Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion [2023]

[BitByte]

For profit companies are just that and not charities. When companies set gross margin goals they tend to be a lower bound target. There is no upper bound set by a heart of gold.

Do you use such logic when value you own skills and talent. I'd bet you more than likely have a cutoff or a minimum salary that you would accept in return for your time and effort. And I am willing to bet you have no upper bound with anything over that value you equate to greed.

Nvidia isn't selling living saving pharmaceuticals or any other essential goods and forcing people to pay high prices because they have no other choice as those products are essential to their survival.

They are selling gaming GPUs who prices are ultimately set by PC users. The fact that AMD sells competing products at lower prices, yet Nvidia dominates the market shows their pricing is set by the market who has a lot disposable cash when it comes to highend wares.

Nvidia isn't a Grapes of Wrath land owner and PC gamers aren't the Joads.

Why differentiate at life saving pharmaceuticals as you’re not entitled to those either. Someone’s hard work and talent made those a reality. It’s just some arbitrary line that you’ve drawn in your head to determine who is allowed to partake in excessive profiteering and who is not. Here’s a shocking revelation for you, nobody is entitled to anything.

Do not ascribe your ideals to me. I have a strong disdain for excessive profiteering and I’m quite wary of its long term effects. I certainly do not partake in it and actually will refuse excessive payments. This is not the thread to discuss the cancerous effects of greed and it’s by products which are very visible in our everyday lives. I’ll leave it at that.

 

[Nesh]

Why differentiate at life saving pharmaceuticals as you’re not entitled to those either. Someone’s hard work and talent made those a reality. It’s just some arbitrary line that you’ve drawn in your head to determine who is allowed to partake in excessive profiteering and who is not. Here’s a shocking revelation for you, nobody is entitled to anything.

Do not ascribe your ideals to me. I have a strong disdain for excessive profiteering and I’m quite wary of its long term effects. I certainly do not partake in it and actually will refuse excessive payments. This is not the thread to discuss the cancerous effects of greed and it’s by products which are very visible in our everyday lives. I’ll leave it at that.

Entitlement and appropriate pricing or accessibility are two different subjects. Entitlement was not brought into this discussion.

 

[Inuhanyou]

Why differentiate at life saving pharmaceuticals as you’re not entitled to those either. Someone’s hard work and talent made those a reality. It’s just some arbitrary line that you’ve drawn in your head to determine who is allowed to partake in excessive profiteering and who is not. Here’s a shocking revelation for you, nobody is entitled to anything.

I think this is a very dehumanizing and immoral attitude but I think we should get back in topic of the actual conversation rather than exposing people's personal political views no?

The reality is that a lot of people think the 4070 is overpriced for what they are getting which is fair. Nvidia could have lowered the price another hundred bucks just fine I think without much issue on their end and people may be more enthusiastic about this card.

Nvidia may not be able to help it's performance issues this generation relative to jumps in the past but they could atleast grease the wheels a bit.

At the same time of course we know Nvidia for whatever reason has a historical problem with memory capacity compared to AMD which almost boasts of its memory advantages many times, so it's not as if consumers should have been expecting anything different this time despite recent games showing vram challenges.

For my personal view, the 4070 just barely gets over the line for what it's supposed to be, but even in this case the price could be a little lower

 

[Cyan]

Microsoft are experimenting with a Windows handheld game mode for Steam Deck. Pls make it happen, I prefer not to game on Linux.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1646339289230483458

 

[Cyan]

I really hope this becomes a reality soon, would be a dream come true.

Microsoft is experimenting with a Windows gaming handheld mode for Steam Deck-like devices

Microsoft employees are looking at optimizing Windows

www.theverge.com

The video references some prototype handheld work created by Dorothy Feng, a senior UX designer at Microsoft. It includes a launcher that can open games from Steam, PC Game Pass, EA Play, Epic Games Store, and more. This handheld gaming prototype also includes a keyboard optimized for the Steam Deck that can be navigated using a controller, and even a floating taskbar that we’ve seen Microsoft tease before.

The team working on this hackathon project also started working with a developer that created a way to use Steam Deck controls across Windows. There’s even a gaming shell customized for Windows and created by Hayden McAfee, a senior software engineer at Microsoft who works on gaming experiences for Windows.

Microsoft was quick to support Xbox Cloud Gaming on the Steam Deck, but we’ve heard little about its Windows ambitions for handheld gaming outside of this leaked presentation.

