My beef with gamers is the whole GPU thing - that now has come full circle with the age of AI biting them in the ass. The gamer children cry but it was their own doing.
If we go back to early 3D games like
Elite and even up to Doom the onus of good gameplay was on developers. They had to be extremely talented to make the contemporary hardware of the time render their 3D masterpieces at a playable pace. There were no "gaming" computers. Just computers and slightly older computers.
Then came the Voodoo and it has been downhill since. The 3D accelerator marked the start of a childish arms race where the only losers really were games themselves. Developers no longer had to squeeze all the performance they could out of mainstream hardware as it was expected that anyone considering themselves a "gamer" would have forked out big money for GPUs. Nvidia just had to sit back and watch the money roll in. Which brings us to know where the GPU industry just turned their backs on gamers who foolishly bankrolled them into existence, told DRAM to come with, and they are now almost exclusively AI focussed.
When I switched to APU I knew I was not going to play the latest and greatest, but maybe 5 years ago greatest. Yet I had to as no good would come from GPUs - and now that time is here.
At least my R780M can play Xonotic in 4K smoothly.
I'm inclined to agree. I used to always play on consoles because I couldn't even afford a PC decent enough to play games.
(So I'm used to being called a "console peasant" and being looked down on by randos online.)
I believe a good game should be able to run well even on an APU. (Even if that means you need to turn down the eye candy a little)
Well-developed and optimised games should run on hardware released in the last 4 years, period.
Most modern titles can't even do that, no matter how far down you turn the graphics. (Running like a slideshow does not count)
I personally feel like devs have gotten lazy or just don't understand basic Big O Notation anymore.
So they instead rely on AI slop frames to arbitrarily boost a frame number that really has just lost meaning at this point.
But that's also because everyone is always obsessed with getting "
more FPS". And Nvidia used this as a marketing opportunity to take advantage of the naive/uneducated and basically tell people "
New GPU has a higher number, so new GPU is better".
But in reality, in rasterised performance, the uplift is much, much lower, if even there at all.
Heck, I'll admit, part of the reason I was even afraid to switch away from an Nvidia GPU was that I wasn't sure if I would miss any of the "exclusive" features.
5 Months later, I don't.
I've grown tired of gimmicks.
I want my games to be responsive and fun, that's it. (Which would explain why I'm mostly playing indie games lately)
We should have instead been measuring responsiveness and how smoothly the experience runs because that's what really matters.
The problem is, until AI flopped onto the scene, the best way to do this was by measuring FPS, but now companies are superficially inflating that metric at the cost of image quality and responsiveness. And it's become common to expect a new "modern game" would require some sort of frame generation or upscaling, which is honestly completely backwards.
In my opinion, the technology has no real benefit. What is the point in having a higher FPS number when it's a smeary, sluggish mess?
Devs need to optimise their games better again and forget about the gimmicks being pedalled by companies like Nvidia.
It's just a gimmick that takes advantage of people who still get into d**k-measuring contests online about "
who has the higher fps".
That is entirely the fault of gamers, and it's important that people start to educate themselves on what's really going on so companies like Nvidia can't take advantage of the industry, and it's naivety anymore.
www.pushsquare.com
