Yeah, although I am always reluctant to quantify visual quality like that. What is "65% better" in terms of a game playing smoothly or looking good?

The PS5 Pro reveal was a disaster, partially because if you're trying to demonstrate how much nicer a higher resolution, higher framerate experience is, a heavily compressed, low bitrate Youtube video that most people are going to watch at 1080p or lower is not going to do it. I have no doubt that you can tell how much smoother or less aliased an image is on the Pro. But that doesn't meant the returns scale linearly, you're right about that. I can tell a 4K picture from a 1080p one, but I can REALLY tell a 480p image from a 1080p one. And it's one thing to add soft shadows to a picture and another to add textures to a flat polygon.

If anything, gaming as hobby has been a tech thing for so long that we're not ready to have shift to being limited by money and artistic quality rather than processing power. Arguably this entire conversation is pointless in that the best looking game of 2024 is Thank Goodness You're Here, and it's not even close.

Yep. The thing is, even if you're on high end hardware doing offline CGI you're using these techniques for denoising. If you're doing academic research you're probably upscaling with machine learning.

People get stuck on the "AI" nonsense, but ultimately you need upscaling and denoising of some sort to render certain tier of visuals. You want the highest quality version of that you can fit in your budgeted frame time. If that is using machine learning, great. If it isn't, great as well. It's all tensor math anyways, it's about using your GPU compute in the most efficient way you can.

I'm not sure I agree with you on the former, DLSS is pretty remarkable in its current iteration

Oh wow, I haven’t played that in forever… If the community up and running? What’s the update at, are we talking early days, Fire/Fire Defender or different builds altogether? Not even sure where my discs are in the garage. 🤔

City of Heroes has been golden by comparison.

-homecoming gang represent.

Can’t say there is one, at least not yet. The talks for PSO2.

You’re lucky to have friends into the same stuff, I couldn’t pay my friends to play an MMO. I got one girlfriend too, but she didn’t like how much I played. I never got to play BB, what’s it like? And PSO2 was my favorite, the memories… A chance to get back into that, dare I say, it almost felt perfect somehow.