A number of Switch-like handheld gaming devices from GPD and OneXPlayer or even the Ayaneo 2 have been relying on Windows without an optimized UI from Microsoft. That means companies have to build their own interfaces and launchers to make Windows more controller and handheld friendly.

 

[Dural]

I really hope this becomes a reality soon, would be a dream come true.

Microsoft is experimenting with a Windows gaming handheld mode for Steam Deck-like devices

Microsoft employees are looking at optimizing Windows

www.theverge.com

The video references some prototype handheld work created by Dorothy Feng, a senior UX designer at Microsoft. It includes a launcher that can open games from Steam, PC Game Pass, EA Play, Epic Games Store, and more. This handheld gaming prototype also includes a keyboard optimized for the Steam Deck that can be navigated using a controller, and even a floating taskbar that we’ve seen Microsoft tease before.

The team working on this hackathon project also started working with a developer that created a way to use Steam Deck controls across Windows. There’s even a gaming shell customized for Windows and created by Hayden McAfee, a senior software engineer at Microsoft who works on gaming experiences for Windows.

Microsoft was quick to support Xbox Cloud Gaming on the Steam Deck, but we’ve heard little about its Windows ambitions for handheld gaming outside of this leaked presentation.

A number of Switch-like handheld gaming devices from GPD and OneXPlayer or even the Ayaneo 2 have been relying on Windows without an optimized UI from Microsoft. That means companies have to build their own interfaces and launchers to make Windows more controller and handheld friendly.

That would be great, you'd think they would be working with Asus on this for the Rog Ally since it will be running Windows.

 

[BitByte]

Entitlement and appropriate pricing or accessibility are two different subjects. Entitlement was not brought into this discussion.

When dobwal said, "its not like Nvidia is selling life saving pharmaceuticals", it infers entitlement because it has a negative moral connotation. In the sense that doing that would be wrong.

I think this is a very dehumanizing and immoral attitude but I think we should get back in topic of the actual conversation rather than exposing people's personal political views no?

The reality is that a lot of people think the 4070 is overpriced for what they are getting which is fair. Nvidia could have lowered the price another hundred bucks just fine I think without much issue on their end and people may be more enthusiastic about this card.

Nvidia may not be able to help it's performance issues this generation relative to jumps in the past but they could atleast grease the wheels a bit.

At the same time of course we know Nvidia for whatever reason has a historical problem with memory capacity compared to AMD which almost boasts of its memory advantages many times, so it's not as if consumers should have been expecting anything different this time despite recent games showing vram challenges.

For my personal view, the 4070 just barely gets over the line for what it's supposed to be, but even in this case the price could be a little lower

It's just a matter of fact statement. It's neither dehumanizing nor immoral and it's the stark reality of the world we live in. Try living in a third world country without the social safety nets that many developed countries enjoy. I'm sure your opinion on the matter will change.

With regards to Nvidia's pricing, it's planned obsolescence on the 4070ti and below. There are games right now where at 4k, 12gb is simply not enough. Once the next gen raytracing/path tracing games show up, it's pretty much deuces for the 4070ti and below. 192 bit bus on a $600 card? Surely Nvidia's having a laugh.

 

[Flappy Pannus]

But then you need a 256bit 16GB 4070ti which will affect its price and the RTX 4080.

Yes, I would also like the other cards that are an even worse value to be slightly better too. Shipping an $800 card with a 192 bit bus is shittier than a $600 card that is also bottlenecked the same way, no disagreement here.

But the 4070 isn't a 4k card so the 4k numbers imo are irrelevant.

Disagree.

 

[troyan]

With regards to Nvidia's pricing, it's planned obsolescence on the 4070ti and below. There are games right now where at 4k, 12gb is simply not enough. Once the next gen raytracing/path tracing games show up, it's pretty much deuces for the 4070ti and below. 192 bit bus on a $600 card? Surely Nvidia's having a laugh.

Dont get that comment. You cant even get 60 FPS on a 7900XT in Cyberpunk in 1080p and yet you think that 12GB is not enough because 4K could be problematic?

 

[Inuhanyou]

It's just a matter of fact statement. It's neither dehumanizing nor immoral and it's the stark reality of the world we live in. Try living in a third world country without the social safety nets that many developed countries enjoy. I'm sure your opinion on the matter will change.

