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So, after all the hype, it turns out that it's the PC that had the real next-gen "secret sauce" all along?

Mister Wolf

Member
well, still, there are current gen games with open worlds that easily work while flying across them at super high speeds. saying that was not possible in Horizon is simply false. maybe they would have needed to make some compromises here or there but if they really wanted they could have made it possible.

next gen of course, that's another thing entirely. SSDs are a necessity in next gen systems, either that or super large pool of ram would be needed.

on PC you can easily overcome storage limitations with a high ram pool. we have GPUs that have as much VRAM as next gen systems have, then with the new DDR5 standard releasing soon, a spool of 32GB of DDR5 ram is absolutely enough to have a large enough buffer for the most needed assets to be stored on and fed into the VRAM of the GPU

Ive been trying to say this SO MANY TIMES.
 

RoadHazard

Gold Member
well, still, there are current gen games with open worlds that easily work while flying across them at super high speeds. saying that was not possible in Horizon is simply false. maybe they would have needed to make some compromises here or there but if they really wanted they could have made it possible.

next gen of course, that's another thing entirely. SSDs are a necessity in next gen systems, either that or super large pool of ram would be needed.

on PC you can easily overcome storage limitations with a high ram pool. we have GPUs that have as much VRAM as next gen systems have, then with the new DDR5 standard releasing soon, a spool of 32GB of DDR5 ram is absolutely enough to have a large enough buffer for the most needed assets to be stored on and fed into the VRAM of the GPU

What if you need very complex models to be loaded NOW, without having them in RAM the entire time (they might not be among the most used assets)? The point is that if you know that everyone who plays your game will have an SSD with some minimum transfer rate, that kind of design is POSSIBLE. You can do things you just can't with an HDD, and that's all I've been saying this whole time.
 

01011001

Banned
What if you need very complex models to be loaded NOW, without having them in RAM the entire time (they might not be among the most used assets)? The point is that if you know that everyone who plays your game will have an SSD with some minimum transfer rate, that kind of design is POSSIBLE. You can do things you just can't with an HDD, and that's all I've been saying this whole time.

well if you know that your players have 32GB of DDR5 ram and 16GB of VRAM (there is such a thing as Minimum Specs on PC) you can also design accordingly. you can move stuff in and out of each ram pool as needed. that's 48GB of really fast RAM in total here... for most games that is close to 50% of their total size, for smaller titles it is more than that.
so even a slower SSD or fast HDD could be able to keep up with the speed demands. and you can offer lower detailed assets for those with lower pools of ram in the settings menu...many modern game show detailed how much ram the current settings will use so you can set them up accordingly.

and yes, maybe this approach would mean design changes would be necessary but games would not necessarily run/look worse on such a system compared to those designed for the fast and reliable SSDs in next gen consoles.
 
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Mister Wolf

Member
What if you need very complex models to be loaded NOW, without having them in RAM the entire time (they might not be among the most used assets)? The point is that if you know that everyone who plays your game will have an SSD with some minimum transfer rate, that kind of design is POSSIBLE. You can do things you just can't with an HDD, and that's all I've been saying this whole time.

C'mon look at the hypothetical you're using and you cant even give an example besides what we've already covered with R&C and teleporting instantaneously. There is already "teleporting" in Open World games its called fast travel that's why when asked by the Horizon developer all they had to offer was "fast travel will be near instantaneous".
 
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RoadHazard

Gold Member
well if you know that your players have 32GB of DDR5 ram and 16GB of VRAM (there is such a thing as Minimum Specs on PC) you can also design accordingly. you can move stuff in and out of each ram pool as needed. that's 48GB of really fast RAM in total here... for most games that is close to 50% of their total size, for smaller titles it is more than that.
so even a slower SSD or fast HDD could be able to keep up with the speed demands. and you can offer lower detailal assets for those with lower pools of ram in the settings menu...many modern game snow detail how much ram the current settings will use so you can set them up accordingly.

and yes, maybe this approach would mean design changes would be necessary but games would not necessarily run/look worse on such a system compared to those designed for the fast and reliable SSDs in next gen consoles.

But 32 + 16GB of RAM (you can't really just combine them into one pool) wouldn't hold most next-gen (or current gen) games, so you would still be limited by having to transfer data at 100MB/s when you need something you don't already have in memory.

