It’s a personal preference but I would take occasional smearing over janky frame rate, I don’t know why but if you are not a solid 60,90,120 it just feels really like there is a stutter every second or two even though it should be fine if it’s above 60fps.
For some games I’m happy to turn it on as it drops power/temps and provides virtually identical output (as far as i can tell anyway) to native, but my fans don’t need to go into overdrive mode.
I may even put on frame gen too if I just want to bump a stable-ish 80-90fps to stable 120fps, and again drops power and temps slightly. That sometimes does cause smearing but for the most part I don’t notice enough to be annoyed. Without them I would probably be running with more power draw and higher temps, and possibly still not even hitting lower resolutions at 120, some games as you say though can hit 120 no problem even without and the gpu won’t be stressed.
The challenges thst existed to use technology no longer exist, so there is no longer a reason to look under the hood for most people. It’s like how a lot of generations after boomers don’t know about how to change a tyre or spark plugs etc, cars got more reliable and industries created services to stop you needing to worry about that stuff.
As a kid I remember WANTING to play games with a friend on PC, he knew we needed a null modem cable and we went to pc shop 2 towns over got one and tried to figure out how to play together using it. Then when the Internet came out and we had to fight against Internet connection sharing so one computer could share Internet with friends pc. Trying to use no-cd patches just so we didn’t need to keep grabbing cds to play games etc.
There were so many things you learnt back then but it was because we had no alternative, I get why tech knowledge has vanished and I don’t blame them, they have had no need to solve the same problems and haven’t grown with technology, it’s been already established and they have had no need to concern themselves with it.
Problem is the working world still heavily needs PC skills and basic analytical ability so there needs to be more focus on those old “computer driving license” style courses so people can certify they know how to find a file and end task when something hangs.
DULLARD 😅
Also a bonus code I won’t forget:
ADE-NAI-WRA-LKA
You can all guess what games they are from.
The consensus seems to be that AMD priced their cards higher expecting Nvidia to price higher than they did.
Then Nvidia priced lower than they expected (still too expensive imo) and AMD needed to react and price their card cheaper. Problem is retailers already paid for shipments so AMD needed to settle some sort of reimbursement process for the soon to be out of pocket retailers.
This was a big issue for them, but also they realised they could generate more frames if they wanted to, and match Nvidia so they would be able to also claim crazy high FPS figures (it’s all nonsense, we care about raster performance).
To be able to do this they needed a couple of months to dev and test it before reviewers get it.
So delaying launch let’s them solve both problems with the extra time, but in reality they are missing a window to gain market advantage while also being able to align the narrative with what gamers care about (pure raster performance).
I don’t think it’s quite as simple as “let’s crack down on steam like other monopolies” as what do you crack down on?
They do little to no anti competitive behaviour, clutching at straws would be that they require you to keep price parity on steam keys (except on sales).
All these other monopolies do lots of shady stuff to get and maintain their monopoly, so you generally want to stop them doing those things. Steam doesn’t do anything shady to maintain it’s monopoly it just carries on improving it’s platform and ironically improving the users experience and other platforms outside of their own.
Like what do you do to stop steam being so popular outside of just arbitrarily making them shitter to make the other store fronts seem ok by comparison?
The 30% cut is often something cited and maybe that could be dropped slightly, but I’m happy for them to keep taking that cut if they continue to invest some of it back into the eco system.
Look at other platforms like Sony, MS who take 30% to sell on their stores, THEN charge you like £5 a month if you want multiplayer and cloud saves etc. Steam just gives you all this as part of the same 30%.
Epic literally does anti competitive things like exclusivity and taking games they have some stake in off other store fronts or crippling their functionality.
Steam has improved how I play games, it has cloud saves, virtual controllers, streaming, game sharing, remote play together, VR support, Mod support and this is all part of their 30%, the other platforms take same and do less, or take less but barely function as a platform.
Anti monopoly is great when a company is abusing it’s position, but I don’t feel Valve is, they are just genuinely good for pc gaming and have single handily made PC gaming a mainstream platform.
In some games it’s super obvious that it’s doing upscaling and looks awful, some games with without upscaling look awful (TAA), it’s odd that in some cases tools like Dlss can look better than native TAA.
For the most part though it feels like the FLAC vs Opus or whatever, most people can’t notice difference and don’t care enough about it, but some people can tell the difference and want the best, I don’t think either are wrong it’s just down to how much you notice/can tolerate before it’s annoying.