[i5heu]

Also one does have to consider energy! In Germany energy prices are currently at 0.328€/kWh from big providers, and considering a RTX 4080 has 320W alone an say 230W extra for the rest of the system + PSU inefficiencies - my M1 MacBook has way under 30W so the difference between these 2 is 520W.. what means that alone for energy consumption you need to game about 129 hours/month or 4.3/hours per day to break even ... _but_ this is before having to buy a 1300€ GPU, that one would have to replace every year to have the same as GFN.

But IMHO the biggest appeal to GFN in Germany is temperature. In Germany there are no air conditioners in normal households and even in apartments with more then 2k a month rent there are none. So it is quite luxurious to game while not having 0.5kW blasting into your room.

[ftrobro]

Interesting that electricity prices are so different than in southern Sweden even though the distance to Germany is less than 100 km and our grids are somewhat connected. Here in southern Sweden the cost has been negative during daytime for the past week, a trend that will probably continue over summer thanks to solar energy. The net cost for buying electricity is still a bit over 0 though, because of taxes and transfer fees.

[wasmitnetzen]

There's only 600MW of direct grid connection between Sweden and Germany[1]. Southern Sweden uses 4GW right now, Germany 47GW.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baltic_Cable

[dijit]

SOUTHERN? Sweden? We have the worst electric prices within Sweden. (Malmö at least), the connections to the north where there is a lot of power generation is really weak and they shut down nearly all the power plants in the region, so we are stuck importing expensive energy.

My building has solar on the roof and a collective agreement with e.on precisely to try to control the insane costs.

[ftrobro]

Prices were high two years ago, but that is no longer the case. A lot of solar power came online last year. Currently the price is negative:

https://www.eon.se/el/elpriser/aktuella

[Hikikomori]

And then locals dont want wind power.

[distances]

In Finland locals started wanting wind power when it became clear a wind power park can bring considerable tax income for a small municipality.

[KronisLV]

> considering an RTX 4080 has 320W alone

> having to buy a 1300€ GPU, that one would have to replace every year

Feels like gamers are quite the demanding audience, instead of getting something like Intel Arc A380 (or something that supports AV1), upscaling from 720p/1080p using framegen and running games on medium settings. That might make the equation work out better, though perhaps not if the industry pushes for more and more complex graphics all the darn time, while the engines themselves are capable of scaling back all the way to mobile devices.

I probably have lower standards in that regard, I wouldn't expect to max out graphics when trying to play games on a MacBook or a netbook or something, due to the smaller screen anyways, it feels like modern game graphics are so noisy you can hardly make things out well. Nowadays I mostly play indie games that aren't super graphically complex, yet still are lovely experiences.

That said, my current GPU is actually an Arc A580 (replaced my old RX 580) and it's been pretty good since I got ReBAR working, and 1080p at 60 fps is the sweet spot for me (except slightly higher framerates like 72 fps feel better in VR).

[LoganDark]

> upscaling from 720p/1080p using framegen

This isn't something you can just do. I mean, it almost is (look at apps like Lossless Scaling, Magpie) but it's always most optimally implemented by the game itself.

Just because the buzzword exists doesn't mean the problem is solved.

[KronisLV]

From everything I've heard and seen, it seems like XeSS/FSR/DLSS are all making steady progress and the internal rendering resolutions being lower than what's on your screen is no longer such an issue, with more and more improvements being made.

There's no reason why you couldn't have the game be upscaled to whatever the stream resolution is from something a bit more performance friendly, with the quality still being good enough (given that some video artifacts will be there anyways) and things like text/UI being legible.

I'm regards to frame generation, it seems that eventually whatever Nvidia is doing with DLSS 3 will find its way into other vendors' products in a comparable alternative form. Once game engines like Unity/Unreal/Godot get support for the upscalers out of the box, I think the technology will be even more commonplace.

[LoganDark]

> From everything I've heard and seen, it seems like XeSS/FSR/DLSS are all making steady progress and the internal rendering resolutions being lower than what's on your screen is no longer such an issue, with more and more improvements being made.

That's nice, but doesn't really fix the issue of them not being available in every game, or it varying which one even is available.

> There's no reason why you couldn't have the game be upscaled to whatever the stream resolution is from something a bit more performance friendly, with the quality still being good enough (given that some video artifacts will be there anyways) and things like text/UI being legible.

If you're just going to upscale the final image without any internal cooperation from the game, there is no reason to upscale a 720p game and stream 1080p when you could simply stream 720p instead and have the client do the upscaling, unless of course you are using an upscaler that chokes on video artifacts (in which case you probably shouldn't even have video artifacts, it's 2024 and H265/AV1 exist).

> Once game engines like Unity/Unreal/Godot get support for the upscalers out of the box, I think the technology will be even more commonplace.

Don't they all already support it out of the box? It just needs cooperation from the game dev, like I said.

For example, Pacific Drive uses UE4, not even UE5, and still supports DLSS. It almost works fine, except displays (such as the ones in the car and garage) flicker and shimmer under DLSS because the devs didn't implement them in a way that works with the upscaler.

This can't just be solved by the engine, since DLSS integrates multiple different views of the game (depth buffer, motion buffer, etc) and the dev needs to make sure all of these views are faithful to the effects they're actually showing on-screen, else bugs like that will just happen.

