Pixie 0.18 makes chatting much faster on PCs with a dedicated graphics card, and welcomes an eighteenth character.
New
- Chat on your graphics card. If your PC has a dedicated NVIDIA GeForce, AMD Radeon RX or Intel Arc graphics card with about 2.6 GB of free video memory (4 GB cards such as the GTX 1650 qualify), the chat model now runs on it automatically. There is nothing to set up. On our test PC with a GTX 1650 and a 2012 processor, Pixie writes its replies about eight to ten times faster, and a follow-up reply arrives in a few seconds instead of half a minute.
- Always a safe fallback. Integrated graphics keep using the processor, and so do laptops running on battery and PCs streaming with 📡 Stream switched on, so your game keeps its frames. If the graphics card ever fails to run the model, Pixie switches to the processor within the same message and remembers it.
- Settings tell you where it runs. ⚙ → 💬 Chat, under "Wake Pixie up": "The chat model is running on the graphics card: …" or "The chat model is running on the processor." with the reason in brackets.
- Meet Fıstık, the budgie. Our eighteenth character is modelled on a real budgie: a sunny yellow face, a green body, striped head and scaly wings, in two looks — Fıstık (green and yellow) and Sky (blue and white). Click it and it flaps both wings. It chirps, nibbles millet and chats like a budgie learning to talk, now and then proudly repeating a kind word. Pick it in ⚙ or type @fistik in the chat.
Improvements
- Easier @ calls. Turkish and accented letters no longer have to be typed exactly: @kopekbaligi finds Köpekbalığı (the shark) and @FISTIK finds Fıstık. One-character Chinese names such as @猫 work too.
- Error messages that say why. If the chat model can't start, Pixie now names the likely cause (a missing file, a processor it can't run on, not enough memory, a damaged model file or a crash) with a short code, and writes a small report, %APPDATA%\pixie\model-error.txt, that you can send to [email protected].