Framework's Steam Machine + NEXT FEST | OTC EP 19

Welcome to Off the Console, the greatest podcast to ever come out to humankind.

I don't have my script in front of me, so I'm going to be having even more fun today.

So unless anyone stops me, I'm going to continue on with just promoting this amazing thing of of a tech podcast.

We're going to we talk about hardware, games, whatever it is in the zeitgeist of whatever we do as

content creators and everything.

So today

is a special episode.

It's the Next Fest episode where we're gonna be playing, talking about our favorite demos from the Next Fest that's going on right now.

And there's a plethora of them.

There's so many demos that there's not enough time in the world.

to play them, so you have to go solely off of how they look.

And I have to say, that is probably the most interesting part about this whole thing is browsing for demos to play.

Because some of them look really good until you get into it, and then they don't look good.

And then there's the opposite.

So it's a fun time.

With me is Gardner and HiTech Lowlife.

and of course me, James, also known as the Brain Core, Games Revealed.

I personally prepared...

James Revealed.

That seems a little...

nicey, spicy.

That's your oldie fans.

a reoccurring joke that we do sometimes because I'm like, well, if it gets worse, you know, first comes to worse, I need to get a job or something.

I can always do James revealed instead on only fans, but.

go.

So we got our first message from Rachie.

Morning chat.

Morning, Rachie.

Good old Rachie.

a good old rate sheet.

Welcome, welcome Richie.

Welcome to the chat.

So I have my gaming fuel here.

I have a Coke and I have a coffee.

I don't know if you guys are prepared for this, but I have.

Maybe not the device yet.

I've got water.

A beer stein full of water.

got a...

a...

a...

That's nice.

Ooh, go hard into the microplastics.

Nice.

Nah, I've got one of those reusable bottles.

Yeah.

Same.

I'm just messing with you.

Maybe I'll get micro metals.

Maybe you got nanomachines inside.

Nanomachines son.

Nah, just aluminum, you know.

Nano machines not to be confused with micro machines.

no, that's

is like before we edit.

No, there's just the long pauses because we're on a, because we're doing the video chat.

I usually cut out as many of the long pauses as I can.

we can see the messages in Riverside.

That's pretty cool.

I didn't know that.

that.

Yeah, there's a chat section.

No, I had a, uh, no, I usually just like go on YouTube to respond or I just like pull up YouTube and like, okay, it's kind of hard because one of my monitors still fucked up.

But like, I usually have YouTube on the other monitor so I can just re-chat that way.

But hey, it is what it is.

How many viewers do we have?

Looks like two.

No.

Damn.

Well, that's okay.

That's okay.

What matters is people watch it after we do all the fun stuff.

you

And then we also put it on our podcasting platforms.

So now YouTubers get people that watch videos on YouTube, they get priority.

Apparently.

Yeah, it's the only one you can livestream on.

Yep.

So, fellows, what have y'all, yeah, James, go on.

I know, I know.

You guys are just chatting a lot.

Yeah, so what have you guys been doing this week?

Let's get into that.

Next Fest.

Nothing but Next Fest.

How many demos did you try out this week?

Close to 50.

I don't know, I want to be impressed, but I also want to be disappointed.

I don't know which one to feel right now that you didn't try out more.

Some of the demos, some of the demos like didn't run.

Some of the demos didn't actually run on Steam Deck.

So I'm counting those two.

really?

I tried five.

I have 10 or 15 downloaded on my deck, but I've tried five of them.

Yeah, to be honest, I only like half of the ones I've played.

It's very interesting.

Very interesting set of demos.

got a couple of ones that I'm like, these look horrible, but they could still be fun.

A lot of survival horror.

Dude, it's okay because we didn't spend any money.

If he spent like $60 in the game like that though, it's a bit of a nightmare.

That's why so many people can enjoy like bad movies because they can just, if they want to watch it, they can just pirate it or, well, I mean, not saying you couldn't pirate videos,

but like it's more common to pirate movies probably.

Yeah

I know nowadays.

I feel like it's a...

I don't know.

feel like pirating games is way more complicated than it used to be.

Like, I don't know, because I haven't tried, but yeah.

Well, the thing is that people don't know how to download shit.

They just, they just go on like Google and they click on the first result and then they get a virus and that scares them off.

Whereas like you, like you can look, you can look up movies and it just streams from a piracy website and you don't even download anything.

And if you have ad block, then it's relatively safe-er-ish.

Maybe not safe from the ISP though.

No.

Do you think that they're promoting viruses, these companies?

They're like, we're just going to have the first five CD key hacks or whatever be just viruses that they promote.

Wait, Hi Tech, come back.

So from what I understand, I think there was one company in Japan that did this, where they released a quote unquote cracked version of their end game.

This is from like the early 2000s.

And then so they released a quote unquote cracked version of their game.

then you had to put in your name and stuff, and it took a picture of you.

And then the developers exposed you on their websites until you said sorry.

It was hilarious.

Shame man, shame it.

You shame him.

public shaming does work.

It's also the best anti-cheat as we, as you recall from last week.

Yeah.

I have a hard time with that one because I don't even cheat.

don't know how I would explain.

Yeah, I just don't know.

It's a hard one.

the demo I want to try is Roadcraft from Cyber Interactive.

Now, what is Roadcraft from Cyber Interactive?

Let's look it up.

it's got mixed reviews too.

It is it looks like it's a

game where you clear out debris and shit and I mean it seems pretty neat isn't there's a game that's like on steam already though it's more it has more of like voxel style

graphics like tear down I think isn't that you're not just cleaning stuff up though sometimes you're like blowing people's shit up

This game would look, it honestly looks fun.

It looks like it'd be perfect for my kids too, for me and my kids to play.

Dude, you know they should do though?

They should make a game like Teardown, but like it's an actual game.

Like, imagine if made an FPS with like Teardown level destruction.

That would be kind of sick.

And like, and I think there's a mod for it that has structural integrity.

like tear down by itself doesn't have structural integrity.

Like if you take out the like foundation of a building, it doesn't collapse.

But with this mod, it uses so it uses an insane amount of CPU by the way.

But if you like take down the foundation of a building with the mod enabled, it like starts to crack.

Like the wall start to crack and then it falls.

It's awesome.

Do I still sound fine?

K, you still saw fun.

Okay, cool.

I started OBS and it does weird stuff.

So I think today we have to celebrate someone's birthday.

Someone's birthday?

Steam Deck?

life.

Yes.

yeah.

Does someone have a birthday cake or anything?

That would have been a good...

So like a pie?

A steam deck pie?

And the pie is a lie.

Not the pie is a lie.

I wonder if I could get Costco to write like, the cake is a lie on their cake and do a video on that.

I don't see why they wouldn't.

I don't see why they wouldn't.

You're paying them.

They'll write anything, probably.

know I'm just, of course, it's not it's nothing like, well, I don't know if they'll write anything, but yeah.

Yeah, so is Valve doing anything special for the birthday this year?

Do you know?

Hmm, no, but we did see some statistics.

According to AMD, the combined sales of the ROG Ally, the Steam Deck, and the Legion Go hit 8 million total sales.

And many are speculating that the Steam Deck hit 4 million of those sales.

Nah, I don't have any concrete numbers.

But that does sound pretty impressive for a, admittedly sort of niche device.

Honestly, I think it would be more than that.

I mean, how much?

I don't know.

I feel like the ROG ally and the Legion Go are more niche than the Steam Deck, right?

Yeah, I mean, the Steam Deck is definitely a lot more mainstream, but like compared to something like the Nintendo Switch, which sold 20 million on year three.

I mean, that's not even...

