NekuSoul
I’ve been trying to find some better/original sources [1] [2] [3] and from what I can gather it’s even worse. It’s not even an upscaler of any kind, it apparently uses an NPU just to control clocks and fan speeds to reduce power draw, dropping FPS by ~10% in the process.
So yeah, I’m not really sure why they needed an NPU to figure out that running a GPU at its limit has always been wildly inefficient. Outside of getting that investor money of course.
I see. That I can mostly agree with. I really don’t like the temporal artifacts that come with TAA either, though it’s not a deal-breaker for me if the game hides it well.
A few tidbits I’d like to note though:
they announce them way too early, so people are waiting like 2-3 years for it.
Agree. It’s kind of insane how early some games are being announced in advance. That said, 2-3 years back then was the time it took for a game to get a sequel. Nowadays you often have to wait an entire console-cycle for a sequel to come out instead of getting a trilogy of games on during one.
Games shouldn’t be relying on them and their trade-offs are not worth it
Which trade-offs are you alluding to? Assuming a halfway decent implementation, DLSS 2+ in particular often yields a better image quality than even native resolution with no visible artifacts, so I turn it on even if my GPU can handle a game just fine, even if just to save a few watts.
The quality of games has dropped a lot, they make them fast
Isn’t the public opinion that games take way too long to make nowadays? They certainly don’t make them fast anymore.
As for the rest, I also can’t really agree. IMO, graphics have taken a huge jump in recent years, even outside of RT. Lighting, texture quality shaders, as well as object density and variety have been getting a noticeable bump. Other than the occasional dud and awful shader compilation stutter that has plagued many PC games over the last few years (but is getting more awareness now) I’d argue that game performance is pretty good for most games right now.
That’s why I see techniques like DLSS/FSR/XeSS/TSR not as crutch, but as just as one of the dozen other rendering shortcuts game engines have accumulated over the years. That said, it’s not often we see a new technique deliver such a big performance boost while having almost no visual impact.
Also, who decided that ‘we’ would rather have games looking like Skyrim? While I do like high FPS very much, I also do like shiny graphics with all the bells and whistles. A Game like ‘The Talos Principle 2’ for example does hammer the GPU quite a bit on its highest settings, but it certainly delivers in the graphics department. So much so that I’ve probably spent as much time admiring the highly detailed environments as I did actually solving the puzzles.
(like do I seriously need No Man’s Sky installed all the time for the once every three months that I play it?)
That sound’s like the data is in semi-regular use at least. For me it’s more like “Do I seriously need the sequel installed for that other game I haven’t even started yet, but am definitely going to start any day now, after years of having it installed?”.
It was the early days of homebrew when there wasn’t much information out there and the tools were much less advanced. I didn’t really care about the risk either, so it could’ve been anything. I wasn’t immediately banned either. Took about half a year or so.
But yeah, emulation can pretty run all the relevant titles, meaning the exclusives, much better than the Switch itself.
Yeah, I pretty much hopped on it as soon as it was hacked so there wasn’t much knowledge of what could lead to bans. Granted, at that point I was already a bit dissatisfied with the Switch, so I went in fully aware of the risks and not really being afraid of the risk. I even had a preorder running that I got locked out of, though luckily enough, that got a PC port not soon after.
It was similar for me, except that Nintendo made the decision for me by prevening me from purchasing (or downloading) any game from the eShop. Of course, it wasn’t entirely unexpected to get banned since I also hacked mine in order to dump my games and transfer saves for games I owned on PC and Switch.
Still, since Nintendo apparently didn’t want to have a customer and the SteamDeck was announced shortly after I jumped ship day one and only turned the Switch on once again to transfer my saves back.