Game PC Update: nVidia RTX 4070 Super GPU. That "game console vs. PC" debate; twilight of the consoles? Upcoming RTX 50XX GPUs. And graphical diminishing returns in the Art of Gaming.

I know, that's a massive title! But sometimes there's a bunch of stuff to talk/think about before the holidays. 🙂

With recent holiday sales, like I did recently with the Server, I thought it was time to finally update that GPU in my GAMING rig. Although I had updated the CPU last year to the AMD Ryzen 7 5700X (~US$150) 8-core processor, I was still playing with the old-skool nVidia GTX 1080 GPU that I got back in 2017. 

Clearly, after 7 years and a few generations, it was time to get a modern gaming GPU; yeah I have the RTX 4090 but that's for the workstation rather than gaming, in fact, I haven't even installed a single game on this workstation!

As you can see, I got the ASUS GeForce RTX 4070 Super Evo OC Dual-fan model, currently ~US$600 (~CAD$800). The RTX 4070 Super variant was released in January 2024, not long ago and I figured would make for a good contemporary card with longevity for upcoming games and should last me into the 2030's. It's equipped with 12GB of GDDR6X which should be adequate for awhile. And because it's the dual-fan model, it's not as long as the 3-fan cards; this is important because the enclosure I'm using has a limit to the length of large graphics cards it can accommodate.

Inside the box are a few pamphlets and "quick start" guides along with the power connector - 12VHPWR supplied with dual 8-pins. A layer of plastic protectors front and back obviously need to be removed when installing.

Above is a size comparison between the old GTX 1080 and the new RTX 4070 Super. Notice the new card is not as long but it's thicker (takes up 2.5 slot widths instead of 2) and taller so one needs to be mindful of space in an enclosure.

With the much smaller form factor compared to the massive RTX 4090 discussed last year, it was comparatively easy to stick the card in my gaming PC case which in my living room is an old Silverstone LaScala LC14 case I bought circa 2008-2009!

I love it when we can use standardized high quality components for long periods without waste. So even though PC graphics cards might be pricy to get the latest generation ($600 isn't cheap), the way a PC gamer updates with re-usable components every number of years can still be economical over time compared to complete replacements of a game console. Also, I regularly update things like SSDs in other computers, so various component can "trickle down" to the gaming rig and save money that way. Not to mention that ultimately you can do much more on a general computer than locked game system. In my living room, I don't need anything like an AppleTV or nVidia Shield to do things like surf the web, access Netflix, stream video from the home Server, even run software like Roon to stream music.

For those new to this stuff, with a little time and effort, it's certainly not hard to learn how to assemble one's own computers and install Windows.

Thankfully the RTX 4070 Super Dual card is short - notice how if it were longer, it would be running into the edge of that internal drive tray.

By the way, notice that I have an old LG internal combo Blu-Ray and HD-DVD drive (model GGC-H20L, 2007) in there - the drive is still going strong but rarely used! By today's standards the 520W Antec power supply (~2011) isn't very much but it handles the system just fine through heavy prolonged loads.

XBOX 360 controllers & Gaming Receiver also going strong!
Almost 20 years old - that's value. 😁

Here are some tables to compare general and technical details (courtesy of Technical.City) of the new graphics card:

Considering that the GTX 1080 launched also at the US$600 price, this is a nice comparison of the upgrade in processing speed and memory specs over the last 7-8 years. There is excellent improvement in cost-effectiveness (price:speed essentially) and the power efficiency.

We've seen significantly improved manufacturing process from 16nm to just a mere 5nm. Just from a raw floating-point processor power, there has been a 4x increase in those TFLOPS. The RTX generations also added specialized Tensor (fused multiply-add matrix calculations) and RT (ray-triangle intersection calculations) cores beyond the thousands of parallel CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture) cores.

GPU performance is not just the processor but also depends on the VRAM specs to feed the data especially for rasterization speed:

While the bus width dropped from 256 to 192-bits, GDDR6X still outpaces with higher clock speed and per-pin transfer bandwidth.

Here's a look at the GPU-Z statistics:

Note the GPU and Memory clocks are running
higher than default in this "OC" edition already.

So how fast is this graphics card for gaming? It's fast.

I use it with my 65" 4K TV in the living room running at 120Hz refresh rate. In games like Forza Horizon 5, even at 4K and quality settings cranked to ultra, it generally maintains >60Hz through complex scenes. Then there are the features like DLSS (Deep Learning Super Sampling) algorithm that can be used to improve speed through rendered internal resolution and temporal upscaling while maintaining high visual quality - the third generation is available to RTX 40-series only and it looks like we're up to DLSS 3.8 now. Lots of stuff online about this including resolution comparisons between the various versions for gaming graphics geeks.