People are saying the Steam Deck was a failure because the Switch sold 20 million units, and that's not even a real comparison because Nintendo puts a lot in that in marketing,

and it works.

Whereas Valve...

When's last time we've seen Valve market anything outside of Steam?

Never I mean they had the the one like there are like the two trailers like for the original steam deck and for the OLED but that's about all the marketing I've seen them do

I mean yeah, like, you've never seen a Steam Deck on TV before, have you?

I certainly haven't.

I have.

wasn't on TV, it was a live stream on the Game Awards.

It wasn't an ad though.

No.

Was that, I think that was an AMD ad actually not a.

Okay.

I'm kidding.

No, they don't do any marketing for the most part.

do give out, honestly, if they were smart, they would eat with the Steam Deck 2, they would give out even more to even smaller creators to grow their channels because that is a

really good way to market on a budget and also show goodwill.

You know what a valve should do when the singlet too rolls around.

Give it to me.

Yeah, you know it man.

All three of us, we're gonna show off our Steam Deck 2s and then we're gonna play video games together.

Speaking of which though, this isn't on the topic list, but I've seen some mentions of a Steam Deck Pro or some shit like that.

At the very least we saw an Aerith Pro APU.

And for what I understand, P.A.

Lugrafy categorically denied those rumors.

that there is no Steam Deck Pro coming out.

So then, yeah, the Fox seems to believe that this might have to do with Framont.

Yeah.

I believe that.

I think Fremont is gonna have like an upgraded Steam Deck CPU and that's where we're gonna end up finding...

What's the word?

I'm sure the Steam Deck is a lot more capable than we realize.

If A, we didn't have to worry about battery life or thermal constraints, then I'm sure it could run a lot better.

and memory bandwidth because the I watched the Fox's video and it's like you know I think the Steam Deck has like 5,000 something megatransfer a second and the the pro has like

8,500 megatransfer a second so between memory bandwidth

rising and having less thermal overhead and more power available, think that, you know, a console of that, like a steam deck console basically, is going to be pretty incredible.

Very capable.

Well, this is one of the topics I do want to talk about.

This leads kind of into it a little bit, is that I do think what would make a perfect Steam machine this year is going to be that framework desktop.

Hi-tech grew it in the chat and I was...

Framework has always been interesting, but I don't want a laptop like that per se.

Like my MacBooks last four or five years.

They were great.

But I have been wanting a Steam machine solely to do like co-op and all that, but...

potentially even replace my desktop right now because it's just also struggling a little bit.

I'm really, really interested in this framework desktop.

haven't reserved it or like, yeah, I haven't reserved one yet, but and I'm going to contact him too, but I'm going to I plan on at least buying one.

So, Raychi says, problem I have with the Steam Deck is it has a stronger CPU to the PS4, but a weaker GPU, so I can play stuff at 60 FPS but at 40p, 680p.

Listen, dude, the Steam Deck screen is 800p maximum if you're playing in handheld mode.

Like, yeah, you're playing stuff at like 720p because, I mean, it doesn't make sense to raise the resolution when the screen itself doesn't even support a higher resolution.

And when you're playing games on the go, you kind of have to make concessions because of battery.

Like if they made a technology that gives like the steam deck infinite power, that'd be awesome.

But like that's not happening in our lifetimes.

I want options.

don't care if it burns through and only have an hour, but I have 1080.

That's what I want.

I want something like a 1200 1080p for my next Steam Deck.

Just going to say it like I can plug.

I I noticeably like more than FSR or anything else, the resolution does bother me, actually, like 480 on a Steam Deck.

can't I can't do that very well.

It's actually a saving grace of FSR because then it will upscale for me at least.

But I think we all kind of are a little different with this.

I mean, personally speaking, think I'm okay with the lower resolution.

mean, it's a small screen.

Relatively speaking, it's a small screen.

That's my point, though, is preferences, is that like it's nice to have the options.

That's one of the nice things about PC.

So I would rather them.

And I do agree.

Like, I think these to save battery and everything like that, they underpowered the steam deck a little bit.

But I don't really like they're one of the biggest things I saw was actually RAM with a lot of games I play.

That's the games I play.

And this is anecdotal.

is the limiter is RAM for me.

So personally speaking, do sort of agree with your point.

do what I would like Valve to do for like the next iteration of the Steam Deck 2 is to, you know, when it's docked, it like, Valve claims that it runs at full power when like all

the time, right?

Even when docked, right?

But I feel like that could push it just a little bit more when plugged in.

And that's kind of what I want.

Like, like, Neon Hunter Nintendo Switch runs slightly like, you know, a slightly higher clock speed than such when docked.

Yeah, think of it like that.

That'd be nice.

I want options.

I want to be able to run it as high as I want in battery mode, like like docked or non-docked.

But I want the options.

I agree.

Like I want to be able to configure it to like, OK, let's limit it pretty low on the go and then go full speed or overclock it a little bit with the dock.

But you know what really they should be working on?

And I don't know why this doesn't get more traction.

It's just an EGPU dock.

Just

Do an eGPU dock with Steam Deck 2, plug it in, you get more, it makes sense.

That's the way we should go, in my opinion.

yeah, what GPU should we put in the CPU dock?

well, the new GPUs coming out are looking really sexy.

The AMD's 9070.

yeah, the sexiest part though is the price.

$5.99

weirdest part too.

It's like a kink of theirs.

They're like, okay, we're gonna be doing this weird price gap of like pretty big performance, but only $50 difference.

Like why would you get the X, like not get the XT version?

I don't know if you guys looked into this much, but like.

anchoring man.

They want to make the 9070 look a good 9070 XT look a good deal in comparison to the regular 99070.

I don't understand why they're doing it.

I don't think that works the same way for a GPU as it does for like any other markets but like god damn it man.

God damn AMD.

Just lower the price man.

People are gonna

People are gonna give this a bad review and then you're gonna lower the price later, but all the bad reviews are out there now and no one's gonna fucking buy these.

of the of the 9070, the 9070 XT, I think we'll get good reviews and everything, but the 9070, it just doesn't even make sense except for with these types of devices.

They usually it's the same.

It's the same GPU core.

It's just rated better, right?

Like when they do stress testing, if it can run better, they usually upscale it to the next level.

And so I'm thinking that's what it is.

I don't know.

It's interesting.

I don't get where they're going, but I do love where they're going with that price to performance.

It sounds pretty sexy.

Now to be honest, kind of wish AMD competed on the high end again because, you know, I'm hoping that AMD does compete on the high end for like the, 10,000 series GPUs or whatever

that comes next.

But I certainly hope that they compete and that they put up a decent price because Lord knows, historically, and you know, correct me if I'm wrong, but historically, AMD has

always priced their GPUs pretty close to the Nvidia prices.

but like $50 less, but like, let's say 25 % worse performance.

And honestly, that's not worth it.

Yeah, no, I agree.

I do hope that this is like a little bit of a AMD starting to do more to be more competitive and that they'll start getting into the higher end.

But I'm I'm about ready to do this.

And the reason why I bring up the framework stuff like the framework desktop, one of the reasons is because I'm kind of done with the high end right now.

Who knows?

Maybe I'll come back, but it's just.

Price to performance is just, it's a linear scale and I don't like it.

I just don't like that every year they just include a couple more cores and then they just up the price and I'm fine with a mid-range card these days.

They play almost everything great.

So, Ray Chi says, believe the 9070 XT will be out of stock and that the 9070 will be the only thing in stock.

So, I mean, I guess it's a fair point given how GP, but that's more of Nvidia's playbook.

They like to make GPUs scarce so they can justify the prices.

Whereas AMD apparently delayed the launch of these to get more stock.