You also say this would require design changes, and yes, that's my entire point. That's what's happening NOW. Slow HDD transfer speeds have a huge impact on game design. There are workarounds for this problem everywhere in games (maps are designed to limit how quickly new data is needed, etc), and ideas that simply cannot be realized because data can't be loaded fast enough. SSDs becoming standard will remove most of these limitations, and free up game designers to do what they really want. This isn't just a console thing, it will benefit PC games too obviously, once developers leave the old consoles behind and include SSD as a minimum requirement on PC. It's gonna happen, long before 32GB RAM becomes a minimum requirement for any game.
 

RoadHazard

Gold Member
C'mon look at the hypothetical you're using and you cant even give an example besides what we've already covered with R&C and teleporting instantaneously. There is already "teleporting" in Open World games its called fast travel that's why when asked by the Horizon developer all they had to offer was "fast travel will be near instantaneous".

I think you will be able to fly on the flying dinobots we saw in the trailer, they just don't want to reveal that yet.
 

sendit

Member
well, still, there are current gen games with open worlds that easily work while flying across them at super high speeds. saying that was not possible in Horizon is simply false. maybe they would have needed to make some compromises here or there but if they really wanted they could have made it possible.
I disagree tho that Forza for example has a lot of repeated assets... there is a whole city with individual buildings which you can also speed across at ridiculous speeds, and that city is very detailed.

next gen of course, that's another thing entirely. SSDs are a necessity in next gen systems, either that or super large pool of ram would be needed.

on PC you can easily overcome storage limitations with a high ram pool. we have GPUs that have as much VRAM as next gen systems have, then with the new DDR5 standard releasing soon, a spool of 32GB of DDR5 ram is absolutely enough to have a large enough buffer for the most needed assets to be stored on and fed into the VRAM of the GPU

Do you know how stupid and expensive that sounds? Also data would still need to be transferred from point A to B. Having a game engine that takes advantage of a fast SSD with an equally impressive I/O solution defeats the need to increase ram exponentially. Adding more ram is not only an inefficient solution, but a costly one to reiterate.
 

Mister Wolf

Member
Do you know how stupid and expensive that sounds? Also data would still need to be transferred from point A to B. Having a game engine that takes advantage of a fast SSD with an equally impressive I/O solution defeats the need to increase ram exponentially. Adding more ram is not only an inefficient solution, but a costly one to reiterate.

Yes its a solution to a problem that never was on PC. Its a console problem because they want to keep the price down. Buying a new motherboard and new super fast PCIE4 SSD at a reasonable storage size is more costly than purchasing more ram with many of our boards supporting 128GB or Ram already.
 

Redlancet

Banned
Dude, the most expensive games are multiplats, not Sony exclusives.


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That's the list for the most expensive games ever made. Where are the Sony exclusives in there?

dude,you dont find strange there arent exclusvies on that list? you really think with a straight face that deadpool cost more than god of war? do your homework better next time
 

Elog

Member
Ever wondered why? Maybe because CPU and GPU have different requirements towards the memory to reach their maximum performance, and maybe that's exactly why on PCs, or even the most powerful HPC centers and supercomputers on the planed use such setup?

The I/O advantage for these consoles will be significant over the current PCs. In every other aspect high-end PCs will have a significant advantage.

Let's make two things clear:

1) The I/O advantage is clear (for both consoles)
2) I/O is a major advantage and not a minor one

it sounds like you try to argue that there is no I/O advantage. That is simply not true.

That demo that didn't even run at 1440p? Which is said to run even better on a laptop? And that will be officially supported even on PS4 and XB1? PCs will smash that demo whether you want to believe it or not, because data has to be processed before it can be used, end of story.

Resolution does not equal graphical fidelity. I have used this example many times on these forums but I will use it again.

Think carefully why Avatar the movie (in a complete CGI scene) rendered at 1080p would beat any current 4K PC game in graphical fidelity with a vengeance. Once you have an answer, we can continue the discussion.
 

Elog

Member
And that can be brute forced on PC by having more of the game on RAM. Even the older X470 board I have now supports up to 128GB of DDR4 at 3400Mhz

Nope. You can do it by adding more VRAM on your graphics card though. But the amount needs to be big - like 30-40GB big - to almost compensate.
 

