I haven't gamed since the Half-Life 2 era but every now and again I get the urge to play a computer game. This is frustrated by not having a computer with a meaningful GPU, which almost everything needs.
Even before the recent LLM driven inflation I just couldn't justify the quite expensive exercise that building a gaming PC had become. Nonetheless I "banked" lots of games made free on the Epic Games Store thinking I might one day play them.
I think that time has come. This is because a friend at the Hackspace bought a BC-250.
Designed to work as a crypto miner with multiple boards in a large server chassis it's a single board computer built around a variant/cut-down version of the AMD APU in the Sony PS5. When the bottom fell out of the market for these because mining moved on then they ended up on AliExpress at a huge markdown. At one point they were available for a pittance, maybe £50 but as of now you can get them for £120-130 if you pick your moment. The 'sales' are frequent and the price spikes up and down.
What you get for this is...
- CPU: 6x AMD Zen 2 cores @ ~3.5GHz
- GPU: 24 RDNA2 Compute Units (1536 shaders)
- Memory: 16GB GDDR6 shared memory
- TDP: 220W (50W idle - 235W max load)
- OS Support: Linux only (no Windows GPU drivers)
Nothing stellar but when a gaming PC or laptop can easily be £1.5k this is very tempting. You won't be playing brand new AAAA games in 4K, but you can play recent games for example Cyberpunk 2077 in 1080p.
The other thing that's moved the needle is the arrival of gaming on Linux as a thing people just do. Driven by Valve's work on the Steam Deck many many modern games just work, sometimes better than they do under Windows.
There are several Linux distros taking advantage of this Linux gaming surge, notably Bazzite which pretty much turns any generic machine into a Steam Deck. Bazzite supports the BC-250 well. With the addition of "Heroic game launcher" you can play Epic Games Store items as well as things from Steam. So that library of free games I've wanted to play is back on the table.
There are some inconveniences.
Obviously you've got to add an SSD but I was lucky enough to have a small one kicking around.
Also you need a PSU. An ATX one will do but you don't need most of the connectors. I've bought a small server PSU and plan to make a custom power lead although most people use small Flex-ATX ones. I had an old ATX PSU that will power it but it's too bulky for a tidy case build.
Most tiresome is the need to 'peel' the heatsink so you can fit a conventional cooling fan to replace the high pressure airflow that would have been in the server chassis. That's a fiddly job I spent an afternoon doing.
As it's very much a unique form factor you can't just buy a case, but there's a whole community of people designing cases mostly 3D printed. I intend to make a wooden case from scratch.
So far I've got Bazzite on, set it up on a table in a spaghetti wired fashion and proved to myself I can play some games.
More on this when I get to building the case. I suspect the first game I'll play is Half-Life 2 as it's a 'comfort blanket' and a true landmark in design. I need to ease back in slowly.
Why is this related to my various prop building shenanigans? It's not really, but also the BC-250 runs off just 12V not the full set of ATX PSU voltages. Which might make running a moderately powerful Linux machine with a GPU in a field off a lead acid battery a thing. I've not used an LLM as an interactive NPC-like object in a LARP but it has been done and this might get me the hardware to do it without relying on cloud services.
There's a lot of negativity about LLMs in LARP, especially around the replacement of artists and writers and I'd never do that but a set of offscreen low-importance NPCs in our sci-fi LARPs that people can interact with would be interesting. We implemented
MU|TH|UR with a Telegram chat but keeping up with it kept one of the GMs very busy.
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