I remember Alex Battaglia from Digital Foundry mentioning the DLSS SDK exposed - then useless - input points and him speculating these input points could in the future be utilized to directly...
I remember Alex Battaglia from Digital Foundry mentioning the DLSS SDK exposed - then useless - input points and him speculating these input points could in the future be utilized to directly upscale ray-traced reflections (or ray tracing in general.)
Makes me wonder if he possessed insider knowledge such a long time ago. Or maybe it was just a impressively accurate educated guess.
It's good to see NVIDIA continue to innovate - AMD certainly isn't going to start any time soon.
Tangent: I feel like the PC (especially for gaming) is on life support, barely kept alive by the community and vanishingly few corporations. DirectStorage, for example, is still incomplete. Even the (subpar compared to the PS5) shader-based GDEFLATE support in version 1.2 was developed by NVIDIA.
I can see someone having that kind of insight. The RTX 20 series were a little premature as a technology and at launch not many games took advantage of DLSS or ray tracing (I'd argue not enough...
I can see someone having that kind of insight.
The RTX 20 series were a little premature as a technology and at launch not many games took advantage of DLSS or ray tracing (I'd argue not enough games do today, either). The roadmap Nvidia must've had internally, whether it was projected to roughly follow Moore's Law or not, probably showed that within a couple generations they'd have the ability to do things like upscale ray tracing in real time and at a cost accessible to consumers. Little did they know the price gouging that their marketing department would be able to get away with. ;) So it makes sense from a hardware perspective that they'd want to leave some software implementations open to future expansion while they wait for hardware to mature and market share (and mind-share) to be earned.
As to your tangent, I agree. I think the market has been headed away from PC gaming for a long time. It's even headed away from PC ownership to a large degree (laptops notwithstanding). There are too many reasons and examples to list. And I'm not sure if everyone having a uniform computing/gaming experience is for the best with respect to the gaming industry, innovation, and generally the way consumers would be treated. I worry it'll be Call of Duty quality all the way down.
On one hand I want everyone to have the best gaming experience possible and I wish that economies of scale made it so that everyone could afford the top tier GPU. When it comes to competitive games and anything with a lot of complexity I want people to all be on a level playing field (low latency, no dropped frames, same render distances, etc.). On the other hand I don't want the industry dictating to me what is "good enough" and what level of performance is appropriate to my genre of game/internet speed/gender/whatever. I also don't want to see PCs killed off and game performance bifurcated based on what subscription tier I decide to go with. 2x FXAA and DLS 2.0 for $15/mo or 2x TXAA and DLSS 3.5 for $35/mo?
I generally agree with your concerns. We can already to some degree see the difference in the temperament of corporations with respect to PC v Console, where in the latter consumers are weakened...
I generally agree with your concerns. We can already to some degree see the difference in the temperament of corporations with respect to PC v Console, where in the latter consumers are weakened by the locked-down operating systems.
Console players are required to pay for multiplayer, regularly pay for next-gen upgrades, have to play older games at comically low framerates and resolutions - if they can play them at all. They suffer higher prices in general due to the platform holder enjoying a monopoly on their respective digital store and many more anti-consumer behaviour to list in full.
In my opinion, cloud gaming would, eventually, only worsen this issue as the consumer is weakened even more and that any reprieve is temporary. Sailing upwind and all that.
There’s a lot of innovation in the space at the moment, particularly in handheld or portable PC gaming, just less on top of the line hardware. PC game sales still account for roughly half of all...
I feel like the PC (especially for gaming) is on life support
There’s a lot of innovation in the space at the moment, particularly in handheld or portable PC gaming, just less on top of the line hardware.
And when are consoles getting such innovations? I got a hunch that devs are relying more on tech like this to innovate their games instead of finding clever ways to make their vision work on...
And when are consoles getting such innovations? I got a hunch that devs are relying more on tech like this to innovate their games instead of finding clever ways to make their vision work on lesser systems.
