Neowin's Official World Cup 2006 Thread



Recommended Posts

I beg to differ. If Germany plays like they did against Sweden for the most part, Argentina will be in trouble.

I disagree, on Argentina 3 players can take control of the whole game Messi, Aimar and Riquelme. If they play there A game, I think it'll go Argentina's way, but if they're not steller, Germany may have a chance. :)

I think the following teams will go on; England, Argentina, Brazil and Italy.

Henry was dispicable, he is a world class player with alot of respect from millions of fans around the world but i lost complete respect for him when he went down clutching is face, as people have allready said this spoils football, and i actully think he played a rubbish match was offside nearly every ball played to him. zedan on the other hand omg what a player :D!!!

Now you know how i felt seeing Rivaldo faking and injury in 2002 against Turkey.

Well that is another prime example of footballers cheating. The likes of Rivaldo, Henry and Gerrard are some of the best players the game has ever seen. For them to cheat is unacceptable seeing as milllions of people are watching them accross the globe. What kind of example does that set to youngsters? It need's to be stopped before the problem escalates so far that it could detirmine the outcome of an important match, perhaps even the World Cup final.

I disagree, on Argentina 3 players can take control of the whole game Messi, Aimar and Riquelme. If they play there A game, I think it'll go Argentina's way, but if they're not steller, Germany may have a chance. :)

I think the following teams will go on; England, Argentina, Brazil and Italy.

Are you serious about Messi taking control of the game? Messi is not even a starter and when (if) he comes in against Germany, they may already be losing and he many not get much done. I don't see how you can say a bench player can take control of a game. All the times he has come in has been with Argentina winning comfortably, which coincidentally were the only times he scored. Against Mexico, he didn't really do much, other than having his goal called for offside, but he still didn't do anything, he just ran on that 2-on-1.

Lack of World Cup football is damaging for the brain :(

I just threw myself in the pool all day today (I'm toasted from the sun) :laugh:

I was dissapointed in Thierry Henry last night. Henry is one of my favourite players, one of the best in the world and I always admired his personality and passion for the game.

Last night he let me down when he went down clutching his face when he clearly was hit in the chest, it was a foul when he was hit in the chest but Henry was looking to get Puyol sent off. I understand he wants to win but there is still no need to cheat, which was what he did, he cheated by attempting to con the referee.

Even that dude in the Ghana game attempted to win a penalty yesterday by diving. He was not even touched in the slightest, and luckily the referee saw it clearly and because he had already been booked he got sent off for it.

The same can be said for Steven Gerrard when he dived for a penalty in the friendly game against Jamaica. Cheating has no place in football and I really despise some of the players when they do cheat.

I agree with you in the Henry case, faking a fault to get someone sent off is just wrong, FIFA should review those fouls and make those players pay

in the other hand I kinda disagree with you in the penalty thing, diving is a part of the game, the same as fouls that are not fouls(not like the case of Henry just simple fouls), if the ref buy's the diving (as in the Italy vs Australia game) more power to the attacker that fabricated the foul and helped the team, but if the ref doesn't buy it then show him the card and thats the end of the problem :p

I've noticed that my day's been going very slow without World Cup action too. :/

yeah! tehre is absolutely nothing to do when there is no footie :/ actually i went to kick some penalties against my brother, but then rain interupted the fun.

anyway only 1 more day to wait :)

was there a clip of the henry foul anywhere? i missed it...

edit

nm, that was a lot easier to find then i thought it would be. and wow, that was just wrong. truly sad play on his part.

Edited by BroChaos

I really think, despite the disruptions it would cause to the flow of the game, that video refereeing should be instated in matches. They do it in most sports now, and it really does give players peace of mind that the correct call was made - tennis is a prime example of that. We've already seen how the course of the World Cup has changed on more than one occasion because of one dubious decision by a referee.

I really think, despite the disruptions it would cause to the flow of the game, that video refereeing should be instated in matches. They do it in most sports now, and it really does give players peace of mind that the correct call was made - tennis is a prime example of that. We've already seen how the course of the World Cup has changed on more than one occasion because of one dubious decision by a referee.

