Seriously, in 2021 this shit may have been semi clever but holy hell how much longer are we going to keep resposting the same garbage over and over again?

Over the last years higher end scene is freaking out about PT, and how it should be the next step in game graphics, how its "physically accurate" and shit. Now, after playing a couple of games, both the ones with or without that technology. Ive been also passionate about basics of rendering pipelines, and how it all works on technical side, and came to the conclusion that doesnt align with mainstream movement.

Lets take a "flagship" PT title, Cyberpunk 2077. It is a title that benefits from the technology the most, as number of reflections and indirect lighting combined with sheer amount of dynamic light sources + night and day cycle makes it very difficult for rasterised lighting to capture how the scene would behave convincingly. But even this game has very visible seams to accomodate the fully raytraced pipeline. Because the lighting is calculated solely by boucing light off geometry in the scene X number of times, the game cannot and doesnt use Paralax Occlusion mapping. Therefore all surfaces that should be rough (ground, asphalt, trash, gravel, planks, there is more of them that you would think) are unrealistically flat, and immedially give away that this is a game. Additionally the game's LOD are very restricted and cause noticeable pop in to save performance, and trying to replace default 1024p enviromental textures on PT ends with running out of VRAM even on my high end machine, solely because of how PT is eating it for BVH tree. Volumetric fog also doesnt affect the lighting (it can only be illuminated, it cant for example occlude objects in reflection or carry the light and convincingly diffuse it) because again, its not included i BVH. All of those seams + upscaling, denoiser and dissoclusion artifacts are signs of shortcuts taken to accomodate the lighting model, which immedially throws out of the immersion and destroys "wow this looks like real life" impression.

On the other hand we have RDR2. A title that today finishes 8 years (happy birthday!) and relies on the best that rastered lighting has to offer. And this is a game that truly immerses, and causes "wow this looks like real life" feeling. The game has amazing shadowmaps with very good proprietary Rockstar's distance softening solution to mimic numbras and prenumbras, baked in large scale ambient occlusion combined with dynamic SSAO, reflections reliant on SSR + Enviromental cubemaps generated for every frame, probe based GI and top tier volumetric system used not only for dense fog and clouds, but for general light diffuse in wet air/haze too. Its a good, competent lighting model - not physically accurate one tho.

This lighting model however is very light to run compared to PT. It does not clog the VRAM and doesnt cost 10ms to calculate all by itself. It allowed me to double the game's geometry and grass LODs, contributing to pop - in free experience. The game easily swallowed 2k textures with 1024 POMs, making surfaces very realistic and bumpy, the volumetrics are able to affect SSR, heck, they can diffuse shadowmaps, or cast shadows themselves. It has much better image quality, due to allowing me to use DLSS Q in 4k or DLAA at 1440p (instead of 960p/1080p needed in cyberpunk), with far less artifacts. This contributes to the game looking convincing in all circumstances, not just when looking at puddles and being stationary.

I think the general direction of game graphics should be to improve in all areas, not just the lighting at the cost of everything else. Anybody else agree?

so as the titles says i have this weird problem that make zero sense. could be a virus but im not sure. i would appreciate some help

Given the time we are living in right now, many users can consider building their PCs around parts ready to fit in with high-end parts but later on. This is a niche case, but not impossible. Not saying this is the way to go, but if you plan on getting a high-end power hungry gpu later on then an investment into a high-end PSU right now is not particularly a bad idea.

There's an economic supply-demand logic at play here. Now the GPU demand from consumers is lower and so the higher end PSU demand will also be low. Because PSUs are less affected by the AI-boom, the lower demand will drive down the prices. If the buyers wait to upgrade PSUs later when the AI boom is over, the higher demand of GPUs after a price fall will also drive up the higher-end PSU prices up.

Say you build a brand new AM4 build with an R7 5800X3D and get a brand new 4K monitor too, with this PSU but for now, get a lower end GPU brand new or second hand.