So yeah, the stores and this is from Linux Tech Tips, but the stores have been stocking it for a few months now.

And it sounds like there should be, you should not be having the same issue that Nvidia.

Does that mean that they're not gonna be sold out?

I think it's a pretty sexy price to performance.

It sounds like everything's looking good, but we'll have to see what reviews say, of course.

But at the end of the day, like it will be sold out, but it won't be because they did stock limiting.

like Nvidia does or Sony even does like.

Yeah.

Yeah, and also one more thing too is that I don't really think scalpers would go for these cards because, you know, the 50-90 has that mystique of being the fastest gaining GP on

the market.

And some people will pay that pretty penny for that, even if it's from a scalper.

Whereas, you know, this is a mid-range card.

No one's going to want to pay scalpers for like a jacked up price for a mid-range card, right?

No one's going to pay a thousand dollars for this, right?

I wouldn't think so.

It depends on the scarcity level and how hard it is to get and what the demand is.

But I agree.

I don't think it's going to be as bad.

But in the past, when we had GPU limitation, like back with COVID, like their everything was expensive.

Everything was bumped up by two or three hundred dollars.

So it definitely is capable of going there.

But we'll see.

Like, it depends.

I'm really hoping AMD is really.

trying to be competitive because they could really eat Nvidia's lunch if they really wanted to just be like, okay, we're going to have a lot at launch.

We're not playing these games.

We're going to give what gamers actually want, which is the ability to buy it because you're going to kill excitement if you can't get the, in my opinion, if you can't get the

GPU.

like for me, Nvidia is like that.

I just, I'm not going to play the game of trying to get it.

Rache says, six years ago, $600 was the high end.

Yes, I miss Polaris.

The RX 580 was the real bargain.

And I'm going to be real with you, man.

Six years ago was a long time ago.

And times have changed.

Prices have gone up.

And I mean, what more can I say?

It's all Nvidia's fault.

And honestly, I also partly blame AMD.

They're most, they're kind of complicit with this whole ish.

kind complicit.

just let AMD run wild and they also price their GPU similarly as well because I mean they make a little they can make a little more gosh.

Now I think the real savior of GPUs may be coming in the form of Intel.

Now Intel hasn't proven themselves to be nearly as good but I that's just my hope.

My hope is that like Intel can actually make a decent GPU and not overcharge for it and then disrupt the market because Lord knows

I don't want a duopoly of AMD and Nvidia because we all know how that's going to end.

Yeah.

than just what we have now, which it feels like Nvidia.

Like I felt like if I want to get the best deal.

Nvidia are not the best deal, but like the best graphics card that will last me for years to go in the past, like Nvidia and their.

I understand their modeling a little bit better than AMD's.

AMD's modeling is kind of all over the place sometimes with their names.

I don't know that, but.

I don't know what to say.

All I know is I'm going more AMD these days, for now.

I think they're more customer and consumer friendly.

Not to mention open source.

that yeah I think that's a big part of being customer friendly is not trying to you know shut your customers out altogether or not listening to what they want

Let me see what's going on.

Yeah, so I don't know, man.

The GPU market's all kinds of weird, especially now since AI is a major driver.

And unlike crypto, where crypto crashed and crashed and burned and no one fucking...

Like, what's the last thing before anyone crypto farmed?

Crypto still a thing but the problem is it was getting to a point where it was hard to farm anyways crypto still things like Bitcoin still rising it's Not as big as it used to

be which is good You don't have like but you still have your crypto boys or bros or whatever and it's just it is a little

bros, they're all trying to like scan each other as opposed to like buy up all the GPUs to farm crypto nowadays.

when like I haven't heard anyone I haven't heard people.

Yeah.

It's not as productive to do that now because you hit like with mining you you hit limitations because it gets harder and harder and our tech didn't grow with it.

So.

Well, the point I'm trying to make though is that AI is a little different.

AI doesn't seem like something that'll go away anytime soon.

And as such, people are buying up these GPUs to do AI.

And Nvidia is artificially capping GPUs like VRAM to not let, say, know, because they want, they want all the AI guys to buy their Quattro cards or Tesla cards.

Can you, wait, can you believe that Nvidia has a line of GPUs called the Tesla line?

It's kind of crazy.

How long have they had that?

can't remember.

I know Quadro, like that's a professional card.

I thought Tesla was like the one of the architecture names.

And also, Raytree, he says, theory why Nvidia is expensive for gamers is because they fuse the consumer cards with the professional cards together, so the barrier for pro dropped,

but the barrier for gamers increased.

I don't agree, because Nvidia is still clearly handicapping VRAM across the board so that people don't just buy the...

so that, you know, AI developers and people that like AI don't just buy their gaming cards to the AI.

Like, the big...

the, like...

32 gigabytes of VRAM is not enough for an AI model.

Well, it's probably like the low, that's the lowest amount that I would consider to be acceptable for an AI

I don't know, Gardner proved that it runs pretty good on the Steam Deck.

It yeah, I mean the what was it the seven billion eight billion model.

Yeah

Yeah, it was the seven billion.

Yeah, if you're going to be serious though, you're not, you're going to be getting the Quadro or probably a more custom chip set from Nvidia and they do not fuse them by the

way.

They're very different cards.

Like Hitech mentioned, like with the Quadro, the Quadro is a professional.

It's usually for like game development or other high intensive GPU tasks.

I don't know if it's even used.

as much for AI, but I think Nvidia has its own line of AI cards that they more or less sell to, exclusively to open AI and stuff like that.

There's a whole problem with all this, because it's all down to like two companies really doing a lot of this.

Another reason I like the framework and some of these other AI models coming out is like framework.

You can get 128 gigabyte version of it that can share the memory up to 96 gigabytes.

That is enough RAM to run anything you'd want to run.

I can finally make my AI assistant that we talked about.

Like, I'm going to have an AI assistant.

I'm going to be training it every day.

I'm going to have some fun with it.

But yeah.

House, write me a article on why Nvidia bad AMV good.

I posted a video about the framework desktop and someone in the comments was like, I'm so disappointed in framework.

They're now removing modular RAM so that they can price gouge.

And I was like, it's $2,000.

Like I built this computer here for like $4,500.

Right.

And I have 128 gigs of RAM and like a third of that budget was to RAM, right?

Like it's insane.

Like if you buy RAM modules and and it's like if you buy like a Mac Pro, you can't even get 128 gigabytes.

In a Mac Mac studio, I should say.

Dude.

here's the thing.

If you go and look at the Mac Studio compared to, let's say you go with this, is $2,000, I think is pretty reasonable for this setup personally.

For our...

out the RAM in a Mac Studio, it's twice that amount.

And it's only 64 gigs, I think.

It might be 98 gigs, but it's like not.

not not in the studio, but in the Mac Mini it's 64.

It is you can get a Mac Mini to get more expensive than a MacBook Pro mid stock, which is crazy because it includes like a really nice screen and everything else like Apple has a

really bad problem with their upgrade cycle, even though I do like their stuff.

They're crazy.

This.

is a very good deal.

mean, you can look at the deal when you look at the, I think, the memory.

So if you go with a 500 gigabyte, $69, I think that's reasonable.

If you want to go with a four terabyte, it's $349.

Go look at that online.

Reiki says, is that a Series X?

No, think this is much smaller than a Series X.

Like, can you pull up a size comparison?

I think Linus has a picture of it in his hands.

No, we don't.

Well, we can.

Or we could just go look at the banana comparison right here.

This is the comparison right here.

So.

like, it's like as tall as two soda cans and like as wide as one or like one and like

of a balls.

So I love their, by the way, I love their comparisons here.

I did a stream on this this week.

