I am currently running a local AI/LLM on a Strix Halo mini PC, it would be interesting to see how this compares, especially going forward when I want to add more capabilities, I wonder if this will similarly end up in mini PCs.
@themightyant How much of a new PC do you need, if you can get away with just a GPU upgrade that would be my aim for this year, there are still some reasonable deals on 5070Ti and downwards, if you need a new CPU and hence motherboard and RAM then that becomes a bit painful.
The 8TB of storage is also a nightmare at the moment, there seem to be no good deals, I paid £206.92 each for three Samsung 990 Evo Plus 4TB NVMEs in Jan 2025, they are now £419 each and the 64GB (2x32GB) of DDR5 I paid £179.99 for in Feb 2025 is now £976.31 which is absolutely insane.
I got lucky, I built my current PC in early 2025 and there is nothing to actually upgrade at the moment even if I was willing to pay silly prices. I recently sold off some old parts and I had a couple of 32GB RAM kits that sold on ebay for more than I bought them for in 2023 which is crazy. I feel sorry for anyone trying to build a PC at the moment.
I have three 4TB NVME drives in my PC, any more and it would bifurcate the GPU lanes and 8TB drives were crazy expensive even before this all kicked off. One is OS, programs, and document storage, one is purely games and the other is for when I am running projects, the drive for UE5 stuff, AI models, video editing etc. 512GB with Windows and a few programs installed would be getting pretty full and software and especially games seem to have hugely bloated over the last five years, as it does not materially impact performance I do not think many devs are bothered about optimising storage usage.
@dccorona It has to be both, businesses cannot afford to sell at a loss, people will not buy if the price does not work for them.
Realistically a $400-500 console for next gen is unrealistic, it is unrealistic for this generation now so there is no way with more expensive components that will happen. I did not say that people who will not pay more than that are being unreasonable, it is entirely their choice if they choose to buy a more expensive console, but it is unreasonable to expect a specific price point.
The whole business model was historically based around software subsidising hardware, but that model ended this generation and in many ways ended in the PS4 generation, the rise of forever games where people do not buy more games made that model no longer viable. There is not really a way to pivot that model to keep it viable as it has always been, there is not enough subsidy to cover the hardware cost and make a profit. The companies are pivoting their business model though, they are selling hardware at cost or with marginal profit and then making the profit on software and accessories. Consumers should expect that prices will reflect cost, that is the rational position, their choice is whether that represents a value proposition to them or not.
Apple have done that, but by essentially offering a much lower powered version when compared to their main hardware, then iPhone 17e is the phone equivalent of a Series S, cut down and cut back hardware, CPUs that failed binning for a GPU core (so they increase usable yield), seemingly lower clocks, cheaper screen etc. The Neo is basically that model on steroids, it uses a tablet SOC and huge cutbacks compared to even the Air, let alone the Pro. Comparing the Neo to the Air or Pro is like comparing an Ka to a Focus to a GT40 because they are all cars made by the same company, but very different hardware capabilities. As the DF team have said a few times, there is a cheaper alternative to the PS6, which is the PS5, cross gen is going to be very long, likely we will even have a three gen cross gen, with PS4, PS5 and PS6 all getting the same games for a while.
The Series S/X model was not an inherently bad idea, but they did make mistakes with the cutbacks, the RAM issue comes up again and again and if they had kept the RAM the same that would have made things much easier for devs, but MS had lost this generation before it started after losing the PS4 generation and now MS are pushing for the top end of console with Helix, they they have abandoned that concept altogether.
If people do not think that the new consoles represent value for money for them then that is a perfectly reasonable choice. The flip side of that is that is it is not reasonable to complain that a company will not sell them something at a loss.
I posted this on the Patreon. The PS6 pricing is really complicated because I feel that people have actually lost sight of what consoles cost at launch. Ignoring the Pro consoles the average over the last seven generations has been an inflation adjusted launch price of £586, however game prices have more than halved over the same period even with the rising pound/dollar price, the inflation adjusted price of PS1 games would be £96.50/$127.60. A decent PC in the 90s or early 2000s was more than a month's net average income, often twice that and was unable to play the newest games in a year due to GPU changes in the 90s. Now a little over a month's net average salary will get someone pre built with a 9800X3D and an RTX 5080 and that would last many years of AAA gaming. Are many of those who are getting older falling into the trap of not understanding inflation, in the same way the old man down the pub complains he used to be able to go for a night out for 15p, or in my head a pint should still be £2.50 not £7.00?
