Announcement: Firefish will enter maintenance mode

For those who have been supporting Firefish and me, I can’t thank you enough. But today, I have to make an announcement of my very difficult decision: As of today’s release, Firefish will enter maintenance mode and reach end-of-support at the end of the year. The main reasons for this are as follows.

In February, Kainoa suddenly transferred the ownership of Firefish to me. This transition came without prior notice, which took me aback. I still wish Kainoa had consulted with me in advance. At that time, some people were already saying that “Firefish is coming back”, making it challenging to address the situation. Also, since there were several hundred active Firefish servers at that point, I could not suddenly discontinue the project, so I took over the project unwillingly.

Over the past seven months, I have been maintaining Firefish alone. All other former maintainers have left, leaving me solely responsible for managing issues, reviewing merge requests, testing, and releasing new versions. This situation has had a significant impact on my personal life.

Frankly speaking, there are numerous bugs and questionable logic in the current Firefish codebase. While I attempted to fix them, balancing this work with my personal life made it clear that it would take ages, and I’ve started thinking that I can’t manage this project in the long run. Additionally, vulnerabilities have been reported approximately once a month. Addressing vulnerabilities, communicating privately with reporters, and testing fixes have proven overwhelming and unsustainable. Moreover, a certain percentage of users have made insulting comments, which have severely affected my mental well-being and made me fearful of opening social media apps.

I will do my best to refund the donations made to Firefish via OpenCollective, but that’s not guaranteed.

firefish.dev and info.firefish.dev will remain operational until the end of February 2025, after which they will return a 410 Gone status.

Server admins may downgrade Firefish to version 20240206/1.0.5-rc and migrate to another *key variant, or may fork Firefish to maintain.

Downgrade instructions: https://firefish.dev/firefish/firefish/-/blob/downgrade/docs/downgrade.md

Thanks,
naskya

The results from other people who have looked into [the performance difference with the Windows patch] have been mixed, it's fair to say.
[...]
After days and days of very confusing results and multiple fresh Windows installs, I think we're getting somewhere -- or at least I think we are.

[...] I can confidently say that in its current state -- at least prior to the recent patch -- [Windows] 23H2 can be a bit broken with Ryzen, or really, it is pretty broken with Ryzen [causing reduced performance in some -- but not all -- titles]. The degree to how broken does vary, and there seems to be no rhyme or reason as to why this is.

It's really confusing as to how two Windows 11 installs, on the same system, configured in the exact same way, can deliver such different results, but only in some games. In fact, the variance between the games tested is just as confusing, and it makes diagnosing the issue extremely difficult.

The Riot Games balance team has started tempering players’ expectations for its League of Legends plans in 2025, despite the game’s director Pu Liu famously declaring as recently as nine months ago that League would be “changing forever” with everything the developers had planned for next season and beyond.

There is “cool stuff coming,” League‘s studio head Andrei van Roon said this weekend, but the idea it would change the game forever may have been “a bit of an oversell.”

Xitter

Original post: Xitter

Various responses in one unwieldy image: https://fedia.io/media/ce/5c/ce5c5637ce2bf3a36e18264580d48e416d3052bba2db4a9f4c8b7e0a44f87275.webp

[AMD] asked me if I was testing with an Administrator account [as distinct from a user account with administrator rights]. [...] As far as I can tell, if the Ryzen processors aren't run on an account with these elevated privileges then they don't function as intended for bursty workloads, so that means gaming in particular. AMD told me this bug -- if that's indeed what it is -- won't impact sustained all-core workloads.

Across our 13 game sample, the 9700X saw a 4% performance improvement when compared to the day 1 review data. Meanwhile, the 7700X saw a 3% improvement. [...] So we've improved the 9700X's position [compared to the 7700X] by 1% - that's it.

This Windows bug -- which AMD has told me should be addressed in a future Windows update -- seems to be more of a general Ryzen bug, at least based on the testing we've been able to do so far. So, it's not an issue that specifically affects Zen 5 processors - I need to make that clear.

It's very possible that the Administrator account will also boost the gaming performance of Intel CPUs. [HU chose to publish before doing Intel testing in order to get the information out that it wasn't a Zen5-specific problem]

I expect a written version of this video will be published to TechSpot in a day or two?

4K, 120 FPS, and more

AMD advertised a roughly 16% IPC increase for Zen 5 over the previous Zen 4 architecture, and while we are fully aware that IPC doesn't linearly scale with gaming performance, we were a bit surprised to find that the 9700X and 9600X are no more than 3% faster than their predecessors in the most CPU-bottlenecked 720p gaming benchmarks.

Such a deviation from AMD's claims took everyone by surprise in the tech press, some reviewers even wondered initially if they had bad samples, there's plenty of discussion and drama in online communities. Like everyone else, we did several rounds of re-testing, and tried poking and prodding with the settings to figure out if we could better understand the architecture. Through the course of our testing, we found some interesting core scheduling behavior, and set out on an adventure.

Our argument with this article is not that SMT is the way to go [sic], but rather that there's something in the SMT or non-SMT behavior that affects performance on Zen 5 more than on previous processors.