Lots of obvious astroturfing going on regarding this. I’ve seen this news everywhere from Slashdot to Reddit with people sucking Microsofts dick. It’s either that, or people are too young to remember the bullshit Microsoft pulled … since forever basically. People aren’t going to benefit from this merger. Microsoft is patient. Embrace, extend, extinguish is their strategy. 10 year agreements are nothing for them to wait out.
And it’s the same with every merger – “This will bring more competition, blah blah blah”, then merger goes through and half the people are fired, half the rest are rolled into existing systems, and some empty shell of the previous company just wanders along with no real spirit any longer.
I’m not happy with the state of consolidation in every market under the sun, but I’m sure as shit happy Bobby Kotick is finally going to fuck off and I’m happy I’ll be able to play activision games on gamepass. When gamepass inevitably enshitifies I’ll just get rid of my subscription.
Yeah I can see that. Nadella brought new energy and almost made MSFT look cool, but years later we can see how MSFT is basically gobbling up everything in every domain.
Update: Why am I being downvoted? Did you all forget that MSFT has acquired LinkedIn, GitHub, Mojang, Bethesda, ABK and 49% stake in OpenAI all under Satya? Each one of those are massive acquisitions.
Microsoft are far, far, far from being close to the leader in the market even with ABK on their books, so your FUD makes no sense. Pretty much no one in the entire industry is against the acquisition apart from their main competitor, Sony, who are the market leader and abuse that position every day of the year to pull content away from Microsoft.
ABK will operate like they do currently, just like Bethesda do, only now they have Microsoft money and backing.
The only people that this deal is bad for are people who only play on PlayStation consoles. Everyone else benefits.
You said nothing will change. They will be part of the microcrap veil and will follow their ways of doing things. Like not hire people and only contract for 18 months then get in new contractors to pick up where the recently fired left off… Like what happened at 343i.
I can't believe how this guy just keeps opening his mouth and telling us how Starfield used to be fun and interesting, but that they removed all that stuff until all that was left was this sterile Far Cry clone that feels more like a chore than a game.
I'm already mad at how unbearably boring the game is, and the more Todd Howard talks about the development, the more angry I get. It's callously just rubbing salt in an open wound.
There needs to be a strike and a boycott of video games. I believe everyone is absolutely sick of being beta testers for unfinished AAA game releases.
I have been a Diablo fan for years but my last straw was Diablo IV. Not only is the game incomplete, Blizzard is going to charge for yearly expansions. If there was actual content in D4 to start, I would have gladly bought an expansion later. If future seasons anything like Season 1, Blizzard can fuck right the hell off.
What is sad is that Blizzard threw so many employees under the bus by having them lie about the game as well. That is seriously fucked.
I don't think a strike really has anything to do with that. It has to do with treating the workers better.
Now if that also came with extending the time for releases (yes, even the really long AAA development cycles) that could probably improve the quality of said games.
Proof of exactly how important unions are. I never got into gamedev because of its well-earned reputation of being a meatgrinder full of underpaid, overworked devs who never get credit and are the first to be laid off.
It’s for voice actors’ IP rights for AI and non-existent residuals, according to the article. It’s basically about the same issues as the writers/actors strikes.
Though it’s interesting because games have a legitimate use for AI voiceovers. I hope they can negotiate for per-title AI training and residuals, and not just eliminating AI altogether. The potential situational and reactive voiceover seems amazing for games - or even just having an NPC speak your unique name.
IMO the devs could stand to unionize and strike too. God knows gamers all have a backlog and many would hopefully support them for the long haul.
"Eliminating AI" would probably just mean that game studios would stop using SAG actors entirely in the future. There's limits to the power of unions like these.
Unfortunately, that has been proven false many many times. Even if by some miracle online communities manage to organize to that extent, and they manage by some miracle to actually follow through with it... it is still a drop in the ocean compared to the casual market that doesn't care at all.
I think 180k people disagree with you each day playing starfield.
Tho I myself agree that lots of recent AAA games don’t value their 60$ price or whatever. The low effort and quality put into them at launch is just not worth the money.
Maybe sometimes in the future when they are fixed and on discount they could be better value.
Tho hogwarrs legacy for example did not see any update since 4-5 months. And it’s still cursed with bugs. Maybe it’s what we could see with other recent releases too.