I know prices historically come down over a generation, but we also all understand the reasons why that has not happened this time and why it will be an issue going forward. For me personally, I bought a PS5 Pro, I have a good PC, I would probably at the moment pay up to £1k for a PS6, but that does depend what it offers at the time.
@Darren1967 It is a backwards compatability option for the game so it uses the same code on PS5, on Series the dev can set different limits, or resolution boost can also be a factor for non aware games.
@exclamationpoint
If you are a Patreon supporter you could submit a question for the Q&A and see if the team have any more insight?
Personally I will be waiting for it to get discounted then playing it as I already have a fairly big backlog and I have an Nvidia GPU anyway, but from the videos if path tracing is coming to RDNA 4 I would wait.
@exclamationpoint I cannot remember, but I remember reading that it was tied to Nvidia at launch for two reasons, Nvidia sent a tech team to help them and that to get it working they want full fat Redstone, Ray Regeneration and the new Radiance Cache update first (which means RDNA 4 only). It might have been rumour, it might have been speculation or it might have been totally genuine.
@MemuAccount From looking at the output from the one game it is available in now, it is not better or worse than PC upscalers, but DLSS is simply better than anything else on the market in an incredibly consistent way. It seems PSSR2 beats FSR4 in some situations and not others even within the same game, Xess (either native on Intel or running on other GPUS) was better than FSR3 but generally FSR4 is better, other in engine versions differ, from excellent to awful.
If one can run DLSS then that win, almost always also beating native and only really being beaten by DLAA, or something heavily supersampled (KCD2 will run at 16k and downsample to 4k, looks amazing, but unplayably slow).
PSSR2 is optimised for TV viewing distances rather than monitor viewing differences so they will have made different design choices based on where it compromises on output. Until we can see see side by side comparisons it will be hard to tell for sure, roll on the March update!
The standing mat is an interesting one as I have not thought about it much before as whilst I tend to wear trainers most of the time I am rarely standing for 8-10 hours a day, do they make any difference over having comfortable well fitting footwear?
I am interested in the Machine from a tech perspective but will not be getting one as I already have a better PC so I have no need. I also have no interest in buying the Deck, again interesting tech but I only play games at home on TV or monitor and not on the go so it does not fit for me (my Switch 2 only gets used docked as well). However the Controller looks a great option for when playing with it sent to my living room TV or when some games need a controller either way. The Frame for me though is close to a day one purchase if there is availability. I have been wanting to get a VR headset for a while and all the current offerings seem to have too many weaknesses in different areas and the Frame seems to deal with all of those so I will finally get into VR and also want to use it to go back and enjoy some games in stereoscopic 3D that are old school 3D as well.
The next XBox I just cannot see the point in, it will be more expensive than a PS5/6, much more, but offer nothing over a PC where all it's games will be available anyway and with none of the Playstation exclusives. I just cannot see what the purpose of the next Xbox existing is.
I have been looking at getting a standing desk for a while now as I am getting some minor back problems. Last year I decided I had to do something about my health and fitness so I joined a gym, lost 40KG and still working at keeping fit and healthy, but this also lead me to be aware of other health niggles. Having been a desk worker for 20+ years, and a gamer for 30+ years, in my early 40s I have weak core muscles and especially lower back, as well as not great desk posture so this year is about fixing my back and core strength whilst maintaining my newfound fitness. I have been looking at standing desks for a while and struggling to find one I actually like, four legs seems essential for stability, at work I have two 33 inch monitors, plus laptop and other bits so four legs is essential rather than the two column designs of most as with that weight on most two legs models wobble, I also want adjustable as I will still want to sit down sometimes. These look really great and the cable management add ons also look useful as I know people with sit stand desks where the cables snag and pull. Thanks for this, will properly assess and it may be my next office purchase.
@ramu-chan You can claim you dislike a trope of laziness, but that is a straw man, I did not say that devs were lazy, I pointed out that most if not all of the issues are solvable with additional work. I suspect that the vast majority of devs themselves would rather put the extra work in to make a game performant, but they are likely constrained by publishers and accountants, as long as a game is "good enough" then most publishers will want it shipped, they worry far less about polish than the development team would.
