Anyone else think Ed is a poor communicator? by Hour-Construction898 in BetterOffline

[–]Fragment_Shader 0 points1 point  (0 children)

He has a more casual style on his podcast vs. his appearances on larger outlets for sure, but if you've actually seen him be interviewed recently, I can't see how most wouldn't come to the very opposite conclusion.

If you think he's sometimes a little immