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Steam's monthly hardware surveys suggest the proportion of PC players with a VR headset plugged in roughly doubled in 2018.
For those that own a VR headset, this is good news. A growing active user base means more interested publishers. It's not exponential growth, but it's definitely a good start. I only recently demoed my VR setup to extended family. Even my less tech savvy relatives were quite impressed. One of the things I demoed to each group was the Epic Roller Coaster demo. Really, I'd forgotten how impressive it is the first couple of times through. It's a sit down experience and all you're doing is looking around. It definitely cuts down on the whole getting used to the interface, etc and gets right to the fun part of VR. Here's hoping for at least another 2x increase of users in 2019.
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/01/steam-survey-vr-headset-ownership-roughly-doubled-in-2018/
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday January 04 2019, @04:04AM (4 children)
https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/cpus/ [steampowered.com]
I wonder what 6/8/12 and 16 CPUs (cores) are going to look like by the end of 2019.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Friday January 04 2019, @05:35PM (3 children)
I was able to part together a new computer when the Ryzen 1700 first came out. I've had it since then and am quite pleased with it. I needed to update the Motherboard BIOS a couple of times, but after that it's been quite stable. I won't count the issues caused directly by the Windows 10 updates. Ryzen 1700, 32GB RAM, 1TB SSD, RX480, and a MSI B350. Really, the RAM is overkill, even for VR. Though, apparently I parted it together at just the right time. Shortly after that the RX480 doubled in price, as did the RAM.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday January 04 2019, @06:18PM (2 children)
The RAM is slowly declining in price and should decline further this year [soylentnews.org]. But you got very lucky to avoid the doubling/tripling of prices and 32 GB should last you a long time.
Ryzen 1700 was $329 at release and got you 8 cores. According to the rumor mill [wccftech.com], Ryzen 7 3700 will be launched/announced next week with 12 cores for $299, and 12 cores with a 400 MHz clock boost for $329. Ryzen 9 3800X would have 16 cores for $449. Supposedly, you could drop even the 16-core part onto your old AM4 motherboard, although we'll need to see if most motherboards can handle it or not.
So my question is: Any interest in going up to 12-16 cores, possibly after the prices drop? These chips should also improve single-threaded performance, since the preceding "12nm" Ryzens made some modest clock speed and IPC gains, and the "7nm" 3000-series will further improve clock speeds and IPC (in the neighborhood of 15-25% altogether).
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Friday January 04 2019, @06:51PM (1 child)
I likely won't be making an incremental upgrade to my processor. Usually, I hold on to my rig for a while, without much in the way of upgrades. Sometimes I hold onto it long enough to make a GPU upgrade worthwhile. I went from dual-core, to quad-core, to hexa-core, and now Octa-core. The only really noticeable improvement with CPU performance was when I went from dual-core to quad-core. My current setup is doing pretty well with VR, but I think the bottleneck right now is the GPU. I'm not planning on replacing that for a while either, mostly due to the price craze on GPUs. I'll probably replace the whole thing in a year or two after I've saved up enough to get what I want. Then, likely will hand down my current setup to my wife, as she usually gets my old system. She doesn't like spending her funds on computer stuff. Yet, she really likes having a good computer, go figure. I'd be interested in building her a computer, if she didn't want Windows.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Friday January 04 2019, @09:48PM
The Ryzen 9 3800X could have as much as 2.5x the performance of a Ryzen 7 1800X (my guess, and an ideal scenario with all 16 cores fully utilized), so it's a bit more than an incremental upgrade. But I understand that not everyone can use that many cores effectively, and those who can know who they are.
It would be neat to see quad-cores drop off the map entirely, as seen in the leaked lineup with a minimum of 6 cores at $99.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]