Hardware Monday | The first and hopefully last one.

Hey everyone, I'm back from my vacation and ready to start working again... is what I'd like to say. The reality is that my hardware is acting up in a major way once again. Let's talk about it.

Some of you might remember that I mentioned a big hardware failure I had a few weeks ago, but it was "resolved". The reality is I never fully resolved it, I just got my PC to boot again, but with frequent crashes and only one of my two GPUs working. But because I didn't want to risk anything before getting the last update out, I decided to not deal with any of that before my vacation and instead tackle the problem once I'm back home.

And as you can see in the picture the problem persists. I started working on it on Friday and have been going at it ever since Going through one possible solution after the other, trying to narrow down what the actual problem is, but I still don't have the slightest clue. Right now I'm in the process of reinstalling the NVMe drivers for my SSDs which, for some reason, decided to not get recognized as bootable devices anymore, don't ask me why, and launching in CSM will simply not post at all, I'm guessing because of the GPUs. In general the 4090 has no signal no matter what I do and I'm actually using an older mainboard that a technician declared broken, because my new board won't post either and gives me a constent loop of error codes regarding the CPU, which works perfectly fine on the older board. But on the older board I can't use multiple GPUs because it will, for some unknown reason, stop powering the top GPU whenever I boot. And because this isn't even the dumbest thing, no matter how much I mucked around wtih BIOS settings and drivers to get my dual GPUs running, the only fix is to play Monster Hunter World for about 30 minutes and the second GPU will power on magically and works again, until I reboot the system. I guess it's not very surprising that there is very little advice to be found on this very particular situation. And as you might expect that's not even all of it.

So... I'll be honest. I don't know when this will be resolved. I'm trying out everything I know and I think I'll find a solution at some point, but for now this simply means I can't work on the game. I have many possible fixes yet to try, but there is a limit to how long I can work on my broken machine without going absolutely crazy. Most of the time I can confidentally say that I'm a pretty calm guy, but when it comes to fixing the hardware my entire work is based on, I have the shortest fuse imaginable. I get really angry. Reaaaaaaaly angry. I hope this won't lead to any big delays but this time I can't promise anything. I'll start working on the game again the day this problem is resolved. but I can't say if I'll find the solution today, tomorrow or at the end of the week. I'm confident that I can find it though.

And that is all. I'll go back to talking about the game again when this whole episode is behind me, you just need to give me a bit of time. Until then I wish everyone a great week and please wish me luck : D