Elog

Member
A game can go from CPU bound to GPU bound. FS2020 goes to CPU bound because there is a lot going on that needs a CPU to compute. That's been the case for every accurate flight simulator or any simulator for that matter.

I'm talking about the games that don't utilize the CPU in such a way (i.e. most games).

My point is that as soon as you start to simulate foliage movement, water movement, NPC movement (AI), clouds and so on properly - and one of the reasons for this not being done currently is because most games need to be able to run on Jaguar as well - the CPU requirements sky rocket. I expect most next-gen titles to do exactly this and hence the CPU becomes a significant part of the FPS calculation - just like in FS2020.
 

Elog

Member
For higher-resolution textures it depends. A native 4K texture is ~25 MB, as an example. But we can even consider 2K or 1440p native textures as high-resolution depending on the boundary of what is "high resolution" in a modern context. In both cases you're looking at even lower texture asset sizes.

For some of the geometry textures they could have a single base texture and smaller textures, like alpha textures, to offset the base texture. Those alpha textures would be magnitudes smaller in size than the base, so you can realistically scale a few of those native 4K base textures through and a good chunk of those offsetting alpha textures through a network connection and, again, the top-end for network connections AFAIK is about 250 MB/s, the vast majority of which most people don't even have.

I don't see how that's really interpreted as in any way downplaying SSDs, it's just a means of me saying not all types of data or texture asset streaming pipelines require the maximum bandwidth throughput of next-gen SSDs, or even the data packaging infrastructure of the next-gen SSDs. But those SSDs still serve a very strong role and you have the added benefit of all of that streamed data being localized to the device which can benefit latency issues (some types of asset streaming pipelines don't really require super-tight latency to be efficient, though, FWIW).

Fair points - then I misunderstood your argument.

As to textures I just want to highlight that high density models in modern CGIs uses 100+ textures per object (when a person). Meaning that at 4K each person represents uncompressed textures in excess of 2.5 GB. It gets very big very fast.
 

Mister Wolf

Member
Nope. You can do it by adding more VRAM on your graphics card though. But the amount needs to be big - like 30-40GB big - to almost compensate.

I will be looking forward to all of your posts this generation accusing the multiplatform games of not utilizing "SSD speed" and I/O on consoles when the PC specs don't require anywhere near the same speed of storage and your "reasons" for why that is the case.
 
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dude,you dont find strange there arent exclusvies on that list? you really think with a straight face that deadpool cost more than god of war? do your homework better next time
That’s not a counter-argument. Get me the budget for these Sony exclusives or GTFO.

HZD is estimated to have costed 45M Euros to produce or 53M USD. That's not even close to the highest games on this list with GTA V having almost 5x its budget and barely half of Deadpool. Apparently Sony was also quite stingy with the funds for GOW 2018 and that partially explains the repeated enemy models like that troll boss you fight 10x.
 
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sendit

Member
Yes its a solution to a problem that never was on PC. Its a console problem because they want to keep the price down. Buying a new motherboard and new super fast PCIE4 SSD at a reasonable storage size is more costly than purchasing more ram with many of our boards supporting 128GB or Ram already.

Agreed. The workflow of a PC can never improve. Lets just continue throw more RAM at a problem. Process improvements are non existent on PC.
 

Elog

Member
Do you think that UE5 demo was *impossible* to do on a PC today? Like it cannot be done in that form because the PS5's secret SSD can't be matched by the PC?

Impossible is a very definite word - but fundamentally I would say it is impossible on a PC today unless you have a graphics card with an SSD on the card where all texture assets are loaded (which is a market that basically does not exist).

With lower texture resolution the story becomes different of course.
 

sendit

Member
Impossible is a very definite word - but fundamentally I would say it is impossible on a PC today unless you have a graphics card with an SSD on the card where all texture assets are loaded (which is a market that basically does not exist).

With lower texture resolution the story becomes different of course.

I think the the demo is fully capable of running on a PC with an SSD or a PC with simply more RAM (which is a stupid solution at best). I don't think the extent of what the PS5s I/O architect is capable of has been fully realized.
 

