Edward Snowden Lashes Out at NVIDIA Over GeForce RTX 50 Pricing And Value

[valentyn0]

He should ask russia or china to make better GPU's for him.

Is that your best answer you could come up with ? LMAO.

 

[FoulOnWhite]

Well at least when they are outdated, the 5090 will make a very decent door stop for your solid oak door

 

[Six_Times]

"Lashes Out"

Give us a break with the exaggerated title. He was just voicing a detailed opinion on a consumer product. Get over it.

 

[dyonoctis]

What I mean is that the terms "tricks and fakery" implies that something is wrong with the way we render our images. As it's been proven from time to time, traditional raster can look good.

Ultra realism and photo-accuracy isn't the only way to produce a good-looking image in a game. It's a brush in the painter's hand, just like any other.

I feel like "tricks and fakery" was taken the wrong way both because there's fear about what those new technologies might mean for the price of the hardware (I feel like ADA really put a negative spin on the future) and also there seems to be a lot of misconception about what optimizing a render means.

You can either have enough raw power to use high polycount assets everywhere, or you can smartly make use of LOD, and use low-resolution/remove assets in the distance because you won't notice the loss of details of things that are that far anyway. If it's done right it's the right way. But sometimes it's not done right, and you get pop-in or a very obvious loading of a higher quality asset that feels very unnatural). LOD and Culling (not rendering invisible things) are techniques that are still being improved to this day. It would have been easier to just brute force high-quality assets and textures, but they would rather use the additional power for something else, and refine that trick until they consistently get it right.

CG is like magic: when you can't see/aren't aware of the tricks, it's wonderful. There's something to be said about how some console gamers think that their consoles offer them the best experience when they have been using a less elaborate upscaling solution than the PC for over a decade...and consoles used to be native. (and that's with the hardware still being sold at a loss at launch)
And the big irony is that the platform that could benefit the most from upscaling, had to be stimulated by the appearance of upscaling on the PC where it's seen as a plague that needs to be shut down (and I'm barely being hyperbolic here).

 

[Assimilator]

What I mean is that the terms "tricks and fakery" implies that something is wrong with the way we render our images.

There is. Rasterisation is a hack.

As it's been proven from time to time, traditional raster can look good.

Yes. Due to 3+ decades of hacking it to make it look good.

Ultra realism and photo-accuracy isn't the only way to produce a good-looking image in a game.

The pursuit of increased visual realism is what has driven the videogame industry, and the hardware behind it, since its founding. Consumers have consistently reinforced this direction by voting for it with their wallets. Sure it may not be the only way to make a good game, and indeed there are far too many games that lean too hard on graphics at the expense of gameplay, but visuals are the hook that gets people in.

 

[Totally]

Only idiots are buying these new nvidia gpus for use, most are buying to resell to idiots that have more money than sense and I believe AMD will be the same, another failure overpriced GPUS.

Can someone explain to me why others can people buying these things idiots but I can't call them sheep?

 

[Visible Noise]

I know how game rendering works. Read my post above to see what I meant earlier.

No, I really think you don’t know. You may think you know, but I’m afraid you don’t.

 

[AusWolf]

No, I really think you don’t know. You may think you know, but I’m afraid you don’t.

You obviously know what I know a lot better than I do. Please stop this childishness, will 'ya?

There is. Rasterisation is a hack.

I don't recall anybody calling it a hack before RTRT got introduced. I'm also wondering how people imagine doing geometry or textures without raster.

Yes. Due to 3+ decades of hacking it to make it look good.

Exactly. How is that not good enough?

The pursuit of increased visual realism is what has driven the videogame industry, and the hardware behind it, since its founding. Consumers have consistently reinforced this direction by voting for it with their wallets. Sure it may not be the only way to make a good game, and indeed there are far too many games that lean too hard on graphics at the expense of gameplay, but visuals are the hook that gets people in.

Except that games aren't visually realistic. We get improved lighting, shadows and reflections, but other areas of the game often suffer. We still can't simulate human skin accurately, for example, especially in the rain. NPCs still look like oiled porcelain dolls in most games up to this day.

 

[dyonoctis]

I don't recall anybody calling it a hack before RTRT got introduced. I'm also wondering how people imagine doing geometry or textures without raster.


Exactly. How is that not good enough?


Except that games aren't visually realistic. We get improved lighting, shadows and reflections, but other areas of the game often suffer. We still can't simulate human skin accurately, for example, especially in the rain. NPCs still look like oiled porcelain dolls in most games up to this day.

