Nuclear Monster

  • Sam Byford, for The Verge:

    AMD has announced that FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR), its super sampling technique that should boost performance and image quality in supported games, will launch on June 22nd. The company gave a presentation at Computex Taipei today with more information on the feature, though it’s still not clear just how effective it’ll be.

    It’s good that AMD is aiming for feature parity for their cards, and even making this technology available to older Nvidia cards that don’t support DLSS is awesome.

    More incredible to me is that both of these technologies, FSR and DLSS, are designed to work around a lack of processing power in the graphics cards and chipsets from Nvidia and AMD to provide a better graphical experience when the hardware couldn’t otherwise keep up at high resolutions. Consoles have been adding these upscaling technologies for a few years, so it makes sense for the original companies to focus on it, but it still just wild how much technology and work has gone into features that specifically accommodate the low horsepower of modern home computing and rendering. it’s not just DLSS and FSR, the entire variable refresh rate technology space of FreeSync and Nvidia’s G-Sync for monitors is also designed to assist with providing a more enjoyable experience when the computer just can’t keep up with high refresh rates.

    When DLSS works well, it’s great. You get a great framerate and a great apparent resolution for the game while it runs internally at a lower resolution using anti-aliasing, sharpening, and scaling. Unfortunately, Nvidia’s scaling solution isn’t open-source, and so that could be a huge advantage for AMD’s FSR if it is truly not encumbered and any engine and game can use the FSR solution if the developers have the time, documentation, knowledge, and interest to implement it. There are a very limited number of games that support DLSS (about 40 by this list on Wikipedia), and there are a number of iterations to DLSS so the best version, the latest version, of DLSS, isn’t supported with all of those games. To be fair, that’s only 6 of those supported games that are still on the 1.0 version of DLSS. Even worse are the games that said they would add support and haven’t. PUBG is on that list, so is Red Dead Redemption 2. More games need support for these scaling technologies and if FSR can reach more of them and does a good job of upscaling, that’s good.

    It’s just a little disappointing that rendering capabilities for gaming haven’t kept up with display technologies. 4K gaming is really here with these scaling technologies and display technologies, but it just isn’t as fun as knowing the game is really running natively at that resolution. Scaling and refresh rate technologies are a little dishonest, but they’re for the best for now and help extend the life of the computers and video cards we buy to last longer when they wouldn’t otherwise be able to run  newer games.

    Notably, No Man’s Sky recently became the first VR game to support DLSS and VR seems like a fantastic use-case for that technology. The more frames you can get in VR the less likely you are to make the player sick.

  • Since the last update on the Freenode situation the new Freenode  leadership team decided to make the situation worse and hijack all IRC channels that mentioned Libera in their channel topic. Here’s what that looked like for the ioquake3 project’s #ioquake3 channel:

    Screen Shot 2021 05 25 at 18 10 56

    At that point the #ioquake3 channel was moved to ##ioquake3 (in freenode parlance this indicates that it is unofficial or off-topic to the network’s purview of free and open source software, this change to mark the new channel as unofficial was the smallest possible token of honesty in this hijacking) and with my username specifically being NuclearMonster on IRC and the voice bit removed I couldn’t speak without changing my username and losing any authority to let anyone who had missed our notice to move to our new home on Libera.chat know about the situation or what’s going on. The new freenode leadership also helpfully unbanned every single banned user. I guess they just want the trolls and not the people who actually work on projects.

    Of course this didn’t just happen to the ioquake3 project, it also happened to:

    In total, about seven-hundred project channels were apparently hijacked to feed Andrew Lee’s new rulership over the Freenode IRC network. Lee also posted a bizarre screed to the Freenode website titled “freenode exists for FOSS.” In the statement, Lee says that projects that decide to leave are a “a trojan horse to pursue a political cause based on falsehoods on IRC.” and that the project leaders are “an illness.”

  • The freenode internet relay chat network has been a staple of open-source and free software projects for decades and it has been taken over:

    Developers of the open source organization Freenode are quitting en masse after Andrew Lee, a tech entrepreneur and the Crown Prince of Korea, has taken control of the network in what developers are describing as an “hostile takeover.”

