The market is splitting into GPUs on one hand, that still have latency concerns, and dedicated vector processors that can be high latency but need their own resources and maybe even dedicated OS.
I'd like to see GPUs that are closer to dumb frame buffers again, with their need for fast RAM access served by the main system RAM and that capability benefiting the whole system.
Likewise, the last time I can recall a notable increase in my own enjoyment from a new GPU was my GTX 660. It ran all the games I was playing back then (TF2, Skyrim, Civ V, Bioshock Infinite...) on mid to high settings. The newer cards I've bought since then have only felt like marginal improvements. Yeah, the graphics have more detail, more effects, better lighting. So what? Do the games actually look better, aesthetically? Are the worlds more immersive? Is the gameplay any better? Nope.
1030 DDR5 is as good as the 660 but at 30W instead of 140W.
I can still play all games, the only games that struggle are the ones that hit their head in efficiency roof because of engines or pushing the boundaries too far.
> Nvidia is already very keen on emphasizing DLSS as the solution to this problem, and AMD is likewise tauting its own tech as well.
Personally I dislike DLSS so much:
If I enable it in Cyberpunk 2077, there are some visible noise patterns that pop in and out of view especially near shadows on flat textures all the time, it looks horrible and distracting. And if I disable DLSS, if the game updates sometimes it enables it back so I see the horrible things again!
Why do you need AI to upscale anyway if it looks this bad, why not just use Lanczos/bicubic/... upscaling? They are not only simpler and faster, but look better too, because they don't create the above mentioned horrible visible noise patterns.
Then they have the inter-frame thing that causes input lag, another bad degradation.
Then they 'solve' input lag by touting a vendor lock-in-sounding feature (Nvidia Reflex), while the real solution to input lag is not add vendor lock-in feature but ensure you compute 1 frame at the time and do so fast (which is of course not simple, but is a matter of optimization and not of brand-named features, and perhaps not generating and inserting additional frames would help).
Then there is the fact that DLSS is something that needs to be supported by games themselves: why? This again makes it sounds vendor-lock-in-ish because they can have it "exclusively" in some games. But nothing about upscaling, nor frame generation, sounds like something that requires game engine support to me. The graphics card should have enough info to do that by having all the pixels. I mean, it was always possible to play games at different resolutions (DLSS is basically also like playing the game at lower resolution), and there always has been some upscaling required for that (whether it's the monitor or the graphics card doing it). This never required special engine support.
> This again makes it sounds vendor-lock-in-ish because they can have it "exclusively" in some games. But nothing about upscaling, nor frame generation, sounds like something that requires game engine support to me
Because DLSS is a AI-based solution with customized settings and inputs for each game. (The “Deep Learning SuperSampling” is right in the title.) This is also why it requires NVIDIA’s bespoke Tensor cores to function. DLSS 2.0 removed most per-game optimization but there’s still some support work required.
AMD’s FSR is basically a traditional upscaling solution, just with low overhead. FSR runs fine on NVIDIA and even the Nintendo Switch - but almost all reviewers agree DLSS is superior in most games.
Except, perhaps, Cyberpunk 2077. But that’s not a fair metric to measure DLSS by because everything about that game has been a technical disaster.
As far as I know, Tensor cores are a little like Raytracing cores. Precision, unlike for mining or science, is not valued and they are allowed to do sloppy math within a tolerance in exchange for much, much greater speed.
> With that name, it could have been based off of a single pre-training on many games, to work on games in general
Well, I’m not NVIDIA, so I don’t know if you could. I just know AMD tried and the results were almost universally considered inferior.
> They are not only simpler and faster, but look better too
I disagree. It's not even close how much better DLSS looks than traditional upscaling. I've run into very few noticeable artifacts from DLSS that are distracting, and this seems to be the general consensus among most consumers.
> DLSS is something that needs to be supported by games themselves: why?
