The advantage of having every DLSS feature (except for frame generation) in a low-end card like this one can’t be understated. You need bit of extra frame rate and image quality you can get with a card like this one. DLSS is both the most widely supported and best upscaling method - and even if you don’t like it for some reason, you can still use FSR or XeSS in games that support it instead.

Just make sure to get the 8 GB instead of the identically-named 6 GB version, because of course a much worse card has the exact same name. Not only is there more memory, it’s also faster (128 bit instead of a 96 bit bus), there are more CUDA cores (2560 instead of 2304) and the card runs at a much higher clock speed (1.78 GHz vs. 1.47). It needs a separate power connector, unlike the cut-down variant, but it’s still more power-efficient than OP’s current card.

I remember trying the single player campaign when it came out in 2012. To say that it wasn’t good would have been an understatement. Everything about it was abysmal: Visuals, sound design, controls, level design, AI, weapon feel, etc. It was also ridiculously buggy. I’m talking 1, maybe 2/10 at best. This surprised me, given the fanfare surrounding the project back then and the high hopes I had. I also quite like flawed, quirky Indie and AA titles, but this project wasn’t it back then, despite being free.

I hope the final release is vastly improved, but honestly, the trailer reminds me too much of what it was like 14 years ago.

It also reminds me of the recently released Timesplitters fan game, which is even worse, one of the most incompetently designed and programmed games I’ve ever had the displeasure of experiencing. I’m not exaggerating.

Sorry for the outdated impressions and negativity. I really do hope Renegade X has come a long way.

former Rockstar QA tester, Build A Rocket Boy scripter (in various capacities), and Splash Damage senior technical designer

Really stretching the definition of “former Rockstar dev” here.

Edit: It looks unbelievably bland. There’s absolutely nothing even remotely new or compelling here. No AI usage and no early access are nice, but that’s not enough on its own. I’ll happily eat my hat in case I’m wrong though.

Will do, thanks!

Holy Moly, I need to get back into Minecraft and Minecraft modding.

Saved you a click: It uses AI voice actors.

Sure, but human-written shit still had that human touch. It could be unintentionally funny, it could be a mixed bag that reaches unexpected heights at times. AI writing is just the bland kind of bad, not the interesting kind of bad.

after chroma subsampling

Cool info, but I’m not sure about this part. Do you mean downsampling instead? Because chroma subsampling doesn’t make sense in this context.

Steam also has a built-in streaming feature that doesn’t require any additional software.

A couple of years ago, I hooked up my laptop to a monitor and to watch a movie from a streaming service. Since the monitor (a budget AOC model) didn’t support HDCP, it didn’t play.

Here’s the amazingly sophisticated hack I used to get it working: Instead of using the monitor as an additional display, I mirrored the laptop screen to it. Millions of dollars developing DRM defeated by a single key stroke.

I hope you aren’t literally still using an actual HDD.

What emerging players? You can’t just whip up a competitive GPU in a jiffy, even if you have Intel money.

Also, unless they are from a different planet that has its own independent supply chain, they’d have to deal with the very same memory shortage and the very same foundries that are booked out for years.

Gaming laptops are notorious for dying from overheating. These things need to be meticulously maintained if you want to use them for their intended purpose for long.

Which is totally fine. Not every game has to support older hardware. Games are allowed to use “newer” tech.

Worth noting that I played Indy at 1600p/60 on an RTX 2080, which is a card from 2018 that I bought used for 200 bucks two years ago. This card can still run every single game out there and most of them extremely well, despite only having 8 GB of VRAM.

The whole debate is way overblown. This doesn’t mean that there aren’t games that could run a whole lot better, but overall, PC gamers with old hardware are still eating good.

This heavily depends on the game. Which game were you testing?

In my experience at least, small Indies and last-gen or earlier ports from console are fine, but games with frequent loading times and those designed for SSDs benefit from being installed to the internal storage.

They are, unfortunately.

That’s a single risk you (hopefully) willingly accepted when you decided to use an extremely niche browser.

Been there, done that, eventually discovered the errors of my ways and returned to Firefox.

Somewhere above 720p upscaled to 1080p with the help of FSR should work for 60 fps. The lower render resolution is likely enough to compensate for the lack of VRAM. This is all theoretical, of course.

How’s your CPU situation?

Bit late, but in theory, it should work just fine, even at 60 fps, given that the Steam Deck’s display resolution is only about half of 1080p.

Use supersampling. Either at the driver level (works with nearly all 3D games - enable the feature there, then select a higher than native resolution in-game) or directly in games that come with the feature (usually a resolution scaling option that goes beyond 100 percent). It’s very heavy on your GPU depending on the title, but the resulting image quality of turning several rendered pixels into one is sublime. Thin objects like power lines, as well as transparent textures like foliage, hair and chain-link fences benefit the most from this.

Always keep the limits of your hardware in mind though. Running a game at 2.75 or even four times the native resolution will have a serious impact on performance, even with last-gen stuff.

Emulators often have this feature as well, by the way - and here, it tends to hardly matter, since emulation is usually more CPU-bound (except with very tricky to emulate systems). Render resolution and output resolution are often separate. I’ve played old console games at 5K resolution, for example. Even ancient titles look magnificent like that.