4 ms·

This is incorrect. If you want to play e.g. Cyberpunk at 4k maxed out with decent framerates the 4090 is the only card that gets you there. Especially once you

This is incorrect. If you want to play e.g. Cyberpunk at 4k maxed out with decent framerates the 4090 is the only card that gets you there. Especially once you start looking at meaningful numbers like 1% lows, even the 3090 is struggling to break the low 30s. It doesn’t apply to every game or every resolution, but there are actual game scenarios where a 4090 makes sense. Price and heat and power and space not withstanding, it’s a meaningful upgrade.

flerchin 4y ago
Dangit, I do want to play Cyberpunk maxed in 4k. Sorry kids, I guess you'll have to take a gap year before you can go to college, daddy's gonna upgrade.
- Wowfunhappy 4y ago
  I will add that, IMO, if it's possible for any gpu to play a just-released game at maximum settings at a high resolution at 60+ fps, the developers haven't set the maximum quality settings high enough. Leave some headroom for future GPUs, or allow players who e.g. prefer a ludicrously high draw distance at any cost to make that choice and dial down the resolution to compensate. Most games don't meet this bar, and I think gamers who expect to be able to set every slider to the max and go to town—yes, even on a $2K GPU—are mostly responsible.
  - Godel_unicode 4y ago
    I disagree that developers should spend valuable engineering time on producing games that can’t be run. Spend that time making other games instead, or squashing bugs (looking at you, cyberpunk!) and maybe keep a backlog of future features to patch in when the hardware gets there.
    - autoexec 4y ago
      I agree! When it comes to graphics, just make them look great with current (and not uncommon) hardware. When most gamers have upgraded hardware capable of substantial differences games can keep selling remasters if people care. I'm fine with nearly all gamers getting a better experience even if that means the tiny fraction of gamers who can and are willing to spend insane amounts of money on the best of all possible video cards are not able to take full advantage of their crazy hardware in most games.
    - Retric 4y ago
      It’s actually cheaper to build a game with higher graphics settings and then let people tweak the settings vs trying to optimize a game for hardware you can’t actually test with in development. On top of this you can release some awesome screenshots from settings that aren’t actually playable at release. This is especially beneficial when deadlines slip and suddenly consumers have a lot better hardware than you where expecting.
    - gambiting 4y ago
      As an actual gamedev - no real extra engineering time is spent on this - during development all textures and assets are usually produced in 8K or higher anyway, it's only during the data packaging step that everything gets downscaled to whatever was selected by tech art. There's a reason why my workstation has 256GB of ram - just loading up the main world of the game easily takes 100-150GB because everything is in such extreme quality. Same applies to visual effects - usually in development you will run all effects at full resolution to test how it all works. Releasing an "extreme" preset that no consumer PC can really run yet is just a matter of leaving those higher-quality assets in + enabling those full resolution options for VFX. Allowing users to use ray tracing at full resolution(something which will kill any GPU on the market) requires just adding an extra config option - there's very little engineering time required. QC will need to do a full pass of these options, but in the grand scheme of things tested that's not a huge deal.
      - mjrpes 4y ago
        Will that substantially increase size of game on disk?
        gambiting 4y ago
        I mean, it can - but that's also a solved problem. Look at far Cry 6 - you want HD textures that require at least 12GB of vram? No problem, it's just an optional download.
  - jandrese 4y ago
    There is a limited set of knobs a developer can add without increasing their development costs. If you ship a set of "ultra mega extreme" textures that will only be usable with future hardware you are still bloating the download by many gigabytes, probably dozens or even hundreds. If your dev team says they can make even better shadows but not on today's hardware then is it really worth the development effort to create them now? You can multiply particle effects to crazy amounts but that ends up looking silly.
    - Wowfunhappy 4y ago