I think 180k people disagree with you each day playing starfield.
As a developer myself, I consider Starfield to be a fairly finished product in terms of quality. The outstanding bugs I’ve seen are uncommon and the type I would expect to end up in a production product.
My complaints about Starfield are fairly specific. I don’t like how they built the bounty and forgiveness process, as it’s a bit unpredictable and simultaneously gamable. I can pirate a ship and rack up a $650 bounty, or get a $30000+ bounty pirating the same ship. The way stealth works is comical (if not buggy) in that it’s stealthier to be seen throwing a grenade into a room and running than to shoot someone from hiding. But those (presumably) aren’t bugs or incompleteness, they’re side-effects of the designed systems working as intended.
I’m not a developer, for the record, but I was also pretty impressed with Starfield’s lack of bugs. It’s still got some, but it’s definitely at the ‘normal and acceptable’ level. Not how Bethesda usually releases games.
It’s not about the bugs. I have no idea what bugs are in the game.
The game was advertised as “next gen” priced as a high quality AAA, then it’s just not next gen, it’s last/previous gen with s* optimisation, and bad physics on many parts. And not delivering well on the rest either.
NikTek did some videos on starfield. The channel is mostly news as meme or similar things : youtube.com/
It’s a bit extreme, but we can see the care put into the character, weapon and static object physics and interaction is nothing. It’s year 2000 type of quality, even then there was maybe better character physics.
They didn’t even bother to add a brightness control in the game. No hdr (even if I can’t run it, is a f 60+$ game !). And the start screen could have just been a style, to be “empty”. But with all of this, it’s more likely they just didn’t bother.
And there is plenty more complaints on the game quality.
The game was advertised as “next gen” priced as a high quality AAA
I mean, they were very clear that it was Creation Engine 2, a new iteration on the Creation Engine. What were you or anyone expecting except another iteration on the Creation Engine?
it’s last/previous gen with s* optimisation, and bad physics on many parts
This is a surprise or a disappointment? Nobody plays a Bethesda game for the physics.
And not delivering well on the rest either.
What “the rest” did they not deliver well on? Consensus seems to be that if you like Bethesda games, you love Starfield. If you don’t, you don’t. I mean, I don’t buy the fancy new Madden Football. You know why? I don’t like Madden Football. When Madden 2077 comes out with a new “throw the ball” engine, I’m not getting all amped up that this is finally the Madden Football I’ll want to play. They promised us Skyrim in Space. They gave us Skyrim in Space. The only let-down is that it didn’t have nearly as many “signature bugs” as I would expect from Skyrim in Space.
It’s a bit extreme
Extreme is an understatement. I love CP2077, but they made terrible design decisions and most gamers would have been happier if we got a little less “physics realism” and a lot more game at release. Call me old school, but I feel like “Realistic Physics Simulation” is something that doesn’t belong in most games, and it’s often the cause of bugs and detracts from the game itself.
but we can see the care put into the character, weapon and static object physics and interaction is nothing
You probably want to separate all those other things from interaction. You kinda shoehorned that in at the end of the rant about physics. Even that Nik guy focuses on physics mostly (and drugged out people dancing).
It’s year 2000 type of quality, even then there was maybe better character physics.
I’m thinking you’re a fairly young gamer. You clearly don’t remember year 2000 quality. Morrowind came out in 2002 and Vampire Bloodlines cames out in 2004… Starfield definitely feels like a game 20 years newer than those.
They didn’t even bother to add a brightness control in the game
…full tilt, here? Sounds like you’re looking for a year 2000 game. More and more games leave out brightness control the last decade because you can do it at system level on tv or computer. When I see one of those brightness control gauges, I think “early-mid 2000s”. Bioshock 1 comes to mind.
No hdr (even if I can’t run it, is a f 60+$ game !).
That’s a very cherry-picked feature. HDR is not “the big buzzword of the future of gaming” or some shit, it’s just a color range technology. Big deal? The lack of native RTX/DLSS (otoh) is a bit disappointing, but not exactly unique to Starfield. Most new games don’t have it, and it generally has to do with vendor/API lock-in (something I can respect)
And the start screen could have just been a style, to be “empty”. But with all of this, it’s more likely they just didn’t bother.