Mister Wolf

Member
Agreed. The workflow of a PC can never improve. Lets just continue throw more RAM at a problem. Process improvements are non existent on PC.


Nice strawman though. Also you will see the limitations of that GPUs ability to render "realized" alot sooner.
 
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Elog

Member
I will be looking forward to all of your posts this generation accusing the multiplatform games of not utilizing "SSD speed" and I/O on consoles when the PC specs don't require anywhere near the same speed of storage and your "reasons" for why that is the case.

This is a circular argument. All current games are made with a texture asset pool that should fit at a 2-4GB card at lower resolutions. Even if you increase the texture quality you will never hit the I/O limitations of a modern PC.

The point is that current game design is taking a bad I/O system as a boundary condition in the design itself. I.e., I/O is only used to load assets into the various pools of memory - the I/O is basically not fast enough to swap assets in/out of the (V)RAM pools outside of load screens. The last sentence is a bit of over simplification but very close to the truth.

So of course no current game requires higher I/O.

The question you should ask yourself is if games would look much better if the (V)RAM pools could be swapped on the fly? The answer is a huge YES. Will this advantage be used outside of Sony first party titles near-term? I doubt it but I am looking forward to some serious eye-candy over the next 1-4 years from Sony that will rock the PC world.
 

Elog

Member
I think the the demo is fully capable of running on a PC with an SSD or a PC with simply more RAM (which is a stupid solution at best). I don't think the extent of what the PS5s I/O architect is capable of has been fully realized.

RAM to VRAM is not fast enough on a PC. If you need significant turnover of the assets in VRAM with short notice the PC platform is toast.
 

ZywyPL

Banned
The I/O advantage for these consoles will be significant over the current PCs. In every other aspect high-end PCs will have a significant advantage.

Let's make two things clear:

1) The I/O advantage is clear (for both consoles)
2) I/O is a major advantage and not a minor one

it sounds like you try to argue that there is no I/O advantage. That is simply not true.

No it's not clear, rather what you and some other guys here desperately want to believe, while in reality, we have Medium which doesn't even swap the levels, but actually renders both of them simultaneously, and that game does that on a simple HDD, let alone 99% next-gen games unveiled so far that are multi-platform titles and again, none of them requires even a mere SATA-based SSD. What is clear is that any additional processing power will matter in 100% of the games, while the advanced I/O subsystems in maybe 1%, and that's only if the devs will desperately want to prove that "hey look! we couldn't have done it without the SSD! look!" like it's the case with R&C. What is also clear, is that putting faster SSDs won't let you play games at 60, 120, 144FPS, because that's not where the bottleneck is, especially at 4K those consoles are targeting.
 

Mister Wolf

Member
This is a circular argument. All current games are made with a texture asset pool that should fit at a 2-4GB card at lower resolutions. Even if you increase the texture quality you will never hit the I/O limitations of a modern PC.

The point is that current game design is taking a bad I/O system as a boundary condition in the design itself. I.e., I/O is only used to load assets into the various pools of memory - the I/O is basically not fast enough to swap assets in/out of the (V)RAM pools outside of load screens. The last sentence is a bit of over simplification but very close to the truth.

So of course no current game requires higher I/O.

The question you should ask yourself is if games would look much better if the (V)RAM pools could be swapped on the fly? The answer is a huge YES. Will this advantage be used outside of Sony first party titles near-term? I doubt it but I am looking forward to some serious eye-candy over the next 1-4 years from Sony that will rock the PC world.

With you saying all of this and PS5 having the way superior transfer rates than Series X with similar performing GPU's, Horizon better look leaps and bounds better than Hellblade 2. If it doesn't then I'm calling bullshit.
 
This back and forth is pointless. In a couple of months we’ll know and as has been customary for the past 20 years, the capabilities of the upcoming consoles are grossly overestimated by console gamers. In no small part due to industry professionals who deliberately mislead them to sell a product.

For now of course we cannot prove or disprove the claims but once we get them in our hands, the same thing that has happened every gen will happen again.
 
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Elog

Member
With you saying all of this and PS5 having the way superior transfer rates than Series X with similar performing GPU's, Horizon better look leaps and bounds better than Hellblade 2. If it doesn't then I'm calling bullshit.