So like, did a bunch of research into this because once you showed this, I'm like, my gosh, it's a steam machine.

And the game performance on this thing is awesome in the sense of like with cyberpunk, you're going to be looking at, let's say 1440p quality high.

you're looking at 70 frames per second average, which I think is pretty honestly really good for an APU.

So I'm pretty excited.

these particular APUs have like 4060, 4070 mobile performance.

Am I correct?

4060 performance, but they do compare to 4070 down here.

But that's a 4070 laptop, but I'm hearing like 4060 like desktop performance potentially, but.

I found the dimensions of the series X.

It's 15 centimeters square by 30 centimeters tall.

Right?

So also another thing too is that I've heard that there are some limitations in regards to AMD trying to get, because I think Framework did try to have modular, like, soda memory in

this, but they couldn't get it working.

It wasn't fast enough, essentially.

It was faster if they just saw out of the memory.

This is one of the reasons why Mac does that too.

it sucks for upgradability.

I agree with the premise that frameworks all about longevity, right?

It's all about swapping it out however you want, be able to swap out potentially like a different, let's say GPU later on, like their laptops have little ports for that.

This...

If you're gonna swap, this is a little bit different beast.

If you're gonna swap it out, you're gonna have to swap out the whole internals because from my understanding, I don't even think the APU, I think the APU is essentially stuck on

there.

Like you're stuck with APU, the RAM.

The only thing you can upgrade is the ports, the outside and the hard drive.

But.

yeah, Juan, how much is the motherboard by itself?

Because I believe the motherboard itself is just a standard, like it's standard size ITX.

So like you could stick this in an ITX case.

this is a mini ITX.

But yeah, so.

Yeah.

So, yeah, no, you can you can throw it out, throw it into something else like there's I don't imagine why you couldn't do that, but there are like people need to start

understanding there's reasons behind doing things before they get upset and not everything is to price gouge you.

And that being said, if even if it is, it's a competitive thing.

Go buy a different computer, in my opinion.

I'm not a framework simp or anything like that.

like what they've done, but I've never been overly excited about anything until I saw this.

One of the cool things too, I know this is supposed to be Next Fest stuff, is that you can cluster them.

And I think that is awesome.

This is a real competitor for machine learning and AI for the Mac mini.

The Mac mini, you can do this too, but.

For price to performance, I guarantee this thing's gonna potentially beat it because of that RAM size.

we'll have to see, we'll have to see.

Welcome Steam, wait, is his name just Steam?

Or, oh, I don't see the flow part on the chat, whatever.

But hey, Steam flow.

Hello.

The thing about this, the framework desktop, is honestly I don't like the chassis design.

Like I think it's kind of basic.

So if I were to get one of these, I'd just get the bare board, you know?

Like I would just get the bare board, which you you can get like the laptop boards and stuff.

So I'm assuming you'll probably be able to get just the boards with the, you know, you could.

put whatever modules, M2 modules on there you want or whatever.

And then I'd probably like 3D print like a rack mountable chassis for it, know, something that would be sick.

You get two of those, you network them together, you have a little rack mounted cluster.

That's what gets me excited about this.

I think that's gonna be cool.

James, can you pull up the motherboard?

I want to see the motherboard.

I don't know if they're selling.

yeah, yeah, right.

So I would, personally don't like, this is one of biggest problems with framework is I don't think any of their stuff looks good.

Personally, it looks like the 90s plastic-y stuff and I just don't like it.

I would probably be getting a special plastic spray paint or getting a kit and actually have, like this would be me modding this.

I'd have fun designing it.

So I agree.

That doesn't look good.

13 and I think that it is the nicest looking laptop I've ever used.

Like, I like it better than the the Mac Air, the M1 Mac Air that I had.

This is like it's so nice.

It's it's all aluminum.

The biggest issue that I have with it is like if I'm sitting on my lap without like my little laptop.

Hmm.

that I have, then the chassis is a little flexible.

so sometimes the physical switch for clicking the button, like clicking the mouse doesn't enact, like doesn't actuate, I guess.

Yeah.

So but other than that, like I really love the design.

I love the finish of it.

I think that it's great.

And and the laptop 12 I'm actually really excited for.

I think like

If they can get the right price point on the laptop 12, then I think that it's going to have a major impact on getting their brand out in front of people, making their

repairability more accessible to folks.

And I think that it looks really cool.

Like it is more plasticky though, like you said, James, but I don't necessarily think that's a bad thing.

the 13 definitely is the better of the ones I've seen I haven't held one obvious like so I can't say like it's the worst But I've never I mean, okay, it's not too bad I'm watching

this now and I'm like the 13 definitely is the better of the ones I've seen I Just I don't know the MacBooks I have always improved and they're so good at least in the way that they

look personally

But this is the best of both worlds almost is that that's the one thing I don't like about the MacBook is it's not customizable.

But I've gotten into this flow of my life of I want something that's going to be easy for work because I do a lot of development and a lot of other things.

I just want those things to work.

And then I want my play devices.

My my laptop is not my play device.

It is needs to be the device that is just on the go.

And I can always expect it to be what it is.

That's why I like the desktop is that it's my play device.

I can throw it into the living room, have fun with it, spray paint it, have my kids put stickers on.

It just seems like the perfect one for me for right now.

Also, one more thing too, customization.

So the front panel can actually be customized with 3D printed or you can purchase it from them, but you can customize it with little front panels that you can buy from them or 3D

print.

And I've seen Linus, he put a logo for Bazite.

Wait, do they sell a Bazite logo on there?

They don't.

You just...

You gotta load it up.

Make all you got to load up with all like Arch Linux All Arch Linux tiles did you I let him know that you use arch by the way

Yeah, you have to get like, like, like Scrabble tile style and then says BTW asterisk I asterisk use and then arch arch arch arch arch arch arch arch arch all the way down.

So one more thing too, one more thing too.

So I know we talked about putting the motherboard in a standard ITX case potentially, but how would front IO work?

Cause I don't think I saw any pinouts for like standard IO ports on the motherboard itself.

That's, it probably does.

I'd be shocked if they did a custom board that was like, that went away from typical IO ports, but, we'd have to look into it some more.

to be fair though, the motherboard is designed for these framework-like front I.O.

ports here.

Well, I doubt these, let me look at this.

It's a USB-C port right there.

Like there's different ones.

I think they're all like this.

Yes, USB-C.

So on the other side, I would be shocked if they didn't have the pins that go into the main board be a typical IO set of like USB.

if you go to the motherboard image.

Let's see, I gotta get out of here.

Which one's that?

Scroll down, scroll down, keep going.

Keep going.

Keep going.

There's one where they're like placing it in a case right there, that one.

So if you see like there's like the 24 pin and the eight pin Molex connectors.

Yeah.

And then there's like if you follow those down to the bottom left edge.

You can see there's two USB type 3.2 Gen 2 headers.

I do see those.

And it looks like they have two USB type C headers on the side, right, the top right or top left in this case.

And it looks like they have a PCIe, like, eight, like, by eight connector?

I'm not sure, I'm not sure the length of this one, the PCI connector.

That looks by 8, yeah.

It's eight.

So no, this is looking very standard.

So you have a PCI.

You have a bunch of other.

It looks like a typical ATX, in my opinion, in that they didn't do anything custom.

And that's what I'm liking about this, like more and more.

This is feeling like the high end Raspberry Pi to me, where the Raspberry Pi has never been powerful enough for me to experiment with this.

The performance that this is going to give me is exactly what I want.

And I can do a

of different videos, a ton of different things and have fun with this thing for a while.

I can do AI modeling, I can do my steam machine stuff that I want to do with that.

