Value of Hardware Unboxed benchmarking

Jayz 2 cents original video is archived here. I watched about 5 minutes of it, albeit now when I try to access it, it times out so ymmv.

Yeah it's pretty bad, he had to farm this out due to being in the hospital and I'm not sure how much experience the guy he got has in doing this stuff, it was kinda Verge-building-a-PC quality.
 
JayzTwoCents posted an apology video about their 4060Ti review and took the video down. WTF did they say in the review?


I don't care about the 4060Ti but I must find this video. Apparently it was so bad it put him in the hospital :mrgreen:

Based on thumbnail someone managed to catch before it was deleted, it's worse than "not negative enough" (of course assuming content matches the thumbnail)
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Jayz 2 cents original video is archived here. I watched about 5 minutes of it, albeit now when I try to access it, it times out so ymmv.

Yeah it's pretty bad, he had to farm this out due to being in the hospital and I'm not sure how much experience the guy he got has in doing this stuff, it was kinda Verge-building-a-PC quality.
The guy is his video editor who has worked for Jay for years.
 
I have no real disagreements with the gamers nexus review, but something about the tone of it rubs me the wrong way. The PC space is starting to feel really whiny. The 4060 ti looks disappointing as a gen over gen product. For someone with a 1060 or 2060 it's still a nice upgrade, but I wouldn't buy an 8GB card at this point. I'm really curious to see what happens to all of these hardware reviewers if gen over gen increases slow dramatically and the prices of the hardware keep going up. If the reviews are continually negative not just in the verdicts, but in the tone of the delivery, I could see Nvidia and AMD spending more of their efforts in giving their gpus to tech influencers who will shill just about anything.

I feel like the software and the hardware are a bit out of step. The prospects of Unreal Engine 5 are looking a bit weird. Hopefully we see some fully fledged nanite plus lumen games soon to get a sense of hardware requirements. I'm skeptical about buying anything until those true next-gen games hit. Or GTA6 or something.
 
I have no real disagreements with the gamers nexus review, but something about the tone of it rubs me the wrong way. The PC space is starting to feel really whiny.
I have some disagreements, all of them are based on the fact that we have somehow resorted from reviews of actual products to reviews of products in comparison to our (someones? viewers? customers?) fantasies.
4060Ti is not a bad product, it's just not that impressive of an improvement - but it is not that impressive in comparison to the perf/price king of previous generation which was universally praised back at its launch for being that.
Does that make it a bad product? In comparison to what exactly? Is there a better product which everyone should be buying instead?
The tone of 4060Ti YouTube reviews seems weird to me, as if people were expecting some miracle they've dreamed up for themselves somehow which couldn't happen - and got utterly disappointed when it didn't.

I'm really curious to see what happens to all of these hardware reviewers if gen over gen increases slow dramatically and the prices of the hardware keep going up.
Yeah. Does anyone here really expects GPUs made on N3 to do better? I mean sure, they can put twice the VRAM capacities on them but that alone would skew the perf/price improvements to even worse than being just mild.
This reality of silicon production isn't going anywhere, and then we'll likely hit a point at which even these mild improvements will be seen as massive.
What will these reviewers be saying then?
 
"Be able to beat the model it's replacing at all resolutions" is not exactly expecting a 'miracle'.
It does that in 1080p and 1440p.
As for going higher than 1440p the card isn't really capable of providing stable 60 fps in modern titles in 1440p even* so while I get the technical interest in such comparisons it is hardly a user facing value issue which should be affecting the final judgement.

* Without dropping settings at least.
 
....w...what? Nvidia shit out a poor product so devs get a pass on broken games? The poor vram management of games - and for many of those, improved significantly with subsequent patches - is but a small subset of the problems of recent AAA games. Cards with 24gb are still getting pso and traversal stutter. Despite HBU's dumb take that vram was really the only barrier to TLOU being regarded as a good port (so it's a solid port now, I guess?), that's far from the case.