People in the CG community absolutely did (but I feel like you are really getting too hang up on the pejorative aspect of the word hack) that's from the blog of Matt Pharr, a CG scientist who worked at Pixar. That man has been thinking about CG since the 90's...and he's currently involved in making RTRT a reality. When that guy joined Pixar, he worked on movies that weren't ray-traced, the tech was too expensive back then. Pixar had to slowly ease into it as computers and software got better.

I’ve been a long-time skeptic about ray tracing for interactive rendering. Whenever the topic’s come up, I’ve always been on the side of “I wish, but it just doesn’t make sense for real-time rendering”. It’s certainly not that I don’t like ray tracing, but for a long time, I felt that most of the arguments that were made in favor of it never really stood up to close scrutiny.

I don’t want to go through all of them (in part because smoke will start to come out of my ears), but just to mention a few:

• Rasterization is a hack. This is the worst one. Rasterization is a wonderfully efficient algorithm for computing visibility from a single viewpoint. That’s an awfully useful thing. And by the way, for the past 30 years, it’s done that robustly, without cracks along shared triangle edges—something that has just recently been solved for ray tracing.

. On to the next thing

And yep. Skin is hard to render. Path traced skin is very heavy, which is why they pretty much gave up on RTRT skin, and want to use neural rendering instead. Transluscent/Transparent materials at large are just generally challenging. Heavy to compute offline, hard to hack in raster. Is part of those materials that are being used with caution in games. Flat thin windows are easy. but once things start to get curvy, thick or with funky interaction with lights like diamonds, things start to get challenging. I'm not expecting to see a game level made of diamonds or funky glass/minerals (like an entire castle made of diamond) anytime soon

And that's a 2003 book

 

[AusWolf]

People in the CG community absolutely did (but I feel like you are really getting too hang up on the pejorative aspect of the word hack) that's from the blog of Matt Pharr, a CG scientist who worked at Pixar. That man has been thinking about CG since the 90's...and he's currently involved in making RTRT a reality. When that guy joined Pixar, he worked on movies that weren't ray-traced, the tech was too expensive back then. Pixar had to slowly ease into it as computers and software got better.

And yep. Skin is hard to render. Path traced skin is very heavy, which is why they pretty much gave up on RTRT skin, and want to use neural rendering instead. Transluscent/Transparent materials at large are just generally challenging. Heavy to compute offline, hard to hack in raster. Is part of those materials that are being used with caution in games. Flat thin windows are easy. but once things start to get curvy, thick or with funky interaction with lights like diamonds, things start to get challenging. I'm not expecting to see a game level made of diamonds or funky glass/minerals (like an entire castle made of diamond) anytime soon

And that's a 2003 book
View attachment 383021

Ok, let's call raster a trick (I'm tired of arguing) simply because it doesn't have anything to do with the realistic tracing of light rays. But that doesn't necessarily mean it's bad in every case and/or we should call it a hack. Not everything that isn't perfect is necessarily bad, especially when the performance costs of the more realistic approach are enormous.

 

[tpa-pr]

I'm a bit lost here, can someone explain the significance of Edward Snowden commenting on the current generation cards? I mean, he's a well-known name for sure but I don't understand why it's a big deal he's commented.

(Not that I necessarily disagree with some of his points mind you, i'm just confused).

 

[R-T-B]

I'm a bit lost here, can someone explain the significance of Edward Snowden commenting on the current generation cards? I mean, he's a well-known name for sure but I don't understand why it's a big deal he's commented.

(Not that I necessarily disagree with some of his points mind you, i'm just confused).

It's clickbait. Sad the world of journalism is at this point, but it works and pays the bills.

I blame all of you.

 

[Caring1]

I'm a bit lost here, can someone explain the significance of Edward Snowden commenting on the current generation cards? I mean, he's a well-known name for sure but I don't understand why it's a big deal he's commented.

(Not that I necessarily disagree with some of his points mind you, i'm just confused).

It's about as relevant as a Kardashian commenting on the topic.

 

[upt]

in retrospection
2014 GTX 980 398 mm² 549 USD 4 GB
RTX 5080 378 mm² 999 USD 16 GB

What are you complaining about 5080 is 7x faster and provides 4x more memory for 2x the price. 24 Gbit 3GB chips can't be released soon enough.

You have to factor in inflation. the cost of living has increased.

Nvidia provides interesting times to live in and gets all of this whining in return.

Can you do the same analysis for CPUs, SSDs, or Wifi ? Probably CPUs would be the easiest to acquire data.
was 4th gen Intel core around that time? If you could do the same 2014 vs. 2024 perf./price math on that it would be cool.