It requires motion vectors and depth buffers in addition to the low res aliased images.
The issue is generally looking better isn’t enough. The goal is immersion and even relatively rare artifacts destroy that feeling so DLSS is simply worse than playing at a lower resolution that I’m going to get used to in a few minutes.
This is the same reason 60FPS in modern games isn’t “enough” while it felt buttery smooth on old console fighting games. Consistent FPS is vastly more important than average FPS.
The reality is that we're dealing with trade-offs, and one of them is reducing resolution to improve FPS. If I can't play at native resolution with adequate FPS, the options are to reduce quality or resolution. I personally prefer to keep quality as high as possible, even if that means a lower resolution.
If you reduce resolution, the first thing you'll notice is that the result looks blurry, or otherwise just less sharp thanks to whatever is doing the default upscaling. DLSS lets me reduce resolution while retaining a sharp image that looks like native resolution. That's a win-win if you don't enjoy 4k@30fps.
> This is the same reason 60FPS in modern games isn’t “enough”
There are hundreds of millions of console users that disagree. It's great to get a billion FPS, but the reality is that outside of a few people most gamers just don't notice the difference after a certain point.
Entertainment doesn’t need to be responsive. I can watch a movie at 24 FPS and it’s fine hell most YouTube videos are fine at 360p. First person games however need to be immersive to be entertaining rather than annoying.
> It’s great to get a billion FPS, but the reality is that outside of a few people most gamers just don’t notice the difference after a certain point.
You’re talking about something different. I’m saying a monitor set to 60 FPS is fine as long as the game is rock solid at 60 FPS. However, frame rates vary so wildly a game can easily average 120 FPS and suddenly then drop 4 frames which people notice.
It's such a subjective evaluation. I was plenty immersed in Elder Scrolls Daggerfall, despite constantly falling through the floor. I was plenty immersed with Cyberpunk 2077, despite minor car accidents rocketing me to the moon.
> frame rates vary so wildly a game
Which is a problem that DLSS helps solve, by improving FPS while minimizing the sacrifice to quality. I'm not sure what's the problem? If a few wonky shadows or other minor graphical glitches ruin the immersion for you, it sounds like you've set the bar too high and have unrealistic expectations.
> it sounds like you've set the bar too high and have unrealistic expectations.
I much prefer turning shadows off than have them do something crazy. Graphics don’t need to be awesome just consistent. Minecraft is in many ways worse than Daggerfall, but you quickly get used to the world. Skyrim is fine for a more realistic world even without mods, until a texture messes up and looks crazy. That’s the moment when you go from playing at game to looking at a screen.
IMO Cyberpunk would be strictly better off with fewer effects and worst textures in exchange for fewer glitches. Voluntarily selecting more glitches please aka DLSS is just a terrible trade off from my perspective.
> Then there is the fact that DLSS is something that needs to be supported by games themselves: why?
DLSS requires motion vectors, depth buffer, and jitter in addition to the rendered frame. DLSS 2.0 is effectively Temporal Anti-aliasing (TAA) with deep learning replacing the heuristic approach of TAA implementations and thus needs as much integration as TAA does.
> But nothing about upscaling, nor frame generation, sounds like something that requires game engine support to me. The graphics card should have enough info to do that by having all the pixels.
Modern upscaling solutions (eg TAA) require not just the pixel outputs but various inter-frame/metadata such as depth, normals, motion vectors, last frame, etc. DLSS is more or less just the spiritual successor to TAA with machine learning sprinkled in. Integration with the game engine is needed because the non-color metadata needs to be provided to the DLSS and how each engine computes those things is a bit different.
>while the real solution to input lag is not add vendor lock-in feature but ensure you compute 1 frame at the time and do so fast
No, Nvidia Reflex is a step in the right direction. You want to sample input at the latest possible time and then create a frame for that input. Sampling input at the beginning of a frame is the worst time you can choose as that will guarantee at least a frame of latency. If you are able to render in 20% of the time of a frame you want to sample the input and then start rendering 80% of the way through the current frame that way you are only add 20% of a frame of latency at a minimum in this part of the system.
