He admits that — in general — when AMD pays publishers to bundle their games with a new graphics card, AMD does expect them to prioritize AMD features in return. “Money absolutely exchanges hands,” he says. “When we do bundles, we ask them: ‘Are you willing to prioritize FSR?’”
But Azor says that — in general — it’s a request rather than a demand. “If they ask us for DLSS support, we always tell them yes.”
SO developers aren’t forced contractually to exclude DLSS, but outside the contract language, they are pressured to ignore it in favor of FSR. That explains why these deals tend to result in DLSS being left out, and also why there are some exceptions (e.g. Sony games–I imagine Sony knows what features it wants its PC releases to have and has decided to push back on DLSS inclusion). I think AMD is being honest this time, and I’m surprised it admitted publicly that it’s doing this. Hopefully the word about this will get out and more developers will insist on including DLSS.
Well, FSR is open, as is FreeSync and most other AMD tech, it’s just that NVIDIA is so dominant that there’s really no reason for them to use anything other than their own proprietary tech. If Intel can eat away at NVIDIA market share, maybe we’ll see some more openness.
I guess they could just use FSR as a wrapper for DLSS, but they made DLSS because there was nothing like it available, and it leverages the hardware to absolutely blow doors off of FSR. They're not comparable effects.
Last I checked, DLSS requires work by the developers to work properly, so it’s less “leveraging the hardware” and more “leveraging better data,” though maybe FSR 3 has a similar process.
It's a hardware level feature, though. The reason they didn't support hardware prior to RTX was because they didn't have the tensor cores to do the right math.
FSR is substantially less capable because it can't assume it has the correct hardware to get the throughput DLSS needs to work. I know the "corporations suck" talking point is fun and there's some truth to it, but most of the proprietary stuff nvidia does is either first or better by a significant bit. They use the marriage of hardware and software to do things you can't do effectively with broad compatibility, because they use the architecture of the cards it's designed for (and going forward) extremely effectively.
I think it’s more the other way around. They designed the feature around their new hardware as a form of competitive advantage. Most of the time, you can exchange cross platform compatibility for better performance.
Look at CUDA vs OpenCL, for example. Instead of improving OpenCL or making CUDA an open standard, they instead double down on keeping it proprietary. They probably get a small performance advantage here, but the main reason they do this is to secure their monopoly. The same goes for GSync vs FreeSync, but it seems they are backing down and supporting FreeSync as well.
They want you to think it’s a pro-consumer move, but really it’s just a way to keep their competition one step behind.
They can't improve openCL. They can make suggestions or proposals, but because broad compatibility are the priority, most of it wouldn't get added. They'd be stuck with a worse instruction set with tooling that spends half its time trying to figure out all the different hardware compatibility you have to deal with.
Cuda is better than openCL. Gsync was better than freesync (though the gap has closed enough that freesync is viable now). DLSS is better than FSR. None of them are small advantages, and they were all created before there was anything else available even if they wanted to. Supporting any of them in place of their own tech would have been a big step back and abandoning what they had just sold their customers.
It's not "pro consumer". It absolutely is "pro technology", though. Nvidia has driven graphic and gpgpu massively forward. Open technology is nice, but it has limitations as well, and Nvidia's approach has been constant substantial improvement to what can be done.
CUDA is only better because the industry has moved to it, and NVIDIA pumps money into its development. OpenCL could be just as good if the industry adopted it and card manufacturers invested in it. AMD and Intel aren’t going to invest as much in it as NVIDIA invests in CUDA because the marketshare just isn’t there.
Look at Vulkan, it has a ton of potential for greater performance, yet many games (at least Baldur’s Gate) work better with DirectX 12, and that’s because they’ve invested resources into making it work better. If those same resources were out into Vulkan development, Vulkan would outperform DirectX on those games.
The same goes for GSync vs FreeSync, most of the problems with FreeSync were poor implementations by monitors, or poor support from NVIDIA. More people had NVIDIA cards, so GSync monitors tended to work better. If NVIDIA and AMD had worked together at the start, variable refresh would’ve worked better from day one.
Look at web standards, when organizations worked well together (e.g. to overtake IE 6), the web progressed really well and you could largely say “use a modern browser” and things would tend to work well. Now that Chrome has a near monopoly, there’s a ton of little things that don’t work as nicely between Chrome and Firefox. Things were pretty good until Chrome became dominant, and now it’s getting worse.
It absolutely is “pro technology”
Kind of. It’s more of an excuse to be anti-consumer by locking out competition with a somewhat legitimate “pro technology” stance.
