Value of Hardware Unboxed benchmarking

[trinibwoy]

It’s a replay of the Turing launch where lots of people complained that Nvidia wasted transitions on RT and ML instead of raster and we see how that turned out. Neural rendering seems a taller mountain to climb but if somehow Nvidia manages to find similar success over the next 6 years people will look back on Blackwell launch more favorably as the necessary investment to move graphics forward. It’s a big if though.

I think the next generation of consoles will play a large role in whether material shading or other ML use cases see wide adoption. I don’t think Nvidia on their own can make it happen as it’s so much more intrusive than just tacking on RT.

AMD for their part haven’t shared their vision for the future of rendering. They’ve hinted at improving RT and ML but do they actually believe in those things or are they just falling in line because Nvidia and Sony are forcing them to?

 

[Scott_Arm]

This video, at least the start, is kind of like the "worst of" hardware unboxed. Calling the 5080 launch depressing, and then saying they're not influencers that would hype of marketing features like frame gen and are instead in the business of recommending products with actual performance ...

It's kind of strange. I don't mind that they're disappointed, but there should be some level of distance from their own situation, if their job is recommending good products to gamers. These are people that have the latest and greatest of everything, so if you already have a 4090, this product might not look very good. In reality, if you have a 1080, 1080ti, 2080, 2080ti, 3080, 3080ti or any gpu lower in the stack from previous generations, this is a significant upgrade. That's a lot of people. If you are a person that upgrades every generation, then yes, I'd say the 5080 is not worth it. You'd have to have some really special use case, like you want a 480Hz screen and multi-frame gen will help. But if you really think about the product landscape, and who needs upgrades, then there should be a majority of gamers that could potentially use this card as an upgrade. $1k USD is a lot of money, so that's a real point of consideration.

There's just clearly a very emotional component of this to them to call it depressing, which tells me it's about themselves in most ways, either because they want upgrades for their own use, or it has something to do with their business model. I don't know. Just weird.

 

[Discord]

and then saying they're not influencers that would hype of marketing features like frame gen and are instead in the business of recommending products with actual performance ...

I wonder what they would consider performance boosting software like Optix?

 

[Scott_Arm]

I watched further and these guys live in la la land. They have absolutely no idea what it's like being part of a large publicly traded company. Steve expects Nvidia to come out and rationalize the performance of a 5080 by essentially talking it down in some way, by saying manufacturing difficulties etc etc. There's no universe in which a publicly traded company would ever ever do that in the way that he's suggesting. They have to market their products and maintain the confidence of their investors. That's essentially what they've done with AI. Pretty sure Jensen even mentioned Moore's law, when talking about the future of "neural" rendering. But then Steve will say it's just marketing hype and dishonest. So he wants Nvidia to not market AI, but also "come clean" with some justification for why a 5080 is not as big a performance gain as he wants it to be. Doesn't live in the real world. Here's the real answer. Compare the products, compare the prices and make a recommendation detached from emotion. That's it. All of this industry stuff does not matter. If there's a better product in the same price range as the 5080, then recommend that instead.

 

[homerdog]

Compare the products, compare the prices and make a recommendation detached from emotion. That's it. All of this industry stuff does not matter. If there's a better product in the same price range as the 5080, then recommend that instead.

Yea but remember how much faster the GeForce3 was than GeForce 2 Ti? Everyone should buy a GeForce3 IMO since it was awesome.

 

[Scott_Arm]

I can't make this up ... they're now saying a 5080 is better value than a 7900XTX. So it is the best product in its price category, by their own standards. What the fuck is going on?

They're now saying AMD sets their own pricing by overvaluing rasterization performance as if that's the only factor that consumers buy gpus for, and ignore ray tracing and video encoding etc. Meanwhile HUB is the slow adopter of getting onboard with the features that consumers clearly want, and uses the same sort of value math that AMD does. Just before this Steve was saying that 7900XTX was close to 5080 in value, but Tim corrected him by saying only in rasterization and 5080 is better at literally everything else. This whole video is just non-stop face palm.