This is how things are done in VR, but the location of input devices are also exterpolated to predict where they should be located at time they will be displayed.
> but the location of input devices are also exterpolated
That's impossible, if you change your movement it will mispredict and thus cause more lag, while exactly when you change is when it should feel the best. Consistency feels better.
Just like no magic gizmo can reduce audio lag other than have actual proper low latency standards (for bluetooth audio): it can never predict when you will hit the button to fire your weapon, etc..., in games
>That's impossible, if you change your movement it will mispredict and thus cause more lag
It will not cause more lag, it will just not be accurate to where your cursor actually should be when the frame gets displayed. For people with strong computers you would only need to predict a few ms forward in time which should be possible to get really accurate.
>it can never predict when you will hit the button to fire your weapon
That is not what is happening. What is happening is that time between registering the click and the frame being displayed. The prediction I'm talking about would be predicting subframe mouse movements. This behaviour is more for smooth mouse look. For shooting you want to have a precise timestamp of when the click happened so that you can see if at that moment in time the shot would have hit. The position where you are looking when shooting and the position where you are looking on screen are different things.
>Then there is the fact that DLSS is something that needs to be supported by games themselves: why?
Old news, but in a similar vein -- games that incorporated PhysX back in the day required nVidia hardware to make it work. I imagine its a similar issue for PhysX and DLSS, in that the game engine has to know to expect PhysX calculations and have something to run those calculations, and then use those calculations for debris or ragdoll physics. It could be turned on or off (so AMD cards could still play the game with a different physics backend).
It sounds like another case of nVidia making a cool technology and game devs choosing to use that cool tech in their game (or not, looking at you Starfield).
You’re definitely in the minority. Most people agree that DLSS is the best upscaling tech available right now. It produces an image that is genuinely similar to a higher native resolution with fairly minor artifacts.
It probably could run on other GPU but Nvidia isn’t the type to just give tech to their competitors.
Who can blame them, I mean where's the motivation? Gamers aren't asking for 4k gaming, they want 2k gaming at high refresh rates.
Modern game engines aren't credibly capable of 4k gaming, given the market's desire for high refresh rates. The fine print will show that they are doing 4k@30Hz which is like going back in time to the PlayStation 2 era but with really fancy geometry.
The bar to clear is 4k@120Hz. However getting there requires a full stack refresh. A high end panel made in the last two years that not only can handle high refresh 4k, but has the required state of the art HDMI or DisplayPort tech to stream that many bits.
Since nobody else is in place yet -- the monitors, the game engines -- there's no incentive for the graphics card to be early to the party. RTX 40 series was for people with more money than market sense.
Nvidia is going to pay gaming lip service and bide its time until there's an actual growth vector in that space. All their attention is, and should be, on monetizing the 'AI' hype curve.
If the surge of indie game popularity has shown anything, it's that games can be 8-bit hot pixellated messes but still touted as visual masterpieces as long as there's a decent global lighting engine somewhere in the mix.
I think, as you say, AI will be the next paradigm for gamers, and having specialised chips on these GPUs that can turn a scripted NPC story-based interaction into a do-what-you-want-under-these-contraints a la "AI town"[1] might keep them in business a little longer before they have to start upping the visuals again.
Even more importantly, a game can have crunchy 8-bit graphics that no one praises, but still be an amazing game.
No one (at least that I've heard) is saying, for instance, that Undertale or Deltarune are "visual masterpieces". They don't need to be. They're well-made games that do and say some interesting things.
I don't play many modern games. Not really interested in the latest consoles and my graphics card in the PC is around 8 years old. It seems a lot of games now require a large time investment and not for causal gamers.
