Does this really amount to a “pivot”? It sounds like they just updated their toolchain and binaries to support LoongArch - presumably Basalt is also continuing to support other architectures too:

Russia-based Basalt SPO has been recompiled to support Chinese Loongson processors based on the LoongArch architecture

The company says the product is offered ‘as is,’ and its commercial distributives will be available later.

The distro is based on the unstable, experimental branch of the Sisyphus project repository, which developers use to test new ideas and developments, including support for various processor architectures, reports CNews. The distro is available for download, but a stable release with LoongArch support is set for Q1 2024.

It is an interesting sign that LoongArch availability in Russia is high enough that at least one company put a fair bit of work into adding support, but it seems premature to claim anyone is actually pivoting away from Intel/ARM, especially all of Russia.

Is there some method behind the seemingly random selection of discrete GPUs charted for comparison? I don’t think I’ve seen a GTX 980 compared to anything inside the last decade, what made it crop up here?

It runs like shit even on the 3080 and also doesn’t actually look any better raising quality from low to high, so for this one I think it was less using high specs as crutch and more just throwing some random specs out and shipping whatever they had by the deadline.

Some of the textures get progressively lower quality the higher you raise the quality settings lol.