The problem isn’t the tech itself. Getting a pretty darn clean 4k output from 1080p or 1440p, at a small static frametime cost is amazing.

The problem is that the tech has been abused as permission to slack on optimization, or used in contexts where there just isn’t enough data for a clean picture, like in upscaling to 1080p or less. Used properly, on a well optimized title, this stuff is an incredible proposition for the end user, and I’m excited to see it keep improving.

I’m down for uh… one tiny part of this. I certainly think we could do to make games smaller, I’m sick of massive open worlds and colossal play times, which seem like an astounding amount of developer time to make swathes of stuff that ends up so soulless that I don’t want to play it.

More focus on fundamentals, shorter, more meaningful campaigns with well executed gameplay and ideas would be wonderful, because we’re rapidly finding the limits of every studio on earth trying to make the “forever” game. Players only have so much time.

The best recent example I have is Mario Kart World. It’s a marvellous game, wall and rail grinding are amazing, the tracks are some of the best in the franchise, it’s fantastic. But you can tell a massive amount of effort and years went into the open world, which uh… actively makes the game worse? Free roam is fun for an hour or so, but I have no idea why I’d want to do it with friends, and the game shoves its 200+ “intermission” tracks down your throat constantly. Time trials are the best mode in the game, because it’s the only real way to consistently play the excellent tracks enough to actually unpack and learn the shortcuts and tricks that are afforded by the game’s deep new mechanics. I feel bad that the team wasted so much time on something the community begs for better ways to avoid.

Oh, does it? I was literally thinking to myself that Teardown was an interesting example of destruction, and wondering how they did their lighting. RT makes perfect sense, that must be one of the earliest examples of actually doing something you really couldn’t without RT (at least not while lighting it well).

But yes, agreed that recent performance trends are frustrating, smearing DLSS and frame gen to cover for terrible performance. Feels like we’re in a painful tween period with a lot of awkward stuff going on, and also deadlines/crunch/corporate meddling etc causing games to come out half-baked. Hopefully this stuff does reach maturity soon and we can have some of this cool new stuff without so many other compromises.

The big benefit of raytracing now, imo (which most games aren’t doing), is that it frees games up to introduce dynamic destruction again. We used to have all kinds of destructible walls and bits and bobs around, with flat lighting, but baked lighting has really limited what devs can do, because if you break something you need a solution to handle all the ways the lighting changes, and for the majority of games they just make everything stiff and unbreakable.

Raytracing is that solution. Plug and play, the lighting just works when you blow stuff up. DOOM: TDA is the best example of this currently (although still not a direct part of gameplay), with a bunch of destructible stuff everywhere, and that actually blows up with a physics sim rather than a canned animation. All the little boards have perfect ambient occlusion and shadows, because raytracing just does that.

It’s really fun, if minor, and one of the things I actually look forward to more games doing with raytracing. IMO that’s why raytracing has whelmed most people, because we’re used to near-flawless baked lighting, and haven’t really noticed the compromises that baked lighting has pushed on us.

Honestly, I’m a bit relieved that OpenAI is at least trying to intervene here. When I heard they backtracked and re-released 4o, alarm bells went off for me that they were going to give in and just rake in profit off this type of dangerous AI addiction. Sounds like at least some of that original non-profit “managing the future of AI” concern is still there, if obviously far less than I’d like.

Honestly, the delays have increased my hype more than decreased it. I’m not one to obsess over a release, I’ve played other things and enjoyed them in the interim, so I really have no resentment for the long dev cycle.

Lately my habits have been to try to avoid games for a couple months to let them get polished up anyway (I recently regretted picking up DOOM TDA at launch after they reworked combat across the whole game, and that would’ve been a better first playthrough experience). Team Cherry is a team I know can use time well like that, in fact, HK did get broad balance overhauls before I discovered it. They also added an astounding amount of well integrated post-launch content, so I’m excited to see just how much they’ve managed to create and polish Silksong with all this time, and will feel comfortable playing at or close to launch now due to these delays.

Mhm, fair point. Although… I would say the steam deck’s popularity and proof of viability as a gaming device is doing an immense amount of work on its own. I built a gaming PC ~2 years ago, and even as a long time developer and someone comfortable with a UNIX terminal I opted to get a copy of Windows for gaming, and had to awkwardly get to grips with it and find tools to get it playing the way I wanted.

It’s only ~1 month ago that the prevalence and maturity of the steam deck (combined with Windows recall re-emerging🤮) finally had me at ease enough to give Bazzite a shot, and since jumping myself and expressing how happy I am with it, 2 of my long term “on the fence” friends have asked me questions and are starting to try Linux themselves.