Lol, and Steve is on about value again talking about pricing of the 7900XTX and Tim is again correcting that's saying value for rasterization and not ray tracing.

 

[DavidGraham]

In the middle of the video Tim admits that he didn't want to talk so negatively about DLSS4 MFG as it's a useful tech for certain situations, but the way NVIDIA hyped it forced his hand! So he wants to punish NVIDIA by misleading the consumer and showering him/her with needless negativity?

They also admit they had very negative coverage for all new tech in the past 6 years: ray tracing, DLSS, frame generation... etc, but they try to wash their hands of it by stating these things were bad in the beginning, but has improved over time, they are not interested to learn any lessons from this though!

Overall, this video shows how deeply conflicted and confused individuals they are about tech. Deep dowb they know they are acting the wrong way, but their personal bias/business model prevents them from correctling the course

 

[Scott_Arm]

In the middle of the video Tim admits that he didn't want to talk so negatively about DLSS4 MFG as it's a useful tech for certain situations, but the way NVIDIA hyped it forced his hand! So he wants to punish NVIDIA by misleading the consumer and showering him/her with needless negativity?

They also admit they had very negative coverage for all new tech in the past 6 years: ray tracing, DLSS, frame generation... etc, but they try to wash their hands of it by stating these things were bad in the beginning, but has improved over time, they are not interested to learn any lessons from this though!

Overall, this video shows how deeply conflicted and conusfed individuals they are about tech. They know they are acting the wrong way, but their personal bias/business model prevents them from correctling the course

Give me a time stamp. I skipped over a little because it's been super dumb. I jumped a bit to get to Radeon.

 

[DegustatoR]

If there's a better product in the same price range as the 5080, then recommend that instead.

Exactly. This is just a replay of 40 series launch again: they are comparing the new cars to their own fantasy of how a great product should look like. There is no way in the universe any product would end up being good in such comparison.

 

[Scott_Arm]

Yea but remember how much faster the GeForce3 was than GeForce 2 Ti? Everyone should buy a GeForce3 IMO since it was awesome.

It reminds me of my elderly parents and how when I told them I bought a new winter jacket that was $300 CAD and they made these faces like it's really expensive, when it's actually significantly cheaper than what most outdoors companies would sell a winter jacket for. If you constantly compare prices to what you remember 10, 20, 30, 40 years ago, you become more and more detached from reality.

 

[homerdog]

I bought the line about DLSS being clever marketing with a slightly inferior competing alternative in FSR until I got a 4070. Turned on DLSS in Witcher 3 and couldn't believe how good it was. Spent a while checking settings and measuring framerates to make sure my eyes weren't deceiving me.

I'm not an AMD hater or NVIDIA lover. I have a 6700XT in another PC that my brother uses and it's really great. But DLSS and FSR are so far apart that I see little value in comparing them on performance metrics.

 

[Albuquerque]

I bought the line about DLSS being clever marketing with a slightly inferior competing alternative in FSR until I got a 4070. Turned on DLSS in Witcher 3 and couldn't believe how good it was. Spent a while checking settings and measuring framerates to make sure my eyes weren't deceiving me. <...snip...> But DLSS and FSR are so far apart that I see little value in comparing them on performance metrics.

Really, all of this right here. When DLSS first came out, I had my reservations and at the same time saw FSR as a pretty reasonable (if not a bit behind) equivalent. Give them time, let them cook, and surely AMD can come up with additional IQ just like NVIDIA was doing. For what it's worth, FSR did get better over time, there were several good review comparisons made which showed it wasn't completely stagnant.

But holy hell, DLSS is so good now, especially with the latest transformer models. Sure, those of us on non-Blackwell hardware will pay a bit more tensor perf penalty to run it, however the tradeoff is absolutely worth it. I can't right now imagine how FSR is ever going to catch up; AMD is seemingly unable to compete with essentially any of NVIDIA's software advances as of late. I feel DLSS "K" has to be literally years ahead of what AMD could do if they right now started fully staffing and funding a renewed and reinvigorated FSR tech.