If they really were so “pro technology,” why not release DLSS, GSync, and CUDA as open standards? That way other companies could provide that technology in new ways to more segments of the market. But instead of that, they go the proprietary route, and the rest try to make open standards to oppose their monopoly on that tech.
I’m not proposing any solutions here, just pointing out that NVIDIA does this because it works to secure their dominant market share. If AMD and Intel drop out, they’d likely stop the pace of innovation. If AMD and Intel catch up, NVIDIA will likely adopt open standards. But as long as they have a dominant position, there’s no reason for them to play nicely.
Cuda was first, and worked well out of the gate. Resources that could have been spent improving cuda for an ecosystem that was outright bad for a long time didn't make sense.
Gsync was first, and was better because it solved a hardware problem with hardware. It was a decade before displays came default with hardware where solving it with software was short of laughable. There was nothing nvidia could have done to make freesync better than dogshit. The approach was terrible.
DLSS was first, and was better because it came with hardware capable of actually solving the problem. FSR doesn't and is inherently never going to be near as useful because of it. The cycles saved are offset significantly by the fact that it needs its own cycles of the same hardware to work.
Opening the standard sounds good, but it doesn't actually do much unless you also compromise the product massively for compatibility. If you let AMD call FSR DLSS because they badly implement the methods, consumers don't get anything better. AMD's "DLSS" still doesn't work, people now think DLSS is bad, and you get accused of gimping performance on AMD because their cards can't do the math, all while also making design compromises to facilitate interoperability. And that's if they even bother doing the work. There have been nvidia technologies that have been able to run on competitor's cards and that's exactly what happened.
Opening the standard… compromise the product massively
Citation needed.
All NVIDIA needs to do is:
release the spec with a license AMD and Intel can use
form a standards group, or submit it to an existing one
ensure any changes to the spec go through the standards group; they can be first to market, provided they agree on the spec change
That’s it. They don’t need to make changes to suit AMD and Intel’s hardware, that’s on those individual companies to make work correctly.
This works really well in many other areas of computing, such as compression algorithms, web standards, USB specs, etc. Once you have a standard, other products can target it and the consumer has a richer selection of compatible products.
Right now, if you want GPGPU, you need to choose between OpenCL and CUDA, and each choice will essentially lock you out of certain product categories. Just a few years ago, the same as true for FreeSync, though FreeSync seems to have won.
But NVIDIA seems to be allergic to open standards, even going so far as to make their own power cable when they could have worked with the existing relevant standards bodies.
Going through a standards group is a massive compromise. It in and of itself completely kills the marriage between the hardware and software designs. Answering to anyone on architecture design is a huge downgrade that massively degrades the product.
How do you explain PCIe, DDR, and M.2 standards? Maybe we could’ve had similar performance sooner if motherboard vendors did their own thing, but with standardization, we get more variety and broader adoption.
If a company wants or needs a major change, they go through the standards body and all competitors benefit from that work. The time to market for an individual feature may be a little longer, but the overall pace is likely pretty similar, they just need to front load the I/O design work.
Completely and utterly irrelevant? They are explicitly for the purpose of communicating between two pieces of hardware from different manufacturers, and obscenely simple. The entire purpose is to do the same small thing faster. Standardizing communication costs zero.
The architecture of GPUs is many, many orders of magnitude more complex, solving problems many orders more complex than that. There isn't even a slim possibility that hardware ray tracing would exist if Nvidia hadn't unilaterally done so and said "this is happening now". We almost definitely wouldn't have refresh rate synced displays even today, either. It took Nvidia making a massive investment in showing it was possible and worth doing for a solid decade of completely unusable software solutions before freesync became something that wasn't vomit inducing.
There is no such thing as innovation on standards. It's worth the sacrifice for modular PCs. It's not remotely worth the sacrifice to graphics performance. We'd still be doing the "literally nothing but increasing core count and clocks" race that's all AMD can do for GPUs if Nvidia needed to involve other manufacturers in their giant leaps forward.
communicating between two pieces of hardware from different manufacturers
like a GPU and a monitor? (FreeSync/GSync)
like a GPU and a PSU? (the 12v cable)
DLSS and RTX are the same way, but instead of communicating between two hardware products, it’s communicating between two software components, and then translating those messages onto commands for specialized hardware.