Please note that both consoles have a significant I/O advantage over PC due to hardware decompression and no RAM->VRAM transfer requirement.

But as you point out, the PS5 has a significant advantage (seemingly) over the XSX in the I/O department as well and that should transfer to better looking graphics in a first party setting everything else equal (but with an FPS advantage to the XSX).
 

Elog

Member
No it's not clear, rather what you and some other guys here desperately want to believe, while in reality, we have Medium which doesn't even swap the levels, but actually renders both of them simultaneously, and that game does that on a simple HDD, let alone 99% next-gen games unveiled so far that are multi-platform titles and again, none of them requires even a mere SATA-based SSD. What is clear is that any additional processing power will matter in 100% of the games, while the advanced I/O subsystems in maybe 1%, and that's only if the devs will desperately want to prove that "hey look! we couldn't have done it without the SSD! look!" like it's the case with R&C. What is also clear, is that putting faster SSDs won't let you play games at 60, 120, 144FPS, because that's not where the bottleneck is, especially at 4K those consoles are targeting.

See my answer in post #274.
 

Mister Wolf

Member
Please note that both consoles have a significant I/O advantage over PC due to hardware decompression and no RAM->VRAM transfer requirement.

But as you point out, the PS5 has a significant advantage (seemingly) over the XSX in the I/O department as well and that should transfer to better looking graphics in a first party setting everything else equal (but with an FPS advantage to the XSX).

Right, so if they look the same or Horizon looks worse after I've had to read all this stuff then I'm calling bullshit.
 
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01011001

Banned
Please note that both consoles have a significant I/O advantage over PC due to hardware decompression and no RAM->VRAM transfer requirement.

But as you point out, the PS5 has a significant advantage (seemingly) over the XSX in the I/O department as well and that should transfer to better looking graphics in a first party setting everything else equal (but with an FPS advantage to the XSX).

the decompression hardware is not necessarily an advantage. these help the CPU performance as the CPUs don't need to decompress the data. but on PC you can easily have way more powerful CPUs to compensate for that.
these consoles have 8 Zen 2 cores, while there are already consumer Zen 2 CPUs on the market today that have 16 cores. worst case scenario you would need half of that to compensate for the decompression and the other half to run the game logic.

BUT these CPUs usually run at higher clocks than those found in the PS5 and SX, so they don't need that much overhead in terms of cores to compete here.
that and with Zen 3 on the way, I don't see the issue here. of course at first games will need low settings that reduce asset quality but that's a given anyways.
 

ZywyPL

Banned
See my answer in post #274.

There are some next-gen only games, and still none of the I/O advancements are seen in action. There aren't even any unique textures as seen inRage's Megatextures, it's all yet again copy-paste of the same textures. What you are missing in the whole equation is the stuff BEFORE the SSD - the Bluray Discs - they can contain only so much data, and bare in mind the discs don't need to duplicate the data, and we already see games reaching 100-150GB, so logically, next-gen games simply won't be able to store that much better or more unique textures, because the disc size didn't go up, it's still the same 100GB. Sure there will be more impact on the compression but that will just bump the textures quality to what we have been seeing on PCs in the past decade or so, instead of Medium-High consoles will be able to catch up with High-Ultra, as already proven in all the revealed games so far, where everything is so damn sharp and detailed (finally!). But like I said, all the I/O and SSD theories sound nice in theory, but in practice, where is the proof, where are the examples? Because we already saw something between 50-100 games that will be released in the next 2-3 years. If anything, RT is where the change is clear, you can see its impact from the very first second of a trailer/gameplay, this is what makes the next-gen games look next-gen.
 

sendit

Member

Nice strawman though. Also you will see the limitations of that GPUs ability to render "realized" alot sooner.

No one is saying the GPU can’t be bottlenecked. No one is saying the PS5 has unlimited potential. What people are saying and what developers are excited for is how this tech has the possibilities to change the way games are designed, how levels are structured for a more seamless experience. It’s not hard to to be forward thinking based on what Cerny presented.
 
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Mister Wolf

Member
No one is saying the GPU can’t be bottlenecked. No one is saying the PS5 has unlimited potential. What people are saying and what developers are excited for is how this tech has the possibilities to change the way games are designed, how levels are structured for a more seamless experience. It’s not hard to to be forward thinking based on what Cerny presented.

