Claiming “multiple patent rights” without mentioning smells like kafkatrapping.
I think that Nintendo’s delayed reaction was to gauge how much money it could get from bullying Pocketpair to accept some unfavourable settlement outside the court; if too little the costs would be too high to bother, considering the risk, but now that Palworld sold a bazillion it’s more profitable to do so. It might actually backfire if Palworld decides to go through the whole thing, I don’t know how Japanese law works in this regard but if Nintendo loses this certainly won’t look good for them, and even if they win it might be a pyrrhic victory.
Yeah CDPR doesn’t care about Linux support at all. They for years promised Linux support for their GOGGalaxy desktop client and then abruptly deleted the webpage that promised that feature. Their Linux support IME is some dodgy shell scripts that never work right.
CDPR has some interesting history. My understanding is that they got their start bootlegging games that couldn’t be got legally in their area, and transitioned to making games for their isolated market. GoG felt like a way to he true to their roots, distributing the old games used to bootleg legally.
Yeah GOG has an interesting legacy. For a long time it was the only place to get working games for abandoned platforms that didn’t require ages of tinkering. They’d give you a bundled copy of dosbox or some other emulator preconfigured to work with the particular game on Windows.
It’s moved so far from its roots that they’ve all but abandoned the acronym. A bit like how TLC used to stand for “The Learning Channel”
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.
They don’t really need a chat though, do they? For their purpose of user-interfacing development and tracking, a forum would be much more useful when coupled with a code hosting system, no?
Can do bug reporting/tracking and development through the latter, while the former allows discoverable FAQ, dev-to-user and user-to-user support. With chat, the last point is just about impossible plus it’s not discoverable.
EA's launcher still requires internet access though, right? If so, you're probably better off sticking to the GOG versions. I booted up Jedi: Fallen Order on a train, and EA told me "no".
Maybe not. The disclaimers on the side of the store page appear to be different between these and some other EA games. I hate how hard it is these days to discern if a game has a stupid always-online requirement.
Usually I am against huge mergers like this because they rarely benefit the customer, but ActiBlizzard was about as bad as it gets anyway.
Selfishly I hope maybe at least one decent RTS might come from this before everything gets enshittyfied again.
I realize though that OG Warcraft/Starcraft were not the big motivators for MS so the chance is probably slim.
I actually got a spot in the closed alpha this month.
It feels pretty good so far even though unfortunately I can’t play as much as I would like due to my job and aspects of my personal life taking a lot of time right now.
I plan on getting at least a couple more games in this weekend.
Microsoft still supports AoE2, and that game is going on 22+ years. Some of the other stuff they’ve released has been a bit hit and miss, but they at least tried to do something fresh.
I’ll take that over ActiBlizz dropping support for the SC2 pro scene for no good reason other than “profitability” any day.
Hell, maybe they can fix WoW classic while they’re at it, and say what you will about the guy but if I understand correctly even Chris Metzen is coming back.
Imagine if your GPU drivers just updated through your package manager. We could have so much automated shit but Nvidia needs tk collect your personal data so heres a web page disguised ss an app. I fucken hate this shit.
I don’t get it. I mean I get it because it’s Ninty, but I don’t get why now?
Has there been something in a major new feature update that has finally tipped the scales into clearly taking the piss, or have the legal team at Big N finally seen their erections subside after the game’s launch and only now can move enough to do something about it?
Considering they’re going for patent infringement and not copyright infringement, it’s possible it just took this long for Nintendo’s legal department to find something even remotely tangible that they could sue over. And since they haven’t said what patents Palworld infringes on, I have to assume whatever it is, is very flimsy.
Despite their reputation for being quick, my opinion is that Nintendo does often take their time. Most of the things they take down do exist for months or years (and also follow the same format of a ROM hack that got a lot of attention so easy copy paste). My assumption is they’re just dotting their i’s and crossing their t’s and patent is just what they think they’ll have the best chance at winning.
Going back to Yuzu, Nintendo was in Discord and all over the place monitoring and collecting evidence even since Tears of the Kingdom launch. It took almost a year before the final attack with overwhelming number and secured evidence. Nintendo is not fucking around and is serious, that’s for sure. So if Nintendo attacks, they often have a point or (legal) reason to.
That’s why I’m so curious in this case. I would hope that Nintendo being (legally) wrong for once.
My best guess: whatever they’re filing now was so exhaustively researched that it took months to prepare the strongest case they’re able to make, possibly delayed by the lawyers working on several other cases. Plus waiting until sales have dried up can maximize damages.
Another possibility is that Nintendo/TPC is planning to make some big Pokémon announcements soon and wants to target this shortly before their own new games to reduce competition. Palworld might seem like more of a threat to the execs now that Pokémon is nearing a major release than it was in the middle of a long drought for the series.
So its due to sync rights. Oof. I wonder if some of the song licenses (looking at you, Experience Hendrix) are the culprit.
The Line really is an example of a painfully average game held up by its narrative, and hot damn, how well it held up. I adore some of the moments of this game, especially for their vicissitude.
The licenses referenced likely have to do with the game’s music. During the The Line’s menu screen, Jimi Hendrix’s rendition of “The Star Spangled Banner” can be heard while the game’s soundtrack includes Martha and The Vandellas’ “Nowhere to Run.”
The same thing happened to the first Alan Wake before they worked something out to get it back (even though it took almost a decade). Consequently, that's also one of the reasons they wrote original songs for the sequel. It's very much a gamble these days to license music for games. More or less puts it on a timeline to be removed at some point.
If you have time for some reading, here's a really great article from a few years ago that talks about licensing in video games and how complicated it can be (the first half of the article is really the only relevant part). Depending on what exactly you want to do with the music in/with the game, a developer could be looking at having to deal with more than one license. I imagine it could get expensive very easily.
Pyrocynical used Midge Ure’s cover of “The Man Who Sold the World” in a video covering Half-Life 2 or a mod of it, and that meant Midge needed a cut, the original writer David Bowie, his estate needed a cut, Kobalt Songs, who owns the rights for Midge’s cover needed a cut, Warner Chappal, who owns the Bowie library needed a cut, ASCAP needed a cut, PRS needed a cut…
You only get a small fraction of who owns what off SongView. It’s a removed. Pyro paid $24,000 for the sync rights. That’s the budget for like five of his videos right there.
I wish this process was easier. Contacting a label’s sync office is typically the start of the nightmare.
Perpetual sync rights licenses aren’t unheard of, but typically these require an ongoing revenue split of sales or a big up front. More often than not, limited rights are used to save scratch and because its going to be for a set period, like 30 days (for an ad campaign).
In fact, I wouldn’t be shocked if Take Two opted for perpetual, and decided they won’t afford a per unit sale anymore, and pulled the game to stop paying.
So basically music rights owners are too greedy and demand so much money for a reasonable license they have publishers can’t afford it? Sounds about right.
It gets really murky and there is a question of intent but… I think it is truly elevated by how painfully average it is. That is the game that everyone was making and playing, right down to the overhead camera explosives shot with the mortars.
And what made The Line “work” is that… it pointed out how fucked up it is that this is so normalized. We had been trained, arguably indoctrinated, by so many Call of Duty style games that there was zero question about how fucked up what we were doing was.
Of course, because Gamers, everyone instead lost their shit and got angry that there was a false choice because they were being told they should walk away but weren’t given a button prompt and a special ending to do so. Rather than understanding that “walking away” is… maybe not buying the annual, rather mid, "shoot brown people in the middle east’ simulator.
Of course, because Gamers, everyone instead lost their shit and got angry that there was a false choice because they were being told they should walk away but weren’t given a button prompt and a special ending to do so.
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