Both DLSS and RTX are a simpler, more specific casez of GPGPU, so they likely could’ve opened and extended CUDA, extended OpenCL, or extended Vulkan/DirectX instead, with the hardware reporting whether it can handle DLSS or RTX extensions efficiently. CPUs do exactly that for things like SIMD instructions, and compilers change the code depending on the features that CPU exposes.
But instead in all of those cases, they went with proprietary and minimal documentation. That means it was intentional that they don’t want competitors to compete directly using those technologies, and instead expect them to make their own competing APIs.
Here’s how the standards track should work:
company proposes new API A for the standards track
company builds a product based on proposal A
standards body considers and debates proposal A
company releases product based on A, ideally after the standards body agrees on A
if there is a change needed to A, company releases a patch to support the new, agreed-upon standard, and competitors start building their own implementations of A
That’s it. Step 1 shouldn’t take much effort, and if they did a good job designing the standard, step 5 should be pretty small.
But instead, NVIDIA ignores the whole process and just does their own thing until either they get their way or they’re essentially forced to adopt the standard. They basically lost the GSync fight (after years of winning), and they seem to have lost the Wayland EGLStream proposal and have adopted the GBM standard. But they win more than they lose, so they keep doing it.
That’s why we need competition, not because NVIDIA isn’t innovating, but because NVIDIA is innovating in a way to lock out competition. If AMD and Intel can eat away at NVIDIA’s dominant market share, NVIDIA will be forced to pay nice more often.
Every single thing about what you're discussing literally guarantees that GPUs are dogshit. There's no path to any of the features we're discussing getting accepted to open standards if AMD has input. They only added them after Nvidia proved how much better they are than brute force by putting them in people's hands.
Standards do not and fundamentally cannot work when actual innovation is called for. Nvidia competing is exactly 100% of the reason we have the technology we have. We'd be a decade behind, bare minimum, if AMD had any input at all in a standards body that controlled what Nvidia can make.
We're not going to agree, though, so I'll stop here.
The process I detailed does not require consensus before a product can be released, it just allows for that consensus to happen eventually. So by definition, it won’t impede progress. It does encourage direct competition, and that’s something NVIDIA would rather avoid.
Well, Nvidia isn’t directly involved here at all, they’ve only commented on the issue once (to say that they don’t block other companies’ upscaling). The objections tend to come from users, the majority of whom have Nvidia cards and want to use what is widely considered the superior upscaling technology.
Seems sort of weird. They say "when we make a deal we expect prioritization of AMD features" but that they don't explicitly say you can't add DLSS. I think that's too much grey area to say for sure, especially when the one saying it is on one side.
There was a recent game announcement that was Amd sponsored that has both (I think it was the avatar game?). I think it's very likely many of the games are time or budget constrained, and so when they're given money from AMD they implement that first and if they've got time or previous code add DLSS.
This feels like the old console money that Sony & Microsoft would give where developers focused some extra optimization or early engine design around one platform because of extra funding. If I recall, Sony gave a bunch of money to xplatform games.
Might be nice if they’d even comment on the Mac version which they supported from day one, but then went silent (beyond saying it was delayed) when it was time for release.
I was similarly disappointed but IIRC it was delayed to September 6th.
I wonder how will it run in Act 3 since DX11 is so much more performant than Vulkan and I assume they use either MoltenVK or straight Metal. It’s likely the reason for the delay.
9/6 is the PS5 date. Still no word from Larian on the Mac date - the last I heard was when they originally announced it would be delayed, and that they didn’t want to give a date and not meet it. What worries me is that they are willing to give these other dates - PS5 & Xbox - but not even a window for Mac.
They were touted as having their engine running on Metal, and it was one of the first major apps to port to Apple Silicon. The early access worked fine. Unless there was something in the later acts that really broke performance, I can’t see why they didn’t go ahead and release with the engine they had.
9/6 is the PS5 date. Still no word from Larian on the Mac date - the last I heard was when they originally announced it would be delayed, and that they didn’t want to give a date and not meet it.
I just checked Wikipedia which I think I got it from and it states 9/6 but the link cited as source doesn’t state it anywhere.
They probably have no contractual date with Apple, so they’re prioritising the ones where they do. Also, PS5 and Xbox are both probably bigger markets than Mac.
I’m pretty tuned into gaming news, and although I haven’t owned an Xbox since the 360 era I still keep an eye on gaming console hardware. I have no clue at all which Xbox is which. This naming convention is even worse than the ill-fated ‘Wii-U’.
At least with the PlayStation I know the bigger number is newer and the pro version is better than the non-pro and that slim means small.
