• 37 Posts
  • 170 Comments
Joined 7 years ago
Cake day: August 24th, 2019
  • CriticalResist8@lemmygrad.mltoGames@lemmygrad.ml•Announcing NVIDIA DLSS 5 | AI-Powered Breakthrough in Visual Fidelity for Games
    22·
    1 month ago

    Okay, I ended up doing a bunch of research and writing and rewriting this comment a few times lol but I think we got to the bottom of it.

    In the final analysis, I think what dlss 5 shows is that nvidia is betting on moving away from ‘traditional’ GPUs to tensor-architecture processing units, made especially for running AI models.

    So what they would have is instead of rendering the ray-tracing, subsurface scattering, hair physics etc directly on the GPU all at once, they would have an AI model running on a TPU (Tensor Processing Unit) to render it on the frame/geometry. This would give some breathing room back in computing power, if it pans out.

    This would cement their status as a monopoly or near-monopoly in TPUs, but it would also bypass the bottleneck of current tech that’s not scalable indefinitely. The 5090 is already pushing manufacturing capabilities. The new dlss does help performance, especially on TPUs if they go that way, but even on the GPU, compared to the same ‘native’ options.

    This could work, but it’s very early work. So how this will pan out in practice is still anyone’s guess, it’s too early to be sure that we’ll just have to settle for TPUs and ‘slop’.

    Keep in mind nvidia is already the leader in GPUs, and games are made to their specifications for their hardware (for the most part). They’re the ones who released physX, and then shelved it. They’re the ones who make ray tracing and HDR that people can’t run, and this is tech we already have. So I don’t necessarily see the move to TPUs, if it even ends up happening, as wholly different to what we’ve been living with for 20+ years.

    In my opinion this showcase was more of a developers’ demo, though it seems I was right that nvidia engineers used the model on the games without going through the devs - the artists that worked on some of those games were surprised that their game was in the video. Engineers used an aggressive setting and capable devs could instead use it sparingly or the way they want it for their art direction. And others won’t care and just press the ‘enable everything’ button.

    However, the fact remains that most people won’t be able to run it. They have announced that dlss 5 will initially run on a single 5090, which is just out of price and even if it was affordable, not everyone could use it. So they’re sowing the seeds now, knowing that devs will end up using the SDK and thus get ‘locked’ into using nvidia - like they’ve been doing for the past 20 years of course.

    If this pans out for nvidia hardware requirements will go down, and along with it the model will get expanded to allow for more usecases, like LORAs or fine-tuning on the devs’ part to get it to look the way they want. In general with AI it’s the same situation as Photoshop in its time - people don’t know how to approach it at first and think it’s taking away their intent, then they get comfortable with it and find ways they can still show intent even with different tools. Companies started making digital drawing surfaces etc. It’ll be similar here, but in the final analysis what we see is capitalism doing its monopoly thing. I know it’s a duh moment lol, but it’s interesting seeing it play out perfectly from just a showcase video.

    What will likely end up happening in the short-term is studios will use ‘captured in-game (*with dlss 5)’ disclaimers in their trailers, and they will include it in the game, but just like motion blur it’s something people won’t turn on, not that they could for at least a good few years lol. From my research I found that graphics are a big selling point, even when people won’t be able to run the game at max settings. Of course we knew graphics sell, but it’s interesting that it doesn’t seem to matter if the customer will be able to run the graphics - they just like that it looks good, even if they know that they won’t get these graphics out of it.

    tl;dr: new paradigm shift that shakes up the market lenin-pointing . but yeah the big takeaway is a complete shift from GPUs to TPUs, with all that entails.

  • CriticalResist8@lemmygrad.mltoGames@lemmygrad.ml•Announcing NVIDIA DLSS 5 | AI-Powered Breakthrough in Visual Fidelity for Games
    27·
    1 month ago

    I have to assume this was for the showcase video, DLSS offers options and devs can tailor it to their game - if they use it correctly hopefully. It’s way easy to just say “unreal engine will take care of it just ship” nowadays which is a problem in software in general but not entirely nvidia’s.