Or it was just a style to be “empty” since that was a signature of Skyrim and they were trying to give us Skyrim in Space.
And there is plenty more complaints on the game quality.
Go on. None of your complaints have had to do with game quality so far. They were that it isn’t a Physics Simulator, and that it doesn’t have certain vendor-lock video features you admitted you can’t even run on your system.
I don’t call such a game “finished”.
I think you need to look up what “finished” means. None of your complaints are about an incomplete nature to the game, but for decisions not to include things that were unnecessary to the game’s vision. This isn’t “they left out major questlines halfway through to save money” or “they were 6 months short on QA time”. This was “I want a physics simulator with my cheesy poofs!”
EDIT: Just to add a bit more. I find it interesting everyone wants Bethesda to be a physics simulation. Nobody expects that of a Diablo, or a Baldur’s Gate, or even a GTA. A few FPS games added it. So what? Truth is, people are falling into this “FPS rut” where every game is expected to have (and lack) the features the a few FPS franchises spearheaded. I literally spent my entire life avoiding FPS games because I hate them, and everyone bitches at the good and original games for every time an FPS has a feature they don’t.
You know what else doesn’t have a physics simulator built in? Microsoft Excel.
Sounds like you’re looking for a year 2000 game. More and more games leave out brightness control the last decade because you can do it at system level on tv or computer.
I’m sorry, but not everyone has a high brightness display. Adding a brightness gauge can be very useful for those people.
The rest is just nonsense and Bethesda fanatism. Like
if you like Bethesda games, you love Starfield
Is one of the worst take possible to save your wallet.
Like if they come out with a broken game at 150$ you are going to buy it because you like Bethesda? I cannot agree with this, and lots of steam comments neither. People are complaining about issues with the characters, broken launch mission launch bugs and bad quest variety.
And maybe you need to take a new look at what “finished” means in a dictionary. Because quest breaking bugs and missing features don’t seem to mean “finished”.
I’m sorry, but not everyone has a high brightness display. Adding a brightness gauge can be very useful for those people.
Sure… but that’s not an indicator if a game is complete or if it’s “like a circa 2000 game”. I don’t fault you for wanting a feature that’s not present. But that’s not an objective measure of the game.
The rest is just nonsense and Bethesda fanatism. Like
You know how you can tell someone is approaching toxicity? They fault people for liking things. I disagree with you, therefore I must be a stupid fan who would accept anything.
if you like Bethesda games, you love Starfield Is one of the worst take possible to save your wallet.
Not sure what you mean here. Bethesda flagships are equational games. You expect “X”, so if you want “X”, you give them money for “X”. I dunno about you, but I used to “demo pirate” games because you never knew what you were getting and nothing sucks like blowing $50+ hoping for “X” and getting “Y”.
<span style="color:#323232;">ME: "I want Skyrim in Space"
</span><span style="color:#323232;">Them: "Here you go, Skyrim in Space"
</span>
I call that a breath of fresh air. You’re actually holding that against them and me. Why? Have you never bought a game that surprised you unpleasantly?
Like if they come out with a broken game at 150$ you are going to buy it because you like Bethesda?
That’s the opposite of what I said.
Let’s put it this way. I don’t like McDonalds. But I know people who do. When they order a Big Mac, it is exactly the same every single time. So if you’re craving a Big Mac, you will never be disappointed when you buy a Big Mac. I’m not saying a McDonalds fan should drop $150 on a flaming bag of crap. I’m saying that you don’t get a “flaming bag of crap” when you order a Big Mac. You get a Big Mac.
Bethesda didn’t come out with a broken game at $150. They came out with Skyrim in Space. If you don’t like McDonalds, don’t buy McDonalds. But stop treating people who happen to like McDonalds like there’s something wrong with them, or like they’re zealous superfans.
People are complaining about issues with the characters, broken launch mission launch bugs and bad quest variety.
Do you know what moving the goalposts is? It starts with the line “It’s not about the bugs. I have no idea what bugs are in the game.”. Make up your mind, because we’ve had a fairly heated discussion where you chose to make no meaningful statements about bugs. You don’t get to just drop that line, now. And you were smart to do so, because overall consensus seems to be that Starfield is overall less buggy than the new Gold Standard AAA (BG3). I’ve been playing it since release, and have found exactly ONE frustrating bug (related to outpost building), significantly lower than my gaming expectation of ANY game over the last 20+ years.