Ray-tracing looks great as well although computationally heavy and the frame rates suffer. The combination of ray-tracing + DLSS 3.5+ (with "ray reconstruction") could result in a nice balance in speed and VRAM use when games support these technologies. Check out videos like this for the pixel-peeping in Cyberpunk 2077 Phantom Liberty with path tracing as well. Great to see the progression in graphics tech capabilities across the generations!

Some benchmarks...

So let's have a look at the recent 3DMark benchmarks using "Steel Nomad" which is modern non-ray-traced and will run on the GTX 1080 in 4K. Let's run it in DirectX 12 (as opposed to Vulkan):

That's a pretty looking benchmark/demo!

As you can see, I've turned on the detailed hardware descriptions. This is running on the AMD Ryzen 7 5700X CPU, 32GB DDR4 RAM, on an MSI X570-A PRO motherboard.

Here's the same test with the RTX 4070 Super installed:

An immediate 3x the number of frames per second over the RTX 1080. Notice that with stock settings, the machine is running at the Internet Average score for this combination of hardware.

Since the GPU is in a relatively small case, let's see if I can optimize with some "Power Limited Overclock" as I did with the RTX 4090. I'll use MSI Afterburner again and play with the Core and Memory clocks to make sure stable, while dipping Power Limit to 90% (and maintaining GPU temperature below 81°C). My desire here is to overclock GPU core and memory even further so the card remains at around the stock speed while sucking less power. Obviously we don't want to overclock too much to the point of the machine crashing or seeing glitches!

Final settings:

Not bad, I could push Core another +175MHz and Memory +1000MHz easily (the memory overclock doesn't increase performance much so no need to obsesses over that). Always test at both 1080P and 4K to make sure stable. It's a bit of "silicon lottery" so how much you can push your card depends on a bit of luck; my card is stable to +225/+1500 but it's good to leave some buffer room.

"Steel Nomad" score remains at around the Internet Average and I was able to run this in Stress Test mode looping 20x without any crashes and within about 5% variance max (as the machine heats up, the score gradually dips). Yup, the fans will speed up and it will get modestly loud, about as loud as the XBOX 360 under load, and I can feel the heat generated, but all's good. I'm not hearing much coil whine with this GPU BTW.

For comparison with a much faster GPU, here's what the benchmark looks like on my nVidia RTX 4090 at stock speed with the faster 16-core AMD Ryzen 9 5950X CPU:

The RTX 4090 runs the benchmark about 2x the speed of the RTX 4070 Super but at a price premium more than twice currently on Amazon (over $2,000 - ouch!).

Let's run the ray-traced "Speed Way" benchmark which I showed quite a bit of last year with the RTX 4090.

The RTX 4070 Super achieves around 5200 points on "Speed Way" compared to the RTX 4090 with 9800 points, again close to 2x the speed of the RTX 4070 Super.

Here's one more 3DMark benchmark - "Fire Strike Ultra" which is a test at 4K, but measuring performance with older DirectX 11 games:

I'm getting 12,200 on the RTX 4070 Super. Comparatively, the RTX 4090 achieves over 21,000 on this, so again, we're consistently seeing about a 2x speed gain with the much more powerful GPU.

Finally, let me throw out one more benchmark which is free and can be used to torture test your hardware based on Unreal Engine 5 - GameTech Benchmark (v0.999):

In 1440P resolution which still looks great ray-traced, we're getting around 36fps average over 10 iterations which is more than 20 minutes continuously and really heats up the system.

Push the resolution up to 2160P/4K, the machine is brought to its knees running an average of slightly over 15fps across the 10 iterations. A different benchmark to try if you're tired of 3DMark. 🤓

You can follow the thread here to see results from others; be mindful of the versions as it looks like it's still under development. Also, my numbers above are significantly lower because I'm torturing the machine with 10 loops, while limiting to 90% power and keeping GPU temperature <81°C.

ASUS GeForce RTX 4070 Super Evo OC Dual-fan: 3 x DisplayPort 1.4a, 1 x HDMI 2.1

Summary...

