5 ms·

Also one does have to consider energy! In Germany energy prices are currently at 0.328€/kWh from big providers, and considering a RTX 4080 has 320W alone an say

by i5heu 2y ago

Also one does have to consider energy! In Germany energy prices are currently at 0.328€/kWh from big providers, and considering a RTX 4080 has 320W alone an say 230W extra for the rest of the system + PSU inefficiencies - my M1 MacBook has way under 30W so the difference between these 2 is 520W.. what means that alone for energy consumption you need to game about 129 hours/month or 4.3/hours per day to break even ... _but_ this is before having to buy a 1300€ GPU, that one would have to replace every year to have the same as GFN. But IMHO the biggest appeal to GFN in Germany is temperature. In Germany there are no air conditioners in normal households and even in apartments with more then 2k a month rent there are none. So it is quite luxurious to game while not having 0.5kW blasting into your room.

brnt 2y ago
.328 and they are complaining! Bah!
KronisLV 2y ago
> considering an RTX 4080 has 320W alone > having to buy a 1300€ GPU, that one would have to replace every year Feels like gamers are quite the demanding audience, instead of getting something like Intel Arc A380 (or something that supports AV1), upscaling from 720p/1080p using framegen and running games on medium settings. That might make the equation work out better, though perhaps not if the industry pushes for more and more complex graphics all the darn time, while the engines themselves are capable of scaling back all the way to mobile devices. I probably have lower standards in that regard, I wouldn't expect to max out graphics when trying to play games on a MacBook or a netbook or something, due to the smaller screen anyways, it feels like modern game graphics are so noisy you can hardly make things out well. Nowadays I mostly play indie games that aren't super graphically complex, yet still are lovely experiences. That said, my current GPU is actually an Arc A580 (replaced my old RX 580) and it's been pretty good since I got ReBAR working, and 1080p at 60 fps is the sweet spot for me (except slightly higher framerates like 72 fps feel better in VR).
- LoganDark 2y ago
  > upscaling from 720p/1080p using framegen This isn't something you can just do. I mean, it almost is (look at apps like Lossless Scaling, Magpie) but it's always most optimally implemented by the game itself. Just because the buzzword exists doesn't mean the problem is solved.
  - KronisLV 2y ago
    From everything I've heard and seen, it seems like XeSS/FSR/DLSS are all making steady progress and the internal rendering resolutions being lower than what's on your screen is no longer such an issue, with more and more improvements being made. There's no reason why you couldn't have the game be upscaled to whatever the stream resolution is from something a bit more performance friendly, with the quality still being good enough (given that some video artifacts will be there anyways) and things like text/UI being legible. I'm regards to frame generation, it seems that eventually whatever Nvidia is doing with DLSS 3 will find its way into other vendors' products in a comparable alternative form. Once game engines like Unity/Unreal/Godot get support for the upscalers out of the box, I think the technology will be even more commonplace.
    - LoganDark 2y ago
      > From everything I've heard and seen, it seems like XeSS/FSR/DLSS are all making steady progress and the internal rendering resolutions being lower than what's on your screen is no longer such an issue, with more and more improvements being made. That's nice, but doesn't really fix the issue of them not being available in every game, or it varying which one even is available. > There's no reason why you couldn't have the game be upscaled to whatever the stream resolution is from something a bit more performance friendly, with the quality still being good enough (given that some video artifacts will be there anyways) and things like text/UI being legible. If you're just going to upscale the final image without any internal cooperation from the game, there is no reason to upscale a 720p game and stream 1080p when you could simply stream 720p instead and have the client do the upscaling, unless of course you are using an upscaler that chokes on video artifacts (in which case you probably shouldn't even have video artifacts, it's 2024 and H265/AV1 exist). > Once game engines like Unity/Unreal/Godot get support for the upscalers out of the box, I think the technology will be even more commonplace. Don't they all already support it out of the box? It just needs cooperation from the game dev, like I said. For example, Pacific Drive uses UE4, not even UE5, and still supports DLSS. It almost works fine, except displays (such as the ones in the car and garage) flicker and shimmer under DLSS because the devs didn't implement them in a way that works with the upscaler. This can't just be solved by the engine, since DLSS integrates multiple different views