3080/5800x PC Upgrade

 

I ended up replacing the CPU cooler with a Scythe Fuma 2 due to the heat produced by the 5800x.

Instead of waiting for the Nvidia 4000 series GPUs, I upgraded my 5700 xt to an EVGA 12 Gig 3080, along with my Ryzen 7 3700x to a Ryzen 7 5800x. After seeing the prices for the high end 4000 series, I feel fairly justified in spending 799 on a 3080. EVGA, probably the best Nvidia partner, also just pulled out of the graphics card market, citing abuses by Nvidia, so I guess I lucked out in grabbing my EVGA card. On paper, it's a big upgrade over my 5700 xt. With 4 more gigs of memory as well as hardware ray-tracing support, my 3080 should be almost 50 percent faster than my old card at conventional rasterization. The 5700 xt doesn't support ray-tracing, so I now have access to that much hyped feature, along with Nvidia's superior DLSS upscaling. The CPU upgrade should give me a little more headroom, as the 5800x is probably about 15 to 20 percent faster in single core applications compared to the 3700x. It's a hot little bugger, and I had a lot of problems with it until I installed the Ryzen chipset drivers.

So how much faster is my pc now? In Assassin's Creed Odyssey, I went from 62 frames per second at 1440p at the highest settings to 92 fps, with my 1 percent lows improving from 40 to 50 fps. Halo Infinite now runs flawlessly at 120 fps at ultra quality 1440p, whereas I was getting around 60 to 70 fps with  occasional frame drops below on my 5700 xt at medium quality. Ray-traced games like Spiderman Remastered look amazing, although the cost to frame rate is pretty huge. Honestly, Quake 2 RTX is the most impressive ray-tracing demo I've played. It'll be interesting to see how the technology develops with the release of the 4000 series, since the X Box Series X and PS5 are pretty deficient compared to Nvidia in that department.

All in all, it was a big upgrade, but not exactly as transformative as my i5-2500k to Ryzen 3700x jump. Here's to holding off the consumerist urge to flush money down the toilet for another 3 to four years.

Guess which one is the 3080?

Quake 2 RTX Review

 

Check out that real-time reflection!

I splurged on a Geforce RTX 3080 instead of waiting for the release of the 4000 series like a smart person, but I wanted an upgrade and I almost never spend cash on myself (or on much besides basic necessities). I'll do a review on my EVGA card eventually, but first I want to talk about Quake 2 RTX, which is obviously the reason anyone would spend 800 dollars on a ray-tracing capable graphics card. For those not in the know, Quake 2 is a classic first person shooter developed by id Software back in 1997. It featured id's most developed campaign to date, along with an upgraded graphics engine supporting hardware acceleration, colored lighting, texture filtering, and other stuff that was innovative at the time. Twenty-five years later, Quake 2 looks just as dated as Quake, and I would argue its art direction hasn't aged as well, considering retro shooters like Amid Evil are clearly inspired by the pixelated look of the original (although Dusk definitely looks like a Quake 2 era game). However, Nvidia have added full ray traced lighting, shadows, and reflections, and boy, does Quake 2 suddenly shine. Having previously owned a Radeon 5700 xt, which lacked hardware ray-tracing, I was always on the fence about the tech. In screenshots and youtube videos, the realistic lighting didn't really appear worth the massive hit it cost frame times. After playing Quake 2 RTX however, I've changed my tune, at least in this one case. The dull oranges, browns, and greys of Quake 2's military installations have been replaced by the brilliant lights of hyperblaster fire or the flickering shadows of a flare. Glass consoles reflect light as well as the player character; corridors hide monstrous enemies in inky blackness, waiting for you to illuminate their lo-fi visages. Suddenly I'm transported to the wonder of playing games back in the 1990's, when every other year brought an amazing technical advance, and my imagination filled in the blanks that primitive 3d graphics engines could not. Quake 2 RTX feels a lot like Doom 3. It's a corridor shooter with fewer enemies than Doom, and you'll use your flare like Doom's flashlight. Unlike Doom 3, Quake 2 features a kickass arsenal, including id's best supershotgun. You'll never tire of rending Strogg into gruesome giblets, and it sounds like God's thunder. For all the brilliance of ray-tracing, the conventions of late nineties level design limits some of the fun. You'll find yourself backtracking an awful lot, hunting down key cards, and while the reflective surfaces and realistic shadows help differentiate some rooms, you're still running through low-poly environments that don't do much to distinguish themselves. A map would really help, but to my knowledge, Doom is the only id series that ever had a map toggle. Anyway, I think Quake 2 RTX is worth checking out if you have a capable gpu. The game is still pretty fun if you have a high tolerance for wandering around searching for keys.

Screenshots:

 

The Esteemed Critic Reviews Blade Runner 2049 and Hail, Caesar!

 

Blade Runner 2049 is one of the most gorgeous films the Critic has ever viewed. Director Denis Villeneuve loves scale, and utilizes the enormity of structures in such a way that the viewer is often held in awe. The original Ridley Scott cyberpunk staple had its share of megacorp pyramids married to a dystopian, space trucker aesthetic--his other sci-fi classic Alien as well as The Empire Strikes Back also exist in the same dirty, lived-in universe--but Blade Runner is not as striking a film visually, nor is it as epic as 2049. Concessions must be made to the great advances in special effects and CGI that have happened in between Blade Runner and its sequel, but I'll be damned if 2049 isn't the better movie. Gosling's K/Joe has a great character arc that satisfies while still calling back to the thematic material of the original movie. Master creep and possible cult leader Jared Leto is also a compelling villain as the sociopath cyborg CEO of the Wallace Corporation, which manufactures bio-engineered humans called replicants. The relationship between Joe and Joi, a personalized AI, recalls the film Her favorably. My only real criticism is that 2049 is a long movie, and some of the action sequences could've been trimmed. Anyways, if you're in the mood for a damn good cyberpunk noir thiller, watch Blade Runner 2049. 

Hail, Caesar! is a quirky Coen brothers comedy about a studio fixer trying to find a kidnapped movie star during the golden age of cinema, when westerns, musicals, and biblical epics dominated the box office. Josh Brolin exudes his typical gruff masculinity as fixer Eddie Mannix, while George Clooney plays a charming, if not particularly clever, star named Baird Whitlock. Numerous allusions to the flicks of the time delight; Channing Tatum is hilarious as a dancing sailor who is secretly a communist planning on defecting to the Soviet Union. None of the violence that sometimes features in the Coen brothers' work is on display--this is no No Country for Old Men or Fargo. A good time for any well-versed student of cinema, or simply an average Joe or Jane looking for something more charming than a Marvel movie or whatever drivel is showing on Netflix.