I truly feel that the bubble will pop soon within 3-4 months when the general mass and shareholder finally realise that their $100B investment (for example) is returning them $20B or so. Anthropic's financial data is a clue. The immediate reaction by shareholders will be to 'halt' further investment. Investment by AI-companies is made by creating new AI-Datacentres too. You know, the ones that contributes to drying out a whole region off water and creates noise pollution preventing kids from getting a good night's sleep. The conditional portions of contracts they have with the memory making companies will be put to a pause or cancelled and thereby the future shipments that they are conditionally contracted for the AI-companies under scrutiny will be also halted. And this is what will drive more NAND-chips shipments to other markets - for us, the PC users. There's already too much stock of RAMs and SSDs on store shelves right now at egregious prices as the memory making companies play the patience-game with us consumers; and more people continuing to not buy them will create a bigger backlog in their warehouse where they are piling up on their greed. When the AI-fad fades away, these users can buy the higher-end GPUs to complement the rest of their build. Because unfortunately, GPUs are also heavily affected by the memory-flation.

We endured the mining-boom back in the day; we can endure and be patient throughout this period too.

As a gamer who owns both a PC and a PS5, sometimes I have to think about where I want to buy a new game. Sometimes I don't have to think too hard though...

“NVIDIA has denied reports that the GeForce RTX 5090 has been discontinued. However, new information from an unnamed board partner suggests the company is no longer accepting orders for the GPU and memory packages needed to manufacture the graphics card. The source claims that even backorders, which NVIDIA previously allowed during supply shortages, are unavailable.”

“The information comes from Roman Hartung, better known as der8auer, who contacted NVIDIA and sources within its supply chain.”

I’ve recently purchased a pc second hand and when I signed on to the computer it pulls up this prompt.

I have all the information from the purchase, screenshots of everything, the persons name and phone number, the transaction history I made, and the listing I bought it from, I feel uncomfortable knowing this may be a stolen computer and want to figure it out, the person I bought it from says he has no idea what it is and claims the computer has been fully paid off, I want to trust him but the prompt says it may be stolen, I’m still in contact with the person and they say they would give me my money back for the computer but I wouldn’t want to do that if they plan on trying to scam someone else. I would just like this situation figured out and resolved. I’ve reached out to this Fragile company and am waiting to hear back.

* the person I bought it from did a factory reset before it was given to me, a friend thinks it may be a feature to prevent theft but I don’t know if that’s right, any information will help

source is digital foundrys Patreon which cant be linked

Found this crazy X79 rig sitting at a local thrift store for $33 CAD after tax, and I’m still blown away by what was inside.

Specs: ​Case: Thermaltake Level 10 GT Snow Edition (BMW DesignworksUSA) ​Motherboard: ASUS Rampage IV Extreme (LGA 2011 X79) ​CPU: Intel Core i7-3820 ​RAM: 16GB Corsair Quad-Channel DDR3 ​GPU: NVIDIA GTX 550 Ti (Rare 2GB GDDR5 Variant) ​PSU: Corsair Professional Series Gold AX750 ​Storage: 500GB SATA OS Drive + 4TB HDD ​Performance & Usage: Running Skyrim Special Edition smooth at 1080p (~36 FPS average, CPU sitting super cool around 52°C)

Estimate 10-15% IPC uplift.

Novalake Core Ultra 400 will support it, Zen 6 will not, but Zen 7 will.

It's been hours and I've tried a lot of things. I tried heating it up with a hairdryer and twisting it and moving it side to side, it's doesn't even move a millimeter, like the CPU has been molded into the heatsink itself. I tried using the floss and Razer Blade method where you slide them under the corner of the chip after heating the chip and heatsink, but AMD's stock thermal paste is so tightly stuck that there is not space to get the blade or the floss under the CPU. And yes, I pre-heated the PC very thoroughly before trying to remove the heatsink and I was even trying to twist the heatsink to remove i rather then pulling it but it the Zcpu still came out with the heatsink and now I know why, because it is impossibly stuck to heatsink. I don't think there was any way I could've removed the heatsink without the CPU.

I built this Ryzen 3700x PC 6 years ago, never had temp problems before taking it apart I ran stress tests, and my Idel temp was 60C and during the test, it was 75C. But I started having heating issues with the GPU so I thought I should also replace the thermal paste on the CPU while I'm at it. Where I live, there's a lot of dust, and because I didn't expect CPU to come off with the heatsink since I followed every precaution, some of the dust that was caked onto the heatsink fell onto the CPU socket on the mother board. It's inside the pin holes.

This is a terrible situation for me, so if someone with experience can help me with how to remove the CPU that is extremely stuck to the heatsink, and the best way to clean the dirt from the CPU socket on the motherboard so it doesn't cause any problems in the future, It will be a huge help for me.

Please help me out.