UE5 is a tool, turn everything on and do not optimise and it will run like garbage, but so will nearly every engine. Power budgets have to be managed, things need to be optimised and tailored to specific levels of available hardware power.
A low level of traversal stutter is pretty much inevitable in large maps on UE5 unless they are simple, but with careful optimisation they can be reduced to one or two frames on high end kit, and a handful on mid range PCs and console, whilst also only happing periodically, in parts of a game where they do not cause issues. That is however very different to shader compilation stutter which is something that devs can entirely solve themselves with proper shader collection passes and pre-compilation burns. Other issues with UE5 are somewhere in the middle, the feature might work if you turn several on, but turning everything on without optimisation will bring even powerful systems to their knees, or turning some of them on but with something with very poor optimisation will do the same.
Clair Obscure runs great, with few issues, on average hardware, Black Myth Wukong runs poorly on almost anything, some of that relates to design, but a huge amount is related to optimisation, BMW is vastly better now than it was at launch.
@LawrenceMurray In essence software Lumen will run on everything, but hardware Lumen only runs well on console if the whole game is well optimised or on a high end PC, there is a reason even Fortnite uses software Lumen on console, the additional CPU and GPU overhead is not worth the improvement in lighting. Less of an issue at 30/40fps but at 60 it is too big a hit to performance. In theory the dev can just tick the box and let the engine take care of it, but it usually requires quite a bit of work as it traces against actual geometry rather than the SDF that software Lumen uses, that means that geometry culling is more important, light leaks need to be checked for and it can absolutely tank performance in what seems like random locations even if it seems to work fine in other places. I have been playing around with a few very simple projects before I move onto a more complicated one I have in mind on software Lumen performance is just a certain level, turn on hardware and without other optimisations it can destroy performance. Looking at the level design and clutter in HoL2 there is no way that will play nice with hardware Lumen without them putting in a huge amount of additional work, which probably is not worth it from a financial standpoint. If they wanted to improve things on high end PCs they could just push out the distance further, for software Lumen, at the cost of a bigger hit to CPU.
@SodaPop8456 UE5 has been a bit of a failure in general performance terms, whilst I agree there is a lot Epic could do (and seem to have done in 5.7) most of the issues fall on the shoulders of developers. There are great UE5 games with no performance issues, the devs put in the work, others did the bare minimum and that is why they have problems. The main one seems to be incomplete shader passes which is something a dev can solve, Valve have solved it in the Deck for verified games and Intel are doing it with their shader butler program, but devs should be doing this by default.
In the video it shows that the reference laptops run at 65 watts, with Intel saying the TDP on those chips is 80 w it will be interesting to see how a full power version scales and sits against Strix Halo on 80 w as well. I wonder if the reference laptops were set at 65 w because it is the sweet point for performance or just because it fits into a chassis and cooling for the reference design.
@Spodlude I agree, especially as most 9800X3D chips already overclock pretty well, though admittedly they will run hotter than a 9850X3D. When I overclocked mine I barely noticed any difference even with 400Mhz extra on the boost, not noticeable during gameplay and it was running much hotter, in the 80s high 50s when playing CP2077 so I just set it all back to stock. I am certainly not paying any more for a 1-2% performance gain.
This looks really impressive, I will be interested what ends up happing with their top end mobile chips, full fat Celestial might be a very good choice for good battery life but still reasonable performance for graphics work and occasional gaming. This does make me question why there are no RDNA 4 mobile chips though, can AMD really afford to wait until mid 2027 sitting on RDNA 3.5 and on the CPU side is it feasible for them to add 3D cache to the CPU on an SOC?
@NandoCalrissian OLEDs are nowhere near as bright as an LCD backlight, using BFI means halving the brightness. Pulsar gets round this by having a much brighter backlight.
I found it really interesting that Intel are going to be deploying their own shader delivery via their driver/control program. I also liked that to do this they are employing shader butlers.
@NetshadeX I somewhat agree, although they have already found hardware solutions, VRR and 120/144/240hz displays. To and extent I feel that latency has been solved where it can be, e.g. it is basically unnoticeable at 120hz or higher, but at less than 60hz one can feel fluctuations in latency because they are bigger due to the gap between reference frames. Again, some people will be bothered, others will not, I think that is why some of this is subjective and there are people who never seem to notice (incorrect frame pacing, fluctuating frame rates, some people do not even notice screen tearing).