    It’s not a great showcase video but having had DLSS on some games, it does make a pretty good difference. I tried it with a game I own just now and I get from 40 FPS on basic antialiasing to 50 with DLSS to 90 with frame generation enabled. Quality is just as good as without DLSS, just some flickering in this game on the snow, but most of all it doesn’t make distant objects blurry like ‘traditional’ antialiasing does.

    A lot of it has to do with how it’s implemented, and in the comments nvidia said themselves that devs will be able to tailor it and choose how the filter applies and where. I believe you that they used two 5090s for this showcase but I have to assume it’s because they tried to get the most out of it and didn’t even seem to get the game devs involved in deciding on the filter. We also won’t have to turn it on necessarily and use it.

    It’s not a great showcase video lol I agree though, it just raises a lot more questions. And it asks bigger questions, like why we ‘need’ games to look as photorealistic as possible when they are not movies nor real life and elements in the scene communicate things to the player, because it’s a game. But stuff like frame generation does have a positive impact and it works great, so I really can’t find any problem with having this available in games now.

    To the point of GPUs being out of price (and out of stock), at the core it has to do with project stargate and the half trillion dollars US tech companies are receiving from it. OpenAI bought up 40% of the world’s supply of wafers, which are a pre-component in memory (gpus, ram, ssds etc for consumers) not because they needed them but because they didn’t want the competition to have them. They don’t even do anything with wafers, they need the working memory.

    nvidia participates in this scheme of course, they’ve announced a shift away from consumer GPUs, so it’s fair to ask who dlss5 even is for when nobody will be able to use it for years to come, but my broader point to the internet response to this video it’s that it’s not the mystical “AI” pulling the strings from behind the scenes. Like I have no doubt we both agree that components are more than just video games and it’s important to have consumer components, but the gamer reaction is predictably “how will this affect my treats” without ever asking themselves how much their hobby costs in terms of electricity and computing power, but suddenly when the AI buzzword is there they are very concerned about the environment (and about graphics looking bad as if they’ll be forced to turn dlss 5 on for their game, as if the market hasn’t been chasing the dragon of hyperrealistic graphics for decades, and as if the consumers at large don’t base their purchase decision on graphics)

  • CriticalResist8@lemmygrad.mltoGames@lemmygrad.ml•Announcing NVIDIA DLSS 5 | AI-Powered Breakthrough in Visual Fidelity for Games
    77·
    1 month ago

    I expect it’ll look different by the time it rolls around in 6 months. I don’t get why the internet is so up in arms about this except that it’s just more AI kneejerk reaction. Like yeah it’s not “the best” but it’s also a cheap way to get more mileage out of your hardware - DLSS and AMD FX are already in video games and they do get you more FPS, though you need an RTX and it looks terrible in some games.

    The examples they showed might not be the best but I think during gameplay you won’t notice it, and I expect devs will be able to tweak it to their game so that it retains the art direction they want to convey. I have to assume the examples were filtered by Nvidia themselves and they did whatever they felt was best, I could definitely see losing some atmosphere in the resident evil clip they showed, but it’s a very short clip too.

  • CriticalResist8@lemmygrad.mlOPtoGames@lemmygrad.ml•End-game review of Paranormasight: The Mermaid's Curse
    2·
    2 months ago

    I ended up finishing it lol. Spoiler thoughts below I guess! (And yes, no holds barred these are full game spoilers)

    getting the ending

    The last puzzle was almost frustrating, but just short of thankfully. I kinda knew what to do from having read a few clues online lol, and just following the story actively. However when it came time to ‘call me four times’ I was on the right track but it seems clicks with the controller didn’t work, so I had to open a walkthrough. Bruh.

    Oh yeah and it turns out the deaths in the coastal ditch being in the Gameplay Guide parts of the file was just a mistake, no bearing on the reveal whatsoever. I didn’t mention it above but yeah additional background and primary info gets put in the ‘encyclopedia’ for later reference, and gameplay guide portion is more about how to play the diving minigame and move around the map, so I was wondering what that file was doing there.

