• 0 Posts
  • 72 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
cake
Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

help-circle
  • I don’t understand how providing the average performance gain over the 1070 is disingenuous/lying. In fact it would be more disingenuous to cherry pick certain games where the performance gains are highest.

    The 4060 is not a ray tracing card. Don’t sip the Nvidia koolaid, you gonna need a vram buffer greater than 8 gb to run ray tracing at a frame rate that doesn’t feel bad. Also ray tracing is a gimmick imo. I don’t really think the visual enhancement is worth the performance hit in almost all games I’ve tried ray tracing. I’d rather play a game at 144 fps at native resolution than at 60 fps with ray tracing on and DLSS on.

    DLSS is a fair point imo, but personally, it would feel bad upgrading a decade old card with a 3 year old card; while getting the same vram capacity, an average +50% raster performance, and DLSS.

    Either way, this person’s needs are different from mine, so may be that feels okay for them.


  • I feel like this is not a great deal. Keep in mind that pre-builts are in general, a gamble. They often advertise the parts that people might know (CPU/GPU) but fill the other parts (PSU, MoBo, RAM, computer case, fans, CPU cooler) with cheap garbage.

    Now this PC is $250 short of $1000 (before tax and shipping) and you are getting a low end CPU from an old Intel generation, a mid/low end GPU from a prior generation (only +50% performance compared to the 1070), half the ram capacity you’d want, and absolutely terrible hard drive space at only 512 gb.





  • Science isn’t actually “physicalist”. In fact one major theory in science, Quantum Mechanics, would probably challenge physicalism since quantum suggests that there will always be unknowable physical quantities regarding any given particle of matter. It also suggests that particles of matter (and light) must interact with an observer in order to exist in a state where some physical quantities can be known; else these particles exist only in an exotic state of indefinite probalistic fluctuations.

    I must say though, even though quantum challenges physicalism, quantum’s model of the universe truly rejects the possibility of any omniscient entity. Omniscience requires the ability to know everything about the universe and quantum suggests that this is in fact impossible; therefore a truly omniscient god would be impossible. It was for this reason that god-fearing Albert Einstein rejected quantum mechanics up until his death bed.


  • This argument is more of a philosophical argument than a scientific one. It reminds me of the classic “if a tree falls in the woods and no one is there to hear it, then does it make a sound?”. The purpose of this statement is to question whether the observer is a requirement for something to be real.

    Ultimately, I think science doesn’t have a solid answer to this question. Quantum mechanics might suggest the answer to be “no”, since matter exists as a probability function until something measures (observes) it. This would suggest that a lack of observer would leave matter in an exotic state which would not allow such a definite process as falling in the woods. On the other hand, general relativity would suggest that the tree would make a sound because all matter affects the spacetime continuum whether an observer is there or not. This would suggest that the tree’s existence is independent from an observer. The tree’s matter will bend spacetime and will still be subjected to the effects of existing within a curved spacetime geometry. Therefore, the tree would exist and fall resulting in a sound.

    Of course, the big issue in science right now is that we have failed to disprove both quantum mechanics and general relativity; but these two primary theories of science are incompatible with eachother. Ultimately, this means that this question regarding physicalism is presently unanswerable by science.




  • The real flip side of your question is: do you think you’d still be you as a “brain in a vat” without any body?

    Ultimately this whole discussion boils down to challenging the definition of “you” or “I”. Biologically every “singular” person is the result of many living things working together, so the concept of “I” is an illusion. Physically, there is no “I”, but only “us”.

    This makes the discussion easier. If the hand is removed, then of course “we” are different because “we” lost a piece of “us”. This would also be true if “our” brain was removed.

    Nevertheless, there have been cases of brain dead people’s body adapting to the lack of central nervous system, so the body is more independently alive than we tend to give it credit.







  • This is such a silly technical argument that I’ve seen twice now in this thread. Watts is just Joules/second. It’s entirely valid to wonder “what rate am I ‘consuming’ energy when I do X” rather than ask “how much energy did I ‘consume’ when I do X”

    Making this correction is similar to telling someone that asking how fast they moved is wrong, and they should only ask how far they moved.





  • 4790k was among the fastest per-core performance for many, many generations, even long after CPUs with 4x as many cores that could do 2x as much work total, 4790k could still beat them on single-core performance.

    Tbh, this is testament for Intel’s CPU stagnation more than anything else. Hence, why they are getting cooked financially today.

    Even today it’s still a great CPU and I’m still running one of my gaming machines with it.

    Idk if I would call it a great CPU today when you can achieve roughly double the performance with a budget tier ryzen 5 7600. Not to mention that a 7600 will get to use ddr5 rather than ddr3 memory.