I was a Mac guy, back when that was something one could be unironically.
It mattered to me, what kind of computer you used. I was righteously infuriated if you dissed my superior platform. Sure, Apple cost more up-front, but, but, but… in studies of small business best practices we see obvious improvements in productivity and the total cost of ownership is actually lower… for fuck’s sake, you fucking philistine.
You don’t have to hire someone from Novel to get your three wintel boxes to fucking share the shitty non postscript fucking laser printer with no fonts in it. You can just plug the goddam macs together and BOOM, fuck, they’re sharing that four thousand dollar, that’s right that four thousand dollar postscript laser printer. It just works!
This is all so, so embarrassing, thinking of this now. God it was dumb.
One imagines hard core communists, the ones that insisted that Stalin wasn’t hurting anybody, that the lamestream media was making up that stuff about gulags and whatnot. And how, decades later, they must have felt, about the USSR, the socialist utopia which wasn’t. (By the way, I might have been one of those dumb leftists, too, and I cringe about that sometimes.)
Mac’s were far better for graphic art production for decades, the only platform for serious video editing and audio production; but, there was never all that much money in these tiny content creator niches, and so Apple systematically wrecked their products and pissed away their own competitive advantage, always shoving shiny slick machines at consumers–not creators.
In retrospect? The strategy worked. They’re filthy rich, and every bit as evil as every filthy rich company at their scale. But if you were a creator, and an Apple person? This metamorphosis sucked hard.
Sure, Apple’s consumer focus made many into a kind of creator, with Garage Band and the decent iphone camera and the halfway decent bundled photo editor, the easy video editor, and such, but at the pro level, eventually, macs started lagging. Again, why would you, Adobe, wanna optimize your product for 8% of the personal computer market?
It pissed PC people off if Photoshop ran better on the Mac, which it did, for a long damn time, to the point where it seemed, Adobe delighted in that moment when windows finally got good enough, and wintel started benchmarking better than Macs in every way imaginable.
So high-end PC workstations would now dominate the professional creator space, and running the Mac was, uh, kinda… quaint. You spent a lot of money, to get something that didn’t work as well, that ran a subset of software, and which you couldn’t game on.
3D content creation was a place where the wintel systems and applications were immediately and always far superior to anything mac based. The exact same video card in a PC can do much much more, in a PC that the same card plugged into a mac. (Back when mac’s had normal PCI slots. Yes, for a while Macs were boxes you put cards in… I owned a mac clone!)
I did some 3d early on, when the platforms were closer together in performance, with a now elderly package called Strata Studio, and learned basic stuff about modeling, rendering, and animating 3d content. I created content with this package professionally during the first tech boom and made real money doing it. but I was never great at it, really.
But a friend of mine on Facebook started posting these wonderful renderings in Lightwave of spaceships and space scenes and I started using his stuff for book covers, and finally, I decided, Jesus, I have to buy a PC and learn this. The image I used for the Today We Choose Faces book cover that made me realize, I have to create content this way. It was created by my friend Graham Gazzard, who is a wonderful guy, a real artist who insists he’s just goofing around.
So, yesterday I shucked out 3k on PC parts, buying more of an AMD processor than I really wanted as I was impatient, and then had that choice ripple through the build making everything else cost more, and spent five hours with the 20 year old gamer building this thing.
I’m starting out with Blender and DAZ as my friend told me to skip Lightwave, saying, if he had it to do all over again, he would just use Blender. So, I’ll start out there, and save the thousand bucks.
Having invested, or perhaps simply spent, the money on this, uh, workstation, I now have to actually learn the software. Which of course, isn’t really about software. It’s about the skill, the art, of this. Knowing a tool is not the same thing as having a skill. You can know how to saw and use a router and a drill press and not be able to make furniture. You see people who want to create graphic products say, “oh, I need to learn photoshop, so I don’t have to hire a designer,” and you think, “Buying a paint brush doesn’t make you an interior designer.”
Breathes heavily, angrily staring into the distance. Philistines.
Okay, I’m still an asshole.
But seriously.
