We've upgraded our PCs - I (Lussy) only got a GTX 1070 video card, but Geril replaced his whole machine and it was painful.
We got him a socket TR4 motherboard, a Ryzen CPU, a Vega64 video card and some ram, but when we first put them together, the PC couldn't start up. We had to get another stick of ram to actually get into the UEFI. Then we had to flash the BIOS to get the video card and the other stick of ram to work. This took quite a while, and now he has 32GB ram instead of the planned 16...
So if you buy a recently released motherboard, just be prepared to deal with this.
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| When it's turned on, the whole thing lights up like a Christmas tree. |
In other news, we've barely had time and energy to sit in front of a TV to play games, so we use the Switch a lot. We've seen lots of people just shrug off the portability factor of the Switch, but for us and our lifestyle, it is a godsend - we prefer anything portable over having to sit still in front of a huge screen for long periods of time, since that's what we do for a living, anyways... And we like taking long baths and now we can even play Skyrim during them.
We also try to play our PS4 frequently, but it's really inconvenient that we have to charge the controller every 2-3 hours (seriously, what's up with that battery life?), and, since we finish work well after midnight, we have to turn the volume all the way down and kill the subwoofer. With the Switch, the screen is just the right size that we don't have to sit too close to it and it's not tiring to hold, either. It's also pretty convenient that we can bring it with us to long train rides and family gatherings, where we can split the controller and play Mario Kart with other people.
As developers thought, we have to say that the Switch, while more powerful than last-gen consoles, isn't as powerful as the current generation of home consoles. That won't stop us from aiming to develop for it, however, because it seems like the Unreal 4 gets excellent support for the platform. We always keep in mind how we can tone down the stuff we make so that they will run on the Switch. Right now we're using the GPD Win as comparison: if it runs on the GPD, it will surely run on the Switch, too.
That's it for this month's ramble, we hope we'll be able to talk about or show more interesting stuff in the future.
