My computer is like “Kernel panic” and I’m like “Same man, same…”

That’s the most dystopian shit I’ve heard in a long time.

Like the insect/spider kind or in my code?

We’ve had one yacht sure, but what about second yacht?

Yeah but publishing is still work though. It’s become much easier to self publish on Steam as a small developer, but there is still value in having a professional publisher. It’s hard to say how much value and sometimes the publisher takes up more than their fair share, but it’s not like zero value either.

Rendering a 3D scene is much more intensive and complicated than a simple scaler. The scaler isn’t advanced at all, it’s actually very simple. And it can’t be compared with running a large model locally. These are expert systems, not large models. They are very good at one thing and can do only that thing.

Like I said the cost is fixed, so if the scaler can handle 1080p at 120fps to upscale to 2K, then it can always handle that. It doesn’t matter how complex or simple the image is, it will always use the same amount of power. It reads the image, does the calculation and outputs the resulting image.

Rendering a 3D scene is much much more complex and power intensive. The amount of power highly depends on the complexity of the scene and there is a lot more involved. It needs the gpu, cpu, memory and even sometimes storage, plus all the bandwidth and latency in between.

Upscaling isn’t like that, it’s a lot more simple. So if the hardware is there, like the AI cores on a gpu or the dedicated upscaler chip, it will always work. And since that hardware will normally not be heavily used, the rest of the components are still available for the game. A dedicated scaler is the most efficient, but the cores on the gpu aren’t bad either. That’s why something like DLSS doesn’t just work on any hardware, it needs specialized components. And different generations and parts have different limitations.

Say your system can render a game at 1080p at a good solid 120fps. But you have a 2K monitor, so you want the game to run at 2K. This requires a lot more from the system, so the computer struggles to run the game at 60 fps and has annoying dips in demanding parts. With upscaling you run the game at 1080p at 120fps and the upscaler takes that image stream and converts it into 2K at a smooth 120fps. Now the scaler may not get all the details right, like running native 2K and it may make some small mistakes. But our eyes are pretty bad and if we’re playing games our brains aren’t looking for those details, but are instead focused on gameplay. So the output is probably pretty good and unless you were to compare it with 2K native side by side, probably you won’t even notice the difference. So it’s a way of having that excellent performance, without shelling out a 1000 bucks for better hardware.

There are limitations of course. Not all games conform to what the scaler is good at. It usually does well with realistic scenes, but can struggle with more abstract stuff. It can get annoying halos and weird artifacts. There are also limitations to what bandwidth it can push, so for example not all gpus can do 4K at a high framerate. If the game uses the AI cores as well for other stuff, that can become an issue. If the difference in resolution is too much, that becomes very noticeable and unplayable. Often there’s also the option to use previous frames to generate intermediate frames, to boost the framerate with little cost. In my experience this doesn’t work well and just makes the game feel like it’s ghosting and smearing.

But when used properly, it can give a nice boost basically for free. I have even seen it used where the game could be run at a lower quality at the native resolution and high framerate, but looked better at a lower resolution with a higher quality setting and then upscaled. The extra effects outweighed the small loss of fidelity.

The game is rendered at a lower resolution, this saves a lot of resources. This isn’t a linear thing, lowering the resolution reduces the performance needed by a lot more than you would think. Not just in processing power but also bandwidth and memory requirements. Then dedicated AI cores or even special AI scaler chips get used to upscale the image back to the requested resolution. This is a fixed cost and can be done with little power since the components are designed to do this task.

My TV for example has an AI scaler chip which is pretty nice (especially after tuning) for showing old content on a large high res screen. For games applying AI up scaling to old textures also does wonders.

Now even though this gets the AI label slapped on, this is nothing like the LMMs such as chat GPT. These are expert systems trained and designed to do exactly one thing. This is the good kind of AI that’s actually useful instead of the BS AI like LLMs. Now these systems have their limitations, but for games the trade off between details and framerate can be worth it. Especially if our bad eyes and mediocre screens wouldn’t really show the difference anyways.

A cancer on humanity? That’s a bit dramatic.

You know you don’t have to have it dancing in rainbow patterns right? You can choose any color you like and even have it be static. I have most of my keys in blue, with the function and numpad in a soft white. This is a relaxing layout for me that helps me focus. But if you hate it so much, simply turn the lights off, that was always an option. Plus I think you are overreacting a bit, there are plenty of good keyboards out there without rgb that don’t cost much.

I did the exact same. Google Play Music was actually a good service back in the day. I hated it when they turned it into YouTube Music. I complained about all the broken stuff, so they gave me a home speaker for free and upgraded me to YT Premium for a year. After that year I stuck with YT Premium, since it was less than $2 extra. They also fixed a lot of stuff I complained about. Not everything, but a lot of it. I think YT Music was released a bit before it was ready. Now it still has some issues, but is mostly fine.

Usually I watch 1 or 2 YouTube videos a day and without Premium I would most definitely not. I opened a YouTube video on a computer I wasn’t signed in the other day and it started with a 2 minute unskipable ad about crypto stuff (an obvious scam). So I closed it real fast, no video is worth sitting through that. Even with Premium I still need SponsorBlock. But with that combination watching videos is actually fun.

Still listen to YouTube Music all day at work, so that’s a good value for money for me.

I’ve played this in the past because of the unique co-op feature. You can team up with another player and play the game. You both do a battle and if you win, your units can go over to the other fight to help your buddy out. It’s super fun and I played it a good number of hours with my brother. The biggest issue however was the camera, you can’t hardly zoom out. That means in co-op you can only see your own battle, you can go look at your buddy’s battle, but that means you can’t see your own battle. This sucked really bad, because you couldn’t see what worked and what didn’t and how it was going overall. For us this kinda ruined the co-op game mode, it was just like playing the game solo and sometimes you would get help randomly. We submitted it as feedback to the devs, saying in co-op you need to be able to see both battles at the same time, but I don’t think they ever did anything about it. So we’ve stopped playing it, maybe we’ll give it another go sometimes.

If I could erase any game from my mind and experience it again for the first time, it would be this game. One of my favorites of all time.

Biggest issue with them is they can hardly carry any weight. That’s why the proportions of them are always so weird, with a huge body and a tiny cabin in comparison. They are also slow and very easily taken down. So in reality they are pretty much bad at everything. Cool as hell though.

Including relevant XKCD as demanded by internet law: https://xkcd.com/10/