If I want to play a games these days I normally go to emulators and back to old games. Old arcade games and computer games from the 80s and 90s era may look dated but some of them are more fun.
While AAA games do tend to be bloated with extra content, it is all optional. The main quests usually take only 10-20 hours.
Also, the current trend is to make games more accessible and actually better for casual gamers. Most games now have customisable difficulty and quality of life features. When I think of 80s and 90s games I think of dying a lot and having to replay, not being able to figure things out without buying a walkthrough, no quicksave etc.
> It seems a lot of games now require a large time investment and not for causal gamers.
Whaaaat?? Nothing wrong with emulators, but there's tons of great, short, casual games out there! Here's a list of some of my favorites to get started, you can find a ton more of you search for lists containing some of these titles: Gris, Journey, A Short Hike, The Witness, Oxenfree, Celeste. And if you really want to dig deep into the short/indie games scene, check out https://itch.io (though it can be kinda hard to find the gems there).
Zelda TOTK (and its prequel) are some of the best games in video game history and run on the underpowered Switch at 30fps. The gameplay is what makes them good.
StarCraft (1998) remained big, right as every single RTS released after it went 3D.
StarCraft II is usually played competitively on low graphics settings, to improve visual clarity. The game is 13 years old, and on high graphics still looks fine when compared to any modern title.
The other day when there was a post about Starfield, it was quite striking to me how visually indistinct and cluttered everything is[0], like the people don't stand out from the scenery. The visual technology for Starfield is certainly less primitive (though every single thing looks like it's made out of glossy plastic to me), but I can't help but notice that something like ETLegacy feels much easier to visually process[1]. ETLegacy is also capable of maintaining 333 FPS at 4k almost all of the time if I set the cap that high, even on my now out-of-date GTX 1070.
It really depends on game genre I think. For the types of games I play (slower stuff — solo RPGs/exploration, turn-based, etc), extra frames are nice but really don’t add a whole lot and I’d prefer to be able to ramp up resolution or effects instead. For these games as long as I’m hitting a consistent 60FPS I’m good.
For more twitchy competitive stuff I can see the need for FPS but that’s just a single corner of gaming.
I agree that 4k@60Hz is sufficient. The reason I push further to 4k@120Hz is because at that speed you can guarantee reliable frame rate above 60 frames. Whereas if the goal is 4k@60Hz, it will be treated as average frame rate and Goodhart's law will let games ship with occasional dips below 60 frames as long as it averages out.
Bugs that cause the game to fall below the minimum specs will definitely get fixed. Whereas bugs that cause the game to fall below recommended specs will be deferred to at best a day 1 patch, but also maybe never.
So if you want the minimum specs to enforce 4k@60Hz and really mean it, we need to push the recommended specs higher still.
I really hope Intel doesn't pull an Intel and prematurely give up on GPUs. They put out a solid first crack and the market desperately needs some capable competition.
This. A770 was hampered by driver issues but when they finally hit their stride it really shocked people. I don't think anybody expected it to be on the level is was.
What shocked people was how bad they were at drivers given they've been making GPUs for decades. The cards performed significantly worse than a 1070, which is a mid-tier GPU from 2016, and the drivers had such terrible and inconsistent performance (not to mention all the crashes) that the cards were useless.
Advertisers say that 90% of their ad spend has no results the problem is they don't know which spend that is. Graphics cards have the same problem. 90% of the pixels aren't being looked at. The problem is the card doesn't know which ones they are. This is the problem to solve.
My estimate is 70% is peripheral and the eye can move across the screen in 105ms or so. (60° FOV 18° excluding peripheral and 400°/sec speed)
That makes things really hard when your absolute minimum input latency (that nobody gets in practice) is already 24ms at 60Hz.
Maybe once we start talking about higher frequencies it can make sense. VR is trying hard for higher refresh rates since we are more sensitive to input latency for things we are experiencing and is hoping that tech helps get there.