With SteamOS coming out, this would be fun way to write it, especially since it's AMD, it's probably going to be much more compatible with SteamOS.

Or if it's not, Bazite, right?

So I'm here for it.

You can make a media server out of this too, because it has a little PCIe card.

You can stick with a network-naked PCIe slot.

Or better.

two 5 gigabit NICs in it?

Two 5 gigabit NICs on the back, right?

to tend to get to make.

You could put that in there too.

Or or like an or you could do or you could like turn into a router, add more fat war ports to it.

Neither a lot, yeah.

it is expensive, though.

It's not like it's six hundred dollars.

It is a little pricey.

It starts at a thousand dollars.

But I plan on getting one of these in a Mac mini and kind of like gluing them together and having a fun combo box.

I think the only thing you couldn't do is make a high capacity NAS unless you bought a bunch of like

HBA boards, I believe.

don't know.

I don't fucking know.

It really depends on what you're trying to do.

you can with the USB-C alone, you can get some pretty good performance out of it with a lot of different NAS setups, but you wouldn't be able to put them into the you'd have to

have external and then including like I want to get like to upgrade this eGPU wise.

Right.

I could remove my 39.

It's a it's a it's the perfect playpen for me and what I want to do right now and eGPUs.

Like I really want to invest in eGBU so that I can play with them on my steam, like, well, not Steam Deck, but hopefully Steam Deck two has used before.

But my other portable devices, this and just kind of go a little bit smaller and more reusable, I guess I should say with my tech instead of having a huge tower.

I'm kind of going away from that, at least this year.

So I'm excited.

I know we've probably way over killed this topic.

And I'm with Rachie.

Rachie mentions, I'm 27 and feel so old and tired of the GPU market.

I will just get the next gen console in a year or two.

That's how it's feeling a little bit for me to partially, but I don't wanna go to the next console, cause I don't feel like consoles are doing enough.

I want this to be my console.

I want this to be.

My co-op box that I'm going to play with my kids to a bunch of old games, but a bunch of new games, too.

So I feel that GPU.

It's still fun to look into it.

And if I was able to do some reviews on new GPUs, I would I would enjoy it.

But my day to day life, I just don't care for high end GPUs right now.

So.

Honestly, I agree.

can also stick this.

You can also stick the motherboard in like an arcade machine.

that would be sick.

Yeah, but you'd have to find some sort of way to convert it to like a VGA connection or a SCART connection.

But they have conversion kits.

they have conversions because almost everything's possible these days with this type of stuff and because it has so much standard IO on it I think you're not gonna have any

issues.

That's what I'm excited for for this.

This is a very powerful small Mini ITX board that can do a lot.

It's a lot of power and a little I like the carrying handle

Honestly, this is going to replace like this will have the same power I'm actually curious on how this will compare to some of the consoles, but I'm hoping this has I'd have to look

at that now.

I'm hoping that this has

the fact that it has a by eight slot and it has like the USB-C headers, this is essentially a console motherboard.

It's got soldered RAM, you can't change the CPU and it's an APU and it's by AMD.

It's essentially next gen console hardware.

Yeah.

So maybe with some optimizations, you could be even better than the PlayStation 5, which is highly optimized and but like that RAM is is sexy for me.

Like I really like how much RAM is in there for multitasking.

Yeah, we go back up to the performance.

mentioned the button.

They mentioned from, uh, yeah, click on gaming.

Yeah, let's look at that.

Can you run cyberpunk at 78 FPS on a PS five?

You don't, I don't know.

Can you run out?

Can you even run out 60 on the PS5?

It probably runs downscaled at 10.

It probably runs at 1080 and then upscales to 1440 or 4K, depending.

And it probably doesn't run at 70.

I'd be shocked if it ran at 70.

It probably runs at like between 30 and 60.

Yeah, like look at these numbers, man.

They look so nice.

They look so nice.

Like you can run games at like...

It does mention Monster Hunter Wilds is run with frame gen on, which is...

Yeah, frame generation.

I think it's defaulted to on or something like that.

Yeah, it's interesting.

God damn it.

I don't know.

I mean, it's set to Ultra though.

That's the thing that like that it kind of impresses me with Cyberpunk high and without frame gen.

You throw frame gen on you can be playing 4K at these numbers.

That's pretty cool for me.

I'm fine playing frame gen with with the with with Cyberpunk doesn't bother me.

Some games do like I've mentioned, but Valorant plays that 250 plus.

The only bad side is it's a virus.

Dude, you can play Valorant on PS5 at 200 and so FPS.

can probably only play at most like 120.

But I think they are making a console version of Valorant.

I do remember this.

They say Steamflow says, doesn't mention anything about ray tracing.

That is true.

They didn't mention anything about ray tracing.

You'd have to try out a ray tracing forced game like Indiana Jones, I believe.

requires ray tracing.

Like, you cannot turn ray tracing off because the entire game is designed around it.

So AMD's new architecture, this is based on AMD's new architecture, does ray-chasing fine, but I think we're gonna understand more what this is capable of when the 9070 series comes

out, because I think it's the same gen, right?

And so...

So

I don't have a lot of hope, but at the same time, I don't think a lot of people care about ray tracing these days like it.

If it's forced like Indiana Jones and the way Indiana Jones performs anyways, I think I'll run fine on this.

And don't forget that Indiana Jones was designed for the current gen consoles and those are AMD hardware.

So it's like, and that's basically the Steam Decks GPU, you know, so.

AMD is doing a lot of the things right and if like to be fair like AMD owns everything except for the high-end GPU market which is interesting.

And I believe, and I believe Indiana Jones is also an impact, if I'm not mistaken.

Is a what?

Intek.

it's developed machine games and I believe they use id tech.

Interesting.

Yeah, so I don't know what I can't.

I'm fanboying over this so much.

I want to get one.

So bad.

And it's because of all the stuff you can do with it.

And I don't care about soldered memory like 128 is going to be plenty.

The only problem is, you know, the 128 is going to last a while.

It'd be nice to able to swap out that APU.

But who knows?

Maybe there'll be a mod.

Maybe someone can desolder it and

do something who knows we'll see.

Yeah, apparently it is on EdTech.

It's on a custom version of EdTech that MachineGames has.

Mm-hmm.

But yeah man, Intek is nice.

It's real good shit.

I think Microsoft should use it more.

Yeah.

Yeah, no.

Well, they own it now.

That's what I was saying.

Yeah, maybe they should make Halo 7 on InTech instead of Unreal.

I am curious, before we kind of close this off and I'm going to start streaming one of the games I have.

Or like, know, streaming it from my Steam Deck to my thing and sharing it.

What?

Which version would you get if you were to get one of these and you did have to pay for it and everything?

What would you choose?

I would probably

go with the 128 gig.

I think it would probably be able to replace my desktop here in pretty much every way.

So, and I don't want to downgrade, so I'd stick with the 128 gig.

Well, when you put it like that, I was going to go with number two, but number three just seems so appealing.

Here's my thing, HiTech, what do you need the 128 gigabytes of RAM for?

Is it for just being able to do a lot of different things or do you have something in mind?

For me, I'd be using it for, or I might not use it for LLMs like AI at the beginning, but I would probably retire this at the end of the year into my AI system.

What would you use it for?

see lots of video editing and just having things on the background.

Like I have 32 gigabytes of RAM in my system right now.

And when I, when I launch DaVinci Resolve to edit videos, it uses all of my memory.

And so I might be feed it a little bit more, you know I'm saying?

And also the, you know, the ability to give your GPU like a lot more VRAM too also kind of helps too.

So if you, you, yeah.

nice thing.

is that it's shared RAM and that's why they soldered it is because they needed to be fast as possible because sharing RAM is one of the cruxes of an APU.