The PC furnished us with a competitive ecosystem of add-on components. Back in the day, Apple designed their own video interfaces, etc. For quite some time now, we’ve had myriad options of high performance graphics – ATI Radeon, NVidia etc. Because these are cards that can fit into standard interfaces (PCIe) – it creates a downstream economy for enthusiasts to continue using 3 and 4 year old video boards for essentially ever. You can get a nice NVidia Quadro card used to AutoCAD workstations and get mileage out of it if ray traceing and textures are your thing.
I’d not have spent $3000, unless its for gaming. I bought a Refurbished Dell T5810 Workstation off Amazon for $437 – just as the pandemic unfolded. 8 Core Xeon E5, 32GB ECC RAM, NVidia Quadro K4000, SSD, Windows 10 Pro. For $437, that is Mac Pro 2015 style performance, and the replacement parts if you need them are all over ebay. There is value to be had from the cast-offs of Corporate Leases, although I think that the opportunities will dry up as we now face inflation and people go seeking value.
I exaggerated, it’s about 2800, minus monitor and tablet, but it may in fact be my son’s new gaming PC at some point. It’s a 16 processor AMD chip, with a high end motherboard, all in one water cooling, a fairly decent video card, which I might replace it actually does anything; the new 3d freeware has built in NVidia renderers so you can use the graphics card and not the CPU for some render tasks. So the CPU alone was 750. Got a huge case and a big power supply. The grahics card, cooling system, and RAM all have rainbow LED strips that pulse like the engine room in Star Trek Next Generation. I’m seeing it as my Mom’s final gift. I paid off the mortgage and invested the rest of her money. This was a tax refund.
I am not a gaming person, never have been, but when Microsoft suddenly released a new Flight Simular 2020 Editions – a full decade after claiming they were done with Flight Sim – I bought a copy… The scene detail and effects are allegedly stunning, and someday I want to actually experience it. I cant play it because I dont have video card. Its requirements to experience the full visual effect requires an NVidia RTS 3070 or Higher. They have been Unobtainium since April 2020. Someday I hope to experience it.
Point of notice. When 50 year old people try out video games titles, you quickly realize that you dont have the fine motor skills nor the hand-eye coordination of the typical 20 year old who plays these. And further, this is no “working your way up” to the visual acuity and motor skills needed to enjoy these games titles. Lesson Learned – Old Farts arent even capable of enjoying them. You need to have a recently trained, fresh adolescent brain and months of daily practice to level up to even playing these on the started levels. Sigh.
Yeah. I had a friend who was a decent middle aged gamer, and he forced me to play with him, any my kids, for a few years. I worked my way up to the performance level of a ten or eleven year old, if the voices in my group fights are any indication of my level; teenage boys mocked me mercilessly.
I was really proud, to be able to perform as a tween. I guess I put a few hundred hours into it. I played death matches online, and got to the point where the control faded away, and I was just in the game. I can close my eyes and run through some of those maps, which is amazing, as I have very very poor retention of spatial data, and the interfaces make knowing the maps largely unnecessary with little GPSs in the HUDS.
Lucas is now at about the 95 percentile at League of Legends; he knows it would take another factor of ten increase to get to a pro level, but he plays with pros now and then in unranked matches, and finds them beatable, by his team, on occasion, as they even the diamond level (I think) player can’t carry a bad team.
The pro-tier of e-gamers feels nuts to me, like I live in a science fiction novel. Stadiums full of people watching teens and twenty somethings–younger ones–playing these games.
These games do allow for the building of characters in game that are more strategic, in how they play, and less pure eye-hand (twitch). Often support characters. Area effect powers; they still require split second timing.
I used to insist that monitor refresh, measured in thousandths of a second, couldn’t matter to game play; lucas has proved me wrong. It does. Shaving off milliseconds with faster monitors with different refresh technologies, mouse adjustments, system settings, better net access, all contribute to his performance.
A lot of game station expense is about how pretty the game can be, though; lots of systems can be tuned to play acceptably. Still, these systems all cost 1000s. I’m used to graphic workstations coasting thousands, in the hold days, what’s amazing to me is that the workstations that are comparable now can be built for under a 1000, when they cost me 4k. And most of that expense is useless feature and OS bloat.