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Finding a Middle Ground in the Nvidia RTX “Just Buy It” Fiasco

Pre-flame disclaimer: No person or company asked me to or paid for me to write or comment about this topic.

Roughly one week ago, Tom’s Hardware published an opinion piece about Nvidia’s upcoming RTX series of graphics cards, titled “Just Buy It: Why Nvidia RTX GPUs Are Worth the Money“.

Shortly thereafter Gamers Nexus published a video titled “Response to Tom’s Hardware’s Insane “Just Buy It” Post [RTX 2080]”, with a corresponding blurb on social media posts saying “Tom’s Hardware’s Editor-in-Chief attempts to string together sentences that have meaning”.

“What? What the fuck is this?” -Steve Burke, Gamers Nexus

In this video, Steve essentially completely laughs off the entire Tom’s Hardware article, and sadly misunderstands a number of points. As a fan of him and Gamers Nexus more broadly, I found this particularly disappointing.

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Down the Rabbit Hole: Troubleshooting an Abrupt Outbreak of BSODs

Bonus points for the title because I have pet rabbits.

My sister and I both have our computers in the same room. This is important because it means that when something exciting happens while she’s playing a game, I usually notice.

In this instance that “exciting” thing was Terraria glitching out1 and then crashing (and blue screening?) her PC. I’m a little fuzzy about whether the first blue screen was now or later.

After that, the save was essentially corrupt – loading it either didn’t work or would crash the game. Also fuzzy about which of those it was, but you get the gist. My sister wiped that save, made a new world, and everything was fine.

..At least for a while.

At some point either that day or the next, the computer blue screened (again?).

An example of the Windows 10 blue screen. Image credit: Microsoft

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Everything is Roughly Balanced

This concept is applicable near universally: games, economics, computer parts, whatever. If the category exists, the things within it are almost certain to be roughly balanced.

For “quick and dirty” comparisons between two things, this concept is incredibly valuable to understand. When you just need to know roughly whether something’s worthwhile, you can save a lot of time by keeping the deep analysis for later.

Let’s use some examples to illustrate.

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Systems I’ve Helped Build (Part 1: 2017-2016)

Jo’s “handle anything I throw at it” (August 2017)

Glamour shot of Jo’s case. Image credit: NZXT

Build involvement:

  1. Component selection (assisted)
  2. Building the system (assisted)
  3. BIOS / drivers / software (assisted)

Priorities:

  • Give Jo a feeling of the computer being “able to handle anything”
  • Gaming performance
  • Not-awful acoustics

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