Are the "PC Master Race" days over?

[SvennoJ]

@Pemalite Ha, Everquest is still going as well, still getting expansions after 23 years! EverQuest: Terror of Luclin is the twenty-eighth expansion pack to EverQuest. It was announced on the game's official website on October 12, 2021

Anyway, my ISP tops out at 100 mbps, sometimes goes over but more often provides less :/ So download speeds are just meh and streaming 4K video is not fun. Heck there are nights where Netflix drops down to 360p :( (At least the sound keeps going)

Funny, I always advocated for gsync / freesync type frame delivery. It just makes sense. But now I fear it will become a crutch to not bother optimizing as much anymore to deliver a stable frame rate. Which I find very important for racing. 60 fps is plenty, but it needs to be stable. I can easily adjust to input lag (switching tvs means I have to slightly adjust my brake points based on the visual feedback, but after a few laps I'm as fast as on the other tv again)

But the input lag has to be constant. Racing games (or at least GT Sport) use forward prediction to put competitors in your local time frame. (You race in real time, all others get adjusted to your local time) For that to work correctly, the game needs to know exactly when a frame gets displayed. That only works when it's on a set pace. When time between frames fluctuates, how do you predict how long it will take before the next frame gets shown. If it gets shown too soon, the competitors cars are too far ahead in that frame. If it takes slightly longer, the competitors cars are a bit behind.

Anyway for flying more fps is nice but in FS2020, more fps just draws more attention to all the flaws. Pixelated clouds, lod changes all become more noisy. TAA does benefit from higher fps but brings its own artifacts. While flying high fps doesn't matter at all as long as the glass cockpit remains responsive. After flying around the world at avg 20fps, Asobo did some magic so I got a lot more fps. It looked worse lol, more noise. Plus now it fluctuates more. I guess if you have enough hardware power you can 4x super sample, render 8K and down sample to 1080p for a stable picture.

As for audio, I did hear some improvements in 96khz and 192khz DTS MA. Not that I can hear those frequencies (and my speakers can't produce over 22khz either) but having the entire processing chain in 192khz before it gets converted to analog does make a little difference. It sounds better. Or its that more care was put into producing the high bitrate soundtrack. (Akira in 192khz sounds so clean and amazing. However the only thing to compare it to on the disc is the old Dolby Digital soundtrack which is a night and day difference. Need to have the remastered track in 48khz lossy DD to make a fair comparison) Games never went over 48khz afaik, plus many use compressed audio as well. So yeah, 3D positioning is the only boon to be had. It works sort of, some games do it better than others.

I've stepped out of that race as well, sticking to 5.1, not convinced by Dolby Atmos. Not enough to attempt to convince my wife we need a bunch more loud speakers in the living room lol. I'm happy with my B&W tower speakers setup.



My first impressions of Windows 11 are dire again. Just had another hour long support chat with MS after my kid's new laptop forced his existing MS account into a family group where he's now stuck. I've been through that nonsense before, it just doesn't work. Try to install Firefox, it says have to get permission from a parent. I get an email, I give permission, it says ok and still blocks installing anything. So I disbanded the family stuff last year, just a lot of hassle. And now its back :( (For unknown reason the new laptop needed my consent to use his MS account, which I gave with my MS account and now he has a restricted account again)

The support agent tried everything, just getting the same errors as me on the web end. And gave up after an hour, try again tomorrow. And now I have yet another MS account which takes 30 days to close again. (We set up a new account to act as organizer to try to disband the family that way) So further setup will have to wait.

(I would just make a new MS account if it weren't for Minecraft which forced itself on the MS account since the Mojang logins weren't good enough anymore. So all his Minecraft stuff is now tied to a restricted MS account, grrr. Things were so much easier before accounts!!!)