clicking through to that product page and I remain amazed 4 years in that the killer apps for raytracing are 20+ year old games and Cyberpunk, a game that needed a rehabilitation campaign
There’s nowhere for the technology to go until/unless raytracing gets implemented into the next console generation.
To look significantly better, a game needs to be designed from the ground up with raytracing as a fundamental building block instead of as a replacement to toggle on/off as a premium setting. Even a 4090 can’t handle 100% raytraced lighting in a modern AAA game, and the 5090 likely won’t be able to either. No big budget games using prototype technology can be made for an install base so small.
Kind of like VR, we’re in that awkward era where by the time the technology is matured enough that it’s being implemented widely in 5-10 years, all the current hardware which is touting it will be obsolete.
the joke is the Xbox and Playstation ecosystems do hardware RT, it’s just that they both settled on AMD for their SoCs. it makes sense since we’re in a transitional period and good raster performance has value and they can deliver in a small space and power envelope, but like, even Intel Arc can beat AMD cards at RT for similarly positioned SKUs
I’m going to have a good laugh when the Switch 2 comes out and has DLSS out the ass and wider/better RT support than the PS5 and XSX
100% that is actually going to happen because every feature that makes raytracing viable right now is tied to a propriety nvidia AI upscaler, Nintendo has a stupidly open goal
at this point the PS5 and XSX are DOA for the same reason the 2016-2017 macbooks were DOA, just really poor technological intervals to be released at. funnily enough the PS2 and PS3 both were about as cursed in that respect but were able to coast on software support which is finally irrelevant
you could make the argument that the series S held this generation back by being underpowered but unlike a current gen GPU or the other consoles it actually accomplishes its primary job of playing videogames without costing a fortune or being underwhelming
running cyberpunk with DLSS 3.5 in 4k120 is pretty impressive in my experience but it’s also still cyberpunk
The ps5 remains spectacularly underwhelming and it seems pretty likely that Microsoft is going to give up on console manufacturing entirely. I’m not sure making games even more expensive to make is really going to help anything in the future though.
another irony is that AMD’s APUs were much more broadly competitive and better suited to the PS4 generation than they are now, even though the CPU cores were still absolute shit in comparison to then-contemporary Intel hardware, and it was really only the PS4 CPU that the Series S meaningfully improves on
though that did successfully teach unity to get everything off the main thread
Whereas the PS4’s curse is that it was released in the transitional period to digital storefronts and updatable OSes. So it was incredibly obnoxious whenever you weren’t playing a game, for instance the storefront experience was agonizingly slow. (Based on my experience in my day job in infrastructure for phone UI, my theory is that was partly because 2D UIs heavily depend on single-core performance, and especially so when the software is full of spaghetti code. That’s why phone CPUs all converged on a big+little multicore approach instead of the PS4’s symmetrical cores.)
The PS5 is a breath of fresh air in this respect, it quietly updates itself with no intervention and the UIs are all pleasant to use. So I can’t bring myself to regret buying a PS5 even though I don’t use it much, it somehow has good vibes
I don’t find the idea that any of the commercially available APUs are at the level of “worth it” when you can still take a cheaper (yet still performant) CPU and a cheaper discrete GPU and crush the performance for the cost of form factor
also for god’s sake, whose idea of a sick joke of making an entry level gaming computer involves buying into AM5
my Zen 5 computer is very nice and I like it a lot but the early bios updates and memory prices were very lol
they managed to ship it at least! and I’d been waiting that long for AMD to have normal iGPUs to drive more of my precious monitors. no regrets, but it’s just hard to call it a value platform if you have any memory of pre-2020 at all, which is the current APU criticism.
On my AM5 build I eventually gave up on trying to update the bios to get the DDR5 timing stuff working perfectly. It was too hard to diagnose, particularly how if you get it wrong it could cause a stability issue that you notice for the first time days later and attribute to something else.
So I just keep it turned on so I don’t have to suffer the multi-minute reboots very often. Not great at California’s electricity costs but what can you do
DDR5 RAM is really a straight downgrade. I didn’t think DDR4 was too slow, that’s even like specifically the only performance dimension I didn’t care even a smidge about how fast it was.
If the BIOS had the option “just run the DDR5 RAM at DDR4 speeds instead of doing the whole calibration rigmarole” I would absolutely turn it on
Come to think of it, is there any chance they’ve literally added that by now a year later? I would be willing to upgrade my BIOS again for that. But not for more vague promises of “we fixed all the bugs in the calibration system this time, pinky swear”
having to bridge jumper pins out of the box if you lost the ram lottery is terrible
i have no desire to upgrade my personal machine from coffee lake even if my friend with a 7800x3d is doing no-scope triple axels with emulators and VMs
yeah I certainly don’t think highly of the consumer experience for most of this stuff (and I agree that memory speed is functionally imperceptible unless your CPU is very poorly chosen or something is misconfigured), and it took me a decade to be willing to tackle a new build for a reason, but I can attest that it is at least possible to make this stuff behave
Graphics tech like ray tracing being adopted eventually is a false perspective. Even if a great game comes out where ray tracing is necessary the majority of games won’t need it so it won’t be a priority. It’s like high fidelity in music - great to have but it’s the vocal people that care.
Do I want it? Yeah. But like… games this gen are so good already it’s like totally unnecessary. Honestly just get me even faster loading times and like back buttons.
My wishcast: raytracing will go mainstream when the AI bubble pops. It’s going to last several years longer than the crypto bubble and will cause a buildup of cutting-edge GPU/TPU factories. Then that capacity will need an outlet and a game-platform company will buy up the suddenly cheap GPUs for a new console generation
the ram thing is insane. I never have any idea what’s going to happen when I reset my computer. how long it’s going to take, if it’s going to go straight to windows login or if I’ll have a half second glimpse of the asus logo with finger on the f2 trigger to get into the bios if I want, or if I have to reset the cmos if I ever want to do that again. some of the auto memory profiles in the settings work and some of them make it to where I can’t boot the thing. not overclocking the memory doesn’t even seem to make any of this work more reliably. also that the whole memory training thing happens with no prompt on the screen explaining what is happening and everyone building a new computer is supposed to stare at the black screen for maybe several minutes and just know what is going on from reading anandtech comment threads is an idea that could only come from a mind broken by this world