Plus theres another 5th official sitting on the sideline? That 'should' help the referee.

I agree with you in the Henry case, faking a fault to get someone sent off is just wrong, FIFA should review those fouls and make those players pay

in the other hand I kinda disagree with you in the penalty thing, diving is a part of the game, the same as fouls that are not fouls(not like the case of Henry just simple fouls), if the ref buy's the diving (as in the Italy vs Australia game) more power to the attacker that fabricated the foul and helped the team, but if the ref doesn't buy it then show him the card and thats the end of the problem :p

Well I would still class diving for a penalty as cheating. When you say diving is part of the game, it has become part of the game, but that is because so many player's do it these day's and it is just getting beyond a joke. Just because players dive does not make it right, it is still cheating and that is why referee's book players who they see diving.

As a Liverpool fan it does hurt me quite a lot to have to criticize one of my favourite players in football, Steven Gerrard. Just because I admire his ability and passion for the game does not blind me into thinking that what he did was right.

I was dissapointed in Thierry Henry last night. Henry is one of my favourite players, one of the best in the world and I always admired his personality and passion for the game.

Last night he let me down when he went down clutching his face when he clearly was hit in the chest, it was a foul when he was hit in the chest but Henry was looking to get Puyol sent off. I understand he wants to win but there is still no need to cheat, which was what he did, he cheated by attempting to con the referee.

You betcha, I was truly disappointed to see such an action. Ah well, I'm hoping that France will exit next because such an action may not be allowed.

Well that is another prime example of footballers cheating. The likes of Rivaldo, Henry and Gerrard are some of the best players the game has ever seen. For them to cheat is unacceptable seeing as milllions of people are watching them accross the globe. What kind of example does that set to youngsters? It need's to be stopped before the problem escalates so far that it could detirmine the outcome of an important match, perhaps even the World Cup final.

Yes I am such a "use-the-video-images-person", they are recording the game so take advantage of it. It's allowed in rugby so why not in soccer?

I don't think video refereeing could ever work in football, the way I see it, it would ruin the game a lot worse than diving/acting ever will.

There will always be situations that need to be replayed several times from different angles to see what really happened. Take a look at hockey for example, the game may stand still for 5-10 minutes while the video is beeing analyzed, this would never work in football.

I think the only solution is to penalize diving/acting more actively, if a player takes an obvious dive in a game and the referee misses it, a red card should be given after the game so that the player misses the next game. I'm sure hefty fines would stop many prospering football actors dead on their tracks too.

Well I would still class diving for a penalty as cheating. When you say diving is part of the game, it has become part of the game, but that is because so many player's do it these day's and it is just getting beyond a joke. Just because players dive does not make it right, it is still cheating and that is why referee's book players who they see diving.

As a Liverpool fan it does hurt me quite a lot to have to criticize one of my favourite players in football, Steven Gerrard. Just because I admire his ability and passion for the game does not blind me into thinking that what he did was right.

well yeah, to me is more like, if it doesn't affect the other player at least its better than cheating to get the other one a card :p (a messed up though considering is worst loosing but anyway :p)

[rant]

the other thing that bothers me is the damm 5th ref, why is he there for :sigh: I mean come on! they are paying him(at least that's what I think) and the refs are using those stupid mics, at least USE the 5th(and the 4th for all that matters) for something usefull and use the damm mics with those refs

[/rant]

oh well... :)

The German are already taking the victory for granted. Spain did the same and look where they are now...

I would of said Argentina would be the favourite's for that game anyway, so if Germany are expecting a walk in the park they will be in for a big shock. I think Argentina's attacking prowess will cut apart the German defense.

well yeah, to me is more like, if it doesn't affect the other player at least its better than cheating to get the other one a card :p (a messed up though considering is worst loosing but anyway :p)

[rant]

the other thing that bothers me is the damm 5th ref, why is he there for :sigh: I mean come on! they are paying him(at least that's what I think) and the refs are using those stupid mics, at least USE the 5th(and the 4th for all that matters) for something usefull and use the damm mics with those refs

[/rant]

oh well... :)

I thought the 5th official was just incase one of the other official's got injured (it has happened before)?

