Tech
Amazon Prime Day GPU Deal Still Live: GeForce RTX 3090 for $1299.99 – IGN
For Amazon Prime Day, the Gigabyte GeForce RTX 3090 video card has hit an all time low. This is one of the very few RTX 30 series GPUs that have been able to drop below the MSRP of the reference video card. In the beginning of the year, people were willing to pay upwards of $2500 for an RTX 3090. In hindsight, we shake our heads at the thought of paying that kind of price, especially with the current downward spiral of crypto, but that’s beside the point.
Amazon Prime Day GPU Deal: Gigabyte GeForce RTX 3090 GAMING OC 24GB Video Card for $1299
If you were to purchase an Gigabyte GeForce RTX 3090 Gaming OC 24GB graphics card purely for gaming, even at this discounted price, I’d say you would be wasting your money. Instead, I would kindly direct you to the Amazon Prime Day RTX 3080 GPU deal for $779.99. You’d be saving over $400 and losing only about 5%-10% in terms of performance. The RTX 3090 is not intended for gamers; it’s catered towards professional graphic artists, animators, modelers, software engineers, or data scientists who run render farms, intensive workstation applications like Maya or 3ds Max, or machine learning. The RTX 3090 is the workstation GPU of choice not because of its processing power (which it has in spades), but the amount of VRAM. The RTX 3090 comes with a massive 24GB of GDDRX RAM compared to the RTX 3080’s “paltry” 10GB. Unfortunately, however, the vast majority of games will not benefit from the increased VRAM, and that’s why it’s not a smart purchase for the end gamer.
Counter-Strike 2 (CS2), the next evolution of Valve’s, long-running, ever-popular, and lucrative tactical first-person shooting game was revealed in mid-March 2023. But beyond several visual improvements and refinements to the high-stakes game, it appears as if the company is taking the opportunity to implement far stricter measures to counteract cheaters, who utilise third-party tools to gain an unfair advantage.
As spotted by Twitter user Aquarius and reported on by PC Gamer, a line in the source code of CS2 has indicated a new feature that will immediately cancel an in-progress match of Counter-Strike 2 if a player is detected using cheating tools.
The code, which appears to outline the conditions for certain notifications to pop up in-game, includes the phrases ‘Cheater Detected’ and ‘This match has been cancelled by VAC Live’.
‘VAC’ in this instance, of course, is an abbreviation for Valve Anti-Cheat, the company’s proprietary cheat monitoring solution. VAC was first introduced with Counter-Strike in 2002.
As PC Gamer astutely notes, this appears to be Valve taking a page out CS2’s closest competitor at the moment, Valorant, developed by Riot Games. Riot’s anti-cheat measures have included match cancellations since the game’s launch.
Counter-Strike has always been a game with high stakes, requiring exceptional levels of player investment and focus to succeed. Having your multiplayer experience ruined by a lopsided, unfair match can be incredibly demoralising, especially if you’re stuck in it for some time before you can move on. If Valve’s new anti-cheat measures do go ahead, it can only be a positive thing.
Don’t cheat in multiplayer games. That’s a loser move.
Counter-Strike 2 will launch on PC sometime in mid-2023.
Microsoft’s long-running introductory offer for its Xbox Game Pass subscription platform, which let users try the service out for $1 for the first month before moving onto more expensive payments, has finally come to a close.
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As The Verge report, the deal—which applied to both Xbox Game Pass Ultimate and the PC Game Pass—has recently been pulled, with a Microsoft spokesperson saying “We have stopped our previous introductory offer for Xbox Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass and are evaluating different marketing promotions for new members in the future”.
What those “different marketing promotions” could be is anyone’s guess, though given the whole point of the $1 deal was get new users on the hook, a natural successor could easily be the Xbox Game Pass Friends and Family scheme, which while still unavailable in the US has been tested in a number of international markets since late 2022.
Anyone signed up for Game Pass will see months from existing subscriptions converted into partial months on the sharing plan. If you’re currently signed up for Xbox Game Pass Ultimate, every remaining month will turn into 18 days of Game Pass Friends and Family. Those signed up for the piecemeal tiers will see their subscriptions convert into 12 days of Game Pass Friends and Family.
There are some limitations, however. If you’re the account holder, you can only have four additional people on an account at any given time, and can only share with eight unique accounts over the course of a calendar year. And it’s region-locked: The primary account holder can only add members who live in the same country or region.
While that’s not a 1:1 replacement for the $1 offer, which was just a good deal for anyone, it does mean folks recommending Xbox Game Pass to friends or family would have a pretty easy way to get them onboard via their own account.
It sucks to see the $1 deal go away, since I’m sure many/most of you took advantage of it, but if you weren’t ready for the time Xbox decided to start doing stuff like this, you have not been paying enough attention to TV and sports over the last five years.
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