Well, anachronism most literally means “misplaced in time.” You can go two directions with that, something being more at home in the future or more at home in the past. The former obviously doesn’t apply here, and I would consider my wording identical to the latter. A reduction in belonging implies a reduction in commonness.
I’m not worried about the tech going away so much as the market percentage dropping to make enthusiast hardware more niche. Among other things, it makes enshittification in the space harder to fight.
Except even among most current PC gamers, the threshold isn’t that high. 4K is still less than 5% of the market.
Also, I’d argue “anachronism” isn’t the same as “pointless.” It’s just claiming that something that was once more common will become less common.
I don’t think the greater power of larger devices is being questioned. There just happens to be a threshold where a technically inferior but more accessible solution becomes “good enough” for most people that they never consider moving up.
Just look at mobile devices. Of everyone who accesses the internet, 75% do so via smartphone only. As someone who doesn’t even like desktops losing ground to laptops, that statistic scares me.
If you have meat or dairy items in your fridge, those can become unsafe to eat after only 2 hours. Since the cold air is more dense, it spills out the bottom of the fridge and gets replaced by room temperature air rather quickly. I’ve definitely eaten my fair share of questionable foods going past this, but the calculus changes if you’re giving that food to other people.
As for the main point, agreed. I’m definitely not a luddite, but if I had kids who weren’t yet responsible enough to not leave a fridge open for hours, I think I’d just put child locks on the fridge and make sure they had access to something else.
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I wish dynamic support for user preferences was more of a thing. I like really dense displays of information with small text. Basically, the more a UI resembles a spreadsheet the better. Mobile interfaces almost universally have far too much white space for my taste, so I’m one of those people that’s pretty much always going to want the PDF even on a phone screen. I recognize why that would suck for a lot of people though.
Short rant: Your first sentence touches on a microcosm of a much larger problem. Nuance and context are disappearing everywhere. As far as threats to society go, it’s in my number one spot, and we really need more people actively dismantling it like this, so thanks.
Yeah, there’s a fair bit of criticism about the tech being better for the higher-end cards that shouldn’t need it in the first place. Another way this shows up is in VRAM amounts.
To ELI5, how effective FG is at improving the base frame rate scales with available VRAM. (Think 60 improved to 80 versus 60 improved to 120.) Some modern games hit 12GB regularly now even in 1080p and before any fancy tech. (There’s a separate discussion on game optimization in there.) Since lower-end cards really skimp on provided VRAM (every tier should really be at least 4GB higher), there’s not much space there for FG to work with in the first place.
I’m not OP, but thanks for spelling that out. I guess I must have seen a bunch of tech stuff from that instance starting out. I was under the impression it was started by Machine Learning enthusiasts. Lol.
Yeah, the price parity thing seems to be a big misconception here especially. The price parity guideline comes from Valve’s page for Steam keys. Valve gets a 0% cut when keys are sold on third-party sites, yet they still use Valve’s infrastructure, so it makes sense for Valve to not want you to price them to have all your key sales go third-party.
As far as I can tell, Valve has zero interest in how you sell copies of a game that don’t use Steam keys.
Also something I noticed per their guidelines:
It’s OK to run a discount for Steam Keys on different stores at different times as long as you plan to give a comparable offer to Steam customers within a reasonable amount of time.
As a frequent user of IsThereAnyDeal, I can tell you it’s more common than not for a game’s historical low price to not be on Steam, so Valve is definitely not strictly enforcing this. With this and the lack of legalese on the page and letting developers/publishers determine what “similar” and “comparable” are on their own terms, I’m not seeing anything Valve should be doing differently here.
I never called it reasonable. I just don’t think it’s especially egregious. Honestly, I would price the value of Valve’s contribution (which is definitely not zero) at maybe 15% to 20%, but that’s just a gut feeling.
I’m not saying the standard doesn’t suck, just taking issue with the implication that anyone using it is uniquely bad to do so.
But yeah, you’re right that getting me to admit Steam (overall) sucks would be nigh impossible. I genuinely don’t believe it does, so there’s nothing to admit. Maybe you could convince me to lie about it though? Lol.
I do admit there’s a few places it sucks, the gambling stuff being the biggest, but their positives eclipse those for me. I also acknowledge I’m in a privileged position being able to enjoy Valve’s efforts in VR, Linux compatibility, etc. directly and that I might have different opinions if I was on the outside looking in. I imagine that’s not quite the admission you want though.
30% is the industry standard though, and Valve’s contributions of distribution and discovery infrastructure, its audience, and expanding hardware initiatives are not nothing. If you’re not pricing a game to give yourself a healthy margin within the 70% or your development model doesn’t make that viable, that’s really on you.
The Ventoy thing reminds me of my minimalist setup:
I have done geocaching and I’ve got a Steam Deck, so I may be borrowing the pen and adapter ideas, though I’ll probably keep the adapter with the Deck.
I’d add that “requirement” is relative. My city’s bus system has stops near enough to cover my home and work, so you could say a car is not required for the route. However, using the bus system would turn my 20 minute (10 minutes one way) daily commute into 3 hours. That’s just too impractical to consider.
Yeah, it’s actually been kind of a relief to have fewer new games to look forward to every year. I have a backlog of something like 700 unplayed games already in my library. I know I’m not going to play them all as much as they deserve before I die, but being able to make a much bigger dent in them is nice.
Mostly agreed. For me the actual biggest problem here is Nvidia presenting this as the assumed default experience everyone obviously wants and using a heavily genericized face as a win. The tech needs to be much more energy efficient and configurable on both the developer and end-user side before I’ll give it any serious attention.
Regarding future versions of this tech, I think “death of the author” still applies to video games, so changing artistic intent isn’t always bad, especially for games that get frequently replayed. I certainly don’t play stock Skyrim or Minecraft anymore. To use your example, yes, a photorealistic (attempt of) Ocarina of Time would probably be too off-putting, but give me style options like BotW, Spiderverse, Pixar, anime, etc.? I’d be down to try those.
So, I actually like generative AI (disclaimer I feel I have to include every time: local open models only), and my main problem with that image is how genericized the new face is. If you’ve seen a lot of AI images, it’s immediately recognizable as the default mixed Asian/Caucasian face you get when not prompting something more specific than “woman” due to the datasets dominating the training data. It heavily implies all faces will be similarly genericized.
I don’t think this tech will be viable unless creators can give the AI a reference image of what a character should look like when photorealistic, and that’s just going to increase the workload of running this in realtime.
I definitely think graphical fidelity is “good enough” now, but there’s still quite a bit of advancement available in other areas still drawing on the CPU and GPU, VR and local AI being a couple. I’ve been all in on VR since the Vive, and while I reject corporate AI as much as most people here, I do run local models occasionally and would like to have NPCs using the tech.