This is what we mean when we refer to bad trends in the gaming and tech industries. Not only is mainstream media flat out spreading disinformation in order to help politicians and billionaires dominate the market, smaller networks are joining in to generate clicks and revenue. If ever you need to spot fake outrage, anti-consumerism, and persistent economic oppression of the masses, there's no clearer sign than companies like Kotaku jumping in. In case anyone forgot, Kotaku has been fading from relevance because of their Gamergate handiwork. You see how that panned out or them. But they haven't given up yet. They have to join in late to declare crypto the reason behind the GPU shortages - even though we already know that crypto wasn't responsible. Poor handling of the pandemic, low production, artificial shortages, backdoor deals with parties that otherwise had no access, and especially scalping were the culprits. We pointed all of this out, and it was obvious. But we won't go back into that. The point of this post is that Kotaku decided to chime in and try to make things worse while everything is actually getting better - for now. Crypto didn't fail or get banned, not all of the platforms made the change to KYC or proof of stake, GPU prices still fell as they do almost every year, companies are saving face by pretending that prices are trending down because miners aren't interested in GPU's anymore - when they have no way of actually knowing why most people are buying GPU's, tariffs expired, and scalping is being dealt with. Considering all of these facts, why is Kotaku sticking their nose where it doesn't belong? Answer: to cause new drama because they just can't help themselves. This company is so full of it that its made hardline mudslinging and straight up lying a business model. No, don't blame the rich people who actually created the problem! Blame the poor people who are trying to make extra money! If they weren't trying to survive, none of this would've happened! Don't you see?! GPU's are only for well-to-do people! Anyone with a GPU has to use it for the sole purpose that we outline, not for anything else! Yeah, sure. As if resisting said rich people isn't an option.
They present this as a harassment campaign, when that wasn't true. Though the public was wrong to behave the way it did, Zoe Quinn made false allegations of emotional and physical abuse against Alec Holowka. That's what brought things to a head. He was cut from his own development team because of these allegations, the evidence was never released because it didn't exist, and he killed himself days later. It was originally said that Eron Gjoni wrote an inflammatory blog post about Zoe Quinn, and that his writing was a coordinated effort to get the latter harassed. There was no coordination between him and the public to harass her. He was blogging and wrote about his experience with her, and shared personal conversations along the way - and that was a trend that she herself would later contribute to, as with other people who were already making these posts about the people around them. This is a common online practice today, and has been for an awfully long time. What the harassers mentioned was consequential to their primary concern. The arguments positing highly questionable ethics in gaming journalism were true. It's not just gaming journalism either. The media is now commonly used to push false narratives, sell products, sell services, and to manipulate elections. Allegations made during quarrels is normal, especially when used to save face. The thing is: Alec had nothing to do with it. Gamergate was in full swing by 2019, however, Eron published the post in 2014. With that, tons of other unsubstantiated claims were made all over. Alec stood accused of a crime that he didn't commit, and abuse behavior that wasn't actually abusive. Hypersensitive people weaponized symptoms of his mental illnesses against him by dragging him on social media, blaming him for their personal problems. We found no evidence of Eileen Mary corroborating these claims. She was referring to his mental illnesses and how that was received by those around him. You can read the full statement here. That's not a confirmation of wrongdoing, that's a preface for SJW's, a big reveal that he was in fact a victim of abuse, and had mental illnesses. She did, however, confirm that he was trying to fix the latter. The public still going after Zoe at that time means that the concern wasn't the supposed infidelity or her being female. It was about backdoor deals between developers and journalists, censorship, and the entire community being held to account for the actions or accusations of a small subset of people. Some of the accusations were true, but most of them were taken at the accusers' word. The problem with that is that real people were being brought down for fictional crimes. So, the mainstream media is wrong. This started as a reaction to rapidly fading journalistic integrity. In the thick