      To be clear, I'm just asking for extreme draw distances, higher resolution shadows, and full quality textures. If that would require significant engineering, I stand corrected! I can certainly see how install size would be a concern with textures. I find it difficult to return to games such as Assassin's Creed II because of their muddy textures and low draw distances. These issues feel like something that could have been avoided with just a tad more forward thinking! There are also games like Quantum Break which (at least at launch, not sure if it was ever fixed) included mandatory upsampling which the user couldn't disable. The reason given was that the game wasn't designed to be playable at native resolution, and no current hardware would be able to run it that way.
      - ynx 4y ago
        Yes. Extreme draw distances: large open-world games or those with very long, content-intensive environments need to resort to tricks to unload parts of the world that are not visible or quickly accessible. Extreme draw distance can mean keeping orderS of maginitude more objects resident, which could mean a lot more materials loaded, more draw calls, more VRAM usage, or more swap. Higher resolution shadows: Hard shadows tend to look bad, soft shadows tend to perform bad, and worse with more lights. It takes a lot of deep GPU knowledge to do these in a visually convincing and high quality manner. The difference between "good enough" and "perfect" will easily cost you double digit fps at a minimum. Full quality textures: As with the draw distance caveat, implementing LODs is rather work-intensive. Some people will tell you that you can automate it, and they're half-right. If you are looking for top-notch game quality, that absolutely does not cut it, but if you're not trying to go the extra mile it can be serviceable. Games are super inconsistent in how far they push technology vs push the art, but there is rarely a "turn the dial to 11" knob ready to turn. The production requirements and technical limitations mix in unpredictable ways. Other times, games push ridiculously far in certain directions that later become mainstream, and execute well enough that, after they are copied into other mainstream games, they feel deficient - not in spite of their success, but as a direct result of it!!
- cercatrova 4y ago
  College isn't that cheap unfortunately.
filmgirlcw 4y ago
Look, if you want to pay $1600 to play one game at 4K on max settings, be my guest. I'm fine with it in 1440p or in 4K at not max settings, but you do you.
- seanp2k2 4y ago
  PC vs console has never been a value debate; if one wishes to merely play games at acceptable-for-most quality, console beats the pants off PC all day every day. PC gaming was historically and still is in some cases about living on the edge of available consumer tech; a Vive Pro 2 is 2448 × 2448 @ 120hz /per eye/, PSVR is 960 x 1,080 90-120hz, but for getting into VR it's like a quarter (or less) of the cost of a top-tier VR headset and the PC that can run it. Is that PC experience 4x more valuable than the PSVR experience? Probably not for the vast majority of people, but they still sell enough Ferraris to make it a viable business when a Toyota Camry will do the same job of transportation.
  - filmgirlcw 4y ago
    I wasn’t alluding to PC vs console here — I was literally talking about me, someone with a 3080, who has been playing Cyberpunk on it for 18 months — happily, I might add. I understand that there is a strain of enthusiasts who want to push everything to the extreme, and I understand the appeal to that audience. I’m frequently part of that audience (my desire for a white graphics card outweighed me caring if I was playing CP2077 at above 1440p or not, depending on what frame rates I want) - though I have an XSX and a PS5 as well - but $1600 for one game, right now, isn’t something that compels me. Especially since I’d need to re-evaluate my PSU situation, which might impact my case, which might impact cooling and so forth. Talking to my other enthusiast friends, I know I’m not alone.
  - michaelmrose 4y ago
    This calculation is actually more complicated and doesn't trivially resolve to a singular number. Comparing the two devices across the board only works if its a dedicated computer used exclusively for gaming. Many buying a Gaming PC will be buying a device that will do double duty and the price differential is best described by the GPU required for work vs play and if we want to truly compare it to console quality we ought to be comparing it to a budget GPU similar in performance to a PS5. For example a $370 nvidia gtx 3060 vs a $500 console.