That specific problem could be solved by running the game at native-720 and then using a naïve upscaler such as FSR on the output framebuffer, but that's going to be a significant visual tradeoff compared to if DLSS were implemented correctly. Upscaling isn't magic, but FSR (upscaling the final render output) is even less magic than DLSS (upscaling multiple intermediate artifacts).

And games often omit settings from their menus, even those that work perfectly well in the engine itself. Having upscaling implemented by the engine doesn't necessarily mean the dev cares enough to implement the setting for it and test it.

[ffsm8]

> having to buy a 1300€ GPU, that one would have to replace every year

The flagships usually get refreshed every 2+ years, not yearly. If you're switching yearly, then every second change is gonna be a performance downgrade.

Furthermore, the flagship of last generation is usually at least on par with the card below the new flagship, so you'd have top of the line performance for at least 2 generations, which is 3-5 years. The 4080 specifically has worse performance then a 3090 unless you're using dlss/upsampling. Which most people on high budget systems don't want as it increases latency.

Your napkin math wrt the energy doesn't really make sense either, your card only draws so much power if it's actually on full load. My 4090 is usually mostly idle.

My MacBook pro actually draws more then my desktop PC with a 4090 if both are idle (that's because the MacBook has an integrated display which offsets the higher power draw of the desktop components). At least according to the measurements of my smart plugs that measure energy drain at the plug/wall

Finally, there is no way in hell a working adult will find time to play 4+hours day, every day.

Overall I'd say you've no idea what you're talking about and are just rationalizing and in denial. The performance you get from cloud gaming providers is terrible, worse then a budget PC which costs 1k in it's entirely. And you'll still have it at the end, while the cloud gaming subscriber will have nothing after the sub ends.

[ftrobro]

GeForce Now works great. I subscribed for a while to play Cyberpunk 2077 on a remote 4080 and it felt like playing on a local computer. But with much higher settings and framerate than I get on my local GeForce 1080.

> Finally, there is no way in hell a working adult will find time to play 4+hours day, every day.

Don't make the assumption that everyone live their lives exactly like you do.

[ffsm8]

A 1080 is 8 years old and wasn't a flagship, an equivalent card costs ~$100 currently... Also: that's 4 generations, not 2.

It'd be a complete disaster if gfn couldn't beat that performance.

I've attempted to use GFN several times too and can only conclude that you've never played at a decent setup if that felt like a local machine.

The input latency is so high that anything with pvp is entirely unplayable (it adds at least 40-80ms).

Maybe the only thing you're paying is Scenematic single player? In that case, sure. It works well enough. Not worth the subscription as you'd get better performance and experience from a steam deck, but to each their own.

[NikolaNovak]

I have and love a steam deck, and used to have geforce now for about 18 months before I got a 3080 new rig. We might be playing incredibly different games in very different ways, and that's ok - but geforce now being beaten by steam deck is, again, taking a reasonable position way too far.

Geforce now lets me play cp2077 on ultra with all the ray tracing on high resolution 32" monitor. Steam deck can "play" cp2077 at 800 resolution if you don't mind a melting jet engine in your hands. They're both great for what they do and are, and they can make a powerful combo, but in terms of performance I don't see how they can possibly be compared :-/

Edit : did you by any chance only try the free / low tier version of geforce now?

[ffsm8]

No, Nvidia always gives out a 3 month free trial with every purchase. I tried it out when I bought a 3080 when it was released and a 4090 last year.

> cp2077

That's indeed a game that works well with GFN, witcher 3 and similar games too. Pretty sure you're still playing at 720p on GFN though, they're just using dlss for upsampling. You should be able to see the upsampled resolution in the settings of cyberpunk if I remember correctly. My sub ran out however, so no checking anymore

[NikolaNovak]

Thanks for reply!

Fwiw - Cp2077 ran at full res internally. I've played it both with and without dlss on GFNow. I believe when I started it was 2080 for first paid tier and 3080 for the top paid tier. Now the top paid tier is 4080.

[nothercastle]

It’s great for turn based like BG3 or cities skyline. My biggest issue with it is how long it takes to start up a session

[LoganDark]

> Your napkin math wrt the energy doesn't really make sense either, your card only draws so much power if it's actually on full load.

Not only that, but there's evidence that more powerful cards can actually perform the same workloads as less powerful cards more efficiently. Of course, it's not going to be more efficient if you let it run at full tilt, but if, for example, you lower the power limit of a 3090 to 200W, it's still going to blow a 3060 Ti (also 200W) out of the water in terms of performance. Higher performance for the same power means you can also get the same performance at a lower power.

> Finally, there is no way in hell a working adult will find time to play 4+hours day, every day.

I work full-time and still get the hours of 5 PM to 12 AM to myself, which is 7 hours, and then I can still get 8 hours of sleep

[NikolaNovak]

I agreed with everything up to the "performance of cloud gaming is terrible " - I'm an extremely happy geforce now user. I have gigabit internet and use it with 27" monitor, historically for performance reasons, now that I got a 3080 for occasional convenience reasons (I have half a dozen Intel NUC around house, it's usually simpler and more reliable to stream game from geforce now servers thousand of km away than via steam stream from my upstairs pc - go figure)

Now! Neither one of us have spoken our assumptions out loud so let's do that - I play mostly single player games. There are people who mostly play pvp, cannot live without a 250hz screen and million dpi mouse, and those users likely won't enjoy cloud gaming. That does not mean "cloud gaming is terrible" overall but it may well be that "cloud gaming is terrible for high demanding pvp competitive usage " :).

[brnt]

.328 and they are complaining! Bah!