Even the supposed "vram defenders", Digital Foundry, just spent 20 minutes in their latest DF direct shitting all over the 4060 series as a value prospect even before their review. It's not either/or. 8GB is ridiculous for a $400 card. PC AAA port quality is subpar. Both opinions can, and are held simultaneously by many.

Can you like, tone down the neogaf component in your posts a bit, maybe cut it by 30% or so. Would be appreciated.

Spare me. Don't pretend I haven't called out bad ports. Difference is I place blame equally. And when I solely blame GPU producer, it's specifically relating to the issue of VRAM, price/performance value and awful business practices that are becoming a bothersome trend.

Fantastic coverage by NX Gamer. He does a great job of distinguishing between the faults of Naughty Dog in releasing a very messy port, while also explaining why many PC configurations are performing much worse than console based on the architectural differences and capabilities (independent of developer faults). Objective and thorough analysis are the greatest.


I don't know what was said by DF recently or by who, but Dictator sure seemed to give vendors a pass in his comments directed at me. According to him, there's no place to blame the gpu producer since the product is already available. Well here, the product has yet to come to market. And when it does I guess we don't complain about it because it's too late and wait for the same cruddy practice in 2-3 years time?

As Remij says - the amount of post launch patches radically improving the visual quality of Games on 8 GB GPUs shows that the issues lies on the development side. PC versions get the obvious short end of the stick for time and money investment (with Xbox not too far behind) and the PC crowd including myself are not going to just sit there and be happy with poor quality.

PC Games need to scale regardless of what consoles are - that is the point. These console focused multiplatform Games are not Crysis or something, they are Not so utterly ground breaking unheard of technical masterpieces that necesseitate only the best and most expensive Hardware to run and look good. Getting angry at manufactures long after the fact is a useless endeavour and does nothing to change the situation. Demanding better ports from ISVs actually changes things. Imagine if instead of focusing on #Stutterstruggle as a problem I just made videos about how MS, NV, Intel and AMD are to blame for having different hardware. That would bring 0 progress in anywhere near the next 5 years - games would still launch with even more PSO issues than before and Unreal most definitely would not have had initiative to improve it so utterly in UE5.

The problem is an ISV problem.

Here he is asking game developers to scale the way he and many here see fit, not taking into account that a new generation brings more demanding memory requirements. Basically asking them to perform miracles. Arrogance at an unintentional and subconscious level, at least from my perspective. This issue isn't going away and future games memory needs will become even greater. And it goes beyond graphics and textures. Animation will be a problem. It's just that graphics features are the easiest to get cut and gamers throw a fit over it because it's the most observable. Even if you're excited about RT as most of us here are. You have to sort out memory concerns before you can think about leveraging the otherwise outstanding RT hardware. Meanwhile Nvidia is trying to fool people into thinking these cards are future proof when they absolutely aren't. I just think voices like DF should rebalance the blame casting. It shouldn't be limited to when news of a new GPU comes to market. It should be discussed during there performance analysis as well; maybe take a page out of NXGamer approach.
 
It does that in 1080p and 1440p.

So not 'all resolutions' then, like I said. And the wins at 1440p are tiny. Every reviewer knows the days of 50% improvements are long gone, but ~10% gains, and even some regressions at higher resolutions, for a new generation is pretty much unprecedented.

This, when combined with the vram 'issue', is driving these harsh reviews and I see the reactions as perfectly sensible. I have my quibbles with say, HBU perhaps not giving the most accurate picture by using ray tracing on games where it's a poor implementation and it's starving the vram for a mode that most gamers probably wouldn't run those games in, but otoh this is technology that Nvidia has promoted heavily, and it's even at low resolutions too where it's running into severe bottlenecks. Even in some games with solid implementations, such as Control, you will run into texture streaming issues on 8GB cards when using RT.

