UltraMega

That's true, but it's a lot less true than it used to be. Most people don't know this but Nanite in UE5 can actually run just fine off a hard drive. The point data it streams in is not as much data as people assume it is. On top of that, a PCIe3 3500mb/s nvme drive should be more than enough to allow games to load in whatever assets they need even if it's not done in a particularly efficient way. To date, there are only a few games that can even saturate the bandwidth of a sata SSD, and only for very brief amounts of time. On top of that, direct storage and planned updates to DirectX will give GPUs much greater access to storage and system ram in the future. I don't think Nvidia is skimping on Vram because they're expecting advancements in storage access to get better, but those things are going to get better regardless. On a bit of a side note, Nvidia may be setting themselves up for a situation where people are a lot less compelled to upgrade in the future. By skimping on Vram but pushing DLSS, they are basically sending the message that they think Vram is less important now because DLSS can make up the difference better than the extra Vram can. If that proves true to a reasonable extent, it could take a lot longer for 4000 series owners to feel a strong need to upgrade. I suspect DLSS will only continue to get better, so if the main difference for gamers is running DLSS at balanced or performance mode more often vs quality mode as time goes on, but DLSS is also constantly getting better at upscaling, gamers may just decide to rely on upscaling more and more making new hardware less and less necessary. I wouldn't be surprised if Nvidia is already planning to pump the breaks on DLSS iterations and wait for AMD and Intel to catch up so they aren't giving gamers as much of a free upgrade via effective upscaling. It may turn out that eventually Nvidia aims to just stay a step ahead on upscaling while minimizing the benefit it actually gives to anyone on the fence about an upgrade. Interesting times ahead. Upscaling has certainly thrown a big wrench in the predictability of future hardware, like it or not. One of the most interesting things about this is that I don't think Nvidia was planning to make upscaling such a big part of their marketing back when they had to cut the Vram on the 3000 series in half due to pandemic shortages. If someone had told them back then that they would be inferring 7 out of ever 8 pixels with AI/upscaling just a few years later, I think they would have been almost as surprised as anyone else.

Not to try and defend Nvidia here, but some things have changed. For example, every console generation saw massive (like 16x or more) memory capacity increases except the most recent one. PS5/xbox have about 12GBs of Vram available to the GPU, which is about double from the last gen. Nvidia is clearly being greedy, but it's also true that Vram capacity increases are less important today than they were in the past, in no small part because now we have storage drives fast enough to load in tons of game assets in real time. I think Nvidia also knows that a card as powerful as something like a 4070 could last a really long time if it did have the proper amount of Vram with DLSS 3 being in the mix. One you can do path tracing with good results, there's not a lot left to sell to gamers in the foreseeable gpu market. I mean, what are they going to do, try to sell people on how many bounces the path tracing can do? Anything past 2 bounces has extremely dimishing results, and we're already at 2 in 2077. There's just not any compelling reasons left to upgrade a GPU beyond one that can do PT reasonably well already, so if Nvidia didn't skimp on Vram they may end up with a bunch of gamers reluctant to upgrade in a future where the only difference between a hypothetical 4000 card with enough Vram and an even better card is just what DLSS setting you have to use with it when you do PT. I'm not disagreeing with you @Sir Beregond, but some of the aspects of this have evolved over time and it's interesting to bring up those points. That said, the backlash Nvidia is getting seems stronger than before, maybe we'll see a 4000 series refresh, or a rushed out 5000 series.

Modder creates the GeForce RTX 3070 with 16GB VRAM that never was WWW.TECHSPOT.COM When Nvidia launched the GeForce RTX 4070 graphics card with only 12 gigabytes of GDDR6X memory, gamers... The original video is not in English, FYI. What started as a compromised amount of Vram do to pandemic shortages has turned into full planned obsolescence from Nvidia.

Buy a used 3700x on ebay for $100. Sell the 3600x for $60. Get 4 more threads at for $40.

I think we are going to see a lot of GPUs dropping in price. These high prices can't hold forever.

Yes.

AMD performance still isn't great, but with the mod I can get decent results:

Colorful's Rumored RTX 4060 Ti 8GB GPU: Leaked Specs and Details (guru3d.com) Talk about a cut down card. @Sir Beregond will love this, I'm sure.

This is related to the recent news about the Discord leak as well: China likely to rapidly achieve air superiority over Taiwan, US leaks say | Taiwan | The Guardian WWW.THEGUARDIAN.COM Documents among those shared by alleged leaker raise questions over island’s military readiness This video explains the phenomenon know as the "silicone sheild":

Warren Buffett gives reason for surprise sale of stake in Taiwan's TSMC | CNN Business WWW.CNN.COM Warren Buffett says geopolitical tensions were "a consideration" in the decision to sell most of Berkshire Hathaway's... If the market is reacting to a threat from China, that's pretty big news in and of itself.

This video includes details on a mod that reduces the bounce lightning from 2 bounces to 1 for a significant performance boost and minimal visual difference. The fact that a mod for this came out so quickly shows the PT update is definitely intended as Nvidia marketing above all else. This option should have been in the game and there's no excuse for not including it. Even Portal RTX has the option to reduce bounces.

