Oh man, that sucks. Anandtech was I think the last written tech resource that had kept all their old content up, minus a few broken images here and there. Whenever I wanted to see if my retro system was performing approximately as well as it should, I could google an old Anandtech review and compare my benchmarks to theirs. Sometimes I'd even find an article here or there about some edge case I was pursuing, like running my P233 MMX at a 100 Mhz fsb. Or all the hidden voltage settings on a random motherboard an ebay selling accidentally shipped me instead of the sound card I had actually ordered.

Granted, I never turned to them for modern tech coverage, so I can see why they are shutting down.

I hope everything gets backed up somewhere.

Terrible news.

I hope it's possible to back up some of the content from there. They have many period-correct reviews which showcase how hardware was tested back in the day, and often contain some "behind the scenes" info about how certain GPUs were designed and such.

Sad. Anandtech was one of several sites that I visited daily for years - back when I kept up to date with the latest hardware.

That really sucks. They were one of the better hardware sites out there, especially given the library of legacy content. Hopefully the site stays up for awhile yet, but I imagine at some point it too will disappear.

I suppose it's also another symptom of the gradual enshitification of the internet with the rise of clickbait / SEO / AI-generated content out there. It's hard for a site that doesn't cater to that nonsense to stay viable.

Shponglefan wrote on 2024-08-30, 13:55:

That really sucks. They were one of the better hardware sites out there, especially given the library of legacy content. Hopefully the site stays up for awhile yet, but I imagine at some point it too will disappear.

I suppose it's also another symptom of the gradual enshitification of the internet with the rise of clickbait / SEO / AI-generated content out there. It's hard for a site that doesn't cater to that nonsense to stay viable.

I think it has more to do with people preferring to get their tech news from video content over written. I can say personally I'll take a Gamers Nexus video over anything written. Then again, maybe if HardOCP were still in the game that would change, they had such a unique way of reviewing hardware focused on the highest playable settings instead of comparing artificial benchmark scores.

Namrok wrote on 2024-08-30, 14:04:

I can say personally I'll take a Gamers Nexus video over anything written.

Same for me. They are pretty much the definitive authority on modern hardware.

I would really like Anandtech to stay available online though. They have decades worth of high quality content on their website, and it would be a disaster to lose all that if someone eventually pulls the plug on the hosting.

GameStop ends their publication, Anandtech says hold my beer

I suppose the saying “Don’t be sad that it is over, but be happy that it happened” applies here.

Video format tech news has certainly taken over. I can’t help but just miss reading an article in 5 minutes and being able to form my own opinion about a topic. Versus a 20 minute video that tries to funnel you in to having the presenter’s opinion.

Worst of all are the videos that spend the first few minutes on being vapid and meaningless. “Please remember to like and subscribe! Let’s not forget our sponsor…”

Namrok wrote on 2024-08-30, 14:04:

I think it has more to do with people preferring to get their tech news from video content over written. I can say personally I'll take a Gamers Nexus video over anything written. Then again, maybe if HardOCP were still in the game that would change, they had such a unique way of reviewing hardware focused on the highest playable settings instead of comparing artificial benchmark scores.

True, the rise of video content on the internet has definitely had an impact as well.

And while I enjoy video content for certain things, I find many things like hardware reviews I still prefer a written format. It's much easier to index and search written articles. Especially when it comes to things like benchmarks. I'd much rather see charts embedded in a written article than having to scrub through a video just to find what I'm looking for.

Shponglefan wrote on 2024-08-30, 15:49:

Namrok wrote on 2024-08-30, 14:04:

I think it has more to do with people preferring to get their tech news from video content over written. I can say personally I'll take a Gamers Nexus video over anything written. Then again, maybe if HardOCP were still in the game that would change, they had such a unique way of reviewing hardware focused on the highest playable settings instead of comparing artificial benchmark scores.

True, the rise of video content on the internet has definitely had an impact as well.

And while I enjoy video content for certain things, I find many things like hardware reviews I still prefer a written format. It's much easier to index and search written articles. Especially when it comes to things like benchmarks. I'd much rather see charts embedded in a written article than having to scrub through a video just to find what I'm looking for.