But so the faster you can get that that bridge, the better.

Yeah, but while framework is killing it, some other things are being killed as we speak.

Any guesses?

I think you guys know what I'm referring to.

Are you talking about f-

is canceled?

that what you're talking about?

No, not this D deck too, man.

It's fucking Half-Life 2 episode 3 all over again.

Ha ha ha.

let's not bring up that that went too far.

Okay, let's.

But um, yeah, so I know you guys know who Mozilla is, but do you think Gen Z knows who Mozilla is?

No worry, the generation after that is not gonna know who Mozilla is after this move.

Mm.

Mozilla.

Yeah, they make Firefox and Thunderbird and a bunch of other shit.

don't know.

right.

Did you make Thunderbird?

my gosh, I haven't used that in decade.

So.

That's still my male client, a Thunderbird.

So Gardener, what would you say is the number one selling point of Firefox these days?

well, there's a couple things.

Privacy is one of them.

Not being based on Google Chrome is another one for me.

It's like the only independent browser-ish.

It's like not controlled by big tech.

So I don't know.

Those are my two things.

Yeah.

So how would you feel if one of those were tilled off, namely the privacy portion, I mean?

You know, I'd probably switch over to something like Ice Weasel.

So, here's a quote from Mozilla back in the day.

Nope, never have, never will, and we will protect you from many of the advertisers who do.

Firefox products are designed to protect your privacy.

That's a promise.

Yes, has, will, and won't protect you from Mozilla themselves.

Promises were made to be broken.

So, enough messing around.

They killed off a clause in their mission statement about privacy.

Mainly the whole selling data to advertisers portion.

think, and I mean, part of this is due to the fact that they're losing Google as like one of their biggest like sources of income.

they're a big company and they need to make money somehow and this is the crux.

This is, I think the thing that people don't understand sometimes that things aren't free.

So they either need a restructure or they need to sell stuff off, which seems like maybe the wrong way to go because that was a huge part of why people use Firefox, right?

And so, but I'm curious, what could they have done to replace that income from Google?

Well, here's the deal.

Okay, I know a lot of people are freaking out about this and this is potentially disastrous, right?

However, what Firefox, what Mozilla has been trying to do over last few years when it comes to ethical online advertising has actually been innovative and interesting.

It hasn't been flawless.

There's been a lot of issues with what they've been doing, but they also

there's the potential here that changing their policy on this could open the door to them.

Improving the state of advertising online.

Not saying that's going to happen.

There's a lot of wiggle room here that could lead to no major browsers protecting your privacy in any way, or form.

But if Mozilla can do this, if they can pull off what they've been trying to do, I'm all here for it.

Rachi said, I will give my data and first go to China if they give me stuff for free.

Yeah

That's, you know what?

There's a lot of people that think that way.

And some people don't understand that something free comes at a price, no matter what.

And so I really get, I really get, I don't know, it's really weird.

I really question when people are using something for free and then complain if it starts to become paid.

Cause I'm like, well, okay.

Or even, the privacy stuff.

What do you think was gonna be?

Like, how do you think they're making money?

do you think?

Servers are not cheap, despite what people say.

Like, it comes at a price.

That being said, transparency is key to this.

And you shouldn't use a service unless they're transparent, or maybe have a pro version where they don't do any of that stuff, where you do pay for it.

That's one of the things that, like with YouTube, I don't know how they collect my data, but at the end of the day, like, I don't have ads because I pay for it.

I'm willing to do that.

paying for a web browser in current era?

Man, would you be a Firefox pro?

What was like $20 a month probably.

Oh, hey, it's Esoteric.

here's the deal.

I would pay.

I don't think I'd pay a monthly fee.

I might, but I don't think I don't know.

I'd pay like several hundred dollars up front to like have a web browser that's guaranteed to not track my bullshit, you know, but.

It just doesn't seem like a sustainable model when the competition is practicing, you know.

the ad supported stuff like Google, Google controls everything.

They're a vertical monopoly.

So they have the browser.

They have the technology that's like supposed to be replacing tracking cookies, but isn't going to.

And they have like the actual advertising network, right?

They own the whole stack and it's like, it's like Walmart, right?

Like Walmart can go into any community, bankrupt their, their main street and become the singular retail fixture.

because they control everything and they can undermine everyone else's prices.

And that's the problem with the model that we have right now with web browsers is like, Microsoft has like their last click attribution hijacking that they're doing an edge.

And that's how they're making money.

Yep.

And so like,

I mean, it's a good racket to get into.

You rip off everybody and make money from it.

And Microsoft also has like tons of other business revenue.

Firefox has just their browser and then a few other like services that they keep like killing off like Google.

Right.

So it's like, I don't know.

Like, I think Firefox, think Mozilla should not have like been, yeah, we're basically just going to kill off our commitment to privacy, which is what a lot of people are

interpreting it as.

I don't know if that's exactly what they're saying.

But I think that there is potential here for good.

It's just that everyone's kind of on a we hate Mozilla bandwagon.

I don't know.

I'm keeping an open mind about this.

I mean, yes, too.

Yeah, sorry, go ahead.

No, be careful, don't kill off something you like.

Your other options are limited.

The open source browsers just aren't as good.

here's the thing.

I use Chromium based browsers.

Actually, I use Arc right now, which has a lot of privacy features.

Arc is also kind of potentially getting killed off too, but that's because they're working on an AI browser, but it still works good.

I might move over to...

a different browser that's up and coming, is called, I don't have to look it up, but.

It is called Zen Browser is a good one.

It's based on Mozilla's Firefox though.

I'm not as, here's the thing.

I don't actually like the Firefox browser as much.

I don't like their rendering engine and stuff.

It's just, I'm not used to it.

I'm used to Chromium and the intricacies that come with that or the issue or whatever.

Same thing with Safari.

Safari is fine and all.

And it uses WebKit just like Chromium, I also just, yeah.

So, yeah.

mean, here's the thing though.

If Mozilla dies, what will happen to all the Firefox like forks?

Are they just going to also die as well because they're not getting updates from Mozilla?

That's the cool thing about open source.

Yeah.

the thing, there's a cottage industry of content creators who do nothing but shit on Mozilla.

I don't know if, I'm not gonna name names, but there's at least two pretty big names who do nothing but just undermine the reputation of Mozilla.

And to be fair, there is a lot to criticize with Mozilla, but at the same time, like,

Are they look?

only companies left that's fighting the the chromium Monopoly you know like Microsoft was fighting with with the original version of edge, and then they kind of just gave up and

and WebKit is fine, but it's also basically controlled by Apple right now so and and Apple's kind of stymieing the the progress of WebKit as well, so It's just we're in a

really

precarious place and we need to be really careful about like levying undue criticism like because really when when you do that when you like attack just for You know brownie points

on the internet.

You're not doing anyone any favors and and Firefox is I Don't know.

It's it's my favorite browser

Here's the thing, like you've been talking about, and like I mentioned, be careful, because you might kill off a whole set of projects that you're not planning to kill off.

Be careful.

You can criticize.

You can be negative if you want, but don't go too far.

And I'm seeing this more and more, and there's a couple of channels I'm not going to mention, even in the tech sphere, they only focus on negative, and I'm done with it.

because if that's all you're focusing on, you don't see the good also that's coming from some of these companies, any of them.

But that being said, I have a threshold, and like Nvidia's kinda hitting that threshold of like, what are you doing good?

But Firefox is still producing a lot of good for the open source community.

I would like be critical, but also,

be understanding and don't just say, because they soldered the RAM onto the thing, it's obviously a money grab or because they're opening one little thing, like with Firefox,

like opening up a potentially data collection, which I'll have look into that some more, but it doesn't mean that the whole thing is gone.