    Prior to speaking to the mermaid there was a lot of other steps involved and yeah it’s all just sprung on you at the end as the last puzzle to solve. I don’t remember the first game having this, the meta puzzles were spread out through the story.

    As for finding the mermaid it makes a lot of sense and they knew you’d never think about it lol. You go back to the title screen and literally click 4 times on the mermaid standing there (after finding the hint for it). Also when you start or load your game, you go through a portal, so yeah turns out the title screen is not just a title screen but literally where you the player start the story.

    the mermaid's curse

    The title is right, this is the mermaid’s curse. One of the plot points is that living for 800 years is miserable, and this is nothing new in fiction. Everyone you know and love dies while you endure in a body that will never age. Eventually, people get suspicious and start shunning you - that’s literally how Highlander starts lol. Then, you start to forget your earlier memories. Even if you want to undo your immortality and finally be laid to rest, you can’t. There is no way to. You can still die, get sick, and feel pain - but you come back to life endlessly.

    Once you meet the mermaid on the title screen, she comes across as selfish. It’s not hidden that she resents you, Yuza, for making Mare love you more than her. So when she made you immortal it was also kind of her cursing you - saving you as per Mare’s last wish, but also fulfilling her own twisted relationship to you, her son. She also refuses to tell you about your mother saying that even if you’re her son, their relationship was private and only for them to know. One can speculate lol, but it shows she still bears resentment towards Yuza. It’s only been five years since he became an immortal after all.

    But it also doesn’t really have a resolution. You speak to the mermaid for all of 5 lines and then go back to the game. She’s still as vindicative as ever, and for all mermaids have been hyped up during the game you start to think damn, never meet your heroes. I guess this is part of why I would have been ready to play 12 more hours of this game. Making a self-contained, ‘short’ story is impressive in itself, but there could definitely have been more to this game without turning into fillers.

    Maybe I would have also liked it more if Mare had more of a presence in the game, seeing that she’s Yuza’s mother, and for a long time I thought ‘you’, the player, were playing as Mare in fact. Sort of a last act from her, coming back from purgatory to save her son.

    the surprise plot

    The relationship between Yuza and Sato, the two immortals, sprung out of nowhere and at the very end of the game. I choose to take the story as it is, so I don’t have any criticism about it. It’s just that on the one hand, there was never any foreshadowing about it during the game. They apparently agreed to keep up appearances as if they didn’t even really like each other, so for the whole game they don’t really talk much.

    But then it turns out they love each other deeply, and I’m like how? why? We don’t particularly see any chemistry between them, even in the few chapters you get after you learn they have been dating. They’ve also only known each other for all of 2 months at most.

    The final plot of the game is that Yuza, who has 795 years left to live, helps Sato become an immortal all over again, when she had only 48 hours left to her life. By ingesting mermaid flesh again (hence why you speak to sobae), she gained another 800 years of life so they can be together. This was more of a crapshoot than an established mechanic of how immortality works.

    But yeah, it’s still kinda just two high school kids having a summer fling out of nowhere, I don’t know, they didn’t really give us a whole lot to get invested in. Happy for them though lol.

    Is it truly over?

    I would have liked a better resolution to Kikuko’s story, and was expecting one to happen under the theme of fixing the errors of the past. For most of the game Kikuko was set up to become an interesting part of the plot, as she was the only character to bring the dimension of feeling stuck on a dead-end island with people set in their old ways in a changing world to the story. Like, you can relate to the feeling that your life is stuck going nowhere and maybe you just need to try something radically new.

    But then she turns out to be working for the villain and ready to kill everyone on the island for her own vanity, talking about her ‘noble’ blood and her ‘rightful heritage’. Completely destroyed the character for me. I wish she could have gotten her redemption arc, since in the final timeline she never ended up helping to kill anyone as the plans were stopped in time.

    Although, now that I’ve finished the game, I still have two chapters that the game says I haven’t fully finished yet. They’re also two chapters that seem to influence later events, with a little banner at the bottom that says “Kikuko was subdued” or “Kikuko was killed by the curse”. So I don’t know if it just means I haven’t looked at every option there or can still do one last thing.