And maybe you need to take a new look at what “finished” means in a dictionary. Because quest breaking bugs
Let me reiterate your words: “It’s not about the bugs. I have no idea what bugs are in the game.”
…and missing features don’t seem to mean “finished”.
As a developer, someone whining to me that my product isn’t “finished” because it doesn’t have this silly feature they want that was never on our roadmap is annoying as hell. Can you imagine that? Is your house “finished”? I don’t see an indoor pool or sauna, so it can’t be.
First, you can disagree with my opinion and it’s totally fine.
Not sure what you mean here.
Sencond stop commenting every line out of the context of my answer. It makes your answer extremely long to say nothing.
I was saying that the arguments didn’t make sense other than “buy it and ignore the issues” mentality, now maybe I understand better your point.
For my my point? It’s on the Niktek channel.
Whatever the game is. It could cost 60$ whatever I don’t care if it’s bad or not, it’s just a game. What I care about is if the game is worth that amount of money. And in my opinion it isn’t, or maybe if you just want to play a sandbox with loading screens.
If you want game faults it’s mostly on the technical, immersion + developer implication in story telling.
Just look at the latest video on that channel (don’t if you don’t want to get spoiled) : It presents a part of the game where you get chased. You are supposed to get fast to your ship with your crew. The crew does run, but it stops at tables, people… Like everyone is chill jogging. And there is just some cries just for “ambiance”. The run is interrupted by 4 loading screens. When in the ship it’s like nothing happened outside and everyone is chill around the chaser. And keep in mind it’s a f story mission!
I myself cannot call such thing exciting (for a chase part) or something good quality.
Nvidia issues were present on “lower” spec cards with plenty enough vram. Not even sure if they fixed anything. (youtu.be/lGL3fczSXaI?si=C2bAg_k77CAkhfcN) Nvidia could also have been at fault (nvidia deivers aren’t always perfect).
Starfield is overall less buggy than the new Gold Standard AAA
Call finished whatever you want, but a game slightly better than others recent releases isn’t “finished” just because it’s better. It’s a company experimenting at what extent they can screw you before they get hurt. And companies have been doing this for a lot of time, each time, screwing up people’s preorders and hopes.
Now if starfield has everything you need, it’s fine. But if it doesn’t have everything someone else needs to play it at a good quality, the it isn’t fine by my standards of quality.
I’m sorry to feel that way. Looks like sticking to the topic isn’t working. Cheers.
One point, though. You punctuate your point with a statement that sounds like you think no game is to your “standards of quality” if there exists a gamer somewhere in the world who doesn’t get what they want out of it. Seems a weird type of measurement. I usually consider “mostly positive” on Steam a fairly decent bar for quality. But you can consider whatever you like, of course.
You understand people like you are DIRECTLY the cause of games these days sucking ass right? You guys buy games before they’re out and then buy up all their microtransaction bullshit, so why would they ever worry about improving or trying any harder when they know they have guaranteed money in the bank? Until people like you quit throwing money at this stuff, it’s only going to continue to decline.
I didn’t say I personally was being hurt by you, I said you are being hurt by you, I’m not affected by this directly. I don’t buy games until they’ve been out for a year at least and I don’t buy microtransactions regardless of the amount of money in my account, on principle. So you’re only serving to destroy your own future gaming. Also, I’ve never seen someone tell someone else to get a job that wasn’t secretly just living off their parents. Have a good one.
If you don’t mind, could you explain why one would want to buy these kinds of microtransactions, especially if you don’t even enjoy the game? I just cant understand it, but obviously people enjoy it or the business model wouldn’t work.
I was with you until you said diablo 3 had one of the most compelling stories. I don’t think diablo games in general are good at storytelling. But I do agree with you that the d4 story kinda sucked
Holy shit that borderlands 3 "turn the generator on" quote nails why I struggle to push through for the really fun gunplay half the time. They really do just vomit words at you.
It’s so funny how people who have no idea about linguistics/communications have such strong know-it-all attitudes about how people communicate. Remember the phenomenon of vocal fry? All the youtube vids like “i discovered this thing that millennial wimmin do and once you notice you’ll HATE IT.” and they just describe vocal fry which is just an absolutely normal part of speech and done by men just as much as women.