@Photoss See that is different to me and I guess why there is no universal solution. I get get used to and deal with a rock solid thirty, although it is not ideal, where as a game that bounces around in the fifties without VRR I find an awful experience. I guess that is why some of this is so subjective, even on the same hardware some people really hate uneven frame pacing, fluctuating framerates, but others are not bothered by it at all.
@Photoss It could be possible, but not ideal. Frame gen is good at higher frame rates, in my experience it is brilliant at increasing visual fluidity by pushing anything already 60hz higher, up to the 240hz max my monitor can take, however using it to bring a sub-sixty game up to sixty feels really bad.Whilst it only technically adds a very small amount of input lag, below a level that is actually perceivable it makes the lag feel worse due to there being multiple frames inserted between, it is somewhat hard to understand until one actually experiences it. The advantage of this will also align well with VRR because it allows the monitor to display the additional frames as and when they are ready. With frame gen not all frame times are equal, at 240hz that is not really an issue but at 60hz without VRR it might be. As DLSS 4.5 is live now I am hoping we might get some preliminary analysis data in the Direct that arrives over the weekend.
It could if that was a priority, though I suspect at least in the short term AI will be used just to lower production costs. There are some amazingly well optimised games that do not fill 8GB of VRAM whilst having much better better textures than many games that get close to filling 16GB of VRAM, I sometimes wonder how low resolution textures end up being so large compared to others. However RT and especially path tracing does increase both RAM and VRAM requirements due to the BVH (the CPU builds it in RAM, then transfers it to VRAM to be traced against), on the plus side that whole process is also getting more efficient.
I think that this "crunch" may well lead to devs getting better at optimising their games, with hardware power slowing down, generations getting longer as well as a baseline set up PS5 and then possibly Steam Machine devs will look to do more with the same hardware, much how console graphics look better at the end of a generation than the start even though the hardware does not change.
All the game that ran badly on 8GB GPUs could be made to run well on them if the devs put in the required resources, I remember the improvements that happened with TLOU which was awful on 8GB GPUs at launch and is now pretty good, looks much better whilst also performing better, or with Monster Hunter just decompressing the textures on the hard drive solves the performance issues on 8GB (and also lower end) GPUs.
The Steam Machine interests me from a technological standpoint but as I have a 9800X3D paired with a 5090 and a PS5 Pro it is not something I will buy, however the Frame is on my seriously interested list. I did think about a PSVR2 but wanted to see the level of support and it became obvious fairly quickly that Sony has all but abandoned it so I held out, hoping that a new generation of PC VR would hit the sweets spot and I I think this ticks all the boxes at the moment apart from the one unknown, price.
Comments 29
Re: Nvidia Is Making Laptops Now: N1/N1X Leak Shows a 128GB Monster Derived From Their DGX Spark Desktop AI Workhorse
I am currently running a local AI/LLM on a Strix Halo mini PC, it would be interesting to see how this compares, especially going forward when I want to add more capabilities, I wonder if this will similarly end up in mini PCs.
Re: The Best Time to Build a Gaming PC Was a Year Ago, but the Second-Best Time Is Now
@themightyant How much of a new PC do you need, if you can get away with just a GPU upgrade that would be my aim for this year, there are still some reasonable deals on 5070Ti and downwards, if you need a new CPU and hence motherboard and RAM then that becomes a bit painful.
The 8TB of storage is also a nightmare at the moment, there seem to be no good deals, I paid £206.92 each for three Samsung 990 Evo Plus 4TB NVMEs in Jan 2025, they are now £419 each and the 64GB (2x32GB) of DDR5 I paid £179.99 for in Feb 2025 is now £976.31 which is absolutely insane.
Re: The Best Time to Build a Gaming PC Was a Year Ago, but the Second-Best Time Is Now
Good to see you back Will!
I got lucky, I built my current PC in early 2025 and there is nothing to actually upgrade at the moment even if I was willing to pay silly prices. I recently sold off some old parts and I had a couple of 32GB RAM kits that sold on ebay for more than I bought them for in 2023 which is crazy. I feel sorry for anyone trying to build a PC at the moment.
