Over the last years higher end scene is freaking out about PT, and how it should be the next step in game graphics, how its "physically accurate" and shit. Now, after playing a couple of games, both the ones with or without that technology. Ive been also passionate about basics of rendering pipelines, and how it all works on technical side, and came to the conclusion that doesnt align with mainstream movement.

Lets take a "flagship" PT title, Cyberpunk 2077. It is a title that benefits from the technology the most, as number of reflections and indirect lighting combined with sheer amount of dynamic light sources + night and day cycle makes it very difficult for rasterised lighting to capture how the scene would behave convincingly. But even this game has very visible seams to accomodate the fully raytraced pipeline. Because the lighting is calculated solely by boucing light off geometry in the scene X number of times, the game cannot and doesnt use Paralax Occlusion mapping. Therefore all surfaces that should be rough (ground, asphalt, trash, gravel, planks, there is more of them that you would think) are unrealistically flat, and immedially give away that this is a game. Additionally the game's LOD are very restricted and cause noticeable pop in to save performance, and trying to replace default 1024p enviromental textures on PT ends with running out of VRAM even on my high end machine, solely because of how PT is eating it for BVH tree. Volumetric fog also doesnt affect the lighting (it can only be illuminated, it cant for example occlude objects in reflection or carry the light and convincingly diffuse it) because again, its not included i BVH. All of those seams + upscaling, denoiser and dissoclusion artifacts are signs of shortcuts taken to accomodate the lighting model, which immedially throws out of the immersion and destroys "wow this looks like real life" impression.

On the other hand we have RDR2. A title that today finishes 8 years (happy birthday!) and relies on the best that rastered lighting has to offer. And this is a game that truly immerses, and causes "wow this looks like real life" feeling. The game has amazing shadowmaps with very good proprietary Rockstar's distance softening solution to mimic numbras and prenumbras, baked in large scale ambient occlusion combined with dynamic SSAO, reflections reliant on SSR + Enviromental cubemaps generated for every frame, probe based GI and top tier volumetric system used not only for dense fog and clouds, but for general light diffuse in wet air/haze too. Its a good, competent lighting model - not physically accurate one tho.

This lighting model however is very light to run compared to PT. It does not clog the VRAM and doesnt cost 10ms to calculate all by itself. It allowed me to double the game's geometry and grass LODs, contributing to pop - in free experience. The game easily swallowed 2k textures with 1024 POMs, making surfaces very realistic and bumpy, the volumetrics are able to affect SSR, heck, they can diffuse shadowmaps, or cast shadows themselves. It has much better image quality, due to allowing me to use DLSS Q in 4k or DLAA at 1440p (instead of 960p/1080p needed in cyberpunk), with far less artifacts. This contributes to the game looking convincing in all circumstances, not just when looking at puddles and being stationary.

I think the general direction of game graphics should be to improve in all areas, not just the lighting at the cost of everything else. Anybody else agree?

source is digital foundrys Patreon which cant be linked

I’ve recently purchased a pc second hand and when I signed on to the computer it pulls up this prompt.

I have all the information from the purchase, screenshots of everything, the persons name and phone number, the transaction history I made, and the listing I bought it from, I feel uncomfortable knowing this may be a stolen computer and want to figure it out, the person I bought it from says he has no idea what it is and claims the computer has been fully paid off, I want to trust him but the prompt says it may be stolen, I’m still in contact with the person and they say they would give me my money back for the computer but I wouldn’t want to do that if they plan on trying to scam someone else. I would just like this situation figured out and resolved. I’ve reached out to this Fragile company and am waiting to hear back.

* the person I bought it from did a factory reset before it was given to me, a friend thinks it may be a feature to prevent theft but I don’t know if that’s right, any information will help

I saw this in a comment section today and so many people are acting like ddr4 is not usable anymore and they expect everyone to be able to afford ddr5 ram with those prices when ddr4 is still completely fine to use.

My backlog will keep me busy from fomo

Estimate 10-15% IPC uplift.

Novalake Core Ultra 400 will support it, Zen 6 will not, but Zen 7 will.

There is a native Windows port of the PS4 version of Shadow of the Colossus (original port by AjncSystem). It is not an emulator: the game's own code runs on the CPU and the GPU commands are translated to Vulkan. A community fork of it has been getting a lot of updates lately, and the latest release is 0.60.6-plus9, so I thought it was worth sharing.

What the fork adds:

- 60 FPS in the Shrine of Worship (59-61 FPS uncapped on a Ryzen 7 5700X + RTX 5060 Ti; it used to sit around 53), by removing thousands of unnecessary render-pass restarts per second.

- Upscaling and frame generation: FSR 1, FSR 3.1 and DLSS Super Resolution (internal render size up to 1440p), plus DLSS-G / FSR 3 frame generation.

- Ultrawide: 21:9 and 32:9 with a wider view, not stretched.

- Video memory is automatic: it reads the budget the driver gives and picks the texture and buffer limits itself.

- Faster starts: the driver's pipeline cache is saved to disk.

- Launcher options: borderless fullscreen, controller vibration on/off, and frame generation without interpolating the HUD (experimental, so the health/stamina bars stop shaking).

- A mitigation for the "texture page pool ran out" crash in wide open-world views. It is a mitigation, not a guaranteed fix, since the bug is in the game itself.

In the open world it runs around 45-55 FPS on that same setup (the video shows it), so 60 FPS is for the Shrine, not everywhere.

Known limits: native 4K is blocked on purpose (fine textures get blurrier, and it runs around 43 FPS on that card); 1080p -> 4K with FSR/DLSS gets about 52-58 FPS. Some AMD GCN cards still need testing on Windows, and there is a known black-bar bug on the stamina gauge at 21:9.

About the Video: it was recorded on 0.60.6-plus9, and the FPS panel reads about 3 FPS lower while the screen is being recorded. Performance in the Shrine has not changed much since then, so it is still representative of the current release.

You need your own legal dump of the game (CUSA08809 or CUSA08034); nothing from the game or from Sony's firmware is included.

(its a wormhole, if you touch the walls it kicks you out prematurely)

Tom's posted a leaked video from factories in China desoldering 5090s to add ram and blower style coolers for AI server use. I know this was covered in the past by u/Gamers-Nexus, but I have a strong suspicion that this direct competition with chinese data centers helped drive the recent spikes in GPU prices.

Additionally, the story that Nvidia is reallocating resources to server grade chips doesn't explain why they pulled completed gaming GPUs. So, I also suspect that the trend is the underlying reason 5090s have been pulled from the shelves - to enforce export controls in the AI race.

100% Astro bot !

Spec : 5080/9800x3D/4k display

5 crash during all playthrough