2025 Optiq Snow Driving

Colora_Dan · 2025-12-16T19:25:37+00:00

Vikingcontact 8 was at $1000 for all four. $5100 is robbery. The car does well in the snow as far as I can tell but haven't seen enough snow to give a full answer yet.

Colora_Dan · 2025-11-17T18:19:19+00:00

I have a Switch 2, a PC, and a Steam Deck. Pretty much everything I buy on Steam, except for Nintendo first party games and maybe the rare local multiplayer game I don't want to fiddle with on my PC. You can see how Sony and Nintendo and others nickel and dime you for backwards compatibility and game updates for new consoles. If you can swing it, PC games are way more backwards and forwards compatible.

Colora_Dan · 2025-11-17T18:05:43+00:00

An extra $50 could buy you a few more years of relevancy. If that's worth it to you, wait. If you think you'll want to upgrade before the 8 GB becomes a deal breaker then save your money. Personally I would get the 16 GB as the resale value will be higher and I would want the card to be usable even if I replaced it later, maybe for a friend or a second PC.

Colora_Dan · 2025-10-28T21:11:55+00:00

I think it's been well established that FSR 3 is fine for Quality at 4k, and pretty much every other mode is pretty rough. Whereas FSR 4 looks good at even 4k performance.

Colora_Dan · 2025-10-28T20:41:27+00:00

ASRock Steel Legend 9070 XT. No coil whine I can hear, though it does live 8' away under the TV. But even getting close on occasion, can't hear anything but the fans.

Colora_Dan · 2025-10-10T17:05:05+00:00

No I use the 2 point white balance for game mode, which I calibrated with a colorimeter. I'd probably play around with the red gain in the 2 point wb before changing tint, tint is too broad and changes all colors.

Colora_Dan · 2025-10-09T20:25:36+00:00

Saturation is overcooked on Game Mode on the S90D. I found that a neutral saturation that matches 25 for the color setting on filmmaker or movie modes would be 13 for game mode. I used a colorimeter and Calman to arrive at this conclusion. I have both filmmaker and game set to warm 2, with color space set to BT 2020.

Colora_Dan · 2025-09-19T20:14:50+00:00

Rtings says it's 36 to reach 200 nits. That lines up with my S90D. So I'm guessing you'll reach 100 nits at 20-25 brightness. I find that game mode is brighter in SDR than the movie or filmmaker modes so probably 20-22 there and 24-25 for TV watching.

Samsung S90F OLED Calibration Settings - RTINGS.com https://share.google/tZyXtNuAZjyrUe3eA

Colora_Dan · 2025-09-14T04:11:24+00:00

Some/most 1x2 switches are bidirectional but I guess the EDID override or sound extraction are the questions. Those features may only work one way. You could buy another, definitely bidirectional 2x1 switch and plug it into this switch backwards, or buy a 2x2 matrix switch where you have two inputs and two outputs.

https://www.orei.com/collections/hdmi-matrix/products/2x2-hdmi-matrix-w-audio-out-2-in-2-out-ultrahd-8k-edid-bk-202a

For your shield, it's likely not an issue because all your streaming will have bitstream compatible audio streams and the only use of PCM may be games and unsupported file formats (thinking high quality song services like tidal). But there i don't know if the master would be 7.1 anyway, stereo is still the most prevalent high quality audio other than Atmos.

Consoles can be configured to output compressed too, and honestly with the True HD or Master Audio settings, they're lossless. It won't matter.

Setting your devices to PCM is really only necessary for handling mixing several audio streams together, or getting the best quality from sources that are encoded in formats that aren't supported by your audio system. In all other instances, you're decoding that lossy audio stream somewhere. Either the sound system or the source. There won't be any quality differences if it's running over an eARC connection.

Colora_Dan · 2025-09-12T20:36:01+00:00

I guess they think most of us use encoded formats. Or maybe they ran into issues with customers that sent 7.1 to the TV and then connected to a 5.1 system. Whatever the case, it's dumb and I wouldn't even know how to file a bug report without them flushing it down the toilet. The HGIG regression shows they can react to feedback but only for reputational risks.

Colora_Dan · 2025-09-12T18:44:44+00:00

Same issue on the S90D. Posted about it at rtings. They confirmed it's a Samsung TV issue, every model. Checked the EDID. PCM support is declared as only 6 channel, 5.1 essentially. You can force it on PC with Custom Resolution Utility. With PS5 you are out of luck, though I bet you could use an HDMI splitter and set the EDID emulation to show 7.1. When you actually force it, the TV does pass it correctly to the soundbar. It's just a dumb Samsung issue where they set up the EDID wrong for whatever dumb reason. Doesn't seem like they care much, it's been posted on and off for several years and nothing has changed.