To me, as always, a wise consumer considers what he needs and the value he can get out of the toys bought. I'm definitely not a hardcore gamer but I do want a capable card when playing games in 4K and love the image quality of modern titles with complex modeling, lighting effects, ray-tracing, etc. Over the Christmas season I'll probably boot up some Cyberpunk 2077, Red Dead Redemption II, do some Forza Horizon racing, and various others including those I'll mention below. Many of the casual games will not need anything close to the graphics horsepower here.

The ASUS RTX 4070 Super Evo OC Dual (should be able to get for <US$600, around CAD$800) I think is a very reasonable deal currently for the capabilities especially if you need a shorter card to fit in your case. There are similar models which might be a little cheaper from PNY, or MSI.

If you want to spend a bit more money, you could get the RTX 4070 Ti Super (CUDA cores 8448, up from 7168) which will get you about a +15% speed improvement; the Ti Super also has 16GB VRAM which might be useful for future games that need more texture storage. Price tag for one of these would be around $800; about 30% more than the 4070 Super though.

Higher up in price would be the RTX 4080 Super cards (I don't think there's much availability of straight RTX 4080 any more) which are slightly north of US$1000 these days, feature 16GB RAM, and 256-bit memory bus to maintain performance. They're about +30% speed over the 4070 Super but we're also looking at >60% more expensive.

Below the RTX 4070 Super is the standard RTX 4070, about -16% speed with 5888 CUDA cores, also 12GB selling for typically just over $500. That's a 20% price saving which is about what you would expect scaling the performance.

I suppose one could look at the AMD Radeon cards. To be honest, I've appreciated nVidia's drivers and stability. Look at something like the Radeon RX 7900 GRE for similar speed to the RTX 4070 Super but these are not readily available here in North America. More commonly available are the Radeon RX 7900XT (~$700) and RX 7800XT (~$500) with this nVidia RTX 4070 Super typically performing between those two AMD cards. AMD's FSR (FidelityFX Super Resolution) 3.X upscaling technique is still a bit below nVidia's DLSS 3.X but interestingly, FSR Frame Generation (creation of intermediate frames so frame rate can be perceived as higher) can be used with graphics cards from other manufacturers including nVidia. Sometimes FSR can beat nVidia's DLSS frame gen.

With frame generation, beware of higher latency because even if the framerate looks smooth like 60fps, internally the number of actual uniquely calculated frames might only be 30fps. Best to target the game at something like 60fps internally and use the frame generation to smooth framerates up to 120fps if your monitor handles that and GPU fast enough.

Compared to the previous generation of nVidia RTX cards, the RTX 4070 Super would be even a bit faster than the RTX 3080 12GB released in 2022 and can beat the RTX 3090 (released 2020, but it does have 24GB VRAM) in many games.

Overall, I think the RTX 4070 Super is well situated among GPU options and excellent if you're interested in a good 4K-capable gaming GPU here at Christmas 2024. As I mentioned a couple weeks back, the rate of tech adoption is slowing down in general, so I suspect this GPU will be good for years.

Another metric worth considering when thinking about GPU longevity is what GPUs others are using currently. Let's have a peek at the hardware rankings on Steam:

While reviewers and companies will continue to push the latest and greatest, keep an eye on this for users in the real world.

Considering that the top 17 cards, constituting ~50% of all Steam game players are less powerful GPUs, and mostly 8GB VRAM, it'll be awhile before gamers gradually update to faster hardware. Game developers obviously have to keep this in mind to make sure their software performs reasonably well for most potential customers.

Given how many years the 8GB GTX 1080 has served me, I expect to not "need" an upgrade until into the 2030s which I think makes the $600 gaming investment now not unreasonable. Let's see if there are any "must have" games in the next few years demanding more graphics firepower! 🤔

Just as in audiophilia we have the eternal question of "analog vs. digital", in the world of gaming, it's "console vs. PC".

The current king of console graphics performance is the just-released in November 2024 Playstation 5 Pro (PS5 Pro) clocking in at US$700 with a single controller, 16GB unified GDDR6 RAM + 2GB DDR5 for system use, 2TB SSD, no disc drive (or about CAD$950 here in Canada, you might want to take advantage of 5% off no GST Dec 14 until Feb 15, 2025 on videogame hardware).

On the Microsoft XBOX side the Series X remains their most powerful device at US$500 (CAD$600) with 16GB RAM, 1TB SSD, 1 controller included. Clearly there's a lot to like about all-in-one consoles. It's certainly cheaper and easier than putting brand new computer parts together!

