This entire conversation confirms that apparently yeah, US toilets do this and as usual Americans will blame just about everybody for a problem that is readily solvable instead of actually fixing it.
I didn't think I was gonna end up with toilets as a metaphor for, you know, health care, political corruption and gun control, but here we are.
So this is a US thing, with the weird half-full-of-water bowls, right?
I've had a messy clog maybe once in my life, but evven then it didn't just fill horrifically with water and overflow. It's such a trope that all I can assume is that maybe US toilets do that sometimes?
They did put out an announcement that they had "missed their performance targets", and that made news.
It's fair to be disappointed, though. There ARE serious issues here. The game can be made to run acceptably (I went and dug up a comparable card to your 2080 and yeah, it's a 1080p30 game there, but it works). That takes significant fiddling in their advanced menu, and there are significant visual compromises to be made.
At the very least, their default presets should have been tuned differently. That would have been free and prevented the whole "it runs at 20fps on my 4090 on low" frustration with no additional development effort. Not to say that they shouldn't be patching this up a LOT going forward, but they had tools to mitigate that they're not using, which is very confusing.
Some of the settings are messed up, I think. It definitely can run faster than that by toning down some settings on that hardware. They really should have changed the defaults or straight up removed some visual settings, given what they do to the game. In my experience, the volumetric clouds, reflections and GI presets are all messed up and cost a disproportionate amount of performance when maxed out.
That does sound like a setting is bugged somewhere, or perhaps like one of the problematic settings is not toned down on the low preset. It's hard to tell without testing on the specific hardware. I'm curious enough that I may install it in more devices with less VRAM and mess with the settings just to see what happens.
I do think if they hadn't told people that performance was going to be messed up you'd absolutely assume that's a bug, given that, as you say, it doesn't match their spec notifications.
Some of the settings there are absolute killers. Volumetric coulds is nuts. The game is 90% staring at the ground, and I lose 10+ fps with that. Ditto for transparent reflections, and the settings for global illumination on high are insane as well.
Sure, once you tune it down selectively it looks like CS1... but it also performs like it.
I really don't understand some of the choices they made here, either in the way the visuals work, the way the default settings work or the way they communicated it. If they hadn't come out saying it'd be super heavy and they renamed "high" to "ultra" or had an intermediate setup between medium and high they wouldn't be getting this much crap.
That's fair. Having lived in both settings... well, yeah, the fact that food grows out of the ground with minimal coaxing is a distinct advantage if you have to survive a bad time.
But I've seen maps of the US. The fact that this is a culture-wide assumption goes beyond urban vs rural. You need a yard to make a bunker. Not many bunkers around here.
Plenty of assholes everywhere, though. It's not about a moral compass.
That's another weird one, I guess. You get this notion that suggests that rural settings somehow have the moral high ground or something. They don't. Sharing and community building are survival strategies. You help with gathering because you need help with gathering. You drop off the excess fish because at some point something needs to make up for your lack of lemons.
Going into a mad max rampage the moment the lights go off isn't being mean, it's being suicidal.
I swear American fantasies about societal collapse are so frustrating. Everybody assumes people would turn to violence and greed immediately. Either it's because it looks good in movies or they genuinely think they suck.
Meanwhile in real extreme conditions everybody is all "let's get all the famillies together to help each other gather our crops" and "I have too many lemons from my lemon tree, do you want some for free?" "Oh, only if you take some of this fish I got that may go bad instead".
If property rights are still enforced in the turmoil probably indefinitely. Doesn't mean I'd enjoy it, though.
I come from a place where survival agriculture was the norm well into the 1980s. Would have to start having cows and pigs again, need to work out a salting station, which we haven't had for a few decades. I remember soap making was a mess. We got rid of our wood-fueled kitchen at some point, so that's a problem until society settles back in enough to start selling those again. We'd probably have to go back to setting up a corner for a fireplace in the meantime. That's before my time but it should be possible.
But that's my point, it hasn't been, and it wasn't.
Again, Latin was mandatory in my high school for a year, optional for two more. In the 1990s. It's still optional, I believe. My parents went to church in Latin as kids.
So no, it doesn't sound mystical outside the anglosphere, it sounds like crusy old priests, lawyers and boring lessons. Today.
Yes? I think you may have missed my point in the shuffle.
What I'm saying here is that Latin doesn't make sense as a mystical, secret language for magic because it was too common. I'm not saying it wasn't the language of scholars, I'm saying that not only was it the language of scholars, so every treatise on optics or history would have triggered accidental lightning bolts, but it was also a commonly spoken language as well.
Hey, you know what is lingua franca for science while being widely spoken? English.