Hacker News Reader

Comment by blashyrk | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, right.

I can run basically any game at 1080p with at least 60fps with my 1080ti, except this game.

What they did with the mesh shaders is basically the equivalent of releasing a raytracing-only game.

So now I have to wait until GPUs become affordable again, which might not happen for a couple of years still. Shame, as this was the game I was the most excited about this entire year.

And no, spending money to get the same (or worse) GPU which supports mesh shaders wouldn't be worth it.

View on HN

That GPU came out almost 7 years ago, it's only natural its lack of modern features starts being apparent. I still remember not being able to run new games once Shader Model 3 became standard, it's sad but what can you do?

The problem is that there are no good upgrade paths for 1080ti. It's roughly as powerful as 3060ti. But there's no point to upgrade to a card with a similar performance and less VRAM. So the only upgrade path to feel a noticeable performance gain is to buy RTX 3090 or RTX 4090 and those are very expensive.

One small caveat: the "came out" date is irrelevant, the relevant date is the date an alternative appeared. In this case the real info is the replacement came out ~5 years ago (or ~4 depending on the definition).

And the situation is worse for AMD users, only 3 years since a compatible board came out.

Sure, but there was a new generation of consoles in the meantime. The example I gave of Shader Model 3.0 had to do with the same thing, new consoles appeared.

The real culprit here was the chip shortage, cryptocurrency bubble bursting, rising inflation, and overall instability throughout the world (deteriorating China and US relations, for example).

All in all, it's just how things have always worked out, with the exception of external factors that had unforseen consequences.

I'm sure Remedy put on a ton of work, and is trying to raise the bar in graphical fidelity. Decisions like these had to be done early in the game dev stage, since all the game assets would've taken it into account.

At the end of the day, gimping progress in real time CG for the sake of compatibility with a 7 year old card makes no sense.

Your GPU is 6 years, 7 months old. As an analogy, consider someone in 2007 objecting that their 2001 GeForce3 Ti500 can't run Crysis/Mass Effect/etc. The PS4 generation really messed with the usual conventions and expectations of PC upgrade cycles.

(I appreciate that GPU prices have creeped up and up over time, though.)

For most people, Moore's law died around 2013 with Haswell or even Ivy Bridge. In 2007, 2001 was forever ago (In particular, 2001-07 involved the jump between the space heater Pentium 4 and proper 64-bit multicore chips such as the Athlon 64 X2 and Intel Core 2 Duo/Quad as well as the growth of dedicated gaming video cards - even the GeForce3 was uncommon, while by 2007 everyone had a video card)

In 2007, CPUs and GPUs were still getting twice as fast (perceptibly) each year. That hasn't been true for a while. Other than lacking a TPM, my i7-3770k machine and GTX 970 runs as fast in desktop use as my i9-9900k+2070 Super, and that machine (which dates to....2019, I think?) still plays new game releases at 1440p just fine.

Recall that most games are designed for the XBox Series X (released 2020) and PS5 (released 2020) and still target that caliber of GPU performance.

I went on a quest last year to reduce latency on my desktop and code using an 8khz polling speed mouse, a pro gamer keyboard, and two 1440p 165hz monitors. I read a fascinating article here on Hacker News about it (in November 2022, I’d have to look up the article) Anyway, it feels great. If you’re wanting things to feel faster consider these upgrades! I highly recommend them. For the first few weeks it’d feel like I had started typing before I started typing which was a weird experience. I’d just become so used to a ton of latency.

> Recall that most games are designed for the XBox Series X (released 2020) and PS5 (released 2020) and still target that caliber of GPU performance.

This cycle is extremely unusual though, the length of the cross-gen period has been dramatically extended by both covid shortages and also disruptions to the game development pipeline from covid and the Russian war among other things.

Once developers are no longer forced to validate for literal base-tier ps4 hardware from 2012 (8 jaguar netbook cores and an underclocked 7850, oh my), gtx 970 tier hardware is going to immediately drop off a cliff. And frankly even pascal is not going to age well. There were lots of improvements and features in pascal that got downplayed by reviewers from 2018-2022 and now they are really starting to come into play (and would have done so earlier had it not been for the pandemic).

You can hardly say we’ve even seen next-gen games at this point, tbh. Even CP2077 is a cross-gen title - which in many ways functionally means “last-gen”.

The mesh shader issue isn't a Moore's law raw performance issue. It's an issue with the hardware not supporting specific graphic pipelines. The software fallback is slower than dedicated hardware. Like how AES-NI on a CPU is many times faster at doing AES. That's why the parent comment likens it to newer GPUs' hardware raytracing features.

"Caliber of GPU" is not just performance, but also features. The Xbox Series supports mesh shader (and PS5 with their equivalent). Nvidia 10-series and AMD RDNA1 GPUs and older do not. This youtube video compared two GPUs released around the same time, one with less performance but mesh shader support and one with more performance but no mesh shader support: https://youtu.be/UiduP4Y7RSw

The lesson here is that you need to bite the bullet and get top of the line at least once

Because then you always have some capital within the hardware to upgrade again without breaking the bank

But if you upgrade mid life cycle or even worse: to a mid range card that’s already mid life cycle, then you’re always getting less life span and having to do full upgrades again

> I can run basically any game at 1080p with at least 60fps with my 1080ti

No, you can’t.

There's lots and lots of other great games to play, so don't stress if you miss one.

Have you considered geforce now? A lot more affordable than a GPU. You get a 4080 for $20 a month, no commitment.

You can buy an RTX 3080 for $400 or a 3090 for $650-700 right now. Those can both run the game fine. I got mine from some gamer kid in a beat up van at the gas station and it’s working great.

> You can buy an RTX 3080 for $400 or a 3090 for $650-700 right now

New or with 10 000+ hours of 100% load mining coins ?

Stable load is better for GPU longevity than cycling between hot and cold repeatedly. Also, lots of mining farms will undervolt their cards for more efficiency. Getting a used mining card is probably better than getting one from a gamer.

> Stable load is better for GPU longevity than cycling between hot and cold repeatedly.

Same for cars but I'll buy a 30k km car over a 300k km car every day

Reply on news.ycombinator.com