But let's be clear that even that powerful PS5 Pro cannot reach the graphical capabilities of the nVidia RTX 4070 (much less the 4070 Super); it's more like the older AMD RX 6800 or previous-generation RTX 3070 from 2020 - have a look at this detailed test. Also, the 8-core CPU in that PS5 Pro is basically the same as in the PS5 but can boost the clock to 3.85GHz compared to 3.5GHz. That's better I guess but not impressive since architecturally the CPU is similar to the AMD Ryzen 7 3700X which can boost up to 4.4GHz if anyone's counting.

Sure, some argue that despite the hardware limits, console developers will optimize their games to squeeze out the best from these standard components. Also, exclusive console content is important for those who want specific games, but these days with increasing numbers of multi-platform games, it will take effort to optimize games for specific console hardware, and more often than not, the PC version will simply look better with just much more horsepower under the hood. While it's quite normal to run games at native resolution such as a true 4K on a PC (nice and sharp), console games often use dynamic resolution upscaling, possibly frame generation, or run at lower quality settings to maintain target frame rates.

Playstation's PSSR [Playstation Spectral Super Resolution] is similar to DLSS on nVidia and FSR for AMD. Here's a comparison with DLSS and FSR.

Way back around Christmas of 2013, I wrote some thoughts on Those "next generation" game machines - PS4, XBOX One, Wii U which was basically my sentiment to move away from console gaming already. Indeed, while I have been tempted, I have never upgraded past the old XBOX 360 and Wii! By the time of the XBOX 360, it was pretty clear that PC and console gaming experiences were merging. Certainly when 2013 came around and the XBOX One with x86/64 CPU, AMD GPU, 8GB of RAM and 1TB hard drive space requiring game installs came on the scene, we were at the point that the consoles behaved like stripped down PC, with games needing to download patches to address bugs and performance issues. I didn't see a point of maintain separation between gaming and general computing hardware.

This idea is actually not much different from the recognition that the future of music playback was in computer audio, involving the home network as shown with the Slim Devices/Squeezebox system through the 2000's into the Server-Endpoint distributed model.

So despite owning and loving gaming consoles from my youth, it all stopped at Generation 7 (XBOX 360, Wii, PS3) and we're up to Generation 9 now. The other day I ran across this fascinating and hilarious video - What Happened to the 9th Generation?

I found it an excellent exploration into the "problems" that current consoles have. Here's another video with similar ideas.

Perhaps it's not surprising then that we are seeing plummeting console hardware sales in the last year? It looks like there is a lot of unhappiness in the XBOX world although it should not be surprising that Microsoft has been promoting cross-playable XBOX games on Windows since the Play Anywhere initiative which launched in 2016 (here's a list of all the games).

There are similar concerns on the Playstation side (and also this recent PS5 Pro video). Perhaps we'll see next year in the data if Christmas 2024 provided a boost for either of these game consoles or a bust, especially with the PS5 Pro release clearly targeting the holiday season.

Something disappointing to PS5 enthusiasts is the current list of exclusive PS5 games as of December 2024. These are all the releases since the PS5 came out in November 2020 that is not cross-platform nor available to PS4 gamers:

Sure, the PS5 plays PS4-available games well, typically with 60+fps and wider FOV.
But those are all the exclusive games after 4 years and >65.5M units sold!?
(And one of them is a prettier R-Type side-shooter update!?)

In comparison, Nintendo plays in its own sandbox and dances to the beat of its own drummer and perhaps has been wise to stay away from competing based on top-tier graphics and just focus on game play and their unique IPs (Mario, Zelda, Kirby, Pokémon, and the like).

Needless to say, I'm not tempted to get back into console gaming again after all these years - I'm not sure who would be after looking at the stats!

Instead, let's look at some interesting games to try out with the RTX 4070 Super!

There's HI-FI Rush (2023) which began life as a Microsoft XBOX game in a beat 'em up genre with a rhythm twist. If you like this, check out HI-FI Rush: Original Game Soundtrack and B-sides, very cool music. 😉

Despite the accolades, there were lots of concern when Tango Gameworks was announced to be closed by Microsoft in May 2024. Since then the developer has been reacquired and apparently working on HI-FI Rush 2.

Sony made an excellent conversion of Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart (2021 Playstation, 2023 PC):

Looks like this is the last Ratchet & Clank from Insomniac Games until 2029! Fantastic particle effects, ambient occlusion, ray-tracing, complex 3D models, beautiful draw distances with breath-taking scenery in 4K. Highly recommended if you like this genre.

