Comment by PragmaticPulp | Hacker News Reader

Comment by PragmaticPulp | Hacker News Reader

Your premise is not true. Gaming at high resolutions with high frame rates and full settings required powerful GPUs. VR especially demands high frame frame rates to remain immersive while also rendering the scene twice (each eye has a different perspective).

We actually have a long way to go before GPUs can really support fully immersive VR. The new 4090 is just barely enough to handle some racing sims like ACC in VR at high resolution and settings.

Even 3000 series cards couldn’t deliver playable frame rates at 4K with all of the graphical eye candy turned on (RayTracing, etc.) in games like Cyberpunk 2077. As with all games, you can simply play with lower settings and lower resolutions, but the full experience at 4K really does require something like a 4080 or 4090.

And of course, next generation games are being built to take full advantage of this new hardware. It doesn’t make any sense to suggest that GPU vendors should just stop making new progress and expect games to stay at current levels of advancement.

>in games like Cyberpunk 2077

There’s only the same handful of graphics-intensive games that are being brought in every online argument and tech review outlet, like Digital Foundry. I can understand it when viewing games from a pure technological standpoint. But if viewed as actual games, you play through demanding single-player games like Metro, Cyberpunk or Control once, and then move on. The vast majority of produced titles play perfectly fine with barely any noticeable difference between the latest and greatest €2000 GPU, and something from a few years back like GTX1080, or a Playstation 5.

I don’t think there are enough demanding games come out to warrant the purchase, especially if you count only the ones that are actually fun to play as a game, and not just admire raytracing lighting or reflections.

Agreed, my 3080ti struggles to sustain 144fps for my 144hz 4K monitor even in a game like Apex Legends with all settings at low. We definitely need more GPU evolution still!

Apex is a horribly unoptimized resource hog, I don't think it's a good baseline for this sort of thing, but I get your more general point.

It's wild to me that 144fps 4k is the bar now, a decade ago people hotly debated 60fps being significant over 30 (which it certainly is), but I kinda feel like after 60fps QHD the perceptible difference just isn't there, or certainly not worth the procurement and operational cost.

The difference between 60hz and 120hz is massive in gaming. I know this because I play an FPS that usually runs at 120Hz and I really notice when it drops to 60 when the action gets intense.

The difference between gaming at 4K and 1440p or even 1080p however is not that significant imo. Competitive (and many casual) gamers prefer a high frame rate to high resolution.

But as display technology improves people will just come to expect their games should run in native 4k resolution.

Forgive me for my ignorance, but I genuinely don’t understand why you want a monitor of this quality at this frame rate. My understanding is most humans only see from 30-60 fps and 60hz, and with that I only ever optimized my equipment for that without stressing about higher graphics quality. Is my understanding wrong?

Humans can perceive frame rates far above 30-60.

Can you tell me more? Can you cite me sources? (I’m not asking to challenge you I genuinely want to educate myself on this. Like I said I was going off of a casual Google search that told me humans don’t generally notice beyond 60 fps so there’s no point in significantly higher monitors. If this is wrong I’d like sources because the sources will educate me further where the real info is about this!)

Here is a video from Linus that poses that question. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OX31kZbAXsA

I blind tested my ex on my 144hz displays, setting variating combinations of refresh rates between two monitors where the options were 60, 120 and 144.

She could always tell the difference between 60 and 120/144, the way she saw the difference between 120 and 144 was comparing the pointer trail. She didn't notice that animations were smoother though, so that's definitely trained.

I hate myself so I run Linux on all my client machines, and if my display goes to 60 I notice by the first animation on my desktop (which is essentially only the start menu).

If you're curious it's easy to set different refresh rates on your monitors and try it out for yourself, the 60hz thing is bogus.

I also notice an awful lot of lag when movies have panoramic shots, they are less than 30hz. There are workarounds with computed frames in most modern tvs that help with this.

Everyone is different but it’s generally accepted in the gaming community that the jump from 60 to 144hz is hugely noticeable (and I agree with that, I wouldn't go back to 60hz even though you do adjust to lower refresh rates) but trails off after that except for competitive/pro scenarios. Beyond gaming, things like animations in Windows are noticeably far smoother as well.

First of all, humans can see flickering at 30 Hz and even at 60 Hz (there are different zones in retina with different "specs" some see color, some see motion). But even if it was not visible there is still a huge benefit of higher framerates: the latency between input and output. When you press a button the time to update the screen to reflect your press is 1.5x frame time on average at best (wait till the current frame ends, which will be 0.5 time on average and render the next frame with the input). In practice the output is buffered in many places and the latency can be as long as 10 frames. With 60 Hz that will give you ~166ms latency, which anyone can feel.

That's a bit missing the point of what he said.

You are correct about the hardware requirements - but his point was that 90% of the applications of this high end hardware ends up being in machine learning (and or crypto mining) and not the tiny ultra-high-end gaming market that can afford to pay several thousands for such cards. Most gaming "rigs" are nowhere near those specs.

Nobody would manufacture such cards in quantity beyond a few "show pieces" only for the few very rich enthusiasts that can afford them if there wasn't this non-gaming market, it simply wouldn't be economical.

And your numbers for these assumptions are based on what?

The high end market has always been like that even before ML or mining were a thing on GPUs. While yes, the majority of the use nowadays is in those areas, they clearly do sell enough of them to be making a profit even without being the majority of sales (otherwise they would've never made them prior to GPU compute going mainstream), especially considering that the costs of making the high end cards aren't that crazy when the lower end cards are often just the same chip as the high end model but cut down. It's also worth considering that the same chips also go into the workstation cards.

On top of all that, the halo product effect also plays a role, where it's easier to sell even the lower end models when you can claim to have the fastest model of the generation at the high end.

Furthermore, the current generation's high end tends to become the next generation's mid/low end, so it's really just buying into a product that could last a gamer one extra generation, which offsets the costs (ignoring that $1600 every ~2-3 years isn't really that crazy for someone with stable employment).

> Thanks, this is exactly what I meant in a much better formulation :)

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