Certainly headsets could use the tech but the difficulties in using it for monitors are enormous.
Also the performance benefits aren't as enormous as you would think. For instance unless you are pixel bound (which to be fair most things are in 4k games) it actually hurts your performance by slowing down the CPU.
My fear is it will end up being yet another tool that gets abused to where everyone associates it with a lack of quality.
After all looking to your left and seeing and old image would be very much against the goal of increasing performance.
I dropped a thousand dollars on a new card this generation to replace my GTX 1070 from 2016. Gotta say, I probably shouldn't have bothered. The old card was running modern games at 1080p60 just fine and I can't tell much difference between 1080p run through an mClassic hardware upscaler and native 4K. Even on my 75 inch TV it wasn't a huge leap.
I don’t know why this journalist says the industry needs to “level” with consumers about the death of Moore’s law. NVIDIA has been announcing the end of Moore’s law at least since 2017 [1].
Dunno how you could call any gen with the XX90 series in it "trash", even if the rest of the lineup has issues the fact that level of power and VRAM exists this side of $2000 let alone $10,000 is crazy.
Compare it to the 20XX series where the top of the line card only has 11GB of VRAM, less than the 1080Ti... and the flagship feature "raytracing" just isn't viable at the power of any of those 20XX cards.
What an easily discreditable article. The comments on the 12VHPWR connector (while calling it a 12HPWR) are a joke where they setup the situation, comment Nvidia's claims, and then just go rogue on the cause blaming the power consumption of the card instead of extremely well-defined research showing faulty connectors that make a bad connection and poor information available to customers caused the failures. Obviously a faulty connector will fail faster if it gets more power though it. Meanwhile the 4090 isd actually rather efficient and the article downright ignores the entire rest of the lineup having better performance/watt.
The only thing is that there were a bunch of 3rd party adapters (and a couple first party ones too) which had design or manufacturing flaws which caused them to melt. This kinda muddied the waters on the issue this year but it seems that the vast majority of issues after the problem was figured out were due to the specific 3rd party product.
It’s also the fact to some degree that the safety factor on the 12vhpwr connector is less than the old 8-pin, so smaller issues lead to melting. I know that I am slightly stressed about my 4090 even though I’ve thoroughly verified that it’s fully plugged in.
Are we once again allowed to buy high-end graphics cards at retail price, or are the crypto-boys still ruining it for everyone else? Last couple times I went to look at cards the prices were jacked up and eventually I stopped looking. Though I suppose it's for the best since my GTX 970 still gets the job done all these years later.
AI is probably now what's ruining it for everyone else, especially because NVIDIA essentially has a monopoly on a very broad segment of that market right now and so can hike their margins with little downside.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 165 ms ] threadI'd like to see GPUs that are closer to dumb frame buffers again, with their need for fast RAM access served by the main system RAM and that capability benefiting the whole system.
As someone who is targeting Raspberry 4 and Vision Five 2 where the low end is still 2GB shared RAM there is zero point to go higher.
Embrace the limitation!
I can still play all games, the only games that struggle are the ones that hit their head in efficiency roof because of engines or pushing the boundaries too far.
Most titles are CPU bound too!
Personally I dislike DLSS so much:
If I enable it in Cyberpunk 2077, there are some visible noise patterns that pop in and out of view especially near shadows on flat textures all the time, it looks horrible and distracting. And if I disable DLSS, if the game updates sometimes it enables it back so I see the horrible things again!
Why do you need AI to upscale anyway if it looks this bad, why not just use Lanczos/bicubic/... upscaling? They are not only simpler and faster, but look better too, because they don't create the above mentioned horrible visible noise patterns.
Then they have the inter-frame thing that causes input lag, another bad degradation.
Then they 'solve' input lag by touting a vendor lock-in-sounding feature (Nvidia Reflex), while the real solution to input lag is not add vendor lock-in feature but ensure you compute 1 frame at the time and do so fast (which is of course not simple, but is a matter of optimization and not of brand-named features, and perhaps not generating and inserting additional frames would help).
