Workaround for raytracing performance issues in Minecraft

I’ve been playing a bit of Minecraft this weekend and noticed much worse raytracing performance than previously. After a bit of investigation it looks like a regression was introduced with 1.16.220 which has substantially reduced performance, dropping from around 90+fps to 30ish, this is on an RTX 3080 with DLSS turned on at 3440x1440. After a bit of troubleshooting it looks like its related to v-sync, changing: gfx_vsync:1 to gfx_vsync:0...

Sunday, 2 May 2021 · 1 min · Paul Smith

Increasing view distance with raytracing enabled in Minecraft

One of the main reasons for getting a GeForce RTX 3080 last year was for Minecraft, so I can play with raytraced/RTX lighting enabled. I was expecting to take a substantial hit in draw distance - with RTX disabled I’d always play with at least a 64 chunk draw distance. Disappointingly the maximum view distance in Minecraft with raytracing enabled is only 24 chunks, at least as far as setting it in the user interface....

Sunday, 7 March 2021 · 1 min · Paul Smith

Silent Hunter 5 out very soon and I'm not buying it on release

I've been looking forward to Silent Hunter 5 for a while now as regular readers will know I am a bit of a submarine fan. Playing number 2 and 3 to death, for those wondering Silent Hunter 4 was set in the Pacific and in my opinion nothing could be more boring :-) Silent Number 5 when it was first announced was looking fantastic. However a few months ago it was announced there would only be one submarine, a Type VII....

Tuesday, 23 February 2010 · 5 min · Paul Smith

My proudest achievement to date

Today it finally happened. After so much waiting and hard work, so many recipes and so much chilled meat and northern spice, Dinendal, Guardian of Cenarius finally has his [Chef's Hat]. Below is my buying the [Chef's Hat] off Derek how exciting! Hi Derek how are you doing? Now at long last I can wear my new silly hat in raids, and show everyone how much low level rubbish food I can cook, and more importantly how quickly I can do it....

Friday, 30 October 2009 · 1 min · Paul Smith

Spam never ending in World of Warcraft

So I've just logged back into World of Warcraft after having a break for 5 weeks. I see the spammers have got a new way to spam links in the game now. By making URLs out of corpses. Sigh.

Monday, 24 August 2009 · 1 min · Paul Smith

Silent Hunter 5 announced

Coming to a computer next year, the fifth installment in the Silent Hunter series, this time we're back in the Atlantic (we should have never left) with the Kriegsmarine. New features: Walk through highly detailed submarines in the new first-person view and access every part of your U-boat. Interact with your crew, watch them perform their daily jobs and experience the tension and fear inside the U-boat through the new advanced order system....

Tuesday, 18 August 2009 · 2 min · Paul Smith

Retail Empire Total War downloading from Steam

So as one might expect the Steam servers have been hammered today. And it seems a number of people who have actually brought the retail version, are having Empire Total War get downloaded via Steam instead of actually off the discs. It took six attempts to get the install to work off the discs when I tried about 2 hours ago. You'd run the installer from the disc, Steam would throw an error saying its too busy to handle the request, and the installer would die....

Wednesday, 4 March 2009 · 1 min · Paul Smith

Empire Total War demo

The Empire Total War demo went up today, after waiting almost 6 hours for it to download (Steam was under a bit of strain, the UK server was trickling it down at 12KB/s, so I had to use the US East Coast server which wasn't much better at about 100KB/s), Like previous Total War games this feels a bit glitchy - in fact it has crashed once.  Load times are also a bit on the long side....

Saturday, 21 February 2009 · 3 min · Paul Smith

For the Alliance!

War rages throughout our lands. Only the bravest heroes dare strike the Horde where it hurts them most. You are among such heroes. The blows you have delivered to the leadership of the Horde will open the door for our final assault. The Horde will bow down to the might of the Alliance. Your deeds will not go unrewarded. Ride on proudly! -- Your King One Black War Bear for my troubles....

Wednesday, 3 December 2008 · 1 min · Paul Smith

Halo 3 Wikipedia entry edited by Sony

Seems like somebody at Sony's Liverpool studios couldn't resist making some modifications to the Halo 3 entry on Wikipedia. Seems they wanted to include an extra little bit onto... Halo 3, the third game in the best-selling Xbox game franchise, is a highly anticipated first person shooter video game under development by Bungie Studios for the Xbox 360 and is expected to "set a new high water mark" for next generation games, Although it wont look any better than Halo 2....

Wednesday, 5 September 2007 · 1 min · Paul Smith