Re: Lexar: Gamers Are Willing to Sacrifice RAM, but 512GB SSDs Are a Step Too Far
I have three 4TB NVME drives in my PC, any more and it would bifurcate the GPU lanes and 8TB drives were crazy expensive even before this all kicked off. One is OS, programs, and document storage, one is purely games and the other is for when I am running projects, the drive for UE5 stuff, AI models, video editing etc. 512GB with Windows and a few programs installed would be getting pretty full and software and especially games seem to have hugely bloated over the last five years, as it does not materially impact performance I do not think many devs are bothered about optimising storage usage.
Re: How Much Would You Pay For PlayStation 6?
@dccorona It has to be both, businesses cannot afford to sell at a loss, people will not buy if the price does not work for them.
Realistically a $400-500 console for next gen is unrealistic, it is unrealistic for this generation now so there is no way with more expensive components that will happen. I did not say that people who will not pay more than that are being unreasonable, it is entirely their choice if they choose to buy a more expensive console, but it is unreasonable to expect a specific price point.
The whole business model was historically based around software subsidising hardware, but that model ended this generation and in many ways ended in the PS4 generation, the rise of forever games where people do not buy more games made that model no longer viable. There is not really a way to pivot that model to keep it viable as it has always been, there is not enough subsidy to cover the hardware cost and make a profit. The companies are pivoting their business model though, they are selling hardware at cost or with marginal profit and then making the profit on software and accessories. Consumers should expect that prices will reflect cost, that is the rational position, their choice is whether that represents a value proposition to them or not.
Apple have done that, but by essentially offering a much lower powered version when compared to their main hardware, then iPhone 17e is the phone equivalent of a Series S, cut down and cut back hardware, CPUs that failed binning for a GPU core (so they increase usable yield), seemingly lower clocks, cheaper screen etc. The Neo is basically that model on steroids, it uses a tablet SOC and huge cutbacks compared to even the Air, let alone the Pro. Comparing the Neo to the Air or Pro is like comparing an Ka to a Focus to a GT40 because they are all cars made by the same company, but very different hardware capabilities. As the DF team have said a few times, there is a cheaper alternative to the PS6, which is the PS5, cross gen is going to be very long, likely we will even have a three gen cross gen, with PS4, PS5 and PS6 all getting the same games for a while.
The Series S/X model was not an inherently bad idea, but they did make mistakes with the cutbacks, the RAM issue comes up again and again and if they had kept the RAM the same that would have made things much easier for devs, but MS had lost this generation before it started after losing the PS4 generation and now MS are pushing for the top end of console with Helix, they they have abandoned that concept altogether.
If people do not think that the new consoles represent value for money for them then that is a perfectly reasonable choice. The flip side of that is that is it is not reasonable to complain that a company will not sell them something at a loss.
Re: How Much Would You Pay For PlayStation 6?
I posted this on the Patreon. The PS6 pricing is really complicated because I feel that people have actually lost sight of what consoles cost at launch. Ignoring the Pro consoles the average over the last seven generations has been an inflation adjusted launch price of £586, however game prices have more than halved over the same period even with the rising pound/dollar price, the inflation adjusted price of PS1 games would be £96.50/$127.60. A decent PC in the 90s or early 2000s was more than a month's net average income, often twice that and was unable to play the newest games in a year due to GPU changes in the 90s. Now a little over a month's net average salary will get someone pre built with a 9800X3D and an RTX 5080 and that would last many years of AAA gaming. Are many of those who are getting older falling into the trap of not understanding inflation, in the same way the old man down the pub complains he used to be able to go for a night out for 15p, or in my head a pint should still be £2.50 not £7.00?
I know prices historically come down over a generation, but we also all understand the reasons why that has not happened this time and why it will be an issue going forward. For me personally, I bought a PS5 Pro, I have a good PC, I would probably at the moment pay up to £1k for a PS6, but that does depend what it offers at the time.
Re: Assassin's Creed Unity's 4K 60fps Patch Isn't 4K - But The Upgrade Is Still Worth It
@Darren1967
It is a backwards compatability option for the game so it uses the same code on PS5, on Series the dev can set different limits, or resolution boost can also be a factor for non aware games.
Re: Review: Resident Evil Requiem PC: The Good, The Bad And The Optimised Settings
@exclamationpoint
Download the videos from Patreon and watch them, they are far better than the even the top end of what YouTube offers.