Ray tracing is inherently very demanding. Tech like this is how they make it work on lesser systems. Consoles aren't getting it because AMD hasn't put anything analagous to Nvidia's tensor cores...
Ray tracing is inherently very demanding. Tech like this is how they make it work on lesser systems.
Consoles aren't getting it because AMD hasn't put anything analagous to Nvidia's tensor cores for AI acceleration into their GPUs.
I remember Alex Battaglia from Digital Foundry mentioning the DLSS SDK exposed - then useless - input points and him speculating these input points could in the future be utilized to directly upscale ray-traced reflections (or ray tracing in general.)
Makes me wonder if he possessed insider knowledge such a long time ago. Or maybe it was just a impressively accurate educated guess.
It's good to see NVIDIA continue to innovate - AMD certainly isn't going to start any time soon.
Tangent: I feel like the PC (especially for gaming) is on life support, barely kept alive by the community and vanishingly few corporations. DirectStorage, for example, is still incomplete. Even the (subpar compared to the PS5) shader-based GDEFLATE support in version 1.2 was developed by NVIDIA.
I can see someone having that kind of insight.
The RTX 20 series were a little premature as a technology and at launch not many games took advantage of DLSS or ray tracing (I'd argue not enough games do today, either). The roadmap Nvidia must've had internally, whether it was projected to roughly follow Moore's Law or not, probably showed that within a couple generations they'd have the ability to do things like upscale ray tracing in real time and at a cost accessible to consumers. Little did they know the price gouging that their marketing department would be able to get away with. ;) So it makes sense from a hardware perspective that they'd want to leave some software implementations open to future expansion while they wait for hardware to mature and market share (and mind-share) to be earned.
As to your tangent, I agree. I think the market has been headed away from PC gaming for a long time. It's even headed away from PC ownership to a large degree (laptops notwithstanding). There are too many reasons and examples to list. And I'm not sure if everyone having a uniform computing/gaming experience is for the best with respect to the gaming industry, innovation, and generally the way consumers would be treated. I worry it'll be Call of Duty quality all the way down.
On one hand I want everyone to have the best gaming experience possible and I wish that economies of scale made it so that everyone could afford the top tier GPU. When it comes to competitive games and anything with a lot of complexity I want people to all be on a level playing field (low latency, no dropped frames, same render distances, etc.). On the other hand I don't want the industry dictating to me what is "good enough" and what level of performance is appropriate to my genre of game/internet speed/gender/whatever. I also don't want to see PCs killed off and game performance bifurcated based on what subscription tier I decide to go with. 2x FXAA and DLS 2.0 for $15/mo or 2x TXAA and DLSS 3.5 for $35/mo?
I generally agree with your concerns. We can already to some degree see the difference in the temperament of corporations with respect to PC v Console, where in the latter consumers are weakened by the locked-down operating systems.
Console players are required to pay for multiplayer, regularly pay for next-gen upgrades, have to play older games at comically low framerates and resolutions - if they can play them at all. They suffer higher prices in general due to the platform holder enjoying a monopoly on their respective digital store and many more anti-consumer behaviour to list in full.
In my opinion, cloud gaming would, eventually, only worsen this issue as the consumer is weakened even more and that any reprieve is temporary. Sailing upwind and all that.
There’s a lot of innovation in the space at the moment, particularly in handheld or portable PC gaming, just less on top of the line hardware.
PC game sales still account for roughly half of all game sales and PC gamers outnumber console players significantly.
Market definitely ain’t dead.
And when are consoles getting such innovations? I got a hunch that devs are relying more on tech like this to innovate their games instead of finding clever ways to make their vision work on lesser systems.
Ray tracing is inherently very demanding. Tech like this is how they make it work on lesser systems.
Consoles aren't getting it because AMD hasn't put anything analagous to Nvidia's tensor cores for AI acceleration into their GPUs.
There's nothing innovative about it. It's just a shiny finish on the same boring games.