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.

They’re not stock, but both GIMP and Krita have had generative AI plugins for a couple years now. I don’t know how well they match up to the Adobe stuff, but they seemed quite powerful and well-integrated the last time I looked.

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’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.

Dang. I guess I’m more disconnected from the average consumer than I thought. My 48" has felt like plenty for even a good size living room for a while, and I’m used to 32" monitors and 7" phones, so it’s not like I prefer smaller screens. I had to go and fact check that 65" being the most popular. If you had asked me beforehand, I would have thought 55" was pushing it.

It looks like the other side needs a bit more representation here. I’m late 30’s. While I’ve had the occasional wine with friends and family, I’ve never been drunk and have no plans to change that. I’ve also never done drugs unless you count stuff like caffeine. I guess my rule of thumb is if a substance makes me not me, I don’t want it.

In case you’re not being hyperbolic (or for anyone else legitimately thinking this because I’ve heard it multiple times), I think Valve really did the best thing they could. I know Valve feels huge, but MasterCard and Visa together are over a hundred times bigger, and any payment processing system Valve could make would definitely be a pushover.

Also, never underestimate the casual normie population. If Valve lost Visa and MasterCard support, I’m pretty sure that would mean losing two-thirds of their playerbase if not more. Those people would either prop up alternative stores like Epic or Microslop’s or just pull away from PC gaming altogether.

Anyway, it’s a bit like the people saying Valve should make their own DRAM to combat the shortage. It doesn’t acknowledge how entrenched the existing manufacturers are and how far away Valve actually is from that level of manufacturing.