flerchin 4y ago

Dangit, I do want to play Cyberpunk maxed in 4k. Sorry kids, I guess you'll have to take a gap year before you can go to college, daddy's gonna upgrade.

Wowfunhappy 4y ago
I will add that, IMO, if it's possible for any gpu to play a just-released game at maximum settings at a high resolution at 60+ fps, the developers haven't set the maximum quality settings high enough. Leave some headroom for future GPUs, or allow players who e.g. prefer a ludicrously high draw distance at any cost to make that choice and dial down the resolution to compensate. Most games don't meet this bar, and I think gamers who expect to be able to set every slider to the max and go to town—yes, even on a $2K GPU—are mostly responsible.
- Godel_unicode 4y ago
  I disagree that developers should spend valuable engineering time on producing games that can’t be run. Spend that time making other games instead, or squashing bugs (looking at you, cyberpunk!) and maybe keep a backlog of future features to patch in when the hardware gets there.
  - autoexec 4y ago
    I agree! When it comes to graphics, just make them look great with current (and not uncommon) hardware. When most gamers have upgraded hardware capable of substantial differences games can keep selling remasters if people care. I'm fine with nearly all gamers getting a better experience even if that means the tiny fraction of gamers who can and are willing to spend insane amounts of money on the best of all possible video cards are not able to take full advantage of their crazy hardware in most games.
  - Retric 4y ago
    It’s actually cheaper to build a game with higher graphics settings and then let people tweak the settings vs trying to optimize a game for hardware you can’t actually test with in development. On top of this you can release some awesome screenshots from settings that aren’t actually playable at release. This is especially beneficial when deadlines slip and suddenly consumers have a lot better hardware than you where expecting.
  - gambiting 4y ago
    As an actual gamedev - no real extra engineering time is spent on this - during development all textures and assets are usually produced in 8K or higher anyway, it's only during the data packaging step that everything gets downscaled to whatever was selected by tech art. There's a reason why my workstation has 256GB of ram - just loading up the main world of the game easily takes 100-150GB because everything is in such extreme quality. Same applies to visual effects - usually in development you will run all effects at full resolution to test how it all works. Releasing an "extreme" preset that no consumer PC can really run yet is just a matter of leaving those higher-quality assets in + enabling those full resolution options for VFX. Allowing users to use ray tracing at full resolution(something which will kill any GPU on the market) requires just adding an extra config option - there's very little engineering time required. QC will need to do a full pass of these options, but in the grand scheme of things tested that's not a huge deal.
    - mjrpes 4y ago
      Will that substantially increase size of game on disk?
      - gambiting 4y ago
        I mean, it can - but that's also a solved problem. Look at far Cry 6 - you want HD textures that require at least 12GB of vram? No problem, it's just an optional download.
- jandrese 4y ago
  There is a limited set of knobs a developer can add without increasing their development costs. If you ship a set of "ultra mega extreme" textures that will only be usable with future hardware you are still bloating the download by many gigabytes, probably dozens or even hundreds. If your dev team says they can make even better shadows but not on today's hardware then is it really worth the development effort to create them now? You can multiply particle effects to crazy amounts but that ends up looking silly.
  - Wowfunhappy 4y ago
    To be clear, I'm just asking for extreme draw distances, higher resolution shadows, and full quality textures. If that would require significant engineering, I stand corrected! I can certainly see how install size would be a concern with textures. I find it difficult to return to games such as Assassin's Creed II because of their muddy textures and low draw distances. These issues feel like something that could have been avoided with just a tad more forward thinking! There are also games like Quantum Break which (at least at launch, not sure if it was ever fixed) included mandatory upsampling which the user couldn't disable. The reason given was that the game wasn't designed to be playable at native resolution, and no current hardware would be able to run it that way.
    - ynx 4y ago
      Yes. Extreme draw distances: large open-world games or those with very long, content-intensive environments need to resort to tricks to unload parts of the world that are not visible or quickly accessible. Extreme draw distance can mean keeping orderS of maginitude more objects resident, which could mean a lot more materials loaded, more draw calls, more VRAM usage, or more swap. Higher resolution shadows: Hard shadows tend to look bad, soft shadows tend to perform bad, and worse with more lights. It takes a lot of deep GPU knowledge to do these in a visually convincing and high quality manner. The difference between "good enough" and "perfect" will easily cost you double digit fps at a minimum. Full quality textures: As with the draw distance caveat, implementing LODs is rather work-intensive. Some people will tell you that you can automate it, and they're half-right. If you are looking for top-notch game quality, that absolutely does not cut it, but if you're not trying to go the extra mile it can be serviceable. Games are super inconsistent in how far they push technology vs push the art, but there is rarely a "turn the dial to 11" knob ready to turn. The production requirements and technical limitations mix in unpredictable ways. Other times, games push ridiculously far in certain directions that later become mainstream, and execute well enough that, after they are copied into other mainstream games, they feel deficient - not in spite of their success, but as a direct result of it!!
cercatrova 4y ago
College isn't that cheap unfortunately.

filmgirlcw 4y ago

Look, if you want to pay $1600 to play one game at 4K on max settings, be my guest. I'm fine with it in 1440p or in 4K at not max settings, but you do you.

seanp2k2 4y ago
PC vs console has never been a value debate; if one wishes to merely play games at acceptable-for-most quality, console beats the pants off PC all day every day. PC gaming was historically and still is in some cases about living on the edge of available consumer tech; a Vive Pro 2 is 2448 × 2448 @ 120hz /per eye/, PSVR is 960 x 1,080 90-120hz, but for getting into VR it's like a quarter (or less) of the cost of a top-tier VR headset and the PC that can run it. Is that PC experience 4x more valuable than the PSVR experience? Probably not for the vast majority of people, but they still sell enough Ferraris to make it a viable business when a Toyota Camry will do the same job of transportation.
- filmgirlcw 4y ago
  I wasn’t alluding to PC vs console here — I was literally talking about me, someone with a 3080, who has been playing Cyberpunk on it for 18 months — happily, I might add. I understand that there is a strain of enthusiasts who want to push everything to the extreme, and I understand the appeal to that audience. I’m frequently part of that audience (my desire for a white graphics card outweighed me caring if I was playing CP2077 at above 1440p or not, depending on what frame rates I want) - though I have an XSX and a PS5 as well - but $1600 for one game, right now, isn’t something that compels me. Especially since I’d need to re-evaluate my PSU situation, which might impact my case, which might impact cooling and so forth. Talking to my other enthusiast friends, I know I’m not alone.
- michaelmrose 4y ago
  This calculation is actually more complicated and doesn't trivially resolve to a singular number. Comparing the two devices across the board only works if its a dedicated computer used exclusively for gaming. Many buying a Gaming PC will be buying a device that will do double duty and the price differential is best described by the GPU required for work vs play and if we want to truly compare it to console quality we ought to be comparing it to a budget GPU similar in performance to a PS5. For example a $370 nvidia gtx 3060 vs a $500 console.