of the game (depth buffer, motion buffer, etc) and the dev needs to make sure all of these views are faithful to the effects they're actually showing on-screen, else bugs like that will just happen. That specific problem could be solved by running the game at native-720 and then using a naïve upscaler such as FSR on the output framebuffer, but that's going to be a significant visual tradeoff compared to if DLSS were implemented correctly. Upscaling isn't magic, but FSR (upscaling the final render output) is even less magic than DLSS (upscaling multiple intermediate artifacts). And games often omit settings from their menus, even those that work perfectly well in the engine itself. Having upscaling implemented by the engine doesn't necessarily mean the dev cares enough to implement the setting for it and test it.
ftrobro 2y ago
Interesting that electricity prices are so different than in southern Sweden even though the distance to Germany is less than 100 km and our grids are somewhat connected. Here in southern Sweden the cost has been negative during daytime for the past week, a trend that will probably continue over summer thanks to solar energy. The net cost for buying electricity is still a bit over 0 though, because of taxes and transfer fees.
- dijit 2y ago
  SOUTHERN? Sweden? We have the worst electric prices within Sweden. (Malmö at least), the connections to the north where there is a lot of power generation is really weak and they shut down nearly all the power plants in the region, so we are stuck importing expensive energy. My building has solar on the roof and a collective agreement with e.on precisely to try to control the insane costs.
  - ftrobro 2y ago
    Prices were high two years ago, but that is no longer the case. A lot of solar power came online last year. Currently the price is negative: https://www.eon.se/el/elpriser/aktuella https://www.eon.se/el/elpriser/aktuella
  - Hikikomori 2y ago
    And then locals dont want wind power.
    - distances 2y ago
      In Finland locals started wanting wind power when it became clear a wind power park can bring considerable tax income for a small municipality.
- wasmitnetzen 2y ago
  There's only 600MW of direct grid connection between Sweden and Germany[1]. Southern Sweden uses 4GW right now, Germany 47GW. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baltic_Cable https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baltic_Cable
ffsm8 2y ago
> having to buy a 1300€ GPU, that one would have to replace every year The flagships usually get refreshed every 2+ years, not yearly. If you're switching yearly, then every second change is gonna be a performance downgrade. Furthermore, the flagship of last generation is usually at least on par with the card below the new flagship, so you'd have top of the line performance for at least 2 generations, which is 3-5 years. The 4080 specifically has worse performance then a 3090 unless you're using dlss/upsampling. Which most people on high budget systems don't want as it increases latency. Your napkin math wrt the energy doesn't really make sense either, your card only draws so much power if it's actually on full load. My 4090 is usually mostly idle. My MacBook pro actually draws more then my desktop PC with a 4090 if both are idle (that's because the MacBook has an integrated display which offsets the higher power draw of the desktop components). At least according to the measurements of my smart plugs that measure energy drain at the plug/wall Finally, there is no way in hell a working adult will find time to play 4+hours day, every day. Overall I'd say you've no idea what you're talking about and are just rationalizing and in denial. The performance you get from cloud gaming providers is terrible, worse then a budget PC which costs 1k in it's entirely. And you'll still have it at the end, while the cloud gaming subscriber will have nothing after the sub ends.
- ftrobro 2y ago
  GeForce Now works great. I subscribed for a while to play Cyberpunk 2077 on a remote 4080 and it felt like playing on a local computer. But with much higher settings and framerate than I get on my local GeForce 1080. > Finally, there is no way in hell a working adult will find time to play 4+hours day, every day. Don't make the assumption that everyone live their lives exactly like you do.
  - ffsm8 2y ago
    A 1080 is 8 years old and wasn't a flagship, an equivalent card costs ~$100 currently... Also: that's 4 generations, not 2. It'd be a complete disaster if gfn couldn't beat that performance. I've attempted to use GFN several times too and can only conclude that you've never played at a decent setup if that felt like a local machine. The input latency is so high that anything with pvp is entirely unplayable (it adds at least 40-80ms). Maybe the only thing you're paying is Scenematic single player? In that case, sure. It works well enough. Not worth the subscription as you'd get better performance and experience from a steam deck, but to each their own.

by i5heu 2y ago

brnt 2y ago

.328 and they are complaining! Bah!