Larger Linux market share, regardless of how it gets there, gives broad confidence in Linux, and also pushes developers and Steam itself to maintain Linux support and tools like Proton, which reinforces the cycle, even if it doesn’t help us “kill Windows” for as long as users don’t understand how to install it.

Agreed that the Bananzas are a little weird. Personally I find myself toggling it on and off (you can drumbeat again to transform back), which causes it to use so little meter that it’s recovered almost instantly, if not already recovered by the coins I earned doing the thing.

I’m definitely not using it as a transformation as much as I am just using it as a move in the kit though, so I’m not feeling like I’m using it as intended either.

Bit of an odd answer, but for me (and my wife), the last piece of the puzzle was really budgeting. The invisible, constant financial stress is a lot, and adds to that feeling of “pretending” when you’re not even sure if buying groceries will cause a bill to bounce, let alone hanging out with friends who always seem to comfortably have the money to do whatever it is you’re doing.

It’s been several years now (early 30s, started budgeting in late 20s), it took us a while to figure it out and progress was slow, but I can “see the line” now, towards retirement, towards home ownership, we have no more credit card debt (just student loans left, which we’re working on), and we budget “fun money” that I save up to make big purchases like a 7900XTX without any guilt or credit.

We’re also having our first kid soon, and at least financially, I’m not stressed about it at all, which would’ve been impossible in our twenties. Getting our financials in hand and headed in the right direction has just done massive work in helping me feel like I know what I’m doing, and that our life is actually getting better rather than stuck in place.

“Good” also doesn’t mean flawless at all times. Characters can make mistakes and still be “good” without you having to justify everything they’ve done as perfect.

An even better example is King David, the one and only “man after God’s own heart” taking another man’s wife while he was fighting David’s war, and then arranging his death to cover it up after he got her pregnant.

Arguing that that, or this, is advice for the reader, or meant as an example of something you should do, is a comical straw man. A narrative doesn’t usually stop to explicitly label “good” and “bad” for us like children. There’s loads to complain about with popular far-right Christianity, why would we invent ridiculous arguments that are easy to debunk and make us look like we don’t have good literary comprehension?

Risking some downvotes here, but just like most stories, not every character in the Bible is supposed to be a paragon of morality. Just like in any story, people do bad things.

Obviously this post is somewhat satirical, but dunking on something like this just reminds me of book banning arguments, and that general lack of literary comprehension. There’s better things to take issue with.

I do really think they fumbled the bag here with “Welcome Tour”. Could’ve been a cool pack in, would’ve been reminiscent of Wii Sports, and apparently it’s a decent quality package that probably would’ve been well received, and helped build hype for the console.

Instead, they charged a pittance for it. No way are they getting many sales, and they gave us an easy narrative that they’re greedy and have lost their way since Reggie and the Wii, just as they launch a hella expensive console with big price increases and don’t need that kind of PR.

They turned an easy PR win that might have helped move units into a PR disaster in a touchy time, for chump change next to their profit margins on the console + games like Mario Kart World. Also lost a chance to advertise and show off what the new hardware can really do, the whole thing looks like a big advertisement anyways. Hell, it even looks pretty neat, but there’s not a snowballs chance in hell of me paying for it.

Mhm, of course, critical thinking in general is absolutely important, although I take some issue with describing looking for artifacts as “vague hunches”. Fake photos have existed for ages, and we’ve found consistent ways to spot and identify them, such as checking shadows, the directionality of light in a scene, the fringes of detailed objects, black levels and highlights, and even advanced techniques like bokeh and motion blur. You don’t see many people casting doubt on the validity of old pictures with Trump and Epstein together, for example, despite the long existence of photoshop and advanced VFX. Hell, even this image could have been photoshopped, and you’re relying on your eyes to catch the evidence of that if that were the case.

The techniques I’ve outlined here aren’t likely to become irrelevant in the next 5+ years, given they’re based on how the underlying technology works, similar to how LLMs aren’t likely to 100% stop hallucinating any time soon. More than that, I actually think there’s a lot less incentive to work these minor kinks out than something like LLM hallucination, because these images already fool 99% of people, and who knows how much additional processing power it would take to run this at a resolution where you could get something like flawless tufts of grass, in a field that’s already struggling to make a profit given the high costs of generating this output. And if/when these techniques become invalid, I’ll put in the effort to learn new ones, as it’s worthwhile to be able to quickly and easily identify fakes.