Re: Review: Resident Evil Requiem PC: The Good, The Bad And The Optimised Settings
@exclamationpoint
If you are a Patreon supporter you could submit a question for the Q&A and see if the team have any more insight?
Personally I will be waiting for it to get discounted then playing it as I already have a fairly big backlog and I have an Nvidia GPU anyway, but from the videos if path tracing is coming to RDNA 4 I would wait.
Re: Review: Resident Evil Requiem PC: The Good, The Bad And The Optimised Settings
@exclamationpoint
I cannot remember, but I remember reading that it was tied to Nvidia at launch for two reasons, Nvidia sent a tech team to help them and that to get it working they want full fat Redstone, Ray Regeneration and the new Radiance Cache update first (which means RDNA 4 only). It might have been rumour, it might have been speculation or it might have been totally genuine.
Re: Review: Resident Evil Requiem PC: The Good, The Bad And The Optimised Settings
@AndreasWright Apparently path tracing is coming to AMD and Intel GPUs at some point, it just was not ready at launch.
Re: It's Official: Resident Evil Requiem Uses Sony's Brand-New PSSR Upscaler
@MemuAccount
From looking at the output from the one game it is available in now, it is not better or worse than PC upscalers, but DLSS is simply better than anything else on the market in an incredibly consistent way. It seems PSSR2 beats FSR4 in some situations and not others even within the same game, Xess (either native on Intel or running on other GPUS) was better than FSR3 but generally FSR4 is better, other in engine versions differ, from excellent to awful.
If one can run DLSS then that win, almost always also beating native and only really being beaten by DLAA, or something heavily supersampled (KCD2 will run at 16k and downsample to 4k, looks amazing, but unplayably slow).
PSSR2 is optimised for TV viewing distances rather than monitor viewing differences so they will have made different design choices based on where it compromises on output. Until we can see see side by side comparisons it will be hard to tell for sure, roll on the March update!
Re: Flexispot E7 Plus Review: Recovering From Injury With A Standing Desk
The standing mat is an interesting one as I have not thought about it much before as whilst I tend to wear trainers most of the time I am rarely standing for 8-10 hours a day, do they make any difference over having comfortable well fitting footwear?
Re: If There's Still No Price For Steam Machine, How Viable Is A 2027 Next-Gen Xbox?
I am interested in the Machine from a tech perspective but will not be getting one as I already have a better PC so I have no need. I also have no interest in buying the Deck, again interesting tech but I only play games at home on TV or monitor and not on the go so it does not fit for me (my Switch 2 only gets used docked as well). However the Controller looks a great option for when playing with it sent to my living room TV or when some games need a controller either way. The Frame for me though is close to a day one purchase if there is availability. I have been wanting to get a VR headset for a while and all the current offerings seem to have too many weaknesses in different areas and the Frame seems to deal with all of those so I will finally get into VR and also want to use it to go back and enjoy some games in stereoscopic 3D that are old school 3D as well.
The next XBox I just cannot see the point in, it will be more expensive than a PS5/6, much more, but offer nothing over a PC where all it's games will be available anyway and with none of the Playstation exclusives. I just cannot see what the purpose of the next Xbox existing is.
Re: Flexispot E7 Plus Review: Recovering From Injury With A Standing Desk
I have been looking at getting a standing desk for a while now as I am getting some minor back problems. Last year I decided I had to do something about my health and fitness so I joined a gym, lost 40KG and still working at keeping fit and healthy, but this also lead me to be aware of other health niggles. Having been a desk worker for 20+ years, and a gamer for 30+ years, in my early 40s I have weak core muscles and especially lower back, as well as not great desk posture so this year is about fixing my back and core strength whilst maintaining my newfound fitness.
I have been looking at standing desks for a while and struggling to find one I actually like, four legs seems essential for stability, at work I have two 33 inch monitors, plus laptop and other bits so four legs is essential rather than the two column designs of most as with that weight on most two legs models wobble, I also want adjustable as I will still want to sit down sometimes. These look really great and the cable management add ons also look useful as I know people with sit stand desks where the cables snag and pull. Thanks for this, will properly assess and it may be my next office purchase.