I sympathize with the moms and grandmas of the world trying to shop for the Xbox gamers in their life. It’s a minefield of confusing names.
I’m the opposite. I literally never hear the slack notifications, and half the time my Taskbar icon doesn’t show I have new messages. My volume is at a reasonable level to hear everything else. I’m not the only one at my job who has the issue either.
Me too. Teams is the worst for finding old conversations. They might as well be gone after a couple days pass.
Not to mention lately teams will sometimes just not update with any notifications lately. So I’ll go an hour with no messages or whatever and then suddenly teams decides to update informing me that I missed a call and a handful of messages.
Signing out and back in usually helps but man it feels like they took Skype and just Jerry rigged it
At least Slack has a usable user interface… Teams is, well, I’d rather sit on a cactus. Let me phrase it like this: We have Office at work. We also have a Slack subscription, because Teams is just so much worse in comparison…
I don’t know, I had to use Slack because of a specific customer, and I can’t stand the UI of it.
The way it displays the reply’s… the confusing crap of the workspaces (which each one has it’s own account, and they are independent)… the (lack of?) inline images…
Teams is included in most Microsoft/Office 365 licenses. And since a lot of businesses use those licenses already for office apps, email, Azure AD, SharePoint and more, it’s an easy decision to make.
Teams is also neat because it’s integrated with SharePoint which makes access control easy for document sharing within a team.
The Microsoft ecosystem is quite good for administration.
The only one I know is close is Google Workspace but then you have the problem with having to use Google office apps which are lacking in functionality. I don’t believe Google Workspace have any AD equivalent features (except on chromebooks maybe).
To be fair, teams has been ahead of slack on video call functionality for a few years. Noise suppression, screen sharing and additional functionality all seems to be a bit ahead.
I use both for work. Slack is far superior when it comes to written messages, and I use slack for quick video calls with collegues, just because I don’t feel like booting up Teams, but for scheduled meetings or longer conversations with screen sharing we always use Teams.
I don't need Slack to do voice calls. I could use something else for it. It's just that the things that Slack is good at, Teams is horrible at, and Teams sucks for calls too. If someone calls me, the pop up that allows me to accept or decline the call should actually be responsive and not crash. When I'm browsing old messages, it should be able to render a simple text history without thinking about it for 30 seconds. When I get a message, the notification should occur every time instead of just when it feels like it. When I lose and regain my VPN connection, it should be able to dynamically reconnect without crashing or hanging on a disconnect message. If you're going to put document integration into Teams, why is there not a tab system for open documents I need to keep open rather than forcing me to use the history on the back button or otherwise reload the document by clicking through to teams->team name->files?
I’ll be honest - it has never been an option for me or my workplace to use teams for anything but video calls for us developers. We have bitbucket for code, slack for dm, confluence for documentation, jira for tasks, email for async communication and Teams for video calls. Each one are great at what we use them for and kinda sucks as soon as we try to use it for something else.
Microsoft Teams is for consumers and is the one preinstalled in Windows 11
Then there’s Microsoft Teams. It’s for business. Is completely incompatible with the other Microsoft Teams and is a separate app.
The icon is also “different”. One has the Microsoft teams logo in white on a purple background, the other has the Microsoft teams logo in purple on a white background (forgot which and which)
I really don’t understand why they don’t use the Skype branding for the consumer version. They forgot how many billions they paid for that?
The icon is also “different”. One has the Microsoft teams logo in white on a purple background, the other has the Microsoft teams logo in purple on a white background (forgot which and which)
They do the same thing with PowerBI. THe cloud version is one icon, the PowerBI for Reports Server (aka locally hosted) is for the on-prem version. Pretty annoying.
I work with Teams (Business version) daily. Have never even seen the other one.
Okay, thanks! You’re right, that’s the main thing I care about. The far-superior Original Xbox version of GTA: San Andreas (among others) can only be played on Xbox and Xbox 360…
I have only played GTA SA in my PS2 and almost a full playthrough in my iPhone 6s 😂
I agree that the Xbox version is the best one (not sure about the PC version though), which is weird that this statement remains valid as of today lol.
Teams for work or more specifically Teams from Microsoft 365 Business and other corporate plans like E3, E5, etc is different from the Teams installed by default on Windows 11. I don’t think you can even message across them.
Microsoft has a real branding problem with messaging services. First they had Skype and Skype for Business and now they have Teams and… Teams. They’re completely different products and don’t interoperate. This is almost certainly for the home version of Teams.
It’s not even a good name. Who thinks of their friends and family as teams?
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