Probably the best looking game currently available, Horizon: Forbidden West (2022 Playstation, Complete Edition 2024 PC) :

Wow. This is a great demo piece of modern 3D video gaming. It's simply a stunning visual work of art in interactive motion. With DLSS, this game consistently runs 70-80fps in 4K with max graphics settings looking almost no different from native rendering! On the PS5 you're basically locked to 30fps in graphics quality mode and 60fps in "performance" (1440P upscaling) mode which still looks great.

While I can appreciate modern top-tier 3D graphics, I'll return back once awhile to some old-skool 2D multiplayer shooting. Here's one with modern 3D esthetics on steroids, maximum intensity! Konami's CYGNI: All Guns Blazing (2024):

And classic side-shooter with graphics updated for the 21st Century - R-Type Final 2 (2021):

I'm looking forward to playing these with family over the holidays. With games like R-Type, it evokes good memories of playing with this in the arcades back in the '80s and early '90s!

And in the new year, if the PC port of Marvel's Spider-Man 2 comes out as planned on Jan 30, 2025 (not to be confused with the Amazing Spider-Man 2 game from 2014), that would be an impressive example of what another top-tier game looks like when unbound from the limits of the PS5/PS5 Pro.

I'm sure the mod community is salivating to work on this one!

For most PC gamers, Steam is the main digital distribution and storefront to grab your favorite games from. It is estimated to have about 85% of the marketshare for PC games.

Steam as the heart of PC gaming storefront including small indie games like Slime Rancher. Also check out GOG and Epic Games Store.

There are currently more than 100,000 titles on Steam that continues to expand over the decades covering all genres. Backwards compatibility can be dodgy with old titles but typically there are patches for the more popular ones and there's a community to ask questions if one runs into issues.

Like with streaming music, it would not be surprising if a majority of all titles available are barely ever purchased or played.

And while Steam is available on MacOS and Linux (including their own SteamOS), >96% of users are on Windows 10/11 which further makes it the premier platform for gaming, compatibility and ongoing infrastructure development:

For completeness, I think it's important to mention that Microsoft has PC Game Pass (Windows 10/11) available as well if you prefer the subscription model for US$12/month which I think is a good deal especially for those who play quite a bit! There's access to "day one" new games, in total they have about 450 titles currently in late 2024 available - here's the catalog.

It has been said that this is Microsoft's path forward if (when?) they retire the XBOX consoles.

Well, if this is the twilight of the video game console era, then games like HI-FI Rush, Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, and Horizon: Forbidden West are good examples of how developers - including those historically aligned to XBOX and Sony - will need to increasingly develop for the multiplatform experience (see the Sony exclusives now on Windows PC). Good games are important, good looking games are cool, but most importantly, they have to make money to cover the rising expenses of development especially in the top tier that can run into the hundreds of millions of dollars - sometimes well beyond the cost of blockbuster Hollywood movies!

No matter how good the graphics hardware, even how great the gameplay, if they don't make money, they're toast - go ask Sega and the graphically impressive Dreamcast for its day (1998-2001, RIP).

If you want the latest hardware and highest graphical fidelity, look no further than the PC. The other significant area I haven't even mentioned is the ability to emulate arcade classics and older consoles. And there are handheld devices like Valve's Steam Deck, or ASUS ROG Ally X for those who want higher-end mobile gaming and access to the plethora of PC titles.

Long live the PC-as-game-console!

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Image found here.

As we enter 2025 and CES around the corner, we're starting to see news now on the upcoming nVidia RTX 50XX "Blackwell" series of GPUs. Certainly looks interesting and GDDR7 VRAM so far looks like the main promising performance boost other than the usual numbers on increasing CUDA cores and the like. GDDR7 is said to be capable of 28-32GT/s compared to GDDR6X's 24GT/s (+17% to +33%) as used in the RTX 4070 Super. We'll see how that plays out in real world performance. Power consumption appears to be going up and probably price tag also though.

So far based on early specs, the RTX 5090 will be a monster with 21,760 CUDA cores (the current RTX 4090 has 16,384) that'll be great for AI work with 32GB for LLMs, 512-bit bus but sucks up something like 600W! So we're probably looking at something like a 35% increase in speed over the RTX 4090. I think they need this headline performance to push though because the other lower models might not be as exciting.

The RTX 5070 Ti with 8960 shaders (25% more than RTX 4070 Super), plus a few percent increase for architectural improvements, with 16GB/256-bit GDDR7 VRAM might be good value if the price is right for gaming. The rumored ~300+W power consumption is a bit concerning though but correlates with the performance increase.

