There’s no separate graphics card, it’s an ARM-based SOC.

I would not expect it to be anything even remotely special in terms of performance. Enough to drive a display or two, accelerate video and GUI elements, run some light games. It doesn’t need to do anything more - and more isn’t within the capabilities of Chinese chip manufacturers anyway.

Windows user here: Fuck no.

Good point. Wouldn’t be the first time, but then again, this is much more difficult today then a few decades ago. Still, if it happens, this is the most likely scenario, not some Chinese company somehow coming up with a decent home-grown GPU.

I also thought it looked abysmal relative to its hardware requirements. Low-poly objects, below average textures, poor effects like depth of field that looked like from a PS4 game, lots of pop-in (including every time there’s a cut in a cutscene), glitchy physics (again any time there’s a camera cut), bloated and poorly animated default Unreal Engine faces, etc.

It looked and ran so much worse than Star Wars Outlaws on my pretty powerful computer, which isn’t exactly lightweight title and also open world. Then again, Outlaws probably had 10x the budget and uses a bespoke engine, so it’s not exactly a fair comparison.

The turn-based combat is excellent, there’s other way of putting it, but the poor tech and the laughable exploration aren’t doing it any favors. I have to admit, I didn’t play it for long enough to be able to say anything about the story, but based what I’ve read, it seems like it’s very strong.

Either way, this is a game that sold pretty well, so even if I wasn’t blown away by it, it’s still awful what the people who made it have been going through since release.

They win no matter how this AI thing pans out. Probably the company that is the safest from an AI bubble bursting (although not the safest in general due to their geographical location).

Both are from Taiwan though.

Not gonna happen any time soon. The barrier of entry is massive.

Making decent drivers alone is a humongous undertaking: You have to catch up to the work of several decades - and it’s a moving target. That’s on top of just how difficult it is to design good silicon. Just look at how Chinese GPU manufacturers are struggling to match low-end cards from 10 years ago (even though they are lying and claiming they are matching high-end cards from one generation ago) with cards that have many times the power draw and cost - and all of that with far worse games compatibility.

Hell, even the giant that is (soon to be probably: was) Intel failed to leave a mark in the dedicated GPU business and they actually have decades of experience making (pretty shitty) integrated GPUs and (even shittier) drivers for them.

I’ll freely admit that I’m willing to give it a shot regardless, but I might be holding my nose.

Interesting. I actually remember this game very fondly. It’s a well made mid-budget game for kids, in my opinion. Nothing groundbreaking, but charming, atmospheric and with fun gameplay. I was young when it came out, definitely part of the target audience (despite not caring about Harry Potter), but even revisiting it as an adult, I still found it to be enjoyable. Reading the Wikipedia article, I’m actually surprised by how low its review scores are.

How did your magazine cover it?

Do you remember which game it was?

I only have very limited experience, but from what I’ve personally figured out, another good practice is to look into the thinking process (even though models can and do “lie” in there, so it’s not really the actual thing that’s happening under the hood) and catch mistakes early before the AI has wasted a bunch of time and (possibly) money on some nonsensical detour. You then have to stop the process early, add a line or two to the prompt to explicitly stop it from choosing this detour and start again. (In my case - I almost exclusively use local LLMs - it’s not about money, at least not directly, but because there’s only a very limited context memory due to the amount of RAM I have, so I don’t want it to be filled up by stuff that’s not helpful.)

It’s like babysitting a toddler. The moment you look away, chances are it might try something you really don’t want to happen.

Sometimes, the LLM might misunderstand your prompt entirely, because you chose imprecise language, made a typo that changes the meaning, you asked something of it that is way outside of its ballpark/training data, because of missing context or because the AI just had another dumb moment.

The old adage that computers are just as smart or dumb as the user (but much faster at it) often applies to AI as well, at least in certain use cases - in others, AI can actually help less intelligent users, but at the same time drag down smart people and erode their skills over time. It’s weird what it’s doing to our brains, which is why I’m very wary of using it for anything other than experimentation and fun, and avoid using it for things that are actually important to me. Many people don’t have this choice though, with mandatory AI usage in many orgs still being on the rise.

That’s certainly a unique sentence no other person has ever uttered before.

Publisher relations is another reason. I don’t think EA appreciates this.

You can easily emulate them all these days. I know it’s not the same, but often times, that’s actually a good thing. It’s far less of a hassle to play older titles on modern devices than to hook up an analog output era console to a modern TV and getting a good image quality out of the combination. Not to mention, performance and resolution were often much worse than you remember. Hell, some emulators even fix bugs and you can easily play ROM hacks or other mods that way - which sometimes also fix bugs, like a fan-patched version of Gran Turismo 2, which makes it actually possible to complete the game.

Not gonna happen. Car, music and other licensing makes this practically impossible. These licenses are only for a limited number of years - renewing them is often ridiculously expensive, to the point of usually making no economic sense. It’s the main reason why old racing games like this one are not available digitally.

Even Rockstar was forced to re-release their older GTAs with some music tracks removed (and they had to patch it for existing owners as well). If it’s too expensive for them and far higher profile titles, you know it’s not going to happen for a game like Underground 2.

It’s kind of astonishing how late they are. Then again, it’s Intel. The entire company has been a headless chicken for a while now.

Alright, fair enough. Totally understandable position, now that I get the full picture. Sorry if I was a bit blunt.

This just mirrors what’s been happening with “Indie” music and films for decades already. I don’t think it’s even remotely new in the gaming space either. Indie is more of a genre or even just a vibe than anything else.

The major thing? Not global thermonuclear war? Not global warming leading to massive political and economic instability? Not democratic backsliding?

I like my PC games as much as the next guy, but let’s be reasonable: It’s just a luxury good.