    I’m attempting to move my projects off of the dying service already, it is incredible how much time so many people spent on this one network. It was the place to put a channel about your software or technology project and now it looks like people are moving to a new network called Libera.

    Update: As pointed out by The Internet’s Basscomm The Chairman of Freenode, Andrew Lee, has responded on the freenode website, and linked to a Paul Graham post in the response which really tells you everything you need to know about the Chairman of Freenode.

  • Earlier this year I managed to find elusive computer components and build a Ryzen 5600x-based computer to upgrade from the one I built back in 2016. Reviews are just now coming out for the new 2021 iPad Pro and the M1 system inside of it is benchmarking higher in Geekbench than my desktop gaming computer.

    The results reported in the MacStories review for the M1-powered 2021 iPad Pro by Federico Viticci (a fantastic review you should read just to hear from what an iPad Pro power user thinks of this upgrade) are 1716 single-core, 7143 multi-core, and results are similar across all the M1-powered Apple computers. This was also for a model with 16GB of RAM, the 1 and 2TB storage configuration options for the new iPad Pro both have 16GB of RAM. iPad Pros with less storage have 8GB of RAM.

    My desktop with an AMD Ryzen 5600x and 32GB of DDR4 3600 RAM gets 1609 single-core, 7557 multi-core. Both numbers fluctuate a bit for each run, but the higher single-core score and comparable multi-core score is very impressive and absolutely wild for a battery-powered and passively-cooled mobile tablet device versus a desktop system that’s plugged into the wall and has active cooling. It also makes me very curious what the sequel to the M1 will look like, and what Apple will do with updates to iPadOS now that it has access to so much more power. I’m hoping for Xcode.

  •  Nathan Grayson for Kotaku talking about how much Epic paid for both games from big and small games to give out for free on the Epic Games Store:

    It’s not hard to trace a general trend: Major publishers got a lot, while indies only got a little. Admittedly, some smaller games went free long after their figurative sell-by dates, but those are still some pretty paltry prices.

    The real winner here is Epic. As many industry figures pointed out on Twitter, those user acquisition cost numbers are awfully low, with Epic picking up nearly five million new users for dollars or cents per person. It is not easy to attract new users to a barebones store when a veritable monopoly like Steam is sitting just across the way—with everybody’s friends also on it—but Epic’s spend-to-win strategy appears to have paid off. Now it can boast a large user base to both publishers and players. Many other stores have failed where Epic is now improbably succeeding.

    Epic has been offering different free games to users daily or weekly in order to get more people to sign up for the Epic Game Store and the loser in this is absolutely smaller developers. One look at the numbers makes it clear that the developers got absolutely ripped off as Epic got their users for pennies and then the developers of these games may have missed out on actual sales.

    I can’t believe Epic isn’t more embarrassed by these numbers, I wonder if the free games experiment is done now that it has been running for years and they don’t mind giving it up or they may feel that the developers won’t have a choice but to ship with their store now because the deal is still slightly better than you get with Valve.

    Some part of Epic’s sentiment isn’t wrong: Apple screws developers over just like every rent-seeking business that isn’t big enough to earn a special deal, it’s just that Epic is at least as awful as the facts the lawsuit reveals over and over again, Epic is just less successful and wishes they could put their own app store out on iOS so that Epic could be the ones taking rent even if it is at a more reasonable 15%.

    For example, this lawsuit also revealed that Epic would have stopped campaigning against Apple if Epic had gotten a special deal like other businesses have on iOS. And of course Epic doesn’t sue Sony or Microsoft or Nintendo, because they do get special deals on consoles there and you’ll even see Fortnite editions of consoles.

    I hope that in some way Apple is forced to make some of their platforms more open, because that would enable great things to be done there, but it’s clear that there’s nothing good natured in this fight between two large companies. We don’t win in the end and these numbers made it clear that small developers certainly aren’t getting enough out of it.