KronisLV 2y ago

> considering an RTX 4080 has 320W alone > having to buy a 1300€ GPU, that one would have to replace every year Feels like gamers are quite the demanding audience, instead of getting something like Intel Arc A380 (or something that supports AV1), upscaling from 720p/1080p using framegen and running games on medium settings. That might make the equation work out better, though perhaps not if the industry pushes for more and more complex graphics all the darn time, while the engines themselves are capable of scaling back all the way to mobile devices. I probably have lower standards in that regard, I wouldn't expect to max out graphics when trying to play games on a MacBook or a netbook or something, due to the smaller screen anyways, it feels like modern game graphics are so noisy you can hardly make things out well. Nowadays I mostly play indie games that aren't super graphically complex, yet still are lovely experiences. That said, my current GPU is actually an Arc A580 (replaced my old RX 580) and it's been pretty good since I got ReBAR working, and 1080p at 60 fps is the sweet spot for me (except slightly higher framerates like 72 fps feel better in VR).

LoganDark 2y ago
> upscaling from 720p/1080p using framegen This isn't something you can just do. I mean, it almost is (look at apps like Lossless Scaling, Magpie) but it's always most optimally implemented by the game itself. Just because the buzzword exists doesn't mean the problem is solved.
- KronisLV 2y ago
  From everything I've heard and seen, it seems like XeSS/FSR/DLSS are all making steady progress and the internal rendering resolutions being lower than what's on your screen is no longer such an issue, with more and more improvements being made. There's no reason why you couldn't have the game be upscaled to whatever the stream resolution is from something a bit more performance friendly, with the quality still being good enough (given that some video artifacts will be there anyways) and things like text/UI being legible. I'm regards to frame generation, it seems that eventually whatever Nvidia is doing with DLSS 3 will find its way into other vendors' products in a comparable alternative form. Once game engines like Unity/Unreal/Godot get support for the upscalers out of the box, I think the technology will be even more commonplace.
  - LoganDark 2y ago
    > From everything I've heard and seen, it seems like XeSS/FSR/DLSS are all making steady progress and the internal rendering resolutions being lower than what's on your screen is no longer such an issue, with more and more improvements being made. That's nice, but doesn't really fix the issue of them not being available in every game, or it varying which one even is available. > There's no reason why you couldn't have the game be upscaled to whatever the stream resolution is from something a bit more performance friendly, with the quality still being good enough (given that some video artifacts will be there anyways) and things like text/UI being legible. If you're just going to upscale the final image without any internal cooperation from the game, there is no reason to upscale a 720p game and stream 1080p when you could simply stream 720p instead and have the client do the upscaling, unless of course you are using an upscaler that chokes on video artifacts (in which case you probably shouldn't even have video artifacts, it's 2024 and H265/AV1 exist). > Once game engines like Unity/Unreal/Godot get support for the upscalers out of the box, I think the technology will be even more commonplace. Don't they all already support it out of the box? It just needs cooperation from the game dev, like I said. For example, Pacific Drive uses UE4, not even UE5, and still supports DLSS. It almost works fine, except displays (such as the ones in the car and garage) flicker and shimmer under DLSS because the devs didn't implement them in a way that works with the upscaler. This can't just be solved by the engine, since DLSS integrates multiple different views of the game (depth buffer, motion buffer, etc) and the dev needs to make sure all of these views are faithful to the effects they're actually showing on-screen, else bugs like that will just happen. That specific problem could be solved by running the game at native-720 and then using a naïve upscaler such as FSR on the output framebuffer, but that's going to be a significant visual tradeoff compared to if DLSS were implemented correctly. Upscaling isn't magic, but FSR (upscaling the final render output) is even less magic than DLSS (upscaling multiple intermediate artifacts). And games often omit settings from their menus, even those that work perfectly well in the engine itself. Having upscaling implemented by the engine doesn't necessarily mean the dev cares enough to implement the setting for it and test it.