Then there is the fact that DLSS is something that needs to be supported by games themselves: why? This again makes it sounds vendor-lock-in-ish because they can have it "exclusively" in some games. But nothing about upscaling, nor frame generation, sounds like something that requires game engine support to me. The graphics card should have enough info to do that by having all the pixels. I mean, it was always possible to play games at different resolutions (DLSS is basically also like playing the game at lower resolution), and there always has been some upscaling required for that (whether it's the monitor or the graphics card doing it). This never required special engine support.
Because DLSS is a AI-based solution with customized settings and inputs for each game. (The “Deep Learning SuperSampling” is right in the title.) This is also why it requires NVIDIA’s bespoke Tensor cores to function. DLSS 2.0 removed most per-game optimization but there’s still some support work required.
AMD’s FSR is basically a traditional upscaling solution, just with low overhead. FSR runs fine on NVIDIA and even the Nintendo Switch - but almost all reviewers agree DLSS is superior in most games.
Except, perhaps, Cyberpunk 2077. But that’s not a fair metric to measure DLSS by because everything about that game has been a technical disaster.
Any idea why this needs bespoke cores? GPU's were already used for AI and crypto mining before this, without bespoke cores for 1 specific application
> The “Deep Learning SuperSampling” is right in the title
With that name, it could have been based off of a single pre-training on many games, to work on games in general
> With that name, it could have been based off of a single pre-training on many games, to work on games in general
Well, I’m not NVIDIA, so I don’t know if you could. I just know AMD tried and the results were almost universally considered inferior.
I disagree. It's not even close how much better DLSS looks than traditional upscaling. I've run into very few noticeable artifacts from DLSS that are distracting, and this seems to be the general consensus among most consumers.
> DLSS is something that needs to be supported by games themselves: why?
It requires motion vectors and depth buffers in addition to the low res aliased images.
DLSS looks poor to me and I have yet to actually keep it enabled.
This is the same reason 60FPS in modern games isn’t “enough” while it felt buttery smooth on old console fighting games. Consistent FPS is vastly more important than average FPS.
Here I was thinking the goal was entertainment.
The reality is that we're dealing with trade-offs, and one of them is reducing resolution to improve FPS. If I can't play at native resolution with adequate FPS, the options are to reduce quality or resolution. I personally prefer to keep quality as high as possible, even if that means a lower resolution.
If you reduce resolution, the first thing you'll notice is that the result looks blurry, or otherwise just less sharp thanks to whatever is doing the default upscaling. DLSS lets me reduce resolution while retaining a sharp image that looks like native resolution. That's a win-win if you don't enjoy 4k@30fps.
> This is the same reason 60FPS in modern games isn’t “enough”
There are hundreds of millions of console users that disagree. It's great to get a billion FPS, but the reality is that outside of a few people most gamers just don't notice the difference after a certain point.
Entertainment doesn’t need to be responsive. I can watch a movie at 24 FPS and it’s fine hell most YouTube videos are fine at 360p. First person games however need to be immersive to be entertaining rather than annoying.
> It’s great to get a billion FPS, but the reality is that outside of a few people most gamers just don’t notice the difference after a certain point.
You’re talking about something different. I’m saying a monitor set to 60 FPS is fine as long as the game is rock solid at 60 FPS. However, frame rates vary so wildly a game can easily average 120 FPS and suddenly then drop 4 frames which people notice.
It's such a subjective evaluation. I was plenty immersed in Elder Scrolls Daggerfall, despite constantly falling through the floor. I was plenty immersed with Cyberpunk 2077, despite minor car accidents rocketing me to the moon.
> frame rates vary so wildly a game
Which is a problem that DLSS helps solve, by improving FPS while minimizing the sacrifice to quality. I'm not sure what's the problem? If a few wonky shadows or other minor graphical glitches ruin the immersion for you, it sounds like you've set the bar too high and have unrealistic expectations.