As much as I wholeheartedly agree that we need to think critically and evaluate things based on facts, we live in a world where the U.S. President was posting AI videos of Obama just a couple weeks ago. He may be an idiot who is being obviously manipulative, but it’s naive to think we won’t eventually get bad actors like him who try to manipulate narratives like that with current events, where we can’t rely on simply fact-checking history, or that someone might weave a lie that doesn’t have obvious logical gaps, and we need some kind of technique to verify images to settle the inevitable future “he said, she said” debates. The only real alternative is to just never trust a new photo again, because we can’t 100% prove anything new hasn’t been doctored.

We’ve survived in a world with fake imagery for decades now, I don’t think we need to roll over and accept AI as unbeatable just because it fakes things differently, or because it might hypothetically improve at hiding itself in the future.

Anyway, rant over, you’re right, critical thinking is paramount, but being able to clearly spot fakes is a super useful skill to add to that kit, even if it can’t 100% confirm an image as real. I believe these are useful tools to have, which is why I took the time to point them out despite the image already having been proven as not AI by others dating it before I got here.

True, someone else did some reverse image searching before I got here, but I think it’s an important skill to develop without relying on dating the image, as that will only work for so long, and there will likely be more important things than memes that will need to be proven/disproven in the future. A reverse image search probably won’t help us with the next political scandal, for example. It’s a pretty good backup to have when it applies though, nice that it proves me correct here.

Haha, that’s just because I used a bullet point list. No em dashes though, at the very least.

I’d recommend you get some practice identifying and proving AI generated images. I agree this has a bit of that “look”, but in this case I’m quite certain it’s just repeated image compression/a cheap camera. Here’s the major details I looked at after seeing your comment:

• The grass at the bottom left. AI is frequently sloppy with little details and straight lines, usually the ones in the background. In this case, you can look at any blade of grass and follow it, and its path makes sense. The same happens with the lines in the tiles, the water stains, etc.
• The birthmark on the large brown dog. In this case, this is a set of three photos, which gives us an easy way to spot AI. AI generated images start from random noise, so you’d never get the exact same birthmark, consistent across different angles, from a prompt like “large brown dog with white birthmark on chest”. Spotting a change in the birthmark, or a detail like it, would be a dead giveaway, but I can’t spot any.
• There are other tricks as well, such as looking for strange variations in contrast and exposure from the underlying noise, but those are more difficult to explain in text. Corridor Digital has some good videos demonstrating it with visual examples if you’re interested, but suffice to say I don’t pick up on that here either.

It’s useful to be able to prove or disprove your suspicions, as well as to be able to back them up with something as simple as “this is AI generated, just look at the grass”. Hope this helps!

I’ll give two answers to this question, from the perspective of a Christian reading the Old Testament/Torah.

Wouldn’t it be effective to convince followers of a religion if a religion could accurately predict a scientific phenomenon before its followers have the means of discovering it?

This is interpretative, but if there is a God, he seems big on free will. Why give humanity the option to sin in the garden at all? Why not just reveal himself in the sky each morning? Why even bother creating a universe that can be explained without him? There’s an abundance of easy ways God could make himself irrefutable, and yet in the Bible he makes us “in His image”, and offers us choices like that tree in the garden.

Furthermore, why even create us to sin in the first place? My interpretation of the Torah is that God is big on relationship, and that free will is a key part of that. Just like a human relationship based on a love potion is kinda creepy, and a pale imitation of something real, it seems like God doesn’t want to be irrefutable.

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I think that’s the more relevant answer to your question, but I’ll also give the only example that comes to mind of the Bible seemingly imparting “scientific knowledge”, which is to look at the laws around “cleanliness”. Someone else already mentioned some “unclean” animals, but if you read more, they pretty consistently seem like good advice around bacteria. Some examples of times you need to “purify” (essentially take a bath) that seem like common sense now:

• being around dead bodies
• touching blood that’s not yours
• having your period
• etc.

Reading this as a modern person aware of germs, many of these “laws” seem like they would have kept the death rate of faithful Jews a lot lower than their neighbours in that day.

Interesting. I’ve been using XeSS lately, after seeing better results in DOOM TDA, but now I’m curious if this is worth using instead, and figuring out an FSR replacer on Bazzite to use this.

Exactly what I’ve done. Set my settings to hide NSFW, blocked most of the “soft” communities like hot girls and moe anime girls and whatever else (blocking the lemmynsfw.com instance is a great place to start), and I use All frequently. That’s how I’ve found all the communities I’ve subscribed to, but frankly, my /all feed is small enough that I usually see all my subscribed communities anyway.

Hard to blame them. Proton is dang impressive, and if it works, it works.