of it now...The public wasn't reacting to Zoe's supposed infidelity, the public was reacting to her relationship with journalists. She made a boring game, she was accused of a sexual interaction with a Kotaku journalist, and that was supposed to have led to a positive review that the work didn't deserve. It was about the game and the economics surrounding it. Eron only made matters worse, but the harassment actually started before that post was made, not afterward. That's the conflict. It wasn't about her being female at all, it was bout toxic journalism culture, fake corporate wokeism, a history of false allegations by Kotaku, and conflicts of interest between developers and reviewers. It was about ethics in the industry, and the narrative was twisted into this mess. But it seems true that Zoe did at some point date Nathan Grayson, who did work for Kotaku and already had friendly ties to her, after her game was released - and screenshots of Eron's conversation with her reveal that she did in fact have a sexual relationship with Nathan. It just had nothing to do with a game review. And tweet archives reveal involvement with Quinn as early as 2012, a year before Depression Quest launched. In truth, the public didn't target only Zoe. Reddit posts about Nathan Grayson and Kotaku as a whole can still be found with ease today. But when someone is trying to turn something into something that it's not, all of the other details magically disappear. Grayson got it just as bad, but the focus was only on what happened to Zoe. It wasn't at all sexism. And it's difficult to get these extremely important details across because search engines like Google lower the ranking of opposing views that explain everything. The public misunderstood the post made by Eron. He was actually exposing a manipulator and abuser. She displayed evident narcissistic behavior by punishing him with silence when he didn't behave as she expected him to [that being: he wasn't supposed to stand up for himself]. He never requested or instructed anyone to go after her, just a warning to avoid her in intimate scenarios. How does this all connect to Kotaku besides Nathan? Well, they ran to her defense by conducting and concluding the big internal investigation, suggesting that there was no previous personal relationship between the two. That's simply false, and the internet archive has records of favorable coverage that he gave Quinn since 2012. Here, here, and here. The last one was published just 10 days after GDC 2014, and before the relations were stated to have begun [April 2014]. No, he didn't disclose any form of relationship before then. He has a lengthy record of this sort of conduct. Kotaku! This guy worked for you! Covering for him is why no one likes you anymore! This is THE problem! The finaleThey also covered for Brandon Boyer and his conflicts of interest. It's not okay to create or protect a society of people who exchanges favors to increase the rate of success. It's also not okay to defend them. That's the point of all of this, and why we're going at Kotaku about crypto now. This company has no credibility, and it's rather disgusting to see them promoting more untrue things in order to pitch another false narrative. This is the pinnacle of shitty rich people circle jerking over industries of people who are very often targeted, censored, and systematically destroyed through legislation in order to keep the current elitist system in place. That's why all of this matters. Can we trust them? Answer: NO!!!
This is what Gamergate was always about, and it was very loudly stated repeatedly. This isn't a matter of political affiliation; this is a matter of rights violations, industry corruption, elitism, and demographical discrimination. All gamers = evil has now become all crypto enthusiasts = evil. That's not true, and all of us on both sides of that fence are only protecting ourselves from persecution. By and large, none of us did anything wrong; the elite did. They are NOT trustworthy. Just look at their track record. Why get involved with, and defend lies about, all of that? They didn't even need to make a statement at all. But what else could we expect? They have to defend their ilk from the consequences of their own actions. True evil exposed. Don't trust or listen to these assholes. Thanks for reading. Don't forget to like, share, and comment. Peace! Don't get comfortable just yet. The GPU struggles haven't officially come to an end, though there's been a notable decrease of tension. So far, we've been right about the relationship between GPU stock and crypto. Those calling for a ban didn't get it, and GPU prices still fell while crypto is doing as expected. Ethereum has still not yet switched to proof of stake, anti-scalping legislation appears to be headed for successful implementation, and production has gone up when people were finally allowed to return to work. We're not gloating anymore. The simple fact is that we were right about this the whole way.