As Rich from DF's latest Direct said, it's not just an issue of 'textures' that put a strain on vram, it's the BVH for ray tracing. This was not fully realized I think years ago for most reviewers when Ampere hit, and it's perfectly reasonable for the expectation that the company most hyping RT to make dealing with those increased memory requirements easier to handle in a new generation of cards years later. For these 8GB cards, that's not really the case.

As for going higher than 1440p the card isn't really capable to provide stable 60 fps in modern titles in 1440p even* so while I get the technical interest in such comparisons it is hardly a user facing value issue which should be affecting the final judgement
* Without dropping settings at least.

The advantage of the PC is its flexibility. I don't really get the '1080p' classification of $400-$500 cards, especially in 2023. If you want to lower your settings (often a waste at Ultra anyways), use reconstruction, or accept lower framerates - and something like a 40fps mode is far more viable on the PC since you can force it in every game - that's an advantage of the platform. However if that means that your 8GB of vram is starved when doing that, then there can be cases where your $400 card isn't even as flexible as some console games with their resolution modes. I think that's...bad. That should not happen for a $400 GPU 2 years into a console generation.
 
I don't know what was said by DF recently or by who

Yes, that's quite clear. That's the problem.

, but Dictator sure seemed to give vendors a pass in his comments directed at me. According to him, there's no place to blame the gpu producer since the product is already available.

That's not his position.

Well here, the product has yet to come to market. And when it does I guess we don't complain about it because it's too late and wait for the same cruddy practice in 2-3 years time?

As I said, they literally just spent 20 minutes talking about what a poor product it will be because of that 8gb. You're arguing against phantoms.

Alex's opinion is that releasing a product now, like TLOU, that is crippled on 8GB cards, and doesn't scale well to the hardware that actually the vast majority of your userbase owns is a very poor design decision for a game released in early 2023. It's not even that it's a perfect match for PS5 quality at 8GB, it's fine to expect you may have to accept some downgrades - it's that the downgrades shouldn't be to reduce the texture quality to something from the PS3 era. That makes no sense. And, he was exactly right, as recent patches showed.

However, he has also said it's clear that developers will not always give the proper amount of attention to optimizing PC for scalability going forward, and hence 8GB is a no-go for new GPU's arriving in 2023.

maybe take a page out of NXGamer approach.

lol, figures.
 
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I have some disagreements, all of them are based on the fact that we have somehow resorted from reviews of actual products to reviews of products in comparison to our (someones? viewers? customers?) fantasies.
4060Ti is not a bad product, it's just not that impressive of an improvement - but it is not that impressive in comparison to the perf/price king of previous generation which was universally praised back at its launch for being that.
Does that make it a bad product? In comparison to what exactly? Is there a better product which everyone should be buying instead?
The tone of 4060Ti YouTube reviews seems weird to me, as if people were expecting some miracle they've dreamed up for themselves somehow which couldn't happen - and got utterly disappointed when it didn't.

...

Expectations are a weird thing. I'm perfectly happy not buying things that don't fit what I want, so I don't understand how emotional people can get about a product that isn't what they want. I think the case of a person upgrading from 1060 to 2060 to 3060 to 4060 is probably rare. Most likely they're skipping gens. I don't know what people really want I guess. Just for me, I'd not buy it and move on with my life. 4060 ti, at least an 8GB model, isn't something I'd recommend.
 
Expectations are a weird thing. I'm perfectly happy not buying things that don't fit what I want, so I don't understand how emotional people can get about a product that isn't what they want. I think the case of a person upgrading from 1060 to 2060 to 3060 to 4060 is probably rare. Most likely they're skipping gens. I don't know what people really want I guess. Just for me, I'd not buy it and move on with my life. 4060 ti, at least an 8GB model, isn't something I'd recommend.

I don't know what you're expecting for a review. If it's a poor value and an extremely poor generational uplift, it should be reviewed as such.

The heightened degree of criticism here is also partly due to seeing the writing on the wall wrt vram amounts and recent games. It's not just that this product is poor value now, it's that it may become a disastrous value in the coming years. That's the concern and what's a large part driving the harsh reaction.

