is doubled when it comes to download from where I was from, which was a dense metropolitan area. It's quite counter-intuitive really, having super fast download coupled with a data cap. Alanis Morissette would have sung about that if Ironic was written today. Being a person with obsessive compulsive disorder, it has not been fun at all to keep checking my bandwidth consumption multiple times a day. Then there's the upload speed, which is just 3% of the download speed. It's pretty disgusting really. I had to severely reduce the quality of my twitch.tv broadcasts. Oh how I miss my old Internet.

What are the benefits of country living you ask? Well, you get bad Internet and a lovely morning sky.

For a gamer who favors the industry's progression towards digital distribution, it's a devastating scenario. Modern games are big. Like 10+ GB big. Larger titles averaged around 50 GB per download. To put things in perspective, the recently released Marvel's Avengers has a recommended requirement of 110 GB space. Then there are the patches. Oh the constant patches. 10 GB worth of patches a day, especially for someone like me who has a lot of digital games downloaded locally, is very typical. Of course these things were never a problem before. But they are now. I have started to delay patches and to selectively download only the games that I know I will be actively playing. I now have to wait until the end of the month to see if I have enough bandwidth to download my new games - my desire to get them hasn't slowed down even though I am not able to try them out immediately anymore like I did before.

One of my favorite games gets a new expansion! Oh wait... 61.4 GB patch?! There goes my bandwidth.

The fact that there is nothing I can do about this situation is probably the most frustrating part. If I ended up staying here for a longer period of time, my only hope is that Google Fiber will make its way to my area because it is already available in a city just an hour away from me. In the meantime, I have to make do with this crappy connection, regardless of the impact. Internet availability, access, and dependability were privileges that I apparently have taken for granted. I never thought that I would ever encounter this issue. Life is so very unpredictable. It is best to remember that.

Cool Games Found While Unpacking: NDS

I love the Nintendo DS. The dual screen setup is a definite gaming innovation that should have been implemented into the Nintendo Switch's design. Due to the system's handheld nature, I don't spend as much time with it outside of my large display connected consoles and Personal Computer. My DS library easily triumphs all of the other Nintendo handhelds. Seeing some of these titles again reminded me of the system's magic and I have even started a new playthrough of Radiant Historia, an Atlus role playing game that I have only played for 40 minutes before and then neglected all these years.

Game Room Ver. 4.0 Near Completion

Here are some fresh images from my new Game Room. Furniture placements are pretty much done except for one media storage tower. All that is needed now is for the game cases to be placed into their appropriate slots. In case you were wondering, yes, several games were scarred along the way. As I have mentioned previously, the virtual reality space I am able to set for this room is quite spacious. Strangely, once I am in the VR space, it still feels quite small, probably because the actual VR space in itself is just very expansive. So I am able to finally reclaim my gaming space, again. The bad news is that I may be in for another move in the near future. I hope the technology to scientifically turn all of these games across all platforms into digital Steam games will arrive before that happens. Hopefully the pandemic would be gone by then too?

Cool Games Found While Packing

Having some space limitation in my Game Room Ver. 3.0 resulted in my inability to easily access quite a number of the physical games I have in my library. I used to have unfettered freedom to physically touch any of the games I have within all of my previous dwellings. I am very hopeful that I will be able to have that again at this new but temporary place. While packing up my things, it was nice to see some of these games that have been hidden from my view for years.