DLSS has become the defacto reason why we, as a hardware enthusiast community, really have to consider how to define and measure "performance" -- because IMO native raster just isn't good enough anymore.

 

[Scott_Arm]

Impressions of FSR4 were really good, but we'll see when it's launched. Assuming game adoption is good, FSR4 could be a really nice win for AMD in terms of equalizing with Nvidia. I do think reviews are missing the mark on upscaling. It's very popular and people know DLSS is significantly better. Personally, I wouldn't buy an AMD gpu until they could match DLSS and Reflex. They have Antilag+ now, but I don't think the adoption is up to the same level. There's just a lot more to a gpu than calculating $/frame for rasterization.

 

[homerdog]

Really, all of this right here. When DLSS first came out, I had my reservations and at the same time saw FSR as a pretty reasonable (if not a bit behind) equivalent. Give them time, let them cook, and surely AMD can come up with additional IQ just like NVIDIA was doing. For what it's worth, FSR did get better over time, there were several good review comparisons made which showed it wasn't completely stagnant.

It's possible that my impressions of DLSS were formed reading early reviews and comparisons to FSR. Maybe DLSS 1 wasn't that great, I never used it. By the time I got an RTX card there was an enormous gulf between DLSS and FSR, and I feel the 4070 reviews I'd read didn't point out how important this was. At 1440p DLSS Balanced looks better than FSR Quality. The new TNN model takes things even further. This effectively changes the performance bracket that a GPU sits in.

BTW I believe those who are saying DLSS4 Quality looks better than native with any other TAA solution. I kind of felt this was already true with the old CNN model... What are reviewers supposed to do about that?

 

[Florin]

In the middle of the video Tim admits that he didn't want to talk so negatively about DLSS4 MFG as it's a useful tech for certain situations, but the way NVIDIA hyped it forced his hand! So he wants to punish NVIDIA by misleading the consumer and showering him/her with needless negativity?

They also admit they had very negative coverage for all new tech in the past 6 years: ray tracing, DLSS, frame generation... etc, but they try to wash their hands of it by stating these things were bad in the beginning, but has improved over time, they are not interested to learn any lessons from this though!

Overall, this video shows how deeply conflicted and conusfed individuals they are about tech. They know they are acting the wrong way, but their personal bias/business model prevents them from correctling the course

They can't really be expected to change things up as long as there's demand for this type of coverage. Their channel remains super popular, and there's never a shortage of commenters tripping over each other to come up with the snarkiest one liners about how terrible everything is, to share affirmations with each other about how wonderful everything used to be in the good old days, and how stupid everyone else is for not joining in their crusade to punish evil corporations.

I can absolutely see where it is coming from but it just doesn't work for me. I can watch angertainment when it's about news, politics, economics and things that you have no choice but to deal with.
When it comes to hobbies though it seems counterproductive. All these videos do is make you feel worse. And it's not like there aren't always plenty things that are new, impressive, clever and/or exciting to talk about also - just look at how Digital Foundry mixes a lot of enthusiasm with the criticism - but the HUB guys just can't seem to bother with that anymore. And in turn I find it gets harder and harder to watch.

 

[homerdog]

They can't really be expected to change things up as long as there's demand for this type of coverage. Their channel remains super popular, and there's never a shortage of commenters tripping over each other to come up with the snarkiest one liners about how terrible everything is, to share affirmations with each other about how wonderful everything used to be in the good old days, and how stupid everyone else is for not joining in their crusade to punish evil corporations.

I can absolutely see where it is coming from but it just doesn't work for me. I can watch angertainment when it's about news, politics, economics and things that you have no choice but to deal with.
When it comes to hobbies though it seems counterproductive. All these videos do is make you feel worse. And it's not like there aren't always plenty things that are new, impressive, clever and/or exciting to talk about also - just look at how Digital Foundry mixes a lot of enthusiasm with the criticism - but the HUB guys just can't seem to bother with that anymore. And in turn I find it gets harder and harder to watch.