You probably haven’t gotten to Act 3 yet, the game is extremely CPU bound. I have a Ryzen 9 7950X and while Act 1 and 2 were basically locked to 144fps the entire time, in Act 3 I have seen dips down to the 40s.
Try turning off “Dynamic Crowds” in settings. I didn’t notice much difference in how the crowds behaved, but it supposedly simplifies their AI and pathfinding to cut down on CPU use. It helped me a lot in the city.
2060 super user here. I’m assuming you haven’t made it to Act 3? The game has some performance issues there. I happily turned down the graphics to continue playing smoothly but was a tad disappointed.
I’m on my second playthrough though and they have patched it since my first experience so hopefully the evil campaign runs (visually) smoother.
Act 3’s issues aren’t GPU bound, it’s entirely CPU bottlenecked. It’s likely someone with a slower GPU won’t see as big a drop in performance in act 3 as you, and it’s likely you don’t see any performance gain from using DLSS in act 3. My 2080 Super was sleeping through it even at 3440x1440 on ultra while my Ryzen 7 3700x was getting thrashed.
Its a collectors game with nothing good to collect. This might seem like a silly take, and with 813 pokemon now in the game, it should be. But the way pokemon are laid out in this game is just horrendous.
In the main series games, you LOOK for pokemon. You might just wander around the grass for a while and take what you get, but at some point, you have a shopping list. In order to find specific pokemon, you go to a specific location. You find the pokemon you are looking for, often with others similar in type.
Well, in pokemon go, this isn’t the case at all. There are maybe 20-40 pokemon in the spawn pool at any given time. Go somewhere, ANYWHERE around you, and you are going to see more of the same. Once you have them, you wait for the next spawn rotation (sometimes thats 1 month, sometimes its 8) or events. The events are somewhere between 3 hours and 1 week long, and then you might actually have some cool shit, and the game is exciting for a bit. But after that, its back to the same old bullshit.
Now the game is just about collecting shinies. This is really what niantic has tried to monetize. The (often only) way to get them is to either hatch eggs (buying incubators) or doing raids (buying raid passes). The other way to get them is by doing certain events where they hand them out like candy. I stopped a couple years ago when i had well over 300 shinies, because there just wasn’t a point anymore. The whole “cool collectible” factor came from them being rare, if everyone gets them in events, why is it special?
300 different pokemon shiny or 300 shinies including dupes? While getting a shiny during an event is easy actually being committed and grind out every shiny event is crazy dedication. I can’t bother with the game because the core gameplay loop is just so incredibly boring, and as you say is nothing like Pokemon should be. I’m slowly transferring everything to Pokemon Home and in that regard it has been pretty nice in terms of getting legendaries and mythicals that are really tough in the main series games to get. I’ve never catched the original 151 before and when I combine Let’s Go Pikachu with Pokemon Go into Pokemon Home I’ll actually tick that childhood goal off, which feels nice.
Definitely including dupes, I got rid of tons of dupes from events but the spawn pool was so limited you were bound go get more. I was dedicated enough to grind out wild shinies, but if it was locked behind incubators or raids, forget about it.
Well, no. Rates are higher at different times of day, near bodies of water, in different weather, closer to high-foot-traffic zones, in forests, from eggs and from raids.
Not to mention continents.
Personally I just find it to be a location data collecting app with a light video game skin over top of it. I love Pokemon and wore out of the game when I realized player fun isn’t niantic’s priority in the slightest, it’s how to squeeze more and more data to sell out of the player. If it wasn’t for the blue chip IP they landed the company would be gone already. Literally every other game they’ve launched has been a flop
I tried it for the first time a few months ago. It was bad. The in-game tutorial does not cover half of it and the game play that I could figure out was super shallow. I could probably look up third party getting started guides, but I did not think it was worth the bother.
I’ve been playing since launch, although admittedly not much the past few weeks, and I think it’s fun depending on what you find fun.
I’ve never been big on the Battling (PvP or Raiding) but I’ve enjoyed the “Catch 'em All”.
I do however agree that even the “catch” part of the game is poorly put together. For example while the game may contain 800+ Pokemon, realistically you can only ever catch ~30 different species at a given time. If you started a new account today and did ALL the activities available, really grinding for a month, you’d probably only have ~200 or so Pokemon. If you played for a year, maybe double that.
