It's tempting to craft any number of phone in template
essays under the present circumstances.
My students have just turned in their work, prompting me to sift through
the largest number of portfolios I've ever had to deal with since I started
teaching, there are a number of holiday sales and events that bring to mind
thoughts of how seasonal events are, in a real sense, absolute bullshit, and
also thoroughly wonderful things when well executed. The good people at Overkill Games recently
introduced an update to PAYDAY 2's
feat system that deftly addresses the concerns I brought up a week ago. But those bullshit topics take a back seat,
in my mind, to a more prominent, more pressing bullshit topic: the strange high
stakes game that emerges every time I replace a piece of hardware on my system.
It's a struggle I forget between bouts, but each time it
happens the threat, the consequence, and the rush of success are all very
real. The most recent culprit was a
video card, as it often is. After
installing the card, I had to spend about an hour uninstalling driver sets and
restarting my system to get Windows to even notice that a graphics card had
been installed. When I was finished, I
got to wait a little longer and reboot my system one last time, crossing my
fingers that something, anything would change in terms of how problem games
would perform.
In the end, the difference was minimal. Mechwarrior:
Online, the bane of my hardware existence, runs slightly better, but less
because of my new card, and more because I finally read about how to effectively
force hardware integration out of Pirahna's cobbled together software
package. But as I went through the
motions of reestablishing a stable build for playing games, I remembered why I
loved building systems. It goes beyond
just cobbling together moving parts, or making games run smoother. Sure, those are both components of it, both
satisfying in their own right, but the real motivation behind my hardware lust
comes from a learning-process oriented feedback loop.
Usually learning-process oriented feedback loops are
abstracted: we don't notice we're learning until after we've learned, and even
then we only notice when we're forced to compare previous performance to
updated performance. But when you're messing
around with hardware configurations, the risk and reward components are so stark
and immediate in their response times that it's difficult not to experience an
almost immediate bit of response feedback each time a piece of hardware works
especially well, or a piece absolutely shits itself, potentially bricking an
entire system, or prompting a quick case rewire to insure that all the 8-pins
are in the right places.
So in the end, as I look at Dragon Age: Inquisition and see it running wonderfully, look at Mechwarrior: Online and see it running
more or less the same, and look at the low-end games I spend a great deal of my
time playing and wonder why I even need a dedicated GPU sometimes, I just have
to smile. Even if performance doesn't
dramatically uptick, at least I learned something from the single largest
one-item purchase of the last year of my life.
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