I agree with what you're saying about it being a cut down and overpriced card, but when the 4090 can only do 2077 at 16 FPS without upscaling you could argue there are no 4k cards. I think these days it's more RT or not than res since when RT is on, it's never really at 4k anyway, unless it's very minor RT.

To me it seems like all new GPUs are 4K cards to me these days. I think the 4070 can probably run just about any game without RT at 4K just fine. In a sense, Nvidia needed to push RT because without it, there wouldn't be much reason to buy an expensive card part a certain point. Once a mid-range GPU can run HQ photogrammetry assets with enough detail to really flesh out a 3D environment, the only thing to build on next is the lighting. Kinda makes me wonder, once we have GPUs that can run path tracing in high detail at high res well enough to just make it the standard for all games, will we even need better GPUs anymore for gaming?

Yes, PSVR2 came out, but sony has already cut back their plans for it due to low sales. My argument here is not that VR isn't really cool, just that it hasn't been successfully enough to justify another full blown title like Alyx in the foreseeable future and that's not just me guessing, it's based on all the news I've read or watched about this stuff. Stuff like Gran Turismo VR are ideal because it's just taking a game that already exists and tweaking it for VR, so the dev cost would be really low. I'm sure games that have a VR add on mode will continue to exist. Definitely agree that VR would do a lot better if it were standardized so all VR games worked on all VR headsets. Short of that, I'm sure headset will continue to come out in newer higher res as long as people are willing to pay for the headsets, but that doesn't mean it's not a very small market from a game developers perspective.

For those that hear that Russia doing this stuff and have a reaction of disbelief, it's entirely possible that reaction is based on the exact kind of misinformation Russia is putting out there. To me it's a strong sign of the high level of success Russia has achieved with these tactics when so many people in the US would defend Russia and criticize their own government when they hear about Russian propaganda. There is certainly an ideological divide on the types of people that are most affect by this kind of propaganda that learns heavily towards the right. I don't mean that as a personal comment towards anyone here, it's just a fact that I think has been highly verified at this point and can be considered common knowledge among those who still value a strong attachment with reality over what they want to be true, or believe to be true based on Russia's efforts, or both. But to respond more directly, when you say stuff like "Does Microsoft not know what a VPN is?", I think it really hurts your argument because it's like, yes, of course they know what a VPN is. They are the second largest company in the world, and they are the largest software developer period. I think it's safe to say they have some ability to track things online effectively. This also lines up perfectly with lots of other reporting, so it's not like it's just Microsoft pointing this out.

Dual AMD Zen 5-based system shown scoring over 123K points in Cinebench R23 | KitGuru WWW.KITGURU.NET Although AMD's Zen 5 architecture is not expected to debut anytime soon, it seems the company is already hard at... But can it run...

Just in case anyone here needs a little explanation on the difference between ray tracing and path tracing: Ray Tracing traces light from the camera out, and for however many bounces it's programmed to do. Anything not in view of the camera or not touched by light bounces is not considered in the rendering. Path Tracing traces light from light sources, and for however many bounces it's programmed to do. This is why RT still has missing info vs PT.

Most def. It seems like the comments section of just about every online outlet that has anything to do with news is filled with propaganda bots now.

I have a friend who has always been into conspiracy theories and propaganda. He believes the dumbest things without question, and I'm pretty sure he gets most of his info from Discord groups.

Microsoft warns that Russian agents are trying to infiltrate gaming communities WWW.TECHSPOT.COM Speaking at Semafor's World Economy Summit, Microsoft president Brad Smith said his company's security analysis... This is almost comical. It sounds like a headline from The Onion. I guess I'm getting old because back in my day we just had to worry about Minecraft griefers, not Russian spys

Yea no doubt VR is super cool. From Valve's perspective though, VR is a flop and they're not going to make any more VR games. Same with Sony, they cut back their VR ambitions because VR sales are low. So no matter how cool it is, right now it looks like VR is on life support.

As much as I like to bash Nvidia for their somewhat overbearing business tactics, I gotta give them credit here. DLSS3 on the 4090 is sort of an afterthought, but when you pair it with a $600 card and run path tracing at "4K" ~60fps, it does make AMD look like they're falling behind again just when it started feeling like they were close to being on even terms with the DLSS2/FSR2 race. Interesting times. I think it's like 1 out of every 8 pixels is actual rendered, and the rest is being filled in with AI. It does look a bit soft, but it seems like we've gone from caring a lot about native res to very effective upscaling in a relatively short time. I can only imagine where this kind of 'render a small amount of pixels and fill in the rest' style of doing things will hold for the future.

From what I understand, this was a big push from Valve to kick start VR, and from Valves perspective it failed. I don't think we will see any more VR games from them, and I don't think VR will ever really take off in anything like its current form. As cool as VR seems (have not tried it personally) the barrier to entry of having to buy all the gaming stuff and then an expensive VR kit on top, plus the amount of space it takes in your house to do it properly is just too much for VR to ever take off and justify another full blown title like Alyx.

Oh yea, sure there are CPUs that would have to run the 32-bit version of windows 10. Are there any that can't even do thsmat though?

Having played it myself, I don't think you're missing much as far as the gameplay itself goes. It does a lot of different things, but none of them very well. It's what I would imagine a game made by FutureMark to be like. It's OK, but the main reason to check it out is definitely the visuals. Lots of different endings to the game. In the ending I got, my character committed suicide.