In a nutshell: While modern aircraft carriers are gigantic vessels packed with amenities one might not expect to see on a warship, the UK Royal Navy’s HMS Prince of Wales has something unique: a full eSports/gaming suite for the crew to compete against each other.
In February, permission was given to set up the suite on the 1,600-crew carrier as part of a partnership between the Royal Navy and the British eSports Federation.
The gaming room includes 12 high-end Alienware Aurora R15 gaming desktop PCs, featuring RTX 4080 graphics cards and Core i7 CPUs – the systems are capable of running far more than just low-demand eSports games. The room also has LED lights, a widescreen TV, and office chairs.
I see they’ve gone the route of getting the most overpriced and underperforming gaming hardware for this.
These machines are capable of running high-demand games in the sense that a program crashing presupposes that the program loaded to some extent in the first place
This aircraft carrier is sponsored by War Thunder.
So we’re going to hear all about it, aren’t we?
Smells like a marketing stunt.
Well, yes
The MoD sees embracing gamer culture as a way of attracting and retaining young people, particularly for roles in cyber defence and technology-focused positions. The UK government launched a recruitment plan this year to fast-track gamers into cyber defence roles.
high-end
last-generation Alienware (Dell) machines
oof, a gut punch if I’ve ever seen one
E:
and office chairs
“this baby has a 4 speed manual transmission, an am/fm radio, and floor mats!” right out of The Price Is Right ‘feature list’. Mouse and keyboard not included.
oof, a gut punch if I’ve ever seen one
GTX 4080 and i7s, what can you still even run in that shit, right? Oh, they’re still top tier parts and will run anything you throw at them?
Yeah, real gut punch, they must be pissed.
More of the fact that they are 2.5x the price of the parts, and the cases they are in are the opposite of ‘optimized for cooling’. Thermal throttling is the name of the game here.
Like a Ferrari that looks great (great in air-quotes here) in the driveway, but overheats a block down the street, essentially.
Oh I see. So you’re telling me a military bought overpriced hardware… We should alert the media.
Hey, I have no doubt that these are overpriced poorly cooled boxes, Alienware has always been more form than function. But on the other hand, it’s a single vendor and they can just send a machine back if it acts up. I’m betting they don’t want their IT people dumping time and effort into custom builds, so having a single vendor is likely the much preferred option.
And I wasn’t wrong before, the specs are fine, they’ll play basically anything. With suboptimal cooling the fans will be loud, but there’s a good chance that won’t even matter on an aircraft carrier.
My guy it’s not just “the fans will be loud” it’s legitimately “the cooling is inadequate and the case traps heat in a cycle”. The hardware can be fine but if it’s all boiling at 100C it robs performance due to thermal throttling.
If the GN tests accurately map to whatever the navy’s using, the difference in most games isn’t that significant despite the suboptimal cooling, and if they’re usually just playing TF2 and Halo 2 (as per article) then even 50% of full performance should still be plenty.
Exactly… For Halo 2 and TF2, even if this rig were running at 50% efficiency it could do 200 fps at max settings.
last-generation Alienware (Dell) machines
I noticed that too, it might be a case of military procurement delay ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Whatever their motivation, gaming is good for mental health and cognition so this is a net win for the entire crew.
Military signups are dipping. This is an appeal to the young and stupid which is the lifeblood of the armed forces grunts. Need meat for the grinder.
It’s been done before and will be done again each generation.
“That’s bait”
Gamers or not, they’re still the government’s murderous puppets