For this reason why isn’t Pokemon HOME considered the game with the most Pokemon?
I lost a bunch of legendaries when my Pokébank subscription lapsed.
I’ve been collecting legendaries in Go for ages to rebuild my stable, and I’ve only just realized that Go legendaries don’t count until you’ve had one in the destination game. Which means that Go legendaries are totally without value in terms of collecting a first of anything.
Seems like a coin toss on whether or not your mons got wiped when your subscription ended.
If you can dig up a 3DS with Pokébank and whatever the intermediary app was, you might still be able to pull them all out, now that Bank (the service) is now free.
Well now it’s free forever, you just need to sideload the application itself.
Some stuff got wiped. It was never clear why it happened to some people and not others.
I lost interest in catching them all when I got to the point where the main pokemon I don’t have are behind ridiculously low egg rates. Add in the few pokemon where I’d ether have to buy plane tickets to Alaska and Greece or violate the TOS by spoofing my GPS signal and I just decided the juice wasn’t worth the squeeze
I could almost see the "digital foundry can't share it" as not giving their review outlets preferential treatment over everyone else (because the technical breakdown is a separate thing), but the timeline is just not anywhere near sufficient, especially for a game of this scope.
I understand that Beth delayed the review codes, but I don’t quite understand why. The subtext of this article seems to suggest that they expect higher reviews from other outlets. Is that the case?
I'm kind of reading it like the Europe team did kind of a shitty job, considering they said some places got codes from the American team.
It's generally a hard balance to strike on when it's good enough for reviewers to get their hands on it with enough time to actually provide meaningful evaluations (because they genuinely are fixing shit up to and through launch. This is the same reason it's hard for reviews to provide a lot of information on general bugginess. They also play a lot of unfinished stuff that's actually cleaned up before launch). But there's no reason to give different reviewers codes at different times. It sounds like different divisions and one fucking up.
On another note this will make for an easy comparison of Denuvo ridden game vs Denuvo removed. The Day 1 Patch bringing some Fixes and Performance gains would muddy the results a bit but I think it’s still a good idea to have a test like that. If the rumors/speculation about Denuvos performance impact are true I doubt even a Day 1 Patch would manage to balance out the performance difference.
If the great reddit exodus taught me anything, it’s that I will happily abandon something I’ve enjoyed for over 10 years as soon as it becomes obvious how self-centered its goals are.
I swear deleting that account felt like shackles coming off. Any hint of BS now and I’m just cancelling subs and deleting accounts. I’ve ditched about six services I thought were essential before.
I’m going to be honest, I find things that can permanently mess up your save (in the sense that you’ll get a lesser experience or not reach the ending) is extremely bad game design. It’s something I’d expect out of a 2 hour arcade game, not a modern release.
There are a lot of horror games in the PS1 that are “if you didn’t do this extremely specific thing, in the right order, with the right coloured t-shirt, on a Tuesday, without any hints whatsoever… Too bad! When you reach the end of the game in another 60 hours of gameplay we will tell you you’ve failed”
Baldur’s Gate might be a great game, but sometimes it’s “dice rolls makes things spicy and each run its own thing!” mechanic gets unbalanced and by a little bad luck you can have a significantly degraded experience, sometimes without even knowing it.
This is bad game design, even if ultimately the game can be good in the end.
I’d like to expand on this and say, as a 37 year old parent with a house that barely has time to play a game ONCE it’s complete and utter bullshit. I’m doing good just to finish a game, there is pretty much zero chance I’m going to play it again.
I’ll shamelessly say I do reference walkthroughs if I expect there to be choices the impact the game in big ways.
I don't think that the issue is the quality of their QA. Well, okay, maybe that's a factor, but I don't think that that was the big one for Fallout 76.
Some of the issues in Fallout 76 that they shipped with, they had to know they were shipping with. It wasn't that QA didn't turn up problems, but that they took too-ambitious a plan, ran out of time, and then didn't delay the release to fix all the broken stuff. Yeah, they did a lot of work to fix the game post-release, but by then, a lot of players had already been soured by the initial bad experience.
They did significantly delay the Starfield release, so I assume that they are trying to put this out in a more-sane shape.
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.
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