Finally some games tomorrow :D

Wooo :woot:!

I don't know how you acquired the infromation that us Germans expect to win today. Actually most Germans I talked to today where a bit sceptic about todays game against Argentina - quite a few people thinking this will be as far as Germany will get. That doesn't stop us from hoping for a victory nor from cheering on our team.

This topic is now closed to further replies.
  • Recently Browsing   0 members

    • No registered users viewing this page.
  • Posts

    • AMD RX 9070 GRE AI, Blender benchmarks vs 9070 XT, 7800XT, Nvidia RTX 5070, 4070 by Sayan Sen Earlier this week, we shared the first part of our review of AMD's new RX 9070 GRE. It was about the gaming performance of the GPU, and we gave it an 8 out of 10. As a follow-up, similar to how we did with the 9070 XT and non-XT, we are doing a dedicated productivity review for the RX 9070 GRE as well, where we compare it against the 9070 XT, 9070, 7800 XT, as well as Nvidia's 5070 and 4070. This will include AI, rendering, compute, and more benchmarks. AI performance, especially, is a very important metric in today's world, and AMD also promised big improvements thanks to its underlying architectural improvements. We will be pitching it against the data we already have for the RX 9070, and RX 9070 XT, but also the Nvidia 5070 FE, MSI GeForce RTX 4070 VENTUS 2X 12G, and Gigabyte Radeon RX 7800 XT GAMING OC 16G as they are in a similar price class, but also because we do not have a comparable 5060 Ti card lying around here that we can compare it against. Before we get underway, this is a collaboration between Sayan Sen and Steven Parker, who lent me his test bed. Also, there was no editorial input from AMD. First up, the specs of the RX 9070, 9070 XT, and 9070 GRE, which were given to us by AMD: Radeon RX 9070 GRE Radeon RX 9070 Radeon RX 9070 XT Boost Clock: Game Clock: up to 2.79GHz up to 2.20GHz up to 2.52GHz up to 2.07GHz up to 2.97GHz up to 2.40GHz Stream Processors 3,072 (48 CU) 3,584 (56 CU) 4,096 (64 CU) Ray Accelerator 48 56 64 AI Accelerator 96 112 128 ROPs 96 128 Texture Mapping Units 192 224 256 Memory 12 GB GDDR6, 18Gbps Clock, 192-bit Bus 432 GB/s 16 GB GDDR6, 20Gbps Clock, 256-bit Bus Effective Memory Bandwidth: 640 GB/s Infinity Cache 48 MB (3rd Gen) 64 MB (3rd Gen) Card Bus PCI-E 5.0 X16 Output 2x HDMI 2.1b 2x DisplayPort 2.1a Power consumption 220W 304W Recommended PSU 650W 750W Slot width 2x 3x Price (SEP) $549 $599 As you can see from the specs above, it is less than the standard RX 9070 in every way that counts, except for slightly higher Boost and Game clock speed. Design Moving on, the RX 9070 GRE we were given is an XFX Swift triple-fan, dual-slot design with two 8-pin connectors. At 30cm (self-measured), it will fit in most systems easily. There is no RGB either. The AMD Radeon RX 9070 GRE by XFX from all angles. Test system Our test system consists of the following: Lian Li O11 Dynamic Mini V2 Flow (Amazon|Newegg) ASUS Z890 ProArt Creator WiFi (Amazon|Newegg) Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus (Amazon|Newegg) Thermal Grizzly KryoSheet - 44x37 (Amazon|Newegg) 2x 16GB G.Skill Trident Z5 RGB (7200 MT/s in XMP) (Amazon|Newegg) Sabrent Rocket4 Plus 2TB SSD (Amazon) Windows 11 25H2 (Build 26200.8246) AMD shared a press driver based on the recently released Adrenaline 26.5.2 that we were required to use. We now move on to our benchmarks. First up, we have Geekbench AI running on ONNX. For some reason, the 9070 GRE does exceptionally well here in both half-precision (FP16) and single-precision (FP32). It manages to beat the RTX 5070 and RX 9070 non-XT, and is only behind the 9070 XT. Since Geekbench runs in short bursts instead of continuously hammering the graphics card, it seems the GRE's faster boost clocks are helping here. Next up, we move to the UL Procyon AI test suite, starting with the image generation benchmark. We chose the Stable Diffusion XL FP16 test since it is the most intense workload available on Procyon. The Nvidia cards do very well here, as even the 4070 out-muscles AMD's best fairy easily. The positive thing about the GRE is that it gets quite close to the 9070 non-XT in this test; this indicates that the VRAM does not play a very big role here, as SD XL relies on float16 (FP16). So