This is actually surprisingly easy to understand and explain. When supply is low, demand goes up. Due to this, prices go up as well. At the end of the shortage, the prices for higher end items are expectedly higher than they would've been before. This is because more people are willing to pay higher prices for the latest and greatest. They're also making value determinations based on past products, however, the market was different at that time. It's an incomplete analysis. It's easy to confirm a bias by arguing over the fact that many newer GPU's are roughly priced the same as past generation units and barely perform any better. Some are even rated lower but perform better than expected. This turns out to be the case with the RX 6400. It's priced similarly to the RX 550, but it completely outperforms it. We can prove this. Below is the RX 550 vs the RX 570. The RX 570 completely decimates the RX 550. This competition isn't even close. Now, some will want to argue the amount of RAM is a factor in the video. That won't stick. Here is the RX 570 compared to the 4GB RX 550 in writing. That's got numbers and charts. So, we've set the tone in terms of value with that. Take a look at how the RX 6400 compares to the RX 570 below. Considering that the RX 6400 is the bottom of the current generation matching blows most of the time with the previous mid-ranger, we think that you're getting quite a bit of value at this price. Hell, the RX 6400 has even beaten the RX 570 in a few titles. That's impressive, objectively speaking. Bear in mind that the RX 550 ($160 - $190) is currently going for a higher price than the RX 6400 ($160 - $180). The RX 570 is going for much more ($345 - $460). These are new prices for the lower memory options. We don't get it. What's the problem with this card? It doesn't have EVERYTHING? So what? It's a budget card! This brings us to what's bothering us. The pricing on the budget end has gone up and remained stuck. The RX 550 is at least double its MSRP of $79. The GT 1030 launched at $79 as well, and it's now going for up to $279! That's more than three times the MSRP. The RX 460 started at $86 and is now selling for as much as $592! The GTX 1050 started at $140 and is currently as much as $554. See what we mean? And guess what else... Miners aren't using, and don't want, these cards! How would the crypto is the devil narrative explain that? It can't and won't. These facts are conveniently ignored by virtually everyone except us at Gamers Pointe. That's telling. It's all about narrative control and polarization. As mega corporations and politicians get some skin in the game, they pitch this anti-consumer garbage to steer the masses away from that market, which leaves us slaving away instead of being financially free enough to pursue what we're truly passionate about. Again, this shortage was manufactured for profit, and the fine that Nvidia just received is solid evidence of that. More of that in our next post. For now, we're going to wrap this one up. But what do you think? Is it time to push back yet, or no? We sure do, but who are we to make sense? We don't fall in line and jump on the hate train, so we guess we have no right to correct or complain.
Thanks for reading. Don't forget to like, comment, and share. Until next time!
When it rains, it pours...So, many of you have been wondering when we're going to show off the build. Well, though we like the aesthetic, we haven't been able to fully accomplish our goal. However, we did actually complete it when we mentioned it before. We were so obsessed with achieving everything that we lost sight of the fact that you all would still like to see it. So, we're going to show what we've got. Check it out below. Not too hard on the eyes, is she? We're almost completely satisfied with the look, and we'll revisit when we swap a few new parts. Now, we're not going to add to the e-waste problem, so don't worry. What we yank out of this will go into a new build. One thing that we want to pull is the AIO. We didn't notice that the cooling block colors couldn't be adjusted when we grabbed it. That's not all we'll be swapping, but that's all we need to get the look just right. Beyond the aforementioned - we might as well get on with it - the dual GT 1030 setup only kinda works. What's you're seeing in the image on the left is each awake monitor connected to a separate card. We also enabled crypto mining support (read: multi-GPU settings) in the BIOS. We installed the current and correct drivers - all of them - and installed the Nvidia Control Panel. This is what's required to get mGPU running. Except it doesn't work. Okay, so it technically is working, so to speak. No window or application is locked to a specific display, performance isn't negatively impacted by running multiple games on separate monitors, both GPU's are doing work when something is open on their respective monitor, and both GPU's split the load when we span an application across both displays. However, the settings in the game can't be enabled, and that would allow both GPU's to work on the game while it's on only one of the displays. THIS is DirectX 12 multi-GPU support, not what we currently have. To be clear, we aren't able to enable it in the game due to the respective settings not being available in Nvidia Control Panel. We followed all of the required steps, followed all of the troubleshooting steps, reached out for support, and no luck. Nvidia's response never came.
In closing...Although mGPU is an inherent feature of DirectX 12, companies get away with arbitrarily blocking it, and we think that's wrong. Worse, it creates a false pretense to offer DirectX 12 support without mentioning that certain features have been turned off. Such predatory tactics prod shoppers to purchase products that are listed with inaccurate information. They've skirted the fair advertising policies.
So, can players still game with the GT 1030? Yeah, if concessions are made. Older titles run just fine. But because we can't get it to work specifically the way we need it to work, we'll have to pull the cards, put them in other less demanding builds, and instead use different cards for our build. Many are saying that AMD doesn't block mGPU at all, so we'll be making the switch as a result. We like Nvidia's power and encoding support, but we can't support such practices otherwise. We won't buy or promote another Nvidia product until they put an end to this. We managed to fix every other problem, so this is why you're still waiting for the full rundown. Sucks. We really wanted to give you an honest and powerful sub-$1300 budget build. It's attractive, it's snappy, and can otherwise do everything that we throw at it with relative ease. But we're going to have to widen that margin to also give you the power and convenience of mGPU. Thanks for reading. Don't forget to like and share. Take care! |
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