MudMan

Oh, now you're wrong. AI upscaling is demonstrably more accurate than plain old TAA, which is what we used to use in the previous generation. I am NOT offloading compelling NPC dialogue to a crappy chatbot. Every demo I've seen for that application has been absolutely terrible.

What do you mean "suddenly"? I was running path tracers back in 1994. It's just that they took minutes to hours to generate a 480p image.

The argument is that we've gotten to the point where new rendering features rely on a lot more path tracing and light simulation that used to not be feasible in real time. Pair that with the fact that displays have gone from 1080p60 vsync to 4K at arbitrarily high framerates and... yeah, I don't think you realize how much additional processing power we're requesting.

But the good news is if you were happy with 1080p60 you can absolutely render modern games like that in a modern GPU without needing any upscaling.

That's fine, but definitely not a widespread stance. Like somebody pointed out above, most players are willing to lose some visual clarity for the sake of performance.

Look, I don't like the look of post-process AA at all. FXAA just seemed like a blur filter to me. But there was a whole generation of games out there where it was that or somehow finding enough performance to supersample a game and then endure the spotty compatibility of having to mess with custom unsupported resolutions and whatnot. It could definitely be done, particularly in older games, but for a mass market use case people would turn on SMAA or FXAA and be happy they didn't have to deal with endless jaggies on their mid-tier hardware.

This is the same thing, it's a remarkably small visual hit for a lot more performance, and particularly on higher resolution displays a lot of people are going to find it makes a lot of sense. Getting hung up on analyzing just "raw" performance as opposed of weighing the final results independently of the method used to get there makes no sense. Well, it makes no sense industry-wide, if you happen to prefer other ways to claw back that performance you're more than welcome to deal with bilinear upscaling, lower in-game settings or whatever you think your sweet spot it, at least on PC.

I mean, both times it was a right-wing Trump voter who was disappointed on him. I think we've identified that the real threat here is undecided voters.

If the visuals are performant and consistent, why do we care? I have always been baffled by the obsession with "real pixels" in some benchmarks and user commentary.

I don't see how that's the case. Most people prefer more fps over image quality, so minor artifacting from DLSS is preferable to the game running much slower with cleaner image quality. That is consistent with the PS data (which wasn't a poll, to my understanding).

I also dispute the other assumption, that "we suck at optimizing performance". The difference between now and the days of the 1080Ti when you could just max out games and call it a day, is that we're targeting 4K at 120fps and up, as opposed to every game maxing out at 1080p60. There is no target for performance on PC anymore, every game can be cranked higher. We are still using CounterStrike for performance benchmarks, running at 400-1000fps. There will never be a set performance target again.

If anything, optimization now is sublime. It's insane that you can run most AAA games on both a Steam Deck and a 4090 out of the same set of drivers and executables. That is unheard of. Back in the day the types of games you could run on both a laptop and a gaming PC looked like WoW instead of Crysis. We've gotten so much better at scalability.

You can't just show pictures of me in the bathroom without permission. You'll be hearing from my lawyers.

Yeeeeah, being even vaguely interested on Warhammer stuff these days is an endless process of trying to figure out which parts of the creator and fandom communities get it and which parts "get" it, and nobody wants to think about any of it too hard.

Man, this is true now, but this conversation makes me very nostalgic for the good old days of the 1080Ti, where PC games were absolutely a "max out and forget" affair.

Sure, that was because monitors were capped out at 1080p60, by and large. These days people are trying to run 20 year old games at 500fps or whatever. But man, the lack of having to think about it was bliss.

Well, sure, but that's also because on PC I can choose to buy DRM-free games and have guaranteed backwards compatibility for the foreseeable future. Plus it's not a closed system based on a console that launched with a drive. People (me included) already own PS5 discs, not from a previous generation, but from this one. It's bad enough that I need to keep my PS3 around to play PS3 games, it'd be absurd to not be able to play PS5 games I already own because the thing is physically unable to ingest them out of the box.

So yeah, for people in that position the Pro is a hundred bucks more expensive than it says on the sticker, which is already a ridiculously high number.

I do feel for Sony's PR teams. Trying to explain the concept of visual improvements in 4K over Youtube's increasingly vaseline-smeared compression is an impossible task.

You'd be misplacing that anger. He hasn't been part of a AAA studio or publisher in decades, and as far as I can tell his last venture involved investing in and shutting down some edutainment dev in Malta.

I guess "money guy for a bunch of middleware companies" didn't get nearly as many clicks as "exSONY BOSS PLAYSTATION MAN".