Yeah it’s sort of funny that the absolute worst possible way of trying to compare long form data, charts and analysis is now the only way

Namrok wrote on 2024-08-30, 13:26:

Anandtech was I think the last written tech resource that had kept all their old content up, minus a few broken images here and there.

Yeah, when I first got into this and had to do some research for an end the century build I poured over their articles looking at VIA's chipsets versus 440BX. Most of the images are gone but the text is still there... for now. Should be easily scrapable and plain text doesn't need a server farm's worth of storage.

Shponglefan wrote on 2024-08-30, 13:55:

I suppose it's also another symptom of the gradual enshitification of the internet with the rise of clickbait / SEO / AI-generated content out there. It's hard for a site that doesn't cater to that nonsense to stay viable.

If you told me 25 years ago when I was pestering my parents to get home internet that I would end up hating it, I would not have believed you. I think I was old enough to understand the optimism for the 21st century and young enough to naïvely believe it.

Sad news, but at the same time, not that unexpected.

The whole desktop computer, build your own hardware, research your parts, go down to a seedy shop with the best prices but that scares your parents, etc thing is just... basically dead. Systems last far longer (I've built one modern desktop in a decade, an i7-7700, and upgraded its video card once. And bought a few Macs.). Cool peripherals just exist less and less - there are no nice/5.1 computer channels anymore, cool sound cards have been dead, Microsoft (my favourite vendor) stopped making nice keyboard/mice, no storage peripherals (still looking for a good way to back up my NAS), etc.

And if anything, this is what my dabbling into retro stuff has reminded me of. The Audigy 2 ZS in my 98SE rig is... cool and exciting... in a way that some POS Intel HD Audio Realtek on a modern system is not. Gender bending effects! EAX! Stuff I hadn't seen in 15 years or whenever it was I stupidly ewasted my Audigy 1.

Same thing on the software front. I just downloaded on my modern system the early access or whatever it's called for Age of Mythology Retold. I still have my collector edition box of the original Age of Mythology that I preordered 20 years ago in my closet. Has anybody invented any new game types in 15 years? If anything, many franchises (anyone remember command & conquer?) were murdered by large conglomerates like EA that would prefer to mildly update sports titles for consoles each year?

And let's not just talk about operating systems. Last Windows release I was excited about was 7, that's 15 years ago. Everything since has been a jumbled UI mess filled with more and more use of web technologies. That's why we buy better hardware now - must keep the Chromium engines fed with enough RAM. (I'd love to make every lazy programmer who thinks "Electron" is a passable way to make an application spend a few hours with a retro system that runs software that was actually optimized in an era when hardware was expensive and scarce.)

The irony is that people like me, now in our early 40s, possibly without spouses and kids, now have far more money to spend on computer stuff than we did back when we were begging our parents for another $2-3K computer 3 years after the last one, but there's... just no cool modern stuff... to buy. Just lots and lots of RAM to feed the Electron beast, at least if you don't have RAM soldered on your motherboard. (I am typing this on an Intel iMac with 128 gigs of RAM... and web crap can fill that up...)

This really is a shame - I remember reading a lot of their articles.
I also remember threads here first of the year about an OS/2 archive shutting down, and people saying it was not going to be a good year from retro computing
Guess they were right 😉

VivienM wrote on 2024-08-31, 02:33:

Sad news, but at the same time, not that unexpected. […]
Show full quote

Sad news, but at the same time, not that unexpected.

The whole desktop computer, build your own hardware, research your parts, go down to a seedy shop with the best prices but that scares your parents, etc thing is just... basically dead. Systems last far longer (I've built one modern desktop in a decade, an i7-7700, and upgraded its video card once. And bought a few Macs.). Cool peripherals just exist less and less - there are no nice/5.1 computer channels anymore, cool sound cards have been dead, Microsoft (my favourite vendor) stopped making nice keyboard/mice, no storage peripherals (still looking for a good way to back up my NAS), etc.