I much prefer turning shadows off than have them do something crazy. Graphics don’t need to be awesome just consistent. Minecraft is in many ways worse than Daggerfall, but you quickly get used to the world. Skyrim is fine for a more realistic world even without mods, until a texture messes up and looks crazy. That’s the moment when you go from playing at game to looking at a screen.
IMO Cyberpunk would be strictly better off with fewer effects and worst textures in exchange for fewer glitches. Voluntarily selecting more glitches please aka DLSS is just a terrible trade off from my perspective.
DLSS requires motion vectors, depth buffer, and jitter in addition to the rendered frame. DLSS 2.0 is effectively Temporal Anti-aliasing (TAA) with deep learning replacing the heuristic approach of TAA implementations and thus needs as much integration as TAA does.
https://old.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/fvgf7d/how_dlss_2...
Modern upscaling solutions (eg TAA) require not just the pixel outputs but various inter-frame/metadata such as depth, normals, motion vectors, last frame, etc. DLSS is more or less just the spiritual successor to TAA with machine learning sprinkled in. Integration with the game engine is needed because the non-color metadata needs to be provided to the DLSS and how each engine computes those things is a bit different.
No, Nvidia Reflex is a step in the right direction. You want to sample input at the latest possible time and then create a frame for that input. Sampling input at the beginning of a frame is the worst time you can choose as that will guarantee at least a frame of latency. If you are able to render in 20% of the time of a frame you want to sample the input and then start rendering 80% of the way through the current frame that way you are only add 20% of a frame of latency at a minimum in this part of the system.
This is how things are done in VR, but the location of input devices are also exterpolated to predict where they should be located at time they will be displayed.
That's impossible, if you change your movement it will mispredict and thus cause more lag, while exactly when you change is when it should feel the best. Consistency feels better.
Just like no magic gizmo can reduce audio lag other than have actual proper low latency standards (for bluetooth audio): it can never predict when you will hit the button to fire your weapon, etc..., in games
It will not cause more lag, it will just not be accurate to where your cursor actually should be when the frame gets displayed. For people with strong computers you would only need to predict a few ms forward in time which should be possible to get really accurate.
>it can never predict when you will hit the button to fire your weapon
That is not what is happening. What is happening is that time between registering the click and the frame being displayed. The prediction I'm talking about would be predicting subframe mouse movements. This behaviour is more for smooth mouse look. For shooting you want to have a precise timestamp of when the click happened so that you can see if at that moment in time the shot would have hit. The position where you are looking when shooting and the position where you are looking on screen are different things.
Old news, but in a similar vein -- games that incorporated PhysX back in the day required nVidia hardware to make it work. I imagine its a similar issue for PhysX and DLSS, in that the game engine has to know to expect PhysX calculations and have something to run those calculations, and then use those calculations for debris or ragdoll physics. It could be turned on or off (so AMD cards could still play the game with a different physics backend).
It sounds like another case of nVidia making a cool technology and game devs choosing to use that cool tech in their game (or not, looking at you Starfield).
It probably could run on other GPU but Nvidia isn’t the type to just give tech to their competitors.
Modern game engines aren't credibly capable of 4k gaming, given the market's desire for high refresh rates. The fine print will show that they are doing 4k@30Hz which is like going back in time to the PlayStation 2 era but with really fancy geometry.
The bar to clear is 4k@120Hz. However getting there requires a full stack refresh. A high end panel made in the last two years that not only can handle high refresh 4k, but has the required state of the art HDMI or DisplayPort tech to stream that many bits.
Since nobody else is in place yet -- the monitors, the game engines -- there's no incentive for the graphics card to be early to the party. RTX 40 series was for people with more money than market sense.