Look into it, do some research.

Don't just assume that it's just boycotting because you might end up ruining something you like.

Remember, if you assume things, you make an ass out of yourself.

Right.

The thing is, like the article from Ars Technica mentioned, it's got this sensational headline, right?

Firefox deletes promise to never sell your data, asks users not to panic.

That's a terrible headline, right?

Like the fact is what Mozilla said here, and I know there's going to be lot of skepticism towards this, and rightly so.

Everybody is getting screwed over by huge companies all the time.

But Mozilla says in the reason that they removed their commitment to never sell your data is because they Mozilla Mozilla doesn't sell data about you and we don't buy data about

you since we strive for transparency and the legal definition of sale of data is extremely broad in some places.

We've had to step back from making the definitive statements, you know, in love.

We still put a lot of work into making sure that the data that we share with our partners, which we need to do to make Firefox commercially viable, is stripped of any identifying

information or shared only in the aggregate or is put through our privacy preserving technologies like OHTTP.

So like, there's a lot there to unpack.

Like there are ways that clever people can take aggregate data and like suss out potentially personally identify

Identifiable information about somebody but at the same time They're fighting the good fight still I think and I'm not willing to like Bersmerch them just because they change

something on their website

Well, usually, I mean, I do tend to agree this is more of a wait and see situation.

We're just going to have to wait and see if Mozilla gets worse because of this.

I don't know what's going to happen because Mozilla is kind of a, I mean, they're a big company, but they're also kind of like a small company.

They're no Google.

They're no Microsoft.

Yeah.

And I think what they need to do is go back to their roots.

When, when the tiny little Netscape corporation was taking on the biggest tech company in the world and they were very, very, very close to winning, right?

They were basically the tech insurgency and they were fighting against Microsoft.

They were one of the primary movers in the Microsoft antitrust case, right?

So the fact that they have, they went from being tech insurgents and they were fighting Microsoft to being Google's lapdog essentially, and they were completely dependent on

Google's ad revenue income or whatever it was, not ad revenue, but search priority revenue.

For so long, I mean, it literally corrupted their initial vision.

And so,

They need to go back to where they were and they need to figure out ways to disrupt big tech like they did in the past.

That's my last take on that.

I'm very passionate about this, we can't tell.

No, it's good.

It's good stuff.

But yeah, but yeah, I don't think Mozilla's really there yet.

They're not evil.

There's certainly no Google for sure.

But I can think of a few more companies that fit that criteria.

Yeah.

Like, WB.

Fuck those guys in particular.

my gosh.

one more thing I will say.

There are other open source companies that are more evil than Mozilla.

I can think of a few.

Automatic is one, but that's it.

That's all I'll say.

Automatics is that the?

They're the developers of WordPress.

WordPress, yeah.

Yeah, that's, what a weird, that was a weird, I don't know if you followed any of the high tech last year, but like, what a weird open source controversy last year that the

essentially creator and owner of like WordPress went down just burning the whole thing.

know anything about that.

You're gonna have to educate me, like, later.

Yeah, it's too much to go into right now, I'll tell you that.

it's just...

It's a lot and it's really bizarre.

Yeah, anything else?

we...

Yeah.

yeah, like you guys mentioned the threshold of like, you know, how people like, like just like to hit on companies because you know, big corporations that and all that stuff and

how you like in videos, you have to crush that threshold.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, it's a hard one.

used to be like, they used to do so much and I enjoyed so much of what they did.

And then they just stopped innovating in the customer and in the consumer section and went into AI and a bunch of other things.

And I just then on top of it, upping the price, screwing over there, like doing controlled releases to do scarcity limits, is just so anti-consumer.

just, can't, I can't like that's how's a big one for me a couple of years ago was when they were doing that.

So very, it's a very Intel like move.

Like remember how Intel kind of also like stopped innovating when AMD was basically non-competitive in the CPU space.

This was before Ryzen by the way, for those not watching.

Yeah, like AMD was practically non-competitive after the Athlon series.

And then, you know, the bulldozer was kind of bad.

The FX processes were horrible.

I mean, I never had them, but like that's all I've heard.

And then Ryzen 1 came out and then AMD like,

basically changed their fortune.

Speaking of which...

I had an FX series processor and it was absolute garbage.

It was so bad.

Yeah, Intel was the king during then.

And guess what they didn't do for like the last, for like a decade.

They, they didn't innovate.

Like I think Sandy Bridge was like, was like the coup de grace of that generation.

And then they just kind of like sort of slightly improved the performance every generation up until like, I think it was eighth gym was when they like had the biggest jump in years.

Like from seven to eight.

Yeah, but Intel still thinks they're on top of the world.

They're still barely innovating their CPUs, as if AMD were still not competitive.

That's just what it seems like.

themselves.

I think they kind of screwed themselves over that they stopped innovating and so that it's hard for them to ramp it back up and there I don't think they're doing good as a company

from my understanding right like

hope- I hope- I hope ingridients are just desserts as well.

They probably will, especially with how much they put into AI.

And I don't know if framework would even put a dent into them, but I'm hoping stuff like this where we're going to have very specific tech come out that will be AIs and put it

into the consumer's hands more will hopefully help make it more competitive.

We'll see,

Yeah, so I think, should we, so should we start doing the MechsFest stuff now?

Yeah, I think so.

don't I think we covered everything I wanted to like framework AMD's 9070.

Yeah, also, we will shout out the last two topics that we were going to talk about for the next first.

EA open sourced Command and Conquer.

I know this is a Gardener's Wheelhouse.

GPLV3, believe, if I'm not mistaken, that means you could make a game based on Command and Conquer's code and then sell it so long as you make that game source code also open source

as well.

The only stipulation is you can't call it Command and Conquer and you can't pretend that it's part like or endorsed by EA.

Those are the only two stipulations.

every like everything else.

Yeah.

And those are permissible.

Yeah.

Those are completely permissible under the GPL three.

But yeah, I mean, and the fact that like EA of all companies EA has open sourced some games and they're in

now, new favorite publisher, EA.

EA

they're my favorite.

I love EA now.

No, I'm just kidding.

They're still horrible, but the fact like Jim Vasella should be the next CEO because Jim Vasella is the guy behind this.

Yes, and he is a huge Command and Conquer fan himself and he has been engaging directly as an executive and as a producer with the Command and Conquer community.

Do you remember when they released the Remastered collection?

Command and Conquer Remastered?

It was like five years ago and Jim Vasella personally reached out to the development team of OpenRA, which is an open source engine implementation of Red Alert, Command and

Conquer, and Dune 2000.

And he personally was like, hey,

Would you guys like to help promote this game?

Unlike other companies that would be like, you know what?

This is an open source project.

We're going to shut you down so that you're not competing with us.

That's the kind of stuff that EA needs to be doing.

This is game preservation, and this is the future of game preservation.

And I commend Electronic Arts on doing this, because it's four classic Command and Conquer games.

it's Command and Conquer, Red Alert.

renegade and generals with the expansions for those games and the only reason they haven't done Tiberian Sun and Red Alert 2 is because Ostensibly the source code for those games

has actually been lost so we may never see those ones get open-sourced But there's a good chance.

We'll see more stuff going on in the future because this is just one year of work from one community member who had full access to all of the command and conquer archives at EA

It's fricking cool, dude.

don't know if you can tell.

I love Kaveta Cocker and I'm so pleased with this.

Yeah, that's that is good news.

But there's also bad news to WB, as I've been alluding to fucked up WB.

So they closed on models productions.

No no relation to Nintendo's similarly named model of like Monolith Soft, who made Xenoblade.