 

[dyonoctis]

Ok, let's call raster a trick (I'm tired of arguing) simply because it doesn't have anything to do with the realistic tracing of light rays. But that doesn't necessarily mean it's bad in every case and/or we should call it a hack. Not everything that isn't perfect is necessarily bad, especially when the performance costs of the more realistic approach are enormous.

Do you guys in the UK only use the word hack in a pejorative way?

 

[AusWolf]

Do you guys in the UK only use the word hack in a pejorative way?

Not sure about other people, but I do.

 

[Legacy-ZA]

 

[WatchThe80s]

in retrospection
2014 GTX 980 398 mm² 549 USD 4 GB
RTX 5080 378 mm² 999 USD 16 GB

What are you complaining about 5080 is 7x faster and provides 4x more memory for 2x the price. 24 Gbit 3GB chips can't be released soon enough.

You have to factor in inflation. the cost of living has increased.

Nvidia provides interesting times to live in and gets all of this whining in return.

GTX 970 has the same die(398m²) as the 980 for only 329 USD.

 

[upt]

nvidia sells AI cards with 1000% profit margin and in the gpu market has no competition, they make their own weather like it or not. This is more a failure or the competition, every monopoly will end like this

This. a thousand times... not just with GPUs but everything in general. How this simple and established notion escapes everyone is really strange to me...
Competition, competition, competition = good for consumer/market efficiency.

 

[Assimilator]

Ok, let's call raster a trick (I'm tired of arguing) simply because it doesn't have anything to do with the realistic tracing of light rays.

When I say raster is a hack, I'm not being pejorative per se, I am simply referring to how it is implemented WRT light as opposed to RT. Because the human eye, which is what we use to perceive visuals, begins and ends with light - and so does RT, whereas in raster light is an afterthought that has to be simulated - poorly. To quote Matt Pharr from the excellent link posted by @dyonoctis, with an additional bolded word inserted by me for clarity:

... ray tracing... [is] well suited to computing global illumination and illumination from large area light sources using Monte Carlo integration. Both of those lighting effects are hard to simulate accurately with a rasterizer because the visibility computations required are inherently incoherent.

But that doesn't necessarily mean it's bad in every case and/or we should call it a hack.

Raster exists only because we couldn't do real-time RT until recently, similarly to how we only used horse-drawn carriages until we were able to produce internal combustion engines small and light enough to move those same carriages. It's not bad, it's just had its time and that time is now over, and we need to stop trying to make horse-drawn carriages better when we can instead make better cars.

Not everything that isn't perfect is necessarily bad, especially when the performance costs of the more realistic approach are enormous.

"Perfect is the enemy of good enough", and as an engineer I agree completely. But here's the thing, nobody - and I mean nobody - who works in graphics rendering (I'm talking people like Pharr, and computer scientists) wants to use rasterisation, because it is so god-awfully complex, and therefore brittle and imperfect, compared to RT.

Do you guys in the UK only use the word hack in a pejorative way?
View attachment 383041

It's always been a pejorative term, the fact that it got repurposed to be a synonym for "tip" is one of those particularly American desecrations of English that I refuse to acknowledge.

 

[Contra]

When I say raster is a hack, I'm not being pejorative per se, I am simply referring to how it is implemented WRT light as opposed to RT.

In your opinion, UE5 Lumen is a raster or RT?
And Lumen calculates RT programmatically on regular "raster" Shader Units, and quite successfully, and not on dedicated hw-RT-core hardware. Lumen considers itself RT, BUT reviewers, including TPU, for some reason do not consider it and games on it RT! Strange, isn't it?
Will their opinion change if he enables the HW-RT calculation path? And if he enables it for one GPU and not for another, what effect should this have on anything?) Should the calculation result change in any way?

 

[Lycanwolfen]

If Nvidia is using nothing but Frame Gen to promote their new card. Heck someone could just write some software to produce it's own frame gen through the CPU. Something like reshade.me. I mean I use Reshade for games on my 1080ti's and I can make it look like an RTX card with no hit on performance.

 

[Assimilator]

I mean I use Reshade for games on my 1080ti's and I can make it look like an RTX card with no hit on performance.

Tell us that you don't know what framegen is, without telling us you don't know what framegen is.

 

[Redwoodz]

The part that has me pissed off is Nvidia has consistently lied about RTX features in their "gaming" gpu's. They have forced these hardware capabilities through their monopoly only to corner the AI market while telling gamers this is what they need.

 

[Contra]

The part that has me pissed off is Nvidia has consistently lied about RTX features in their "gaming" gpu's. They have forced these hardware capabilities through their monopoly only to corner the AI market while telling gamers this is what they need.

Especially because all these RTs can be calculated on standard "raster" shader units without hw-rt-cores