Re: Review: High on Life 2 reignites the Unreal Engine 5 image quality/performance debate
@ramu-chan
You can claim you dislike a trope of laziness, but that is a straw man, I did not say that devs were lazy, I pointed out that most if not all of the issues are solvable with additional work. I suspect that the vast majority of devs themselves would rather put the extra work in to make a game performant, but they are likely constrained by publishers and accountants, as long as a game is "good enough" then most publishers will want it shipped, they worry far less about polish than the development team would.
UE5 is a tool, turn everything on and do not optimise and it will run like garbage, but so will nearly every engine. Power budgets have to be managed, things need to be optimised and tailored to specific levels of available hardware power.
A low level of traversal stutter is pretty much inevitable in large maps on UE5 unless they are simple, but with careful optimisation they can be reduced to one or two frames on high end kit, and a handful on mid range PCs and console, whilst also only happing periodically, in parts of a game where they do not cause issues. That is however very different to shader compilation stutter which is something that devs can entirely solve themselves with proper shader collection passes and pre-compilation burns. Other issues with UE5 are somewhere in the middle, the feature might work if you turn several on, but turning everything on without optimisation will bring even powerful systems to their knees, or turning some of them on but with something with very poor optimisation will do the same.
Clair Obscure runs great, with few issues, on average hardware, Black Myth Wukong runs poorly on almost anything, some of that relates to design, but a huge amount is related to optimisation, BMW is vastly better now than it was at launch.
Re: Review: High on Life 2 reignites the Unreal Engine 5 image quality/performance debate
@LawrenceMurray
In essence software Lumen will run on everything, but hardware Lumen only runs well on console if the whole game is well optimised or on a high end PC, there is a reason even Fortnite uses software Lumen on console, the additional CPU and GPU overhead is not worth the improvement in lighting. Less of an issue at 30/40fps but at 60 it is too big a hit to performance.
In theory the dev can just tick the box and let the engine take care of it, but it usually requires quite a bit of work as it traces against actual geometry rather than the SDF that software Lumen uses, that means that geometry culling is more important, light leaks need to be checked for and it can absolutely tank performance in what seems like random locations even if it seems to work fine in other places.
I have been playing around with a few very simple projects before I move onto a more complicated one I have in mind on software Lumen performance is just a certain level, turn on hardware and without other optimisations it can destroy performance. Looking at the level design and clutter in HoL2 there is no way that will play nice with hardware Lumen without them putting in a huge amount of additional work, which probably is not worth it from a financial standpoint.
If they wanted to improve things on high end PCs they could just push out the distance further, for software Lumen, at the cost of a bigger hit to CPU.
Re: Review: High on Life 2 reignites the Unreal Engine 5 image quality/performance debate
@SodaPop8456
UE5 has been a bit of a failure in general performance terms, whilst I agree there is a lot Epic could do (and seem to have done in 5.7) most of the issues fall on the shoulders of developers. There are great UE5 games with no performance issues, the devs put in the work, others did the bare minimum and that is why they have problems. The main one seems to be incomplete shader passes which is something a dev can solve, Valve have solved it in the Deck for verified games and Intel are doing it with their shader butler program, but devs should be doing this by default.
Re: Why Intel's Panther Lake Won Digital Foundry's CES 2026
In the video it shows that the reference laptops run at 65 watts, with Intel saying the TDP on those chips is 80 w it will be interesting to see how a full power version scales and sits against Strix Halo on 80 w as well. I wonder if the reference laptops were set at 65 w because it is the sweet point for performance or just because it fits into a chassis and cooling for the reference design.
Re: AMD Unveils Ryzen 7 9850X3D: Fast, Incremental
@Spodlude I agree, especially as most 9800X3D chips already overclock pretty well, though admittedly they will run hotter than a 9850X3D. When I overclocked mine I barely noticed any difference even with 400Mhz extra on the boost, not noticeable during gameplay and it was running much hotter, in the 80s high 50s when playing CP2077 so I just set it all back to stock. I am certainly not paying any more for a 1-2% performance gain.
Re: Intel Panther Lake: Mobile Graphics, Entry-Level Desktop Performance
This looks really impressive, I will be interested what ends up happing with their top end mobile chips, full fat Celestial might be a very good choice for good battery life but still reasonable performance for graphics work and occasional gaming.
