Comments 16

Re: Review: AMD Radeon RX 9070 GRE 12GB - An Excellent GPU At A Bizarrely Inappropriate Price Point

Obsidian76

Embedded video shows up as unavailable, so I went straight to YT and found it.

My word I stopped watching when the ad spot for the video sponsor, narrated by Richard.
So we have a product review sponsored by a direct competitors product.

This is completely unprofessional and goes against the ethics of journalism. (You are journalists before anyone says you are not)

Regardless of what one thinks of the product under review (I agree about the pricing, but that applies to the entire product stack from both AMD and Nvidia, - oh for the days of £650 xx80 series cards) its become so blatant that maybe DF should just rename itself NVF. (Joke)

MSI doesnt even have RDNA 4 cards in its range, its last AMD line was RDNA 3.

Explains the willful refusal to test on different GPU brands.

Explains how DF did not anticipate backlash to its 'gushing' DLSS 5 'advertorial'

DF has turned into the Games journalism equivalent of the Daily Mail, proudly displaying its bias on its sleeve, and thats fine as long as it is made clear to the audience.

And before anyone jumps on my comment claiming I am a 'fanboi' for one or other Corporation, I have a draw full of GPUs from both GPU companies going all the way back to the HD4850, my first proper 'GPU' was a Geforce 2 GTS.

Re: Forza Horizon 6 PC: Our Optimised Settings for Mainstream, Mid-Range and High-End Systems

Obsidian76

@Magnumstache

Indeed the hot fix patch seems to have sortef the problems.

I still stand by my criticism of testing exclusively on NV. Especially given the price differential between for example the 9070xt (£599) and the 5070ti (£829), DLSS/FG etc is great (not so much FG imho), but its not worth the £200 premium over a card in the same peformance tier, especially in current market conditions for DRAM and Storage.

@Rich_Leadbetter and co, could always ask me to consider doing some testing on my 9800x3d/9070xt and/or my 5800x3d/4070ti Super systems if they really cannot aquire an AMD card and/or don't have the capacity to do the additional testing.

Can DF really afford to alienate potential paying subscribers?

Re: 007 Tech Secrets From Our First Light Deep Dive: Why Series S Is 30fps, How It Hits 60fps Elsewhere and Much More

Obsidian76

@Rich_Leadbetter

I understood DF has an ongoing back and forth with various developers.

Tbh, I lost all interest in James Bond related media once the 'franchise' was flogged to Amazon.

But,

Hopefully you will get a coherent answer about this decision to integrate FSR into the executable instead of following AMDs developers guidance for implementing FSR 3.1.5 + via DLL.

Be great if you could ask them if the future PT 'upgrade' will be vendor locked?

The suspicion over on the Guru3d forums is that this is a result of the sponsorship/marketing deal with NV

This is starting to become a pattern of vendor locks and missing features on recent major releases on PC. Which is not good for gamers.

Resident Evil Requiem: PT vendor locked / standard RT visuals downgraded missing shadows for example, + not implementing an agnostic denoiser for PT

Pragamata: PT vendor locked / standard RT visuals downgraded (missing shadows for example) + not implementing an agnostic denoiser for PT

FH6, FG exclusive to NV 40/50 series by developers not implementing either vendor agnostic FG tech.

(Its not as though NV do not have a long and documented history of specialising in anti- consumer practices going all the way back to its implemention of Physx by using x87 instructions for the CPU pathway to make their GPUs look more performant than if they had used SSE for the CPU path, and then implementing a driver level block on using a secondary NV card to accelerate Physx when the primary card was ATI/AMD)

Re: It's Time To Say Goodbye To The Ryzen 5 3600

Obsidian76

9800x3d on X870E, 5800x3d on X570 (awaiting move to second system) 5800x on x470 in second system, 3700x on B450 in third system (will get 5800x, might rebuild server with this (server 1 using athlon x3)

If DF are updating the test/optimisation systems, please add an RX 9700xt.

Ta

Re: Review: Death Stranding 2 PC: The Last Big Sony Single-Player PS5 Port?

Obsidian76

@Rich_Leadbetter

Maybe I should have been clearer, the optimised settings are of 'no help' to me on my 9070xt system (not my 4070ti super system, (currently with 5800x/x470/16gb Ram, awaiting swap with 5800x3d/x570/32gb Ram) where the DF optimised settings are useful as they can help hit my target frame rates of 72 - 138 hz (4k 144hz VRR display))

On the same display with the same frame rate target, using the 9070xt which is on 9800x3d/X870E/32gb Ram (replaced aforementioned 5800x3d), using PS5 equivalent settings is just leaving potential quality (i.e. not having to use FG, or having higher graphics settings or running at 4k native or Quality FSR4.1 rather than (with or without using optiscaler) dlss performance at my target frame rate) and performance improvements on the table.

Sure some of that can be down to the uplift in cpu performance by moving from Am4 to Am5/Zen 3 to Zen5.

I mean if I was happy with PS5 level quality and performance, my Series X would not be gathering dust as a glorified but rarely used Blu ray player.

What I would like to see in the future, post LLM bubble, from DF or others are PC optimisation guides/reviews that included recommended highest quality settings for targeting a minimum of 60fps (120fps with FGx2) on all three GPU manufacturer's / Both CPU companies (possibly Arm as well, with the N1X et al) at 1080p/1440p/4k for PC rather than just catering to the lowest common denominator.

But as it stands for the 9070xt system, wacking every setting up to ultra or higher works with my frame rate target in 90% of the games I play.

So as I said the optimised settings serve well enough for the 4070ti super system, which I thank DF for.

Re: Review: Death Stranding 2 PC: The Last Big Sony Single-Player PS5 Port?

Obsidian76

@Rich_Leadbetter

"RTX 4070 Ti - our contributor Rayan tests graphics performance on this because it has the Nvidia feature set and the 16GB of RAM"

4070 Ti has 12GB Vram, are you sure you don't mean the 4070 Ti Super which does have 16GB Vram (which I own)? Or was the reference to 16 GB of Ram a reference to the system Ram?

With the spec difference between the 4070 Ti Super vs 4070 Ti non Super a clarification would be good.

Where are the Radeon cards such as the 9070xt (which I also own) in your PC performance/optimised settings articles?

Many times I have tried DFs optimised settings that are okay ish, on my 4070 Ti Super system, yet are no help for the more performant 9070xt system which can usually run games with much higher graphics settings and resolution than the former.

I have been gaming on the PC since the early 1990s (before that, home computers like Atari St, BBC B and Ti 99/4a) and I really had hoped that features locked to one vendor or another would have been consigned to history 30 years on and it would no longer be necessary to maintain two systems for gaming because of hardware companies and game developers anti consumer practices (which they are all guilty of at one time or another)