And if anything, this is what my dabbling into retro stuff has reminded me of. The Audigy 2 ZS in my 98SE rig is... cool and exciting... in a way that some POS Intel HD Audio Realtek on a modern system is not. Gender bending effects! EAX! Stuff I hadn't seen in 15 years or whenever it was I stupidly ewasted my Audigy 1.

Same thing on the software front. I just downloaded on my modern system the early access or whatever it's called for Age of Mythology Retold. I still have my collector edition box of the original Age of Mythology that I preordered 20 years ago in my closet. Has anybody invented any new game types in 15 years? If anything, many franchises (anyone remember command & conquer?) were murdered by large conglomerates like EA that would prefer to mildly update sports titles for consoles each year?

And let's not just talk about operating systems. Last Windows release I was excited about was 7, that's 15 years ago. Everything since has been a jumbled UI mess filled with more and more use of web technologies. That's why we buy better hardware now - must keep the Chromium engines fed with enough RAM. (I'd love to make every lazy programmer who thinks "Electron" is a passable way to make an application spend a few hours with a retro system that runs software that was actually optimized in an era when hardware was expensive and scarce.)

The irony is that people like me, now in our early 40s, possibly without spouses and kids, now have far more money to spend on computer stuff than we did back when we were begging our parents for another $2-3K computer 3 years after the last one, but there's... just no cool modern stuff... to buy. Just lots and lots of RAM to feed the Electron beast, at least if you don't have RAM soldered on your motherboard. (I am typing this on an Intel iMac with 128 gigs of RAM... and web crap can fill that up...)

Man, I think about this all the time. I think the only facet of computing I've gotten excited about in the last 10 years is ray tracing. I fucking love it, be it in AAA games like Cyberpunk or bolted onto open source retro games like Quake. You never realize how jank the plethora of hacks and tricks used in rasterized lighting are until you see fully path traced lighting. It reminds me of when games went from 2.5D to full 3D for the first time.

That aside, sometimes I see the system requirements on games like StarCraft HD and I weep. The original game ran on a Pentium 90. How on earth does higher resolution sprites require, lets see, a Geforce 6800 and an Athlon 64 X2? I can only assume the engine or middlewear in the remaster experienced profound bloat. I recall an anecdote around the development of Daikatana where an artist they hired who'd never done games before handed in some preposterously sized bitmap, thousands of pixels wide and tall, for an icon that would be 32x32 pixels on screen. And that just feels emblematic of all software now.

Maybe we are all sucking it down now.

Maybe we are seeing some fundamental shift in 2024

Namrok wrote on 2024-08-31, 14:13:

That aside, sometimes I see the system requirements on games like StarCraft HD and I weep. The original game ran on a Pentium 90. How on earth does higher resolution sprites require, lets see, a Geforce 6800 and an Athlon 64 X2? I can only assume the engine or middlewear in the remaster experienced profound bloat. I recall an anecdote around the development of Daikatana where an artist they hired who'd never done games before handed in some preposterously sized bitmap, thousands of pixels wide and tall, for an icon that would be 32x32 pixels on screen. And that just feels emblematic of all software now.

It could be about processor instructions too - they use newer compiler that uses newer instructions, and oops, that sets a floor on what processors can run the thing. Athlon 64 X2/Pentium D could be a rough shortcut for "need SSE3" and they don't want to put lots of asterisks about how this core Athlon 64 and that core Pentium 4 is fine but the other core is not.

But also... is an Athlon 64 X2 that unreasonable a requirement? StarCraft Remastered came out in 2017; the Athlon X2's glory days were in 2005, 12 years earlier. The recommended system for StarCraft Remastered is an E6600/8800GT; I had one of those in 2007. Meanwhile, original StarCraft came out in March 1998, i.e. when that Pentium 90 would have been just four years old.

One other thing I would be very curious about - actual performance. Back in the 1990s, minimum requirements for software were... ridiculous. Recommended requirements were barely passable. So my guess is that original StarCraft on that P90 was barely playable. What is StarCraft Remastered like on an X2 3800+ with a 6800 and 2GB of RAM running Win7 32-bit? Is it liveable?

ncmark wrote on 2024-08-31, 14:24:

Maybe we are seeing some fundamental shift in 2024

Well, something very significant is happening in 2024 - the rise of ARM Windows and the continuing collapse of Intel...

