Dream Set-Up (Literally)

When your Gateway PC from 1998 can't run a game from 2023, it's not exactly a shocking revelation. That ancient beige box with its Pentium II processor and whopping 32MB of RAM would struggle to run the loading screen of GTA VI, let alone the actual game. The hilarious part is framing this as "breaking news" - as if anyone was holding out hope that their museum-worthy Windows 98 machine would somehow handle a game requiring approximately 500,000% more computing power. It's like announcing that your horse-drawn carriage won't qualify for Formula 1 racing. But hey, at least you can still play Minesweeper at a blistering 800x600 resolution!

THE ABSOLUTE STATE OF GPU WARS IN 2025! Nvidia's out here making us choose between selling a kidney for performance or switching tracks for affordability, while AMD's just like "Hey, remember us? We exist too!" But AMD's train is literally DERAILED off the tracks! The perfect metaphor for how Nvidia has completely dominated the AI hardware market while AMD struggles to even stay relevant. It's giving "I'm in this picture and I don't like it" energy for anyone who's been desperately waiting for AMD to save us from Nvidia's pricing tyranny. Spoiler alert: THE RESCUE AIN'T COMING!

Remember when "NEVER OBSOLETE" was the biggest lie in tech marketing? This ancient relic from the early 2000s promised eternal relevance with its blazing 64MB RAM and mind-blowing 40X CD-ROM drive. Now it can barely run a Chrome tab, let alone Cyberpunk at 4K. That 667MHz processor would melt trying to render Keanu's first pixel. The irony of asking about Cyberpunk FPS on this fossil is like asking how many horsepower your horse has compared to a Tesla. Spoiler alert: the answer is somewhere between "absolutely none" and "it will catch fire trying."

Remember when GPUs were simple, single-slot cards that barely needed cooling? Now NVIDIA's dropping 150W TDP cards and calling them "efficient." The top image shows the classic reference design that board partners would just slap their logo on. The bottom shows what happens when those same partners get to "improve" it – triple-fan monstrosities that require their own zip code and power substation. Yet somehow we're all nodding along like "yes, this is reasonable progress." My electric bill begs to differ.

Spent $300 on 32GB of RAM just to run a PlayStation 2 emulator that originally worked on a console with 32MB. That's the tech equivalent of buying a Ferrari to drive to the mailbox. But hey, at least Chrome can finally handle more than three tabs without having an existential crisis.

Ah, the classic game dev pipeline of diminishing returns! First, you spend weeks upgrading textures that players will barely notice. Then you crank up those polygon counts because clearly what your game needs is characters with more triangles than actual gameplay features. Next comes the obsessive addition of microscopic details that absolutely nobody will see unless they're inspecting your models with an electron microscope. And finally—the pièce de résistance—just blur everything with fancy lighting effects and call it "cinematic." DLSS/FG (Deep Learning Super Sampling/Frame Generation) is basically saying "let AI fix our performance problems" instead of optimizing the code that's running at 12 FPS. It's the digital equivalent of sweeping dust under a really expensive, ray-traced rug.