    I’ll be honest I’ll probably look for a walkthrough of what else there is to do in these two chapters because I think it’s really just about trying out every single dialogue option for it, I don’t think there’s any secret epilogue or anything like that.

    Are we going to get paranormasight 3?

    I think it’s in the works already, barring some unforeseen events like Square Enix suddenly changing their mind about it. There’s still a lot of mystery surrounding the game, like the identity of the famous psychic that appears in both games, the paranormal affairs bureau, and of course the storyteller. The storyteller is a being that transcends any boundary - they can show up at any time, any place, even in Ryugyu (the domain of the mermaids/purgatory).

    I think really the reason we weren’t expecting a second game is because SE is not known to be making VNs or new IPs - they usually just make Dragon Quest and Tales Of spinoffs and remakes. So while Paranormasight 2 was a surprise, I don’t doubt they have more in the works now.

    But I’m also wondering what they can come up with for a third game, and I imagine they’d have to switch up the formula a little bit. I just hope they manage to keep the quality they’ve cultivated.

  • CriticalResist8@lemmygrad.mltoGames@lemmygrad.ml•A quick thought on Humankind and civ 7
    3·
    3 months ago

    It sucks, Paradox was really becoming a household name around 2015 then they decided to get predatory. Magicka was among the last good games they made, then the early EU4, and since then it’s only been downhill. They pump these ‘grand strategy’ games out and then milk them for years worth of DLCs. I’ve bought all the DLCs for EU4 but that’s because I’ve been playing that game consistently since day 1 (and I usually get them from resellers for cheaper lol). Now everyone knows you wait at least 2 years before playing a new PDX game so they can patch it. Even when HOI4 came out fans of 3 said it wasn’t nowhere near as deep or engaging.

    It’s just disappointing cause I remember when they were the studio that did whatever weird idea they had in their heads, and getting a paradox game provided good value – if only because it had some interesting ideas in it. Today when you see Paradox is behind it you know it’s going to be a miss. Like Vampire the Masquerade 2. We finally got a sequel and… only half the reviews are positive.

  • CriticalResist8@lemmygrad.mltoGames@lemmygrad.ml•A quick thought on Humankind and civ 7
    4·
    3 months ago

    I find 1444 to be an interesting start exactly because there’s so much to pick from. But PDX games are games you cheese through and through, which explains why I stay on EU4 and don’t stray too far lol after I put in all this time learning it. You have to learn all the mechanics, the events and the ways to trigger the events and cheese and abuse as much as possible to get exactly the result you want; I think they went for consistency when it comes to EU4’s design, some events are hard-coded to always fire a certain way if the AI receives it and cannot deviate from it.

    It’s very cheesy, and playing the games historically will only get you so far in PDX games which can be seen as a drawback since most people (me included) when they first pick it up want to recreate historical events. For example there’s an achievement to conquer Britain as Ming (named the copium wars lol). The best strat is to form a line moving northwest and through russia and sweden, then attack Britain from the norwegian shoreline. You can win the achievement by the 1520s and never have to no CB since you have the force tributary state CB on any neighbor. From there I guess you could continue to conquer Europe early and prevent both Spain and the Ottomans from ever developing.

    I wish they would overhaul Africa in one last DLC though, it’s still a severly underlooked area of the world even after they’ve overhauled every other region (mostly).

  • CriticalResist8@lemmygrad.mltoGames@lemmygrad.ml•A quick thought on Humankind and civ 7
    7·
    3 months ago

    lol this is a bit of a rant but when I played it (shortly after release) the in-depth systems were all already there but mostly irrelevant unless you were doing deep optimization. For example if you had a capitalist economy it was advisable to stay a little bit in debt because you were indebted to your own bourgeoisie who invested that money and paid it back in other ways, so ultimately you made more from the debt than you paid in interest. But it did show a limitation in that you can make the systems super deep and convoluted but if players won’t ever see them or influence them, then is there really a point over doing a coin flip?

    edit: I checked out from PDX games at this point and will grind out the rest of my years on EU4 still lol. Last good game they made before the full switch to DLC nightmare and new publishing policy (EU4 got the brunt of it but also started before that policy). EU5 has you go through the black plague 10 years into the game without fail, I have no idea why they didn’t just keep the 1444 start.

