I miss the era of the internet with random games on every website
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I mean, to be clear, nepotism is about hiring relatives (etymologically nephews, not sure if people realize that).
You can be hired on influence rather than skill or qualifications even if you're not blood related. I'm only now realizing that English doesn't have a derisive word for this practice. Other languages do. In fact, had the school been public at least, the hiring process you describe would have been outright illegal where I live.
I think we've stumbled upon one of those cultural differences subtly encoded in language here.
And to be clear, I'm more lenient with it than my compatriots. I find building a team based on personal connection or how well you work with each other, rather than pure objective qualifications, is legitimate and can yield better results in some circumstances. Here it's generally frowned upon culturally if that connection is pre-existing rather than identified through a recruitment process though, family relations or not.
See, that's the opposite. Sheer nostalgia goggles.
I keep reminding people I bought Street Fighter 2 three times at full price AND for a long while before that I paid to play it by the match. Bought multiple expansion packs for shooters from Doom to Half-Life. There were three remasters of Resident Evil in like two years at one point. Sonic 3 came out episodically and they invented a whole cartridge system just so they could sell you physical DLC. Arcades were specifically tuned so you would have to pay more money to keep playing every three minutes on average. They ran studies and playtests with this specific goal in mind. I one had my arcade operator give me a free credit because I was the only one there when he got a new game installed. I played for what he deemed too long, so he went into the system menu in front of me and cranked up the difficulty.
I'm not saying the very olds had it best, I'm saying we ALL have rose tinted glasses. I was out there getting exploited by arcades and Capcom re-releases and it was my dad recoiling in horror. He called it "bug squashing" and kept claiming it was the computer playing, not me.
The biggest company I worked for was a great place to be, but they were a US company. I kept going to performance reviews, getting managers give me the "good news, you got the big bonus this year". My response was consistently "cool, but I'm a base salary guy, I'd rather just keep doing the same job and getting a base salary bump" and they kept being very confused by this.
Good people, good conditions, I had no complaints, but they just couldn't parse this. They kept explaining to me how big the bonuses could get, I kept not being motivated at all by this.
My PC is made from scraps and some of the hardware isn't that standard. At the same time it's not new, so I'm not giving Fedora a pass, either. It was not waking up from sleep, getting stuck on some power settings, not taking modifications through the GUI and other stuff. I think I have it working now, we'll see.
That was on my third attempt, too. I really don't like distro hopping.
I am screaming into a pillow of art critique frustrations right now.
Okay, look , first of all, that's the point of magazines, they had more than one person in them. There was both some editorial oversight keeping an editorial line AND multiple voices working together, so you were never railroaded into just the one guy. We called those newsletters and the understanding was they were supposed to be obnoxious.
I don't disagree that there is good game critique right now. For every ragebaiting, hyperfocused, the-end-is-nigh culture warrior there is someone who actually knows what they're talking about going "alright, ya chucklefucks, here's the deal". But the point is you don't HAVE to get through one of those to get to the trash. The trash is now algorithmically selected and pushed into your eyeballs, and it's your job to sift through the recommendation engine to personally decide what level of that you want in your life.
You want more than you should. On average, anyway.
With no gatekeepers outside the corpobot gatekeepers there are no concerns but engagement. Hard to get that job done like that, and there's more unexpected damage downstream from that change.
Am I saying that a heavily gatekept media landscape where the reputation of publications drives attention more than specificity and focus? Eh, I'm not NOT saying that. It's hard to argue that the societal outcomes have not been great. And while there's good critique out there it's dense, and dull and itself heavily specialized. Even after we went digital there used to be approachable, good critique, -not "reviews", but critique- in loose, ugly blogs written in good humor with sharp observations and constructive approaches. Newsletters, but good newsletters.
Look, I don't mean it as an insult, but your post is a good example of why there were some positives to having people come for the guides and the "technical reviews" and the personalities and have the rest of the package literally stapled to those. I don't think much of the print world delivered on that potential before the Internet took over. The website-based world had a better go at it, some people did great work. A bunch moved on to make great games from there.
The pivot-to-video, content-as-a-service social media landscape we have today? Nah. Not by itself.
Ah, not being American AOL wasn't much of a thing, on account of the A part. Same principle, though.
Well, for one thing there are plenty of directly purchaseable games on phones these days. I've been handing kids some Peglin and heard no complaints.
For another, 2000s Flash games WERE unskippable ads and yet here we are.
Horrified, you will be. I'm telling you.
Oh, you sweet, sweet child.
I'm just going to say I'm very glad you discovered flash games before you discovered IRC.
Not Macromedia, I'll tell you that.
These days it's all part of the Adobe Standard Model Suite. Can't even get it separately.
Oh, wow, we're there now?
Like, the online hellscape of endless Flash applets and browser shovelware games is retro now?