This does make me question why there are no RDNA 4 mobile chips though, can AMD really afford to wait until mid 2027 sitting on RDNA 3.5 and on the CPU side is it feasible for them to add 3D cache to the CPU on an SOC?
Re: Nvidia G-Sync Pulsar is a Motion Clarity Revelation
@NandoCalrissian OLEDs are nowhere near as bright as an LCD backlight, using BFI means halving the brightness. Pulsar gets round this by having a much brighter backlight.
Re: Intel: Stutters in PC Games are "Breaking Immersion"
I found it really interesting that Intel are going to be deploying their own shader delivery via their driver/control program. I also liked that to do this they are employing shader butlers.
Re: Nvidia Announces DLSS 4.5 - New Transformer Model Already Live
@NetshadeX I somewhat agree, although they have already found hardware solutions, VRR and 120/144/240hz displays. To and extent I feel that latency has been solved where it can be, e.g. it is basically unnoticeable at 120hz or higher, but at less than 60hz one can feel fluctuations in latency because they are bigger due to the gap between reference frames. Again, some people will be bothered, others will not, I think that is why some of this is subjective and there are people who never seem to notice (incorrect frame pacing, fluctuating frame rates, some people do not even notice screen tearing).
Re: Nvidia Announces DLSS 4.5 - New Transformer Model Already Live
@Photoss See that is different to me and I guess why there is no universal solution. I get get used to and deal with a rock solid thirty, although it is not ideal, where as a game that bounces around in the fifties without VRR I find an awful experience. I guess that is why some of this is so subjective, even on the same hardware some people really hate uneven frame pacing, fluctuating framerates, but others are not bothered by it at all.
Re: Nvidia Announces DLSS 4.5 - New Transformer Model Already Live
@Photoss
It could be possible, but not ideal. Frame gen is good at higher frame rates, in my experience it is brilliant at increasing visual fluidity by pushing anything already 60hz higher, up to the 240hz max my monitor can take, however using it to bring a sub-sixty game up to sixty feels really bad.Whilst it only technically adds a very small amount of input lag, below a level that is actually perceivable it makes the lag feel worse due to there being multiple frames inserted between, it is somewhat hard to understand until one actually experiences it. The advantage of this will also align well with VRR because it allows the monitor to display the additional frames as and when they are ready. With frame gen not all frame times are equal, at 240hz that is not really an issue but at 60hz without VRR it might be. As DLSS 4.5 is live now I am hoping we might get some preliminary analysis data in the Direct that arrives over the weekend.
Re: The AI Tech Crunch: Are We Looking At A "Dark Age" For Gaming Hardware?
It could if that was a priority, though I suspect at least in the short term AI will be used just to lower production costs. There are some amazingly well optimised games that do not fill 8GB of VRAM whilst having much better better textures than many games that get close to filling 16GB of VRAM, I sometimes wonder how low resolution textures end up being so large compared to others. However RT and especially path tracing does increase both RAM and VRAM requirements due to the BVH (the CPU builds it in RAM, then transfers it to VRAM to be traced against), on the plus side that whole process is also getting more efficient.
I think that this "crunch" may well lead to devs getting better at optimising their games, with hardware power slowing down, generations getting longer as well as a baseline set up PS5 and then possibly Steam Machine devs will look to do more with the same hardware, much how console graphics look better at the end of a generation than the start even though the hardware does not change.
All the game that ran badly on 8GB GPUs could be made to run well on them if the devs put in the required resources, I remember the improvements that happened with TLOU which was awful on 8GB GPUs at launch and is now pretty good, looks much better whilst also performing better, or with Monster Hunter just decompressing the textures on the hard drive solves the performance issues on 8GB (and also lower end) GPUs.
Re: Feature: Hands-On with Steam Machine: Valve's New PC/Console Hybrid
@SodaPop8456 Only if Microsoft don't manage to kill it first!
Re: Feature: Steam Frame VR Hands-On: Quest 3's Biggest Competition Yet
The Steam Machine interests me from a technological standpoint but as I have a 9800X3D paired with a 5090 and a PS5 Pro it is not something I will buy, however the Frame is on my seriously interested list. I did think about a PSVR2 but wanted to see the level of support and it became obvious fairly quickly that Sony has all but abandoned it so I held out, hoping that a new generation of PC VR would hit the sweets spot and I I think this ticks all the boxes at the moment apart from the one unknown, price.