I have no doubt releasing these cards with a 192 bit bus, and hence making the default vram config 12GB (again, not even really an increase over the previous gen when you consider the 3060), and also in turn then making the performance gains more consistent at higher resolutions, at these same prices, would have delivered starkly different review tones. It would still be a generational performance uplift that would not be groundbreaking based on recent past updates, but that little extra vram buffer and removing the possibility of actual performance downgrades at 4K would have made all the difference in perception and fears of near-immediate obsolescence.

(Yes yes I know about how this would affect the entire lineup, I'm aware of Nvidia's reasoning for their design decisions)
 
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So not 'all resolutions' then, like I said. And the wins at 1440p are tiny. Every reviewer knows the days of 50% improvements are long gone, but ~10% gains, and even some regressions at higher resolutions, for a new generation is pretty much unprecedented.
Can't say that I've seen any regressions in 1080p-1440p. The card is some 10% faster than 3060Ti and is close to 3070 when using RT.

This, when combined with the vram 'issue', is driving these harsh reviews and I see the reactions as perfectly sensible.
I mean the VRAM "issue" prompted them to introduce the 16GB version - which while probably having some headroom for additional performance from less data swapping is very likely to end up being within 2% performance distance from the 8GB model - leading to a much shittier perf/price where there will very likely be an actual regression in that in comparison to 3070.

I feel like you can't say both are needed at the same time - would be great if all GPUs would cost about $10 and have 128GBs of VRAM but that's not sustainable and while this is an exaggeration it illustrates that it's not that easy to just solve all the issues at hand here. Adding more VRAM would lead to even worse perf/price, lowering the price would lead to the need to halve VRAM, or cut down the chip further lowering the perf/price again.

Reviewers of all people should understand this, and maybe educate their audiences instead of making funny videos in search of clicks.

The advantage of the PC is its flexibility. I don't really get the '1080p' classification of $400-$500 cards, especially in 2023. If you want to lower your settings (often a waste at Ultra anyways), use reconstruction, or accept lower framerates - and something like a 40fps mode is far more viable on the PC since you can force it in every game - that's an advantage of the platform. However if that means that your 8GB of vram is starved when doing that, then there can be cases where your $400 card isn't even as flexible as some console games with their resolution modes. I think that's...bad. That should not happen for a $400 GPU 2 years into a console generation.
Why shouldn't it happen? Expectations are one thing, reality is the other. Us wanting something to happen doesn't mean that it will happen or even can happen.

The 16GB model will be an interesting one to look at during its lifetime. There are already games where it won't be fast enough to run 1440p+RT despite all its VRAM. It's impossible to tell if the number of such titles will increase or not in the future.
 
I don't know what you're expecting for a review. If it's a poor value and an extremely poor generational uplift, it should be reviewed as such.

The heightened degree of criticism here is also partly due to seeing the writing on the wall wrt vram amounts and recent games. It's not just that this product is poor value now, it's that it may become a disastrous value in the coming years. That's the concern.

Like I said, I don't have any issues with the conclusions of the review. What I find weird is the tone. Like most professional product reviews you'll find people just go through the details about what they liked and didn't. They PC review space has a level of emotional investment that I find off putting in general. To me it comes across as a bit unprofessional.
 
Like I said, I don't have any issues with the conclusions of the review. What I find weird is the tone. Like most professional product reviews you'll find people just go through the details about what they liked and didn't. They PC review space has a level of emotional investment that I find off putting in general. To me it comes across as a bit unprofessional.

While not speaking of you specifically, I find the emotional investment people have to their favourite products to be pretty off putting as well.

It's pretty clear to me that the specific umbrage at say, the occasional snark from Gamers Nexus from some people here is in no small part due to the particular vendor they're slamming at the moment.

I personally don't want reviews of gaming hardware to be actuarial tables and don't think a reviewer is 'unprofessional' because they don't take a corporation's marketing at face value.
 
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