Well, everyone, World War II is almost here. Or maybe we've already been in it.
But at least I can take a Tesla robo taxi to the enlistment office and
distract myself with hardware news on the ride over. That's right, the robo
taxi is alive. Sort of. The program launched this weekend with Model Y's,
not cyber cabs, in Austin, Texas, and was limited to invitees, many of whom
were, surprise surprise, proTesla influencers, in a small geoenced area to
avoid construction, major highways, and complex intersections is scary. Tesla is
allegedly using a special version of full self-driving that's not available
to the average Tesla owner. Of course not. It's not like people paid for full
self-driving years ago. They did. Oh,
they did. Well, kind of sounds like Tesla doesn't
trust the technology yet, which is even more apparent by their inclusion of
safety monitors. These are people there. It's like Amazon with the cameras. These
are people. Elon promised unsupervised trips by June. It is June, but this
launch not only has Chase cars in some instances following the 10 to 20 Model
Y's, but each taxi also has safety bonders in the front passenger seats
with kill switches ready to end the trip. Better than your life. Most
patrons said their rides were uneventful. Hail the car with the robo
taxi app. Find it at the pickup location, show the safety monitor your
phone, and away you go out into the wild blue geoence yonder and straight into
perhaps oncoming traffic. Thankfully, there have been no accidents yet. Elon
stated that there will be over a thousand driverless vehicles within a
few months, and rides currently only cost a flat rate, regardless of
distance, of $4.20. Oh, Elon, you're so
quirky. That's the weed number, man. That's like the 69th time he said that.
Nice. Speaking of rich people stuff, soon your 5090 could pull a,000 watts.
We've actually got a few GPU tidbits for you here, but let's start with Derbau
shunt modding a liquid cooled Astral card to draw a conservative 800 watts.
Definitely not the limit, but enough to outperform the super expensive RTX Pro
6000. in 3D Mark Speedway. It may have
been only by like 6 FPS, but hey, that
card costs overs $10,000. A win's a win. Hate NVIDIA. Dozens of Linux and Intel
Arc users can rejoice. It's been found that disabling Intel's graphics security
mitigations can net a nice 20% uplift in
Open CL and level zero in Ubuntu. This
can be a little risky. Security measures are in place for a reason, but Intel
seems confident that it'll be fine. totally fine. They're so confident you
can already grab the Open CL and level zero compute stacks on their GitHub
pages security. And for more free performance, this time for hundreds of
you, Jay's two cents has pointed out that systems rocking 13th or 14th gen
Intel chips and NVIDIA graphics cards might not actually have rebar enabled.
BIOS says it's enabled. GPUZ says it's enabled, but you'll need to dig into the
NVIDIA profile inspector to know the truth and potentially make a change.
Check out Jay's video for more information and then check out our
sponsor. Oh snap, they looked at all the bulky, cheap, plasticky phone grips out
there and thought, hm, how about not that? Then they made the Snap Grip Lux,
a multi-functional MagSafe compatible, strong as hell phone grip that's somehow
still thinner than your camera bump. Look at this thing in grip mode. Now
look at it in kickstand mode and what it's charging now and it's magnetically
sticking to all sorts of metal stuff so you can do video calls or watch a show
and remember what it's like to have both hands free.
Yeah, I mean that's going to happen sometimes. It's time to upgrade to a
phone grip that doesn't suck. Check out the O Snap Snap Grip Lux at our link in
the description. But what about the quick bits? In preparation for the Xbox
Ally X, Microsoft has been spotted testing out their consolidated game
library in the Xbox app. Finally, an end to game segregation across platforms. A
beautiful world where Steam and Xbox games can live together in harmony. To
try for yourself, just download the Xbox Insider Hub on PC and join the gaming
preview. Then take a look at the My Library section. Not literally my
library. You don't want to go in there. And if you want to play those games with
a Steam Controller, don't. Because Tommy B has shown us the path to enlightenment
with his version of the Steam Controller 2 or Steam Deck controller. He used a
ton of off-the-shelf and 3D printed parts to create a splitable unit that
features everyone's favorite trackpads. And honestly, it looks pretty sick.
Valve, please hire this man or just pay him a bunch of money and make it
official. Either way, just let the people have it. Now, there's more good news. Today's just it's just a good day.
The Epic team working on Unreal Engine 5 updates has shown off a significant
performance uplift going from patch 5.4 to 5.6 in the Paris Tech demo from scans
factory. GPUbound scenarios saw up to 25% higher frame rates and CPUbound
scenarios saw up to 35% with reduced frame time spikes and all with better
visuals. Holy actually. Yeah. U 5
is finally going to be optimized. Incredible. R/patient gamers, you shall
be exalted. Something else to look forward to is this super cool real life
ad block using augmented reality. You see an ad or a product, it gives a big
transparent ad block logo. But soon, thanks to Steen Stigen Spavenho, I'm so
sorry, man. You too could be inundated with giant red rectangles. It's not
perfect, but it's a cool first step to an ad-free world. ltdstore.com. And
last, but not least, yep, War Thunder forum users are added again. War Thunder
Forum users will be War Thunder Forum users this time. A user uploaded a
section from a Nat TOPS manual for the
AV8B and TAB8B Harrier. Clearly marked
that it's not public information. It's not a massive leak, but it's a leak
nonetheless. So, somebody set the counter back to zero for the reset. Just
like I'm resetting in a couple of days, stay tuned for Wednesday's episode where
we'll have stories about crazy stuff like magical GPU price cuts. Just
kidding. I can't tell the future.