I’ve been trying to convince my boomer wife to try affinity. She works mostly with print, and it seems like a good fit to me.

I used to play it a lot when it was cool.

I thought it was an ncurses multiplayer tetris-clone.

Resizable BAR was previously cited as a requirement for Intel ARC cards, but I think the drivers today can do without. Sounds like your system might be too old to have that. Might be a soft requirement, as in you’ll see a performance drop if you don’t have it.

My RX580 does the job just fine. Does 1080p at 3x realtime for HEVC, and 10x for h.264.

They’re dirt cheap second hand.

I moved from kts24 to a hetzner arm node earlier this week. So far I’m very impressed.

I use syncthing. Share from any app, land on that directory on your server.

I think that limit (previously 5GB) is for files that they’ll store for you. Larger transfers are P2P only.

I recommend https://wormhole.app for the purpose. Drag, drop, leave the tab open.

Haven’t heard anything, just from memory of my own testing. Looking back at my notes I see a 40-50% speed up with VideoToolbox compared to x265 on M1, but at a lot crappier quality.

I haven’t tested in quite a while, though. I wrote off doing encoding on the M1, as my AMD cards are a lot faster (and produce better results).

It’s hard to beat a GPU in HEVC encoding performance. SoC:s have comparable performance to dGPU:s in that regard. A used zen/zen2 laptop might be a cheap and tiny workhorse for the purpose. I have a zen/vega10 matebook 2020 that does 1080p at around 2.5-3x real-time at high quality presets. No doubt it could do 4k at faster presets.

With the hardware in my arsenal I’ve found that AMD>Intel>nVidia, at least quality wise. VideoToolbox on Mac is down there with nVidia, and Apple silicon being pretty slow at it compared to software x265 on the same machine.