So model of productions made the Shadow of Mordor game.

They also made the nemesis system that was ultimately patented and that the BB still holds patent to.

Mm.

they shut down the studio and they also canceled the planned Wonder Woman game that they were going to release to that also was supposed to have the nemesis system implemented as

well.

And I'm to tell you right now.

WB.

OK, listen, listen, listen.

I know we usually hate on Activision and Ubisoft and EA gets some of that flack that they've been kind of improving over the last couple of months.

But W, I think WB might be the worst company on the list.

yeah, they're one of the biggest villains now.

Yeah, they are.

And that is not just video games,

just hate software patents.

I hate software patents so much, like with a passion.

Nintendo, WB, any company that does software patents, mean, BioWare has a software patent on their dialog system.

I hate it with...

Yeah, their radial menu system is patented.

That's so stupid.

So they padded like the way it's presented like in a radial instead of like, all right, so just make a box with like some dialogue choices, like what Bethesda does.

All right, we'll do that then.

Yeah, that's my point with software patents, they don't work at all.

is like, like with WB's patent with the Nemesis system, that's just, just slapping together a bunch of things that's been done before.

Like it is nothing super, like it is cool.

It's like, I wouldn't say it's special though.

It is crazy.

that they were even allowed to patent that.

And it really shows that like the patent office needs to ref, like not even get into the software world if they don't know what they're doing because there is no reason to patent

that.

And it's also crazy that they get to keep the patent despite the actual studio that designed the whole system no longer existing.

and using it.

Like here's the thing though, copyright you have to, there's things that go into patents and copyright.

So we'll see, maybe if they don't use it for a few years.

I know that the patent's up in like what, 2035 or something like that.

So maybe we'll lose, like maybe by then we'll be able to create something with it, but they might lose the patent before, we'll see.

Alright man, it's fucked up.

Also, on the Mevics Fest, they have a Game of Thrones game demo.

And it's being developed by Netmarble.

And it's some bullshit.

I tried it out.

It doesn't run that well on Steam Deck.

the gameplay's not even that fun, to be honest.

It's like a lesser clone of Genshin Impact, if that makes sense.

Yeah, yeah, it's, I don't know.

All I do know is that I am going to present Twisted Tower, which is one of the games I'm playing.

I'm playing it on Steam Deck,

Okay, audio listeners, for this portion of the podcast, you might want to go on and mosey on over to YouTube and watch us play some of the games from Next Fest while we chat about

it.

We decided not to include this into the podcast audio version just because there's a lot of pauses and a lot of context missing.

You got to see what we're doing in order to really understand.

So we decided to leave the next hour out, hour, hour and a half.

And so we'll have a little bit of a wrap up talking about Next Fest.

And then that's the end of this episode on the audio version.

So you can go on over to YouTube and check out the full version if you want.

Or you can just wait until next time for our next live stream special.

This was a live stream special.

Yeah, with that, thank you guys for listening and being such great listeners.

If you want, you can comment if you're on the Fetiverse or

wherever you're at on whatever platform you're on, you can comment and let us know what your favorite Next Fest game is.

So thank you guys for listening and yeah, just the rest of this podcast is gonna wrap up pretty soon.

Be a little shorter.

Thanks.

while we're wrapping this up, chat anyone on YouTube.

If you're watching this after the fact too and you can comment, let us know what your favorite game on Next Fest is this year.

What's the game that you're most excited for that we could also be maybe keeping an eye out for and that we could play later?

But let us know in the comments or in chat.

And Garner, did you have a favorite this time or what did you think of Next Fest?

Yeah, I had, I really enjoyed it.

think Wheel's, Wheel World is my favorite game that I played.

It was the one that kind of, I don't know, when I saw the screenshots, I was like, it looked kind of neat.

And then I played it and I was like, oh, this is hitting everything that I like about games.

So it was quite fun.

So it's in its real world, right?

Yeah, I'm gonna, I actually thought it looked pretty interesting too.

I'm curious how much it's gonna cost, cause that will be determined how much, if it's let's say a $20 game, there's a good chance I'll probably pick that up, cause I actually

really liked that.

And it worked on the Steam Deck fine, didn't it for you?

If you're playing on Linux you gotta launch the DX11 version.

The DX12 version does not.

Even on my desktop it's like 4 5 frames a second.

But it had like a 25 to 30 FPS on the Steam Deck.

But it's also a demo, so we'll see.

the way it looks.

It looks like it also could use some optimizing because it's not a very demanding game.

It looked from the from the way it looks.

So, yeah, I actually have a lot of hope for that game, too, because it's a type of game that I could pick up on the Steam Deck and put down.

And those are what I'm here for these days.

Yeah, I got a lot farther on the Steam Deck than I did on my PC.

it's...

Yeah, I like it.

I think it's the game I'd recommend.

Casca

might be my favorite demo I tried out.

And for those of you that want to play on Steam Deck, can do it with a touchscreen too, actually.

forgot about this.

Sometimes I forget that Steam Deck has a touchscreen, but you could do it that way or you could just...

I don't know.

Use the trackpad to play.

That's probably what you should do anyways, to be honest.

And I think, yeah, this episode's been quite the long episode.

I guess this happens when we go off the rails.

Yeah.

Hey, I thought it was fun.

I thought it was fun to to have our topics that we talked about because, you know, me and the framework desktop, I really I'm glad.

Thank you guys for chatting with me about that, because I'm really excited for that one.

But also the it was fun taking turns and just showing which games we were really excited for.

And I definitely think we'll have to refine this, obviously, and like put like time limits on some of these.

But and I'll come better prepared.

But I think for like end of the year or

games like I think at the end of this year, having our favorite games like two or three of our favorite games and just stream them a little bit, take turns, I think it'd be fun

actually while we talk about it as another special.

Yeah, I mean, we should do more live episodes more often.

We just gotta I think it is fun doing like an unedited version like version of our podcast because Make no mistake.

We do quite edit our podcast quite a bit down.

But

Yeah, it definitely adds a lot of trickiness to it, but it is fun to do this and chat with people and see chat and everything.

And I think we'll do better at marketing to Nick.

Like we were like I was not like we were a little wishy washy on how we were going to do this.

And that was probably more me being wishy washy.

So we definitely will.

I'll be better on this type of thing and market it better on my side.

But it's very exciting.

Yeah, I've had a blast.

I had a blast too, man.

All right.

And if you're watching this on, well, shoot, how are we, how are we going to handle this for like all the audio viewers?

Cause they can't, they certainly can't watch us play video games.

Yeah, we might just leave the gameplay to YouTube and cut it for the audio version.

And mention that it's on the end also mentioned that that portions on YouTube

Yeah.

So if you're listening to the audio version, you want to hear us talk about like the games we enjoyed, you should definitely check us out on YouTube.

Yeah, it's a good segue over there.

Sometimes the audio version sometimes will just be lacking.

that's just the.

Not usually, usually we include everything that we do on YouTube, but sometimes like with these specials, it's probably best to just go to YouTube to consume it.

But yeah.

Yeah.

Honestly,

with that, make sure to like, subscribe and, you know, hit that bell with your with for me, I like to say crowbar as a Half Life fan.

yeah, make sure to if you're listening to this after the fact on a different platform like Spotify, Apple, Apple, podcast, make sure to follow us there and to and if you're in the

Fediverse, even better, you can comment there and we will.

keep an eye out for your guys' comments and try to, in the future, start doing a Q &A, maybe as a special in the near future, and we'll start to promote that soon,

Yeah, share with your friends too.

Yes.

is caring.

Okay, thanks guys.

Yep, have a good one.

Peace out, later.