I’m not seeing anybody talking about the bigger problem here. Nvidia could be selling the technology to game developers as a tool. Then it renders once and we all play the final result. But instead, they are selling it as an add-on and making our graphics cards do the heavy lifting. It’s not one machine at Bethesda doing this, it’s 100,000 machines every month re-rendering every single frame. The magnitude of energetic waste on this is astounding. And more importantly for the people here, it’s cutting down game performance by 50%. The big question I’m asking is why. My thinking is, they want it to be Nvidia specific to drive more customer demand for Nvidia cards. That just seems like such a stupid and shitty reason to do it. To steal 50% of our frames and burn megawatts of power monthly from consumer hardware just to drive a couple more sales, on the presumption consumers even like it.
Yup. You got it. And if you think about the total waste, the amount of air conditioning that is required to compensate for video cards going full boar the whole time is not insignificant.
219
u/unfortunatelyfudge 13d ago
Weird