Jess Birch @shivoa@mastodon.gamedev.place

Getting an OLED really has changed my quality demands for the media I consume. I am now dividing local services into those that care to get things like black levels correct for their streaming video & those who don't care about the content they provide (so are not worth using, even if they offer a $1 price or earlier access to certain content).

I do not understand cosmetic economies. Obviously, if you could directly buy anything, for a decent value, you would buy the stuff you wanted the most (in a price tier) first & maybe not have anything to "work towards" in a live game (unless ongoing content previews have you interested). But eg Avengers has a random loot box (each month carries a different subset of possible cosmetics) that you can buy a hundred of (guaranteeing one named cosmetic) for less than 1 store "rare" cosmetic.

While I get the push for zero-power dGPU on the desktop to provide battery life, I do wonder if 2 RDNA2 CUs for laptops isn't forcing gaming output down the PCI-E bus or installing a display mux when actually what you want is a mobile dGPU rework to make them even more power-efficient when driven at low speeds. Rather than dropping a different arch [vs nVidia or RDNA3 likely dGPUs] onto the CPU side of the equation that always has to be powered up & has barely any perf. https://videocardz.com/newz/amd-ryzen-7000-mobile-dragon-range-phoenix-get-first-rumored-specifications

Maybe it's inevitable, given my reactions to most live service game design, but I find it very hard to understand what you're paying for in a pay-to-start/"premium" live game. It always feels like not enough fun additions are included (over many F2P competitors) & there is slightly too much grind, especially vs games with similar sticker prices.
How is Naraka progression meaningfully different to any title using the F2P model? Marvel's Avengers content is as confusing to find as many F2P titles.

Now GPUs are returning to their SRPs at retail, what is going to happen to the Radeon RX 6750 XT (two thirds of a 6800, overclocked until it uses just as much power, but still lagging significant on every other metric, and priced basically the same)?

It's out. They made it into Q2. https://github.com/GPUOpen-Effects/FidelityFX-FSR2
Lots of notes to check through. A reactive mask? nice!

Games seem to have a wealth of visual options nowadays (even on consoles). Has anyone seen a title aim for power efficiency on console yet? I suspect the most likely place would be a last gen port/native app update.
Something that made explicit that this was an "Eco" mode, designed to use less power while playing (likely by setting a modest framerate cap and also lowering the resolution target).

Wishing FH5's TAA implementation was FSR2 (even if they have zero interest in ever giving me what I really want & doing DLSS). What we get is TAA with CAS sharpening & then a separate upscaler (which is FSR 1.0 so also CAS - hope they don't run it twice when both options are enabled).
It's not terrible, and gets rid of some aliasing their MSAA+MLAA options could not, but it's also definitely not amazing at native res (and right now great TAA means these advanced TAAU options).

I understand why AMD are simplifying their platform stack but I do have to wonder why they promoted sTRX4 as having long-term support (it will now only see the launch CPUs so zero upgrade path) if it was questionable if the market could support both that & the sWRX8. https://community.amd.com/t5/business/design-build-accelerate-on-the-ultimate-workstation-processor/ba-p/530661
This also means the two AMD platforms only offer either 8 channels or 2 channels for system RAM. As consumer core counts increase, a shame no one has revitalised Intel's old triple channel options.

😍 When the demo for your unreleased game has already integrated DLSS & looks great for it!

I have never once clicked on the name of the developer in the Steam store & thought "this is what I actually wanted" when it routes you to a generic frontpage for the publisher they're working under.
I realise Valve wanted to give some branding opportunities but when I click on the dev name, I want a list of everything that dev has on the store. I don't want their publisher to have routed it to any other page. If I wanted a publisher's page, I would click their name directly under the dev name!

Credit where it's due: Playground have finally listened to basically everyone & actually implemented TAA into FH5. Given the level of foliage (where driver-forced transparency supersampling AA was prohibitively expensive & totally absent from the in-game options), this should provide a much more stable image. Bit of a shame it doesn't appear to be FSR2/DLSS2, given they're going in that direction to implement any TAA solution.
https://youtu.be/hyzmFfjzh6I

Do people actually recruit via unsolicited DM on Discord? I guess technically you can see what servers someone has in common & maybe see what they post about there (and I've certainly had real people reach out via other SM platforms in the past) so it's not entirely ridiculous. Just a gaming chat SM platform doesn't scream "reputable recruitment" to me.

Apple will promote this sort of comparison https://images.anandtech.com/doci/17431/Apple-WWDC22-M2-chip-CPU-perf-vs-power-03-220606.jpg when I could write down specs for the Apple M2 & the Ryzen 6980HS APU in such a way that you would need to differentiate on details like cache hierarchy (16MB+4MB bigLittle or L2/L3) or fab process (TSMC 5P vs 6).
Apple make good silicon, they don't need to mislead people to sell them! Also AMD have so far resisted upgrading any APU to memory controllers seen in Threadripper/EPYC designs, unlike Apple.

Bit surprised that Chorus (space flight game, UE4) seems to have extremely bad asset load stutter on my system (16hw threads, fast SSD). Every time it loads in a new area or set-piece, the locked 60fps collapses into the teens at exactly the same time as the system RAM (nowhere near capacity) usage jumps up, then recovers back to 60 after a few seconds.

Looking forward to people realising that No Man's Sky & 18 quintillion planets is basically the same as 1000 planets you can land on anywhere. Even if each planet was as small as Outer Wilds & Bethesda had put a huge team on it ever since Skyrim, I'd still question if you could build out 1000 of them, even using procgen to start with. "Land anywhere" means most places you land will be pure procgen noise, no hand-crafted content. Not a selling point for me.

"Wow, this M1 Max laptop doesn't throttle down at all when gaming on battery life - this is really good!"
*shows laptop using 100W+ when running gaming workloads* *absolutely fails to mention that if a laptop lasts 12+ on very low power browsing/video playback mode then this is saying the laptop will eat the entire battery charge if you try playing games while unplugged in about an hour*
This is not the default configuration win some seem to be claiming!

Some interesting notes here from how to fix a shimmering [checkerboard] TAAU result for high frequency detail like foliage. I'd say the final output results are truly night & day. https://youtu.be/uNXLZ-mkrHs
In terms of raw internal pixels, H:FW in this mode uses up to the equivalent of FSR2/DLSS2 Balanced Mode (only checkerboarded grid coverage of each frame rather than jitter patterned regular grid) with dynamic scaling below that to maintain framerate.

We have been really spoiled for RPGs from smaller teams in the last decade. Just amazing production values from outside the traditional big publishers.
Really had an extremely different picture in my mind for "Josh Sawyer is leading a smaller RPG project at Obsidian that will be announced & launched this year".

Really glad that Descent: Freespace came out when it did. And all the Wing Commander etc games before it.
Because I have not been able to get excited about a space flight game for years. They seem to do absolutely nothing for me, even on purely visual grounds.