  • CriticalResist8@lemmygrad.mltoGames@lemmygrad.ml•Got a new gaming PC but it comes with Win11. Can I change the operating system? What's the best OS for gaming?
    6·
    3 months ago

    Well, this can only reflect my experience @pyromaiden@lemmygrad.ml but I tried to get a whole bunch of other distros going and nothing worked properly until I tried Zorin. On the plus side it looks and feels very close to Windows, so after 48 hours I was completely autonomous and doing the crazy linux stuff on my PC. During install do not check “connect to the internet to download updates” you’ll just update manually with sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade. This is a common cause of installs breaking.

    Drivers were installed out of the box including Nvidia CUDA 13 which was a nice surprise. Everything else was up to date too, printer and bluetooth headset worked right away with no fiddling. Wifi too of course.

    Since it works on an Ubuntu base (same one as Mint) there is sufficient information online. They also have a very complete forum you can google for. But usually when I run into an issue I just ask deepseek about it and because there’s a lot of ubuntu info to train on, it finds a fix.

    I think Bazzite since it’s more gaming-focused locks down some areas of the OS. I’m sure you can get access but that’s one thing to think about - if this is your main computer, you want a full OS, not something that will only/mostly do gaming and annoy you with anything else. But at the end of the day all of these are linux.

    One thing I tell everyone is get Timeshift and set up hourly saves on a different drive from your OS drive. If something breaks you can then just timeshift back a couple hours and get a working system back in order. It saved me already once when flatpak suddenly decided to stop accepting its own PGP key.

    For gaming specifically Zorin comes with what they call Windows App Installer. It basically runs Wine into a prefix (an instance of the C drive) that is system-wide. A lot of games just work once you have installed the various runtimes (Visual C++, .net) into that prefix. Then you just right click the .exe, Select Launch with… and click Windows App Installer. A lot of games just work with that. Otherwise, I add them on Lutris which sometimes works better or allows me to select a more specific Wine version.

    On top of Lutris you can install ProtonUp-Qt to download more Proton versions for Lutris to use. But most of the time I don’t need specifically Proton, the default ge-8.26-x86_64 wine works great on almost every game. ProtonDB is not the end-all be-all mind you, it’s what other users reported worked or didn’t on their computer. With Lutris and the ability to add every single Proton version to it, it’s just about trying every other version until you find something that works - if it doesn’t the first time. Sometimes a game works with Proton 9.x but not 10.x, go figure.

    For games with kernel anti-cheat - there’s also an app called WinBoat that might be able to play them? It emulates a whole Windows instance for that app specifically from what I understand. I haven’t tried it yet, I wanted to set it up for Photoshop if I ever get around to it. Apparently though PS works great with WinBoat without having to set up a whole VM, so that’s a good sign.

  • CriticalResist8@lemmygrad.mltoGames@lemmygrad.ml•AI Backlash in Gaming
    6·
    4 months ago

    Thanks for posting. My critique of the video after having watched and discussed it would be that she makes good points in the overall but could stand to drive the point home more: if Marx remarked all that in ~1850 already, then it shows it’s not about AI specifically (or any latest new tech) but about capitalism’s very structure.

    Capitalism doesn’t care about making good products which is the bulk of the video and what the parts she quotes from Marx are getting at. No ethical consumption no ethical production etc. An artistic endeavor or any endeavor in capitalism is for profit and can’t exist on its own unless it has exchange value so there is simply no “true” art possible in capitalism.

    Therefore the end can feel like a call to liberal boycotting, “if only we had people who cared about art in charge of making commodities” but as she implies it would only be repeating the same pattern all over again, eventually these people in charge get alienated from the product. I’m sure she was implying revolution but I chalk it up to you can’t be too spicy for youtube so you have to self-censor. Which is not a good thing but I don’t want to dissert on it right now lol.

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