I can't agree with this post for a variety of reasons, but I'll leave the argument there since it's not the place. I'd love to talk about it elsewhere though if ever feel up to it

 

[iroboto]

Dont get that comment. You cant even get 60 FPS on a 7900XT in Cyberpunk in 1080p and yet you think that 12GB is not enough because 4K could be problematic?

It can run it without insane ray tracing effects.

 

[troyan]

Yes, but i would think that "next gen games" will have the same "insane ray tracing effects".

 

[Flappy Pannus]

Microsoft are experimenting with a Windows handheld game mode for Steam Deck. Pls make it happen, I prefer not to game on Linux.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1646339289230483458

I would also like this, but it's not just the UX that makes the Deck possible, it's also the infrastructure of Valve which enables things such as compiled shader distribution.

 

[Nesh]

When dobwal said, "its not like Nvidia is selling life saving pharmaceuticals", it infers entitlement because it has a negative moral connotation. In the sense that doing that would be wrong.

It still raises the problem of bad pricing and inaccessibility

 

[pjbliverpool]

With regards to Nvidia's pricing, it's planned obsolescence on the 4070ti and below. There are games right now where at 4k, 12gb is simply not enough.

At relevant settings the 4070Ti can actually play regardless of VRAM? What games are those?

Once the next gen raytracing/path tracing games show up, it's pretty much deuces for the 4070ti and below.

So you're expecting the 4070Ti to play these "next gen raytracing/path tracing games" at native 4K and only be hindered by it's VRAM?

192 bit bus on a $600 card? Surely Nvidia's having a laugh.

Why does this matter? What matters is the overall memory performance of the card, not the width of the bus. The 4070Ti obliterates many 256bit GPU's , handily beats the 320bit 3080 and even edges out the 384bit 3090.

Judging a GPU's worth by the width of it's memory bus is even worse than judging it based on TFLOPs.

 

[Ernst94]

At relevant settings the 4070Ti can actually play regardless of VRAM? What games are those?



So you're expecting the 4070Ti to play these "next gen raytracing/path tracing games" at native 4K and only be hindered by it's VRAM?



Why does this matter? What matters is the overall memory performance of the card, not the width of the bus. The 4070Ti obliterates many 256bit GPU's , handily beats the 320bit 3080 and even edges out the 384bit 3090.

Judging a GPU's worth by the width of it's memory bus is even worse than judging it based on TFLOPs.

I refuse to upgrade from my GTX 280 because modern cards don't have 512 bit bus. /s

 

[Jupiter]

Yes, but i would think that "next gen games" will have the same "insane ray tracing effects".

Even the RTX 3070 is faster than the 7900 XTX on Cyberpunk 2077s next gen RTGI graphics. With the poor path tracing performance the 24 GB don't help much either when it comes to longevity. It needs a proper balance and that's where the RTX 4080 has a clear advantage..

 

[Flappy Pannus]

handily beats the 320bit 3080 and even edges out the 384bit 3090.

EDIT: My bad, this was about the 4070ti.

What data are you drawing from where it 'handily' beats the 3080? At 1080p in a few games perhaps.

From DF's review, RT results (which generally favour Ada):

Control, 1440p:



Dying Light 2:



Cyberpunk:



F1 2022:




Exodus Enhanced:



Miles Morales is great, but that appears to be the exception rather than the rule:



There are also some exceptions the other way, where at 4K with raster, they 4070 get its butt handed to it. But again, seems like Returnal is more of an outlier.

Returnal at 4k:




All that being said, it's...'competitive' with a 3080, the big wins are there but they're relatively rare - it seems more often than not, it struggles to match it. In the aggregate, it can be very close, sure. But in no objective assessment does it 'handily' beat the 3080, no review has come to that conclusion for a reason. It's 'in the ballpark'.

 

[trinibwoy]

What data are you drawing from where it 'handily' beats the 3080? At 1080p in a few games perhaps. At 1440p, it's 'competitive' with a 3080 at best, and at 4k it far more commonly loses. Raw bus bandwidth clearly has an impact.

4070 Ti.

 

[davis.anthony]

Yes, I would also like the other cards that are an even worse value to be slightly better too. Shipping an $800 card with a 192 bit bus is shittier than a $600 card that is also bottlenecked the same way, no disagreement here.



Disagree.

As a 4070ti owner I don't think it's poor value at all.

It cost less than double than the 3060ti it replaced and in RT games offers 2x the performance.