Nvidia is going to pay gaming lip service and bide its time until there's an actual growth vector in that space. All their attention is, and should be, on monetizing the 'AI' hype curve.
I think, as you say, AI will be the next paradigm for gamers, and having specialised chips on these GPUs that can turn a scripted NPC story-based interaction into a do-what-you-want-under-these-contraints a la "AI town"[1] might keep them in business a little longer before they have to start upping the visuals again.
1: https://github.com/a16z-infra/ai-town
No one (at least that I've heard) is saying, for instance, that Undertale or Deltarune are "visual masterpieces". They don't need to be. They're well-made games that do and say some interesting things.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1388770/Cruelty_Squad/
(Haven't had the chance to play yet, but I've heard great things)
If I want to play a games these days I normally go to emulators and back to old games. Old arcade games and computer games from the 80s and 90s era may look dated but some of them are more fun.
Also, the current trend is to make games more accessible and actually better for casual gamers. Most games now have customisable difficulty and quality of life features. When I think of 80s and 90s games I think of dying a lot and having to replay, not being able to figure things out without buying a walkthrough, no quicksave etc.
Whaaaat?? Nothing wrong with emulators, but there's tons of great, short, casual games out there! Here's a list of some of my favorites to get started, you can find a ton more of you search for lists containing some of these titles: Gris, Journey, A Short Hike, The Witness, Oxenfree, Celeste. And if you really want to dig deep into the short/indie games scene, check out https://itch.io (though it can be kinda hard to find the gems there).
2. Art Style
?. Sound Design (unsure if under gameplay or on its own).
3. Graphical Fidelity
This is what people look for in a game and what sells them, atleast in my opinion.
Some of biggest mainstream games of the last decade or so are Minecraft, and Fortnite.
StarCraft II is usually played competitively on low graphics settings, to improve visual clarity. The game is 13 years old, and on high graphics still looks fine when compared to any modern title.
[0] https://youtube.com/watch?v=PISGdO_G8dY
[1] https://youtube.com/watch?v=iP6ihgnyHE0
For more twitchy competitive stuff I can see the need for FPS but that’s just a single corner of gaming.
GPU vendors keep pushing new pretty tech that their cards can't quite keep up with and even a 18ms frame time means 30 Hz with no dynamic refresh.
Bugs that cause the game to fall below the minimum specs will definitely get fixed. Whereas bugs that cause the game to fall below recommended specs will be deferred to at best a day 1 patch, but also maybe never.
So if you want the minimum specs to enforce 4k@60Hz and really mean it, we need to push the recommended specs higher still.
1080p is fine for min spec.
120Hz is more than twice as hard of a performance number to hit compared to 60Hz.
But, didn’t mention that because that isn’t the topic of desktop rendering.
That makes things really hard when your absolute minimum input latency (that nobody gets in practice) is already 24ms at 60Hz.
Maybe once we start talking about higher frequencies it can make sense. VR is trying hard for higher refresh rates since we are more sensitive to input latency for things we are experiencing and is hoping that tech helps get there.
Also the performance benefits aren't as enormous as you would think. For instance unless you are pixel bound (which to be fair most things are in 4k games) it actually hurts your performance by slowing down the CPU.
My fear is it will end up being yet another tool that gets abused to where everyone associates it with a lack of quality.
After all looking to your left and seeing and old image would be very much against the goal of increasing performance.
[1] https://www.techspot.com/news/71172-nvidia-boss-moore-law-de...
Compare it to the 20XX series where the top of the line card only has 11GB of VRAM, less than the 1080Ti... and the flagship feature "raytracing" just isn't viable at the power of any of those 20XX cards.
It’s also the fact to some degree that the safety factor on the 12vhpwr connector is less than the old 8-pin, so smaller issues lead to melting. I know that I am slightly stressed about my 4090 even though I’ve thoroughly verified that it’s fully plugged in.
Pretty sure we have at least a year before the 50xx series will be released, assuming it's called that.