ftrobro 2y ago

Interesting that electricity prices are so different than in southern Sweden even though the distance to Germany is less than 100 km and our grids are somewhat connected. Here in southern Sweden the cost has been negative during daytime for the past week, a trend that will probably continue over summer thanks to solar energy. The net cost for buying electricity is still a bit over 0 though, because of taxes and transfer fees.

dijit 2y ago
SOUTHERN? Sweden? We have the worst electric prices within Sweden. (Malmö at least), the connections to the north where there is a lot of power generation is really weak and they shut down nearly all the power plants in the region, so we are stuck importing expensive energy. My building has solar on the roof and a collective agreement with e.on precisely to try to control the insane costs.
- ftrobro 2y ago
  Prices were high two years ago, but that is no longer the case. A lot of solar power came online last year. Currently the price is negative: https://www.eon.se/el/elpriser/aktuella https://www.eon.se/el/elpriser/aktuella
- Hikikomori 2y ago
  And then locals dont want wind power.
  - distances 2y ago
    In Finland locals started wanting wind power when it became clear a wind power park can bring considerable tax income for a small municipality.
wasmitnetzen 2y ago
There's only 600MW of direct grid connection between Sweden and Germany[1]. Southern Sweden uses 4GW right now, Germany 47GW. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baltic_Cable https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baltic_Cable

ffsm8 2y ago

> having to buy a 1300€ GPU, that one would have to replace every year The flagships usually get refreshed every 2+ years, not yearly. If you're switching yearly, then every second change is gonna be a performance downgrade. Furthermore, the flagship of last generation is usually at least on par with the card below the new flagship, so you'd have top of the line performance for at least 2 generations, which is 3-5 years. The 4080 specifically has worse performance then a 3090 unless you're using dlss/upsampling. Which most people on high budget systems don't want as it increases latency. Your napkin math wrt the energy doesn't really make sense either, your card only draws so much power if it's actually on full load. My 4090 is usually mostly idle. My MacBook pro actually draws more then my desktop PC with a 4090 if both are idle (that's because the MacBook has an integrated display which offsets the higher power draw of the desktop components). At least according to the measurements of my smart plugs that measure energy drain at the plug/wall Finally, there is no way in hell a working adult will find time to play 4+hours day, every day. Overall I'd say you've no idea what you're talking about and are just rationalizing and in denial. The performance you get from cloud gaming providers is terrible, worse then a budget PC which costs 1k in it's entirely. And you'll still have it at the end, while the cloud gaming subscriber will have nothing after the sub ends.

ftrobro 2y ago
GeForce Now works great. I subscribed for a while to play Cyberpunk 2077 on a remote 4080 and it felt like playing on a local computer. But with much higher settings and framerate than I get on my local GeForce 1080. > Finally, there is no way in hell a working adult will find time to play 4+hours day, every day. Don't make the assumption that everyone live their lives exactly like you do.
- ffsm8 2y ago
  A 1080 is 8 years old and wasn't a flagship, an equivalent card costs ~$100 currently... Also: that's 4 generations, not 2. It'd be a complete disaster if gfn couldn't beat that performance. I've attempted to use GFN several times too and can only conclude that you've never played at a decent setup if that felt like a local machine. The input latency is so high that anything with pvp is entirely unplayable (it adds at least 40-80ms). Maybe the only thing you're paying is Scenematic single player? In that case, sure. It works well enough. Not worth the subscription as you'd get better performance and experience from a steam deck, but to each their own.