You get what that means, right? In twenty years you GenZ Tumblr nerds will be in some online forum recoiling in horror at some kid waxing nostalgic about back when you could just play a free gacha game full of anime waifus and where have all the good phone games gone?
It's happening and you're not ready.
Well, either that or Thunderdome. We'll see.
Yeah, I don't disagree with the idea that the AI shills are currently peddling it for things it doesn't do well (or at all) and that's a big issue.
It's just not a running tally of "AI doing good" or "AI doing bad". "AI" isn't a single thing, for one.
Alright, so no, TAA doesn't look worse "compared to some older AA tech". For one thing our benchmarks for "some older AA tech" is MSAA used on 720p (on a good day) on consoles. MSAA did a valiant effort that generation, but it doesn't scale well with resolution, so while the comparatively very powerful PC GPUs were able to use it effectively at 1080p60 they were already struggling. And to be clear, those games looked like mud compared to newer targets.
We are now typically aiming for 4K, which is four times as many pixels, and at semi-arbitrary refreshes, often in the hundreds on PCs. TAA does a comparable-to-better job than MSAA much faster, so cranking up the base resolution is viable. DLSS goes one further and is able to upres the image, not just smooth out edges, even if the upres data is machine-generated.
"MSAA looked better" is almost entirely rose tinted glasses.
Internal resolution with DLSS is variable. Some games have a setting to select it on the fly depending on load, but all games give you a quality selector, so it's ultimately a matter of power to performance where you want to set your base resolution and your output resolution. DLSS is heavier than most TAA but much better. If you're keeping output res and settings, then yeah, you're going to lower resolution a bit to compensate the loss, probably, but you can absolutely run DLSS at native resolution (that's normally called DLAA). It looks great, but any AA at native 4K is gonna be heavy, so you need pretty powerful hardware for that.
So the internal resolution hasn't "gone down". You may need to lower it in some games to hit performance, but that's always been the case. What has changed is we're pushing super high definition images compared to the PS3 and even the PS4 generation. 4 to 16 times bigger.
And yeah, upscaling can show artifacts around some elements, but so can old AA. Modern versions of DLSS and FSR are a lot cleaner than older ones, but it's not a downgrade against most comparables. It becomes a matter of whether you think some of the ghosting on particles or fast motion was more annoying than fizzling on detailed areas or thin lines. If a preference for one over the other was the conversation I'd be more than happy to chalk it up to taste, but that's not how this is often framed. And again, modern upscaling is improving much faster than older AA techniques, a lot of the artifacting is gone, not just for new games, but for older ones where newer versions of these systems can be selected even if they weren't implemented at launch. It's actually pretty neat.
And that wall of text is, I think, why this conversation is so obtuse and confusing these days. That's a lot of nuance, and it's still superficial. People just go "this looks like crap because of particles or whatever" and I guess that's fine, but it barely correlates to anything in reality, it's quite deeply impacted by half-remembered results that really don't hold up as well as people remember and clarifying all this is certainly not worth the effort. Just saying it online is a lot simpler and easier, though.
Yep, just about ready to rest my case here.
I swear, it's bewildering.
Specifically, how is this news and how is this World News?
I mean, start an Elon watch thing if you're into minutia about this guy, but this doesn't belong, as far as I'm concerned.
Well, for one thing you're saying you haven't seen the latest version, so I already don't know what you were looking at or when. I don't know what settings you're using or what resolutions you were targeting.
Do I think there are any settings or resolutions in Cyberpunk where TAA looks noticeably better than any DLSS after 2? Absolutely, definitely 100% no. But hey, it'd help get an idea of what type of images we're comparing.
And it'd help to know what sorts of things you are seeing that make you notice a difference. What is it about that DLSS image that looks worse? I mean, let's be clear, these will mostly be the same base picture, just upscaled to whatever your monitor resolution is in slightly different ways. So what is it from each of those that is leading to this assessment? What are the problems we're talking about here?
Because last time I fired up Cyberpunk (and that was a couple of weeks ago) DLSS performed noticeably faster than TAA and looked effectively indistinguishable from native rendering at 4K.
So yeah, you're saying some weird stuff right here and from the explanations you're (not) giving you may as well have ran in from the street drenched in red fluid claiming the aliens stole your dog and I would have about as much connection to my lived reality to parse what's going on. I'm less concerned you're going to randomly stab me over your antialiasing preferences, sure, but in terms of using words to exchange recognizable information I'm kinda lost here.
And yet the anger is new. Again, it's about perception, not reality.
Hah. I just went with Fedora on a new build, got all the way to setting up all the stuff I need that computer to do and found that it seems the power management is borked and sometimes it just decides to die on a black screen after being left unattended for no discernible reason.
That doesn't mean anything to you, but I wanted to whine in public about it. If you want to factor in my specific set of bugs feel free to do so, though.
See, GenZs? This is gonna be you. You're gonna be doing this to justify why your flash games were cool and their gacha crap is crap.
Been happening since books were new technology and it'll keep happening.