Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion [2022]

Very generous, its prolly at most a few cents. Otherwise all equivalent sized junk plastic toys that are shipped from nearly the same place that cost $1 in the shops would cost $51 in the shops

 

Yeah that's what I'm wondering is the primary cause here. Dynamic CB is relatively rare in games with CB implementations, my understanding (granted, very surface level) on the way CB works had me surprised when I learned dynamic res can actually be used with it at all.

 

If the prices remain at this level for years going forward, then the PC as a platform for high-end gaming experiences is definitely in jeopardy. It's an open platform so of course there will always be 'gaming' on it, but the more your market shrinks for experiences that can only really shine on $800+ GPU's, the less developer interest - and skill - will result. It's a vicious cycle, you get fewer developers with expertise on the platform, port quality suffers, take longer to show up or don't at all, and eventually people wonder what's the point of the extra expense. It's not like the PC market is just a high-end blu ray player, every title released on it requires investment.

Personally I've always wondered how tower PC's with increasingly huge GPU's with large amounts of expensive VRAM + power draw can remain viable. Apple of course has a unique position with their closed market that allows them to make the M1 Max/Ultra viable, but I've always been far more excited about SOC's with truly unified design hooked into high-bandwidth ram. Perhaps with the low/mid-range market segment of GPU's being all but destroyed there's an opportunity for these to actually come to fruition in the next 3-5 years.

 

What will replace the PC as a high end experiance ? The current consoles are also having availability issues and are no where near high end , phones wont come close to performance of high end gpus they are at least a decade behind. Even the apple stuff faces the same shortages that all other components face

 

I'm comparing it to running on the PS5. It definitely has significant more sup-pixel shimmer with certain grass/foliage and especially the gold trim on buildings in Meridian. Others users on Reddit have commented on this as well, and that's why DLSS was so welcomed, it resolved this.

 

All of those items are still available at MSRP. You may have to wait a few months to get them yes, but it's nothing like the GPU situation. It would be heralded as a huge win if the GPU situation was like Apple - you order a GPU at MSRP, and get it a few months later.

Again though, the PC as a 'high end experience' is talked about like it's running the same software as consoles, as if it's a high-end phone and you just choose the one you want vs a budget model and you're running the same software as them but just 'better'. It's not. It requires significant developer expertise to take advantage of what it can potentially offer (ray tracing, DLSS) and also the potential pitfalls due to its different architecture (shader stutter, anyone?) - if publishers deem it worthy enough to port at all.

The notion that people will pay whatever they need to pay to have a 'high end' experience is bizarre, there's diminishing returns with the benefits of this experience as it stands due to process shrinks becoming far more spread out over time, requiring more custom approaches to realize the benefits rather than just brute-force (hence complaints about lack of DLSS support if a port ships without it). There is no market on the planet which does not flex or shrink with respect to the capital investment required to participate in it, I don't know why PC gaming would be any different.

 

You can get gpu's at MSRP pricing , I got a 3070 from bestbuy at MSRP last month. YOu also have to wati for stock to come in like the other items. Apple is also cutting back forcasts on units sold.

The current consoles are low end experiances compared to pcs. You can easily get away with geforce 2060s for the current console experiance and that is what 4 or 5 years old now?

 

ouch. I think we all knew this was true, but to have it verified by releasing a DX emulated proton prove it. Ouch.


At least we know it can be fixed. Whether it will be across the platforms I do not know. I hope FROM does something with the profits generated there.

 

It seems prices are slowly coming down, some articles predict by later this year we should see around normal prices again.

I have heard the death of pc gaming for many, many years now, in favour of consoles. PC market is only growing though.

What he is implying is as old as the hills. Theres no source or evidence that pc gaming is dying, not the high end not the lower end. I'd say that by the time the PC as a gaming platform doesnt exist anymore in any form, the consoles wont either.

 

Yes GPU prices continue to come down nicely here in the UK. The 3070Ti is approaching £700 now and the 3060Ti approaching £500.

Still a bit too expensive for my blood, especially with the 4xxx series looming. But it's getting tempting to plug the gap for the next 6 months....

 

Aha didnt even know that. Thats some good progress to say the least.

 

These people have created a game better than I could ever imagine creating. But apparently they all missed the second year university class I took.

 

Lol cruelty. Nothing will honestly prepare you for graphics and game programming, you just get your chops from years of doing it, and having experienced people guide you. It really is a world of pain of trying to get things to work, let alone to have them run efficiently.

 

In defense of them, caching stuff can lead to unexpected bugs that you dont expect, its often just easier to create something new. Though this is a professional game so you would hope they had the professional nous to reuse memory like you should.
But like I have said before. Imagine the rating, if now it scores 96/100 whilst looking & running like it does, and they released it with none of these issues, 110/100

 

Interesting, so maybe even MS can learn from this in dx11 but such caching can have unwanted side effects. So ii don't think they implement a general solution. Like always, those thinks are up to the developer.

 

I'd really rather devs were informed of best practice, and maybe even TRC'd into not releasing 'broken' games. Otherwise we set precedent where devs produce shoddy titles and it's left to post-release hacks, fixes and plugs to make them work properly, which is far from ideal for numerous reasons.

 

I think Cyberpunk 2077 says hi … this was a thing, not that long ago

 

I'm wondering if this is why Windows desktop compositing goes a bit wonky when running Elden Ring. I generally have multiple windows up, some of which are dynamically updating. If those are open while Elden Ring is open, not only do the windows flicker but even browsing the web becomes sluggish. Also, I'll randomly have windows that were behind other windows suddenly pop out in front of those windows.

Then again this could also be just crappy NV driver behavior while Elden Ring is running. But I think in this case, Elden Ring is doing something weird. Overloading command buffers could potentially help explain some of this behavior.

Would be cool if Valve could reach out to From Software and maybe point them in the right direction to fix the behavior in the game.

Regards,
SB

 

Weird question, but don’t IHV also provide that type of feedback? Or is it only for dx11 ?