I tend to be a pessimist about ARM Windows and its prospects, but if ARM Windows catches on, that's basically the end of the do-it-yourself read-review-of-components-at-AnandTech home-built enthusiast rig. Not going to be any different from the Mac side where the modularity of the Power Macs and the Mac Pro 5,1s has turned into... the Mac studio.

VivienM wrote on 2024-08-31, 14:38:

Well, something very significant is happening in 2024 - the rise of ARM Windows

Hahaha, good one.
Oh no, you're serious....

I've been using an ARM-based (snapdragon 8cx) windows laptop since 2021. The OS and software overall is terrible. It runs pretty much like you'd expect a tablet to run - performance is terrible, especially if it's a hot day. The GPU is garbage and constantly crashes/resets during basic web browsing. Wifi constantly has unexplained pauses. Keyboard becomes unresponsive and requires a sleep/wake cycle to bring it back.
The x86 emulation of the OS is abysmal. Not only is the speed terrible, it has CPU emulation mistakes that can flat out break programs or cause data loss/corruption.
To top it off, the pre-installed software provided by the vendor (i.e. bloatware) is built for x86. That's right, they couldn't even be bothered making ARM builds to ship with their ARM machine.

Apple did a good job with their ARM implementation and that seems to make people think it's easy for MS to also make the switch. It's simply not that simple; Apple had the goal in mind when they designed their silicon from the ground up, rather than just throwing random parts together like the ARM windows machines do.

Look at it this way: as long as gaming is a thing, ARM will never take over the windows market.

jmarsh wrote on 2024-08-31, 14:50:

Hahaha, good one. Oh no, you're serious.... […]
Show full quote

VivienM wrote on 2024-08-31, 14:38:

Well, something very significant is happening in 2024 - the rise of ARM Windows

Hahaha, good one.
Oh no, you're serious....

I've been using an ARM-based (snapdragon 8cx) windows laptop since 2021. The OS and software overall is terrible. It runs pretty much like you'd expect a tablet to run - performance is terrible, especially if it's a hot day. The GPU is garbage and constantly crashes/resets during basic web browsing. Wifi constantly has unexplained pauses. Keyboard becomes unresponsive and requires a sleep/wake cycle to bring it back.
The x86 emulation of the OS is abysmal. Not only is the speed terrible, it has CPU emulation mistakes that can flat out break programs or cause data loss/corruption.
To top it off, the pre-installed software provided by the vendor (i.e. bloatware) is built for x86. That's right, they couldn't even be bothered making ARM builds to ship with their ARM machine.

Apple did a good job with their ARM implementation and that seems to make people think it's easy for MS to also make the switch. It's simply not that simple; Apple had the goal in mind when they designed their silicon from the ground up, rather than just throwing random parts together like the ARM windows machines do.

Look at it this way: as long as gaming is a thing, ARM will never take over the windows market.

You didn't quote the part where I said I tended to be a pessimist about ARM Windows, but... have you seen the reviews of this year's Qualcomm whatever-they're-called with Win11 24H2?

Also interesting - Dell/Lenovo/HP appear to be marketing them under 'normal' model names. Lenovo has a "ThinkPad T14s Gen 6 (14″ Snapdragon)". That doesn't suggest it's wildly different than the T14s Gen 5, i.e. their flagship 14" slim business laptop. Given how terrified of returns the big PC OEMs are, do you think they'd make it that hard to separate out Intel and ARM if they thought most buyers would be hugely disappointed with ARM? If they thought ARM remained junk, they'd call it the Lenovo ThinkDragon or SnapPad and make sure that its bad performance wouldn't trash the main brand.

I am starting to think that there's a possibility that many business laptops will go ARM. More and more business workloads are either web-based or using Citrix-type VDI environments. Neither of those is tied to x64.

And that could leave gaming as the main x64 application, and... is there enough money in PC gaming to sustain the development of x64 processors and compatible GPUs if most business computers go ARM and a reasonable share of 'big cloud' servers also migrate away from x64? I am not sure.