this is something to keep in mind again. If you wish to work with float32 AI workloads, graphics cards with larger than 12 GB buffers would likely emerge as victors. Regardless, the gains are still massive on AMD's 9000 series compared to the 7000 series. Following image generation, we move to the text generation benchmark. This is one test where the 9070 GRE struggled, quite a lot. It seems that the 12 GB VRAM and lower memory bandwidth of the new Radeon 9070 GRE are hurting it quite a bit; the split is massive, especially in a test like Llama2, which packs 13 billion parameters. As such, in all the tests, the 9070 GRE is the slowest of the lot. Next, we tried Blender, and here the AMD GPUs were beaten by Nvidia. Rendering is something the Green team has always had a lead over the Red side, and it has not changed so far. On the positive side, though, the 9070 GRE shows significantly better results than the 7800 XT, which means AMD is on the right path. Catching up to Nvidia, though, will require a lot more effort. And we hope HIP and ROCm can keep improving. Wrapping up AI testing, we measured OpenCL throughput in the Geekbench compute benchmark. The RX 9070 GRE alongside the 9070 did not fare well here at all, even falling behind the 7800 XT. Interestingly, even the RTX 5070 could not beat the 4070 on OpenCL, so perhaps this suggests that OpenCL optimization may not have been a priority for either AMD or Nvidia in the modern era. Conclusion We reached the end of our productivity performance review of the 9070 GRE, and we have to say it's a mixed bag. Unlike the 9070 and 9070 XT, the GRE excels in some areas while losing ground fairly easily in others. Similar to how it happened in gaming, any time the card's memory subsystem gets hammered, it tends to fall behind the others. This was the case with text generation, wherein we saw the VRAM sometimes hit its maximum available 12 GB of usage with larger model sizes. So what do we make of the RX 9070 as a productivity hardware? It can certainly be used, but you have to know it has its limitations. For those looking for a GPU that can deal with more, AMD recently unveiled the Radeon AI PRO R9700, which is essentially a 32 GB refresh of the 9070 XT with some additional workstation-based optimizations. On a similar note, the new Ryzen AI Halo platform is something you can consider if you want to set up a local AI processing station. Considering everything, we rate AMD's Radeon RX 9070 GRE a 7.5 out of 10 for its productivity performance. Price is less of a factor for those looking at productivity cases compared to those considering the GPU for gaming, and as such, we felt it did quite decently on many occasions and can be handy if you need a 12 GB GPU and, for some reason, don't want to get Nvidia. Purchase links: RX 9070 / XT / GRE (Amazon US) As an Amazon Associate, we earn from qualifying purchases.
    • Does anyone here know if these updates are integrated into the UUP dump isos?
    • Motrix Next 3.9.4 by Razvan Serea Motrix Next is a modern, open-source cross-platform download manager built as the official next-generation successor to the original Motrix project. It has been completely rewritten using Tauri 2, Vue 3, TypeScript, and Rust, while still relying on the powerful Aria2 download engine for high-speed multi-protocol transfers. The app supports HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, BitTorrent, ED2K and magnet links, offering advanced features like multi-connection acceleration, task scheduling, bandwidth control, and batch download management. With a significantly reduced install size (around 20MB), it focuses on being lightweight, fast, and resource-efficient compared to traditional Electron-based download tools. Designed for Windows, macOS, and Linux, Motrix Next delivers a clean, modern UI inspired by Material Design 3 principles, with smooth animations and a minimal workflow. It improves usability through better download organization, system tray integration, and enhanced torrent handling including selective file downloads and tracker management. Motrix Next features: Multi-protocol downloads — HTTP, FTP, BitTorrent, Magnet, .torrent, ED2K, and Metalink tasks BitTorrent — Selective file download, DHT, peer exchange, encryption controls, metadata caching, GeoIP