For some speculative fun then, based on what I've seen leaked thus far about shader cores and stock clock speeds, the RTX 5070 Ti theoretically would be about:

15% slower than RTX 4080 Super 16GB/256 (~$1150)
Same speed as RTX 4080 16GB/256
10% faster than RTX 4070 Ti Super 16GB/256 (~$850)
20% faster than RTX 4070 Ti 12GB/192 (~$800)
35% faster than RTX 4070 Super 12GB/192 (~$600)
65% faster than RTX 4070 12GB/192 (~$525)

Expectation would be that in real-life gaming there won't be this amount of % fps gains due to other limitations and complexities in an interactive experience. Let's see how close the predictions are once the product is released with some actual benchmarks. Most importantly, we need to consider the asking price. Will the RTX 5070 Ti end up cheaper than the current RTX 4080 Super given the anticipated slightly slower performance?!

Current rumored specs for the RTX 5070 seem a bit disappointing with only 6,400 CUDA cores and GDDR7 running at the slower 28GT/s speed. Assuming the reported clock speed of 2.235GHz (base) / 2.52GHz (boost) are accurate, then we're looking at performance potentially 5-10% below the RTX 4070 Super so it better be priced at most around that $600 mark. Also, we'll need to see if they introduce some kind of DLSS 4 magic to improve the performance to further stimulate interest in the RTX 50XX generation. 

At a more foundational level, it looks like the manufacturing process for the RTX 50XX-series will be 4nm (TSMC N4P) as the gate pitch continues to shrink, but the density is only a 1.06x (6%) increase comparing N5 (the current 5nm process) vs. N4P. In comparison, when the RTX 30XX jumped to RTX 40XX, that process improvement from N7 to N5 yielded a density increase of 1.8x which is much more significant. All those nanometers are getting really small now so it'll be interesting to see whether there are other architectural improvements that can generate growth in performance beyond stuffing more parallel-processing cores. There should be some energy savings with GDDR7 but potentially minimal increase in energy efficiency with these new 50XX GPU cores. TMSC N3 presumably would be in the next generation, and a more significant jump.

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While this blog mostly focuses on audiophile topics, I think it's important to keep an eye on developments elsewhere like computers and the GPU products as they represent meaningful leaps in consumer technology (whereas I see 2-channel hi-fi as mature already).

IMO, audiophilia belongs within the family of other engineered tech hobbies, not some isolated island on its own with esoteric luxury products and mythological faiths. It's worth looking at these other hobbies like video gaming, computing, and home AV to see how they evaluate their products, measure performance, and also what defines a "good" review of something new and whether consumers should be interested.

Whether in audio, general computing or graphics, there always comes a point of diminishing returns, right? As we hit that point, human psychology and capitalistic drives will need to make up the difference between actual improvements in performance with non-utilitarian rationales to spur purchases as we have seen in "high-end" audio. When it comes to computer graphics, there's clearly room to keep progressing still.

However, there is a separate but related issue which is about the "art" of gaming. While it's awesome to see cutting-edge, possibly photo-realistic imagery generated in games, are we having fun? Philosophically, we see different answers to that question when we look at Nintendo's approach to the hardware at least since the Wii (2006), compared to Sony and Microsoft. At some point, with good enough graphics fidelity (like audio fidelity), perhaps there will be no need to compete on the GPU front any more and game developers embrace more of the Nintendo model, satisfied that graphics capabilities can already deliver the intent of the experience.

We should always ask ourselves:

"Am I having any more fun today playing these games as I was perhaps decades ago playing on 8-bit systems with rudimentary sprites, or later when we first experienced 3D shooters like Doom or Quake, or our early online experiences?"

Maybe many game players are already aligned with that Nintendo model of gaming and OK with leaving the photo-realistic rendering to tech demos. Let's just have some simple fun again.

As in audio, subjective matters are important for each of us to decide on regardless of geeky objective numbers, charts, and graphs. Something to ruminate about over the holidays. 😉

With that...

As I head off to hang out with family and then travel a little for some sun and warmth soon, I want to wish you all a joyous Christmas, friends!

And a happy 2025.

PS: For some light-hearted '80s nostalgia and video gaming for those who lived through the Nintendo Entertainment System (Famicom in Japan) era, you might enjoy the Christmas movie 8-Bit Christmas (2021).

Addendum:

Thought I'd throw in this benchmark result for Cyberpunk 2077 latest version 2.2 just released Dec. 10 for the RTX 4070 Super running in 4K, "Ray Tracing: Overdrive" preset, with DLSS frame generation and ray reconstruction. Looks great, plays great.