Month: August 2017

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Shmee Made It To The Dark Tower

I told myself that I needed to finish Stephen King’s The Dark Tower books before the movie came out, and I did it, barely, so now that I am free to watch the movie, the reviews say that I should skip it.  Which is a bummer because the books are excellent, and people that love fantasy novels should give it a shot.

The series is as weird and crazy as you would hope a Stephen King fantasy series would be, and it is always fun to see his other characters show up in unexpected places.  Not that you need to read his other books to enjoy The Dark Tower.  He has had such a profound impact on pop culture that you will get a lot of the references by just having lived in the 20th and 21st centuries.

If you are thinking you need a few thousand pages to read and you are sick of all the current gritty fantasy books out there, why not travel with The Gunslinger to The Dark Tower.  Who knows it may just be your Ka to do so.

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Is AMD’s Vega Too Late?

Yesterday AMD FINALLY announced their Vega lineup of cards.  Their top end card will be the Radeon RX Vega 64, starting at $499 US, and their slightly lower end card is called the Radeon RX Vega 56, starting at $399 US.  As an AMD fanboy I was excited to see their new cards, and even more excited that they should be hitting stores soon, August 14th, but the sad news was that they were merely going to go toe to toe with the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 and the GeFore GTX 1070 respectively.

Coming out a year later and not being faster than those cards is a real bummer.  Don’t get me wrong, Nvidia needs the competition, but considering Nvidia already has their ultra fast GTX 1080ti out, and it easily bests the Vega 64, that means Nvidia’s next round of cards that are coming out soon will be even faster than Vega without even trying very hard.

Granted AMD will be able to compete on price like they always have, and they are promising to keep the supply chains stocked to keep crypto-miners from driving the price up, but it just would have been fun to see a fight for the high end graphics market again.  If Vega would have come out even six months ago maybe would we be talking about some sort of Super-Vega to compete with the 1080ti, but that didn’t happen, and now if you want super high-end graphics Nvidia is still the company you should turn to.