peer flags, and tracker probing Browser extension integration — Embedded Extension API with independent authentication, download confirmation, smart auto-submit, filename hints, referer/cookie forwarding, and real-time controls (Chrome Web Store · Edge Add-ons) Safe filename handling — Content-Disposition, RFC 2047, non-UTF-8, percent-encoded, and extensionless URL resolution with path traversal sanitization Download organization — Favorite and recent folders, optional file-type categorization, stale-record cleanup, and completed history backed by SQLite Concurrent downloads — Independent controls for active tasks, HTTP connections per server, segments per file, and BT peer limits Speed control — Global and per-task upload/download limits with day-of-week and time-of-day scheduling System integration — Tray operation, optional tray speed display, macOS Dock badge/progress, protocol handlers for magnet://, thunder://, and motrixnext:// Lightweight mode — Destroys the WebView on minimize-to-tray while Rust keeps the engine, task monitor, notifications, history, and extension routing alive Notifications and power options — Native task start/complete/failure notifications, keep-awake during downloads, and optional shutdown after completion Network controls — Scoped proxy support for downloads, app updates, and tracker updates, plus system proxy detection Auto-update channels — Stable, Beta, and Latest Across Channels policies with separate download and install phases Diagnostics — Structured logs, exportable diagnostic ZIPs, database integrity checks, automatic DB rebuild, and Linux GPU rendering fallback Personalization — Light/dark/system theme, 10 color schemes, 26 languages, and first-launch system language detection Motrix Next 3.9.4 changelog: Motrix Next 3.9.4 promotes the 3.9.4 beta cycle to stable. This release refreshes bundled engine binaries, improves task detail readability and copy actions, expands link handling for magnet and ED2K workflows, polishes responsive navigation and text wrapping, updates browser extension documentation, and refines network preference controls. New Features Task Detail copy actions — Added copyable values for task metadata and reusable render functions for long text fields. Magnet and ED2K lifecycle support — Added task lifecycle handling for magnet and ED2K links. History cleanup for deleted tasks — Deleted tasks can now remove matching history records. User-Agent management — Added user-agent management and improved related network preference controls. Browser extension documentation — Added the Firefox Add-ons link for the Motrix Next extension. Improvements Engine binaries — Updated bundled binaries for supported architectures. Task Detail readability — Long task names, URLs, tracker values, and copyable metadata now render more clearly. Deletion messaging — Refined localized task deletion text for clarity and consistency. Text wrapping — Improved URI input wrapping and task name multiline display. Navigation layout — Improved sub-navigation responsiveness. Disk allocation default — Changed the default file allocation method to trunc. Proxy controls — Improved proxy button styling in network preferences. Download: Motrix Next 64-bit | ARM64 | macOS ~20.0 MB (Open Source) Links: Website | macOS / Linux | Screenshot Get alerted to all of our Software updates on Twitter at @NeowinSoftware
    • NVIDIA officially supports Ubuntu, as linked above with the GeForce NOW Hands on I did in collaboration with Paul Hill.
    • TO be clear I am not running linux today, however I keep thinking about it. And I want to make sure there are minimal obstacles if I decide to make that switch in the coming months.
  • Recent Achievements

    • Proficient
      Eric Biran went up a rank
      Proficient
    • Dedicated
      Conjor earned a badge
      Dedicated
    • Week One Done
      Windows Guy earned a badge
      Week One Done
    • Dedicated
      Mark Spruce earned a badge
      Dedicated
    • Collaborator
      conkir earned a badge
      Collaborator
  • Popular Contributors

    1. 1
      +primortal
      479
    2. 2
      PsYcHoKiLLa
      250
    3. 3
      Steven P.
      72
    4. 4
      +Edouard
      69
    5. 5
      FloatingFatMan
      67
  • Tell a friend

    Love Neowin? Tell a friend!