The RNG engine is the same, so even if there are minor differences, there’s no reason to believe that the RNG would be fundamentally “good” in that scenario.

The 3060 Ti I upgraded to doesn’t support AV1, so not that wasn’t part of the equation, though I’d certainly like to upgrade to card with hardware AV1 encoding in the future. Ideally when GPUs are not being gobbled up by crypto/AI.

I’ve explored Resolve for a few years but haven’t found it worth switching yet (though that might change at some point with future evaluations), and I was very turned off that the last time I checked you need to give up an email as payment to download it (even the free one). Maybe that’s changed and yes, of course, I could use a burner email, but it gives it a bit of a bad smoke signal about how the company values user data. Not a dealbreaker, but occasional codec problems are basically my only significant gripe with Vegas so the cost of switching exceeds the benefits of switching for now.

I remember back in the day people said random wasn’t random either. The belief was that changing your color would also influence the outcome.`No clue if that was/is correct, but out of habit I still change my color to green or yellow.

It seems unlikely that increasing modern HI’s range would help them much while they’re still automatically selecting targets: in terms of damage dealt (but obviously not damage taken), this is essentially what moving them close to their target (as per the tests) already does.

Range would help with their survivability, but it’s an unfortunate situation where we have to try to somehow balance them around both automatic targeting (low DPS) and manual targeting (high DPS), which is essentially impossible without resolving the underlying target selection itself. If they were given, say, +3 range, their performance with automatic targeting would still be bad (better, but nonetheless poor), but their performance with manual targeting would probably make them overbearing, as modern HI (in range) can kill tanks faster than tanks can kill MI, or MI can kill HI.