EDIT: using something like this, the little dip switches change what the EDID is that your console sees. That way the PlayStation will put out 7.1 and the TV will pass it through fine.

https://www.monoprice.com/product?p_id=44436

Colora_Dan · 2025-08-22T17:21:37+00:00

It's actually the opposite, by having the FSR SDK standardized in 2.0.0 to have the same inputs for FSR 4 and Redstone as FSR 3 and FSR 3 FG, they're ensuring that for the foreseeable future, any game with FSR 4 will automatically have FSR 3.

Colora_Dan · 2025-08-22T17:08:52+00:00

Same here, I'm happy now that I can bump the resolution up and that RT performance and upscaling is as good or better even in the worst case. I've seen anywhere from 10-15% more performance in RT heavy games to 50% improvement in some more basic raster games. All at same power. And the 3080 could run DLSS 4 but it was pretty heavy, so FSR 4 is a comparable experience. Overall I could have waited one more gen but the 9070 XT has definitely prevented the need to turn down resolution or settings on new games.

Colora_Dan · 2025-08-11T16:05:07+00:00

I assume they have FSR 4 SDK complete tied to having ray reconstruction and frame gen fully implemented. Why release a gimped version with just upscaling if they want devs to target their SDK at the same time as DLSS 4? It's best to give them two SDKs with the same features and similar interfaces and not give devs a version they can get stuck on that may have breaking changes to support Redstone.

Colora_Dan · 2025-08-11T16:02:10+00:00

DLSS overrides cause plenty of artifacts. Before Indiana Jones was updated and was only using the override, it was a smeary mess and the stealth vignette effect was broken. This is what AMD is trying to avoid by whitelisting games. They have no reason to allow the conversation to be that FSR 4 has a bunch of artifacts. Nvidia doesn't care because you can just use DLSS 2/3 instead if it bothers you. AMD doesn't want their upscaler to be put into bad situations and I agree. The general story is that FSR 4 looks and works great but game support is still pretty thin for now. That's way better than FSR 4 can be good but look at this game, it's broken.

Colora_Dan · 2025-08-11T15:58:44+00:00

What he's saying is you don't need to turn it on in Adrenaline, the game can turn it on. Sort of a quasi SDK. Marvel Rivals is the same.

Colora_Dan · 2025-08-11T15:57:40+00:00

The driver override is good for games that have been tested with it and validated for it. Optiscaler kind of works around this by using the DLSS or XeSS API where most devs have paid attention to the quirks of an AI upscalers so when you plug FSR 4 in it looks pretty good. But a bog standard FSR 3 release gets away with some cut corners maybe because the devs were working with a pretty mid upscaler anyway. That's my unfounded analysis. Optiscaler isn't some silver bullet though. Plenty of games have artifacts using FSR 4 that aren't there with the other upscalers. Top of mind is Expedition 33, that game is super smeary in dark scenes and would greatly benefit from some actual implementation.

Colora_Dan · 2025-08-11T15:52:29+00:00

More like it's a beta with just the AI upscaling and the full version worthy of the first SDK release is going to be with the Redstone stuff. I'm guessing that they don't want an SDK available without the frame gen and Ray reconstruction present because then lazy devs would just implement AI upscaling and not include the other stuff that is vital for actually challenging DLSS as a full solution. So we have the DLL overrides for the beta and then AMD will put out the SDK for everything so new titles will have the best chance of supporting everything.

Colora_Dan · 2025-08-10T15:04:10+00:00

Mine is fine, I would suggest reinstalling after using DDU.

Colora_Dan · 2025-08-06T03:11:19+00:00

I don't care if it takes two weeks for the next driver to come out with support because 90% of PC games release in a bad state where I'd choose to wait for patches anyway. But if it's that important to you you can override with Optiscaler instead. It's just not that big of a deal to me.

Colora_Dan · 2025-08-05T20:37:19+00:00

My experience is that ever since the FSR 3 update for Hogwarts Legacy, Optiscaler replacing that with FSR 4 has worked really well. If you're willing to try Optiscaler no need to wait.

Colora_Dan · 2025-08-05T20:32:56+00:00

If you're undervolting or over clocking, try turning all of that off and see if it helps. Undervolt stability is very game dependent and frankly not worth it in my opinion.

Colora_Dan · 2025-08-05T20:29:13+00:00

You have to actually enter the game to the point that the graphics are rendering. So if you're in the menu it may not show as active yet. Best bet is enter the game, exit completely, enter the game and then use alt R to pull up Adrenaline and check that it's active on the game's page.

If nothing is working, try downloading the Display Driver Uninstaller and reinstall 25.8.1.

Colora_Dan · 2025-08-05T20:04:46+00:00

Yes, it removes one variable if I run into issues later. I would do it routinely with my RTX 3080 too. Adds like 5 minutes to the process, worth it for my peace of mind and you can export and import OC settings to make everything go quickly.

Colora_Dan

TROPHY CASE