It's like all the reviewers have banded together to make sure no matter what you purchase you will feel shitty about it

 

[Scott_Arm]

@Florin If they want to be a specialty channel that focuses on rasterization performance as their concept of value and $/frame, that's totally fine. They can be up-front and say that's their standard, and other features are secondary or tertiary. There are people that agree, and that would be a useful channel for them. What I don't get is their expectation that the industry will be priced around their own desires. By the end of the video when discussing Radeon, they basically flat out admit that on the whole consumers have a totally different way of evaluating value.

 

[DavidGraham]

Give me a time stamp. I skipped over a little because it's been super dumb. I jumped a bit to get to Radeon.

Sorry, believe it or not that was another video dedicated about how the 5090 also didn't impress them. so they have now made two videos about how shitty everything is. Here are the time stamped points (forced negativity, admitting being overly negative about tech).

 

[Scott_Arm]

Sorry, believe it or not that was another video dedicated about how the 5090 also didn't impress them. so they have now made two videos about how shitty everything is. Here are the time stamped points (forced negativity, admitting being overly negative about tech).

Ok, I actually remember this "forced negativity" clip. I remember it because he refers to frame gen as a much better version of motion blur, because it is a terrible comparison. Yes, they both increase smoothness in a way. Motion blur increases perceived smoothness by blending frames together. The problem is frame gen is actually anti-motion blur. It will improve MPRT, which is a form of motion blur on your retina because of sample and hold. So while post-process motion blue reduces clarity clarity in motion to improve perceived smoothness, frame gen will increase clarity in motion and improve perceived smoothness because it actually generates frames instead of blending them together.

I do sort of agree that Nvidia describing it as "performance" needs more caveats, so reviewers have to spend time explaining the downsides, but it's kind of funny how Tim says it's a great feature for improving your experience at high refresh rates. That does not come across in their videos AT ALL. They've done almost nothing to talk about the experience at 360 or 480Hz. In fact their video for MFG was done with a fixed output of 120Hz. Other than maybe a few lines here and there, I don't think they've really talked in depth about how well it works if you are trying to hit 360Hz or 480Hz. In fact, I don't think anyone besides Daniel Owen has made any effort to talk about the subjective experience at higher refresh rates. This is one thing in particular that I want to see tested. Show me if MFG works if I'm rendering at 120, 160, 240Hz and whether frame gen can get you to 480 with 4x, 3x or 2x MFG respectively.

There is a lot more they can talk about to address what the use cases are for the technologies they seem to hate on.


Edit: One thing I think HUB gets right is you have to review the product as it is now. When DLSS1 came out, it sucked. They can't recommend the product because DLSS2 might be a lot better. They have no way of knowing that. It would be a bad way of recommending things. I think recommending products based on what they can do at the time of purchase is the correct way. "Neural" rendering is in that category. We have no way to know how it'll actually work in games right now. We don't know how many years it'll take for games to hit the market that use it etc. So in fairness to them, I think you can't recommend things based on speculation. Ray tracing, DLSS2/3/4, Reflex, (multi)frame-gen do not really fit in that category. There were ways to test and inspect them at launch.

 

[DavidGraham]

They can't really be expected to change things up as long as there's demand for this type of coverage. Their channel remains super popular, and there's never a shortage of commenters tripping over each other to come up with the snarkiest one liners about how terrible everything is, to share affirmations with each other about how wonderful everything used to be in the good old days, and how stupid everyone else is for not joining in their crusade to punish evil corporations.

I think this will eventually get old fast, people are already getting tired of this overly negative tone about their hobby. Gaming is supposed to be about enjoying the moments (gameplay and presentation), not about nit picking bad stuff all the time.

And this is what HUB purposefully do, they now make videos to hate on tech more than anything else, like the video they made about the noise problem in ray tracing .. I have never seen them do a video about the advantages of ray tracing in any title, or about the noise/flicker problem in other graphics techniques (It's not like graphics has been pixel perfect before ray tracing) ... it's stuff like that is face palm worthy, they just hate on new tech for no purpose whatsoever! It's tiresome!