Right just like I didn't say there couldn't be advancements on PC when mentioning more of the game being stored in RAM to make up for slower storage speeds before you attempted to strawman me.
 

sendit

Member
Right just like I didn't say there couldn't be advancements on PC when mentioning more of the game being stored in RAM to make up for slower storage speeds before you attempted to strawman me.

A game being stored on ram is not an advancement.....it’s applying a dated solution to an existing problem.
 
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A game being stored on ram is not an advancement.....it’s applying a dated solution to an existing problem.
They say, "If it ain't broken, don't fix it". I have 32Gb of ram and a 2080 Ti, so 43Gb of ram and vram. It would be cheaper for me to get more ram (probably not even needed), than to upgrade my motherboard and get the latest and greatest nvme SSD.

Especially if ram is several times faster than the fastest SSD, and PC has so much more bandwidth compared to a console that shared unified memory with the cpu and gpu, while handling all of the other tasks and controllers as well.
 

sendit

Member
They say, "If it ain't broken, don't fix it". I have 32Gb of ram and a 2080 Ti, so 43Gb of ram and vram. It would be cheaper for me to get more ram (probably not even needed), than to upgrade my motherboard and get the latest and greatest nvme SSD.

Especially if ram is several times faster than the fastest SSD, and PC has so much more bandwidth compared to a console that shared unified memory with the cpu and gpu, while handling all of the other tasks and controllers as well.

That way of thinking doesn’t apply in the world of tech or any respectable industry. You completely missed the point. This isn’t about the ram being faster than a SSD.
 
That way of thinking doesn’t apply in the world of tech or any respectable industry. You completely missed the point. This isn’t about the ram being faster than a SSD.
So would it be better if motherboard makers remove the slots for ddr4 ram? Should they halt ddr5 from being manufactured? Let's just forget ram, and only use unified vram! Why? Because consoles are revolutionizing the way the industry works! Now graphic designers, AutoCAD, developers, coders all have to buy a new gpu each time they run out of memory! /S


I'm sure PC's will eventually require faster I/O in the future. But for now, it's not an issue, and you can tell it's not, by the lack of SSD hypebeasts in the PC community. Sata SSD's are perfectly fine for next gen games, and you'll start to realize that when you don't see a minimum of 7gbps SSD required for games this gen.
 

sendit

Member
So would it be better if motherboard makers remove the slots for ddr4 ram? Should they halt ddr5 from being manufactured? Let's just forget ram, and only use unified vram! Why? Because consoles are revolutionizing the way the industry works! Now graphic designers, AutoCAD, developers, coders all have to buy a new gpu each time they run out of memory! /S


I'm sure PC's will eventually require faster I/O in the future. But for now, it's not an issue, and you can tell it's not, by the lack of SSD hypebeasts in the PC community. Sata SSD's are perfectly fine for next gen games, and you'll start to realize that when you don't see a minimum of 7gbps SSD required for games this gen.

Overreacting much? All I’m saying is accepting something because it works is bad for innovation. Who knows if what Sony or Microsoft claim about their solutions will be possible or change the way games are designed. The fact that you’re definitively claiming something as truth when nothing has yet to be proven false. Try to be a bit more open minded.
 

VFXVeteran

Banned
Please note that both consoles have a significant I/O advantage over PC due to hardware decompression and no RAM->VRAM transfer requirement.

But as you point out, the PS5 has a significant advantage (seemingly) over the XSX in the I/O department as well and that should transfer to better looking graphics in a first party setting everything else equal (but with an FPS advantage to the XSX).

Like what would be better looking? Textures? Shaders? Lighting? Ray-tracing? What exactly?
 
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SF Kosmo

Al Jazeera Special Reporter
Wasn't the rumours floating about that Nvidia are looking to jack up their prices again? They want $600 to be the entry level now (which would be the normal 3060).
More speculation than rumors. The most leaked card, which is believed to be the 3080 is going to be be very expensive. We can kind of tell this from the cooler and the components. But anything else is just informed guesswork at this point.

There have also been rumors about a 3090 ultrapremium tier replacing the Ti or Titan tier.
 
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