Poll: Do you care about ray tracing / upscaling?

marees · Mar 12, 2025

A review of fake pixels tech

00:00 - Intro (How does Optiscaler and FSR4 work)
02:23 - Cyberpunk 2077 - FSR 4 vs 3.1.3 vs 2.1
12:12 - How to Install Optiscaler FSR 4
12:57 - Black Myth: Wukong - FSR 4 vs 3.1.3
18:19 - Silent Hill 2 - FSR 4 vs 3.1.3 vs 2.1
23:24 - Final Thoughts
24:47 - Channel Members
25:07 - More Videos

Ranulf · Mar 12, 2025

Well, the battle of egos continues. Threat Interactive vs Digital Foundry. The video title itself throws down the gauntlet: "Why you should unsubscribe from Digital Foundry"

This just made me laugh, given DF's rather pro Nvidia past:

MrTeal · Mar 12, 2025

Ranulf said:
Well, the battle of egos continues. Threat Interactive vs Digital Foundry. The video title itself throws down the gauntlet: "Why you should unsubscribe from Digital Foundry"

This just made me laugh, given DF's rather pro Nvidia past:

LOL... Who is this guy, and why did DF kill his puppy?

Ranulf · Mar 13, 2025

MrTeal said:
LOL... Who is this guy, and why did DF kill his puppy?

There is definately no love lost between the two at this point.

GaiaHunter · Mar 13, 2025

I was watching one of those late night shows clips on youtube, and they do a bit where they go out and let people sample one of those single strawberries sold for $20.

People go on and on gushing how they are the best strawberries ever.

Then they tell them to sample a regular supermarket strawberry. Yikes, you can really tell the difference, they say.

They were strawberries from the same box.

Still don't care about upscaling. I can lower settings/resolution myself.

RT will be the present when it is implemented sensibly alongside other techniques with minimal performance penalty.

Edit:

DAPUNISHER · Mar 13, 2025

Ranulf said:
There is definitely no love lost between the two at this point.

I have not been coaching this young man, I swear. Well done calling out those who employ the worst fallacies with nothing else to back it up. Laser focused shots fired too. Fake optimizations indeed. LOL'd at "Alex and his Nvidia babysitter"

We observe DF's shilling around here frequently. He explains in detail why it's shilling and how they go about it. Laments that they are spreading ignorance. Does it all with an air of righteous indignation, and I'm here for it. The guilty must be punished 💀

GaiaHunter said:
I was watching one of those late night shows clips on youtube, and they do a bit where they go out and let people sample one of those single strawberries sold for $20.

People go on and on gushing how they are the best strawberries ever.

Then they tell them to sample a regular supermarket strawberry. Yikes, you can really tell the difference, they say.

They were strawberries from the same box.

On Penn and Teller's Bull💩they did it with regular vs organic bananas. They also got people to sign a petition to ban dihydrogen monoxide. It is a great analogy for whatever Nvidia's tech du jour is.

GTracing · Mar 13, 2025

Ranulf said:
Well, the battle of egos continues. Threat Interactive vs Digital Foundry. The video title itself throws down the gauntlet: "Why you should unsubscribe from Digital Foundry"

This just made me laugh, given DF's rather pro Nvidia past:

View attachment 119671

I don't know enough about graphics rendering and game development to know if this guy is right or not, but his tone is really off-putting. It's like he's trying to be obnoxious.

He's quoting fallacies like a college freshman who just learned about them. "first of all, this is the red herring fallacy. The name of this fallacy originates from fox hunts, where one team would use the strong odor of a dead fish to distract the tracking hounds of the opposing team" ... "that is the ad hominem fallacy" ... "all of which fall under ad hominem or red herring" ... "ad misericordiam" ... "appeal to celebrity".

coercitiv · Mar 13, 2025

GTracing said:
I don't know enough about graphics rendering and game development to know if this guy is right or not, but his tone is really off-putting. It's like he's trying to be obnoxious.

He is obnoxious, but there are things he says on the way TAA is enforced in modern games that should raise an eyebrow or two.

On this forum we usually comment how one game has better TAA implementation that another, but what if there's also a difference in the quality of rendering too? Maybe it's time to ask ourselves how do modern games look like with TAA disabled.

DAPUNISHER · Mar 13, 2025

GTracing said:
I don't know enough about graphics rendering and game development to know if this guy is right or not, but his tone is really off-putting. It's like he's trying to be obnoxious.

He's quoting fallacies like a college freshman who just learned about them. "first of all, this is the red herring fallacy. The name of this fallacy originates from fox hunts, where one team would use the strong odor of a dead fish to distract the tracking hounds of the opposing team" ... "that is the ad hominem fallacy" ... "all of which fall under ad hominem or red herring" ... "ad misericordiam" ... "appeal to celebrity".

The irony is delicious. The above employs the shooting the messenger and ad hominem fallacies. Debating well ensures the level of decorum in a discussion remains high. Winning a debate with an intelligent person is difficult. Winning a debate with an oxygen thief that relies on the worst fallacies is nigh impossible. I commend him for understanding and utilizing proper debate skills.

On topic: The talking points are indeed moving to path tracing as the sales pitch, since AMD is more competitive in other areas.

DAPUNISHER · Mar 13, 2025

Hey, maybe you can't play old PhysX games with your shiny new 50 series without terribad fps. But you can play old games with RTX. The latest update

Ranulf · Mar 13, 2025

Ahh yes, the RTX rejuvination. Also known as, lets just make the game brighter even if the original design was meant to be dark and foreboding. See 32 seconds in. But hey, 270 fps vs 310 fps with nicer bricks at 1m7s. Amazing. Simply amazing. Totally worth $500 with 12GB of vram.

Edit: Nvidia acting as the plastic surgeon of graphics.

DAPUNISHER · Mar 13, 2025

Ranulf said:
Ahh yes, the RTX rejuvination. Also known as, lets just make the game brighter even if the original design was meant to be dark and foreboding. See 32 seconds in. But hey, 270 fps vs 310 fps with nicer bricks at 1m7s. Amazing. Simply amazing. Totally worth $500 with 12GB of vram.

I don't have an issue with it. As long as the OG is still available. Some new PCMR member getting to leverage their fancy new GPU to play old games with a new coat of paint is a good thing as I see it. They updated character models and such too. It looks different enough to maybe feel kind of fresh? I have to play it before deciding if I think it sucks or not.

Hitman928 · Mar 13, 2025

DAPUNISHER said:
I don't have an issue with it. As long as the OG is still available. Some new PCMR member getting to leverage their fancy new GPU to play old games with a new coat of paint is a good thing as I see it. They updated character models and such too. It looks different enough to maybe feel kind of fresh? I have to play it before deciding if I think it sucks or not.

I think comparing it to bad plastic surgery is pretty apt. Technically it's newer, smoother, fresher, but it completely changes the aesthetics, sometimes to the point where it's unrecognizable from the original. That doesn't mean it sucks, but a lot of times, keeping the original, wrinkles and all, looks better (main gripe here being the RTRT addition, not the updated textures, models, etc.). The first thing I noticed was what @Ranulf pointed out, changing out the baked lighting for RT in those Ravenholm scenes completely ruined the mood/atmosphere that made that level so good in the original. Other places it probably looks really good, but that's the problem with these RT facelifts, the games were made by very talented artists to look very specific ways that just gets washed out when changing everything to RT.

DAPUNISHER · Mar 13, 2025

That's been the best argument against RT from the outset i.e. artists not being able to share their vision with the gamer. More accurate lighting does not mean better. Movies heavily manipulate lighting constantly for effect.

I am enjoying what rt is doing for GTA 5 so I'll approach it on a game by game basis. Besides I can always go back and revisit the OG. Now, if they take the OG away like Star Wars did, then we go to war.

Hitman928 · Mar 13, 2025

DAPUNISHER said:
That's been the best argument against RT from the outset i.e. artists not being able to share their vision with the gamer. More accurate lighting does not mean better. Movies heavily manipulate lighting constantly for effect.

I am enjoying what rt is doing for GTA 5 so I'll approach it on a game by game basis. Besides I can always go back and revisit the OG. Now, if they take the OG away like Star Wars did, then we go to war.

OT but apparently there was a short window where you could watch the theatrical release of the original Star Wars before it got taken down.

SolidQ · Mar 14, 2025

9070XT vs 7900XTX RT
Quake 2 RTX also here

DAPUNISHER · Mar 14, 2025

Well I didn't think it would get worse, but it gets worse

Mopetar · Mar 14, 2025

That must suck to play on a 5070 where the effective frame rate responding to input is 20 FPS even though it says it's running at 120 FPS.

Teetotaler gamers can finally understand what it's like to be drunk in the real world.

MrTeal · Mar 14, 2025

Mopetar said:
That must suck to play on a 5070 where the effective frame rate responding to input is 20 FPS even though it says it's running at 120 FPS.

Teetotaler gamers can finally understand what it's like to be drunk in the real world.

It'd be nice if we got DLSS on but FG off. I'm guessing the frame rate in that case is somewhere around 45-50. That doesn't look like as amazing a jump for the slide though.

DAPUNISHER · Mar 16, 2025

DF crew pimping RTX Half Life 2. I have to say it is an entertaining video. The differences are neat to see compared the way they are doing it playthrough style. They are using the OG HL2 from John's DVD not the orange box version.

Ranulf · Mar 17, 2025

Saw this over on Hardforum,

https://twitter.com/x/status/1900193825106067701

Digital Foundry guys get the brilliant idea that they should maybe test games on new hardware in the ways people actually play the games. From the video, 33min or so start, quote from the 35min mark: "An anti-benchmark review where you are deliberately ignoring the concept of apples to apples testing because it is not really relevent to the consumer experience".

marees · Mar 17, 2025

Ranulf said:
Saw this over on Hardforum,

https://twitter.com/x/status/1900193825106067701

Digital Foundry guys get the brilliant idea that they should maybe test games on new hardware in the ways people actually play the games. From the video, 33min or so start, quote from the 35min mark: "An anti-benchmark review where you are deliberately ignoring the concept of apples to apples testing because it is not really relevent to the consumer experience".

A good idea. To make that approach successful you would need to

Test against equivalent card from competitor at same settings
Test vs prev gen card & show what settings you have to reduce for acceptable gameplay
Test vs next higher tier card & show what settings can now be increased (or if same settings then how much improved the fps is)

coercitiv · Mar 17, 2025

Ranulf said:
Digital Foundry guys get the brilliant idea that they should maybe test games on new hardware in the ways people actually play the games. From the video, 33min or so start, quote from the 35min mark: "An anti-benchmark review where you are deliberately ignoring the concept of apples to apples testing because it is not really relevent to the consumer experience".

Sounds like a great idea if the cards involved would be bought and paid in full by the journalist, through regular channels, to fully emulate the consumer experience.

marees said:
Test against equivalent card from competitor at same settings

The whole idea is to not use the same settings, but use the best features each product has to offer.

GTracing · Mar 17, 2025

Ranulf said:
Saw this over on Hardforum,

https://twitter.com/x/status/1900193825106067701

Digital Foundry guys get the brilliant idea that they should maybe test games on new hardware in the ways people actually play the games. From the video, 33min or so start, quote from the 35min mark: "An anti-benchmark review where you are deliberately ignoring the concept of apples to apples testing because it is not really relevent to the consumer experience".

To be fair, all reviewers do this to some extent, and from what I've seen Digital Foundry does it more than most reviewers. In their Halflife 2 RTX video that was shared above, they mess with the settings and show how it affects fps. Their Indiana Jones Tech Review video basically takes this concept and applies it to a single game.

The issue with the "anti-benchmark" approach is the comparisons quickly becomes too abstract to be useful. You might have a game where optimal settings for the RTX 5070 are DLSS4 performance, ultra ray tracing, and high textures. And optimal settings for the 9070XT are FSR4 quality, high ray tracing, and ultra textures. Which graphics card offers a better experience?

I think keeping things as apples-to-apples as possible is best, at least for launch day reviews.

Mopetar · Mar 17, 2025

Anti-benchmark is somewhat necessary because the benchmarks aren't reflecting real world performance or because companies are cheating them.

If you only benchmark for 30 seconds of game play the results may not capture problems that only appear after a few minutes when VRAM becomes completely full and the game spills textures into main memory and needs to load over the PCIe bus.

There have also been numerous examples where games were downgrading texture quality to keep frame rates high. The data is worthless in those cases because it's no longer the same Ultra quality.

Benchmarking is still a useful tool and should be included in most reviews, but it's more important than ever to ensure that it's properly done and that the results are useful and accurate for consumers.

Poll: Do you care about ray tracing / upscaling?

Senior member

Platinum Member

Diamond Member

Platinum Member

Diamond Member

Super Moderator CPU Forum Mod and Elite Member

Senior member

Diamond Member

Super Moderator CPU Forum Mod and Elite Member

Super Moderator CPU Forum Mod and Elite Member

Platinum Member

Super Moderator CPU Forum Mod and Elite Member

Diamond Member

Super Moderator CPU Forum Mod and Elite Member

Diamond Member

Golden Member

Super Moderator CPU Forum Mod and Elite Member

Diamond Member

Diamond Member

Super Moderator CPU Forum Mod and Elite Member

Platinum Member

Senior member

Diamond Member

Senior member

Diamond Member