Actually, this. The mid-engined ‘Vette probably takes the crown. They cruised through what, four-five generations of production cars, mountains of rumors and two or three public-displayed concepts between the original Aerovette and the announcement of the C8?

Nothing’s gonna happen there, sport.

Except that’s not the argument: Ethan’s question was regarding whether the XBSX could run that demo we saw up there in the doodly-doo. Scroll back up if you really need that reminder. You say no, I say yes, we’ll agree to disagree there. You’re hung up on them using the entirety of the PS5's SSD I/O, I say no, they’re…

“Virtual texturing” is the name of a UE component for handling, well, large textures, in this case supplying 8K textures to the assets in the demo. Hell, it’s also in UE4. Here’s the docs.

. . . and is well still under the Series X’s 4.whatever GB/s compressed throughput. I’m also curious about how some of Microsoft’s little tricks play out in practice, as they’ve designed the XBSX to pull partial data. If it works as advertised, they don’t need the throughput if all they do is grab the part of a…

I’ll have to do some more reading but as I fart my way through this hornet’s nest I stirred up, I’ve noticed that MS’ approach to storage I/O is really all about optimization and efficiency. There’s lots of references to dedicated hardware handling the compression on and off the SSD, and only using the parts of assets…

Power doesn’t matter!? That’s Honda talk!

In all seriousness, I’ll grant Sony’s storage solution is significantly faster; I just have questions as to its utility beyond the obvious.

Closer to two and change when handling raw, and under two when dealing with compressed data. Also, Microsoft confirmed at GDC, and Ninja Theory reiterated in an interview, that the Series X also has a dedicated audio chip awhile back so not sure what you’re on about there.

You’re on the right track with your final…

Hi, enterprise compute guy here. Wanna mention the Series X’s faster CPU or the 20-ish more compute units on the GPU, which is why they opted to go with a single locked clock versus Sony’s “we’ll let you bake a few on turbo” set up? Nothing exists in a vacuum. While what I’ve read on Sony’s storage design is pretty…

I’m gonna go out of a limb and say “yes” but NDAs and other such legalese require them all to be cagey about an explicit answer. I mean, it’s not like the fundamental hardware architecture is that different. They’ve got their secret spice blends but that is two fucking pots of chili to me.

You’d be surprised.

In the Dark Ages of the early ‘aughts, I worked at HP’s (formerly Compaq, and even more formerly Inacom’s) facility in New Jersey, where servers and workstations with retail prices more than most cars and some houses were preconfigured for customers. It was a hot, dirty and swampy warehouse in…

This is a bit of a tangent but since you’ve got me thinking.

Old-school spinning platters, yes, but I’m not sure you’d need everyone suited up to produce SSDs. The chips are fab’ed overseas so there’s where the clean rooms would be. The chips’d leave those encapsulated in the ceramic shells so you could handle them all…

I genuinely did not know this. Thanks!

A little Google-Fu has confirmed this single line in the Wiki page to be a thing, and has my head formulating dark, dangerous ideas. . .

Sooooo close.

They just needed to embrace the 90's whole hog.

Seriously.

If he hadn’t bought it, the car was only going to be a pile of valuable scrap and secondhand parts. It’s not like they bought one brand new off the showroom floor, and even if he had, it’s not like these things are gonna be rare. If it weren’t for the shutdowns, we’d be awash in these damn things aleady. …

It’s an interesting car but this guy’s high as a kite. That same money bought me an immaculate E90 335i xDrive, with stick, that’s four years newer and 40,000 miles lighter. Given it’s also from the one (maybe one and half) model years that the sedan had the more reliable N55, that car’s a unicorn. This? Not so much.

Gah, ‘Murrica strikes again.  The only E9x diesel we got was the 335d.  For some reason I thought we got the 330d pre-LCI.

I don’t believe you could get diesels with a stick here in Freedomland, so that’s a non-starter given his wants, anyhoo. An E91 with xDrive and a stick should be within the realm of possibility.

Subie-tax makes a good one a pricey choice compared to similar options.  If you’re dead set on a Subie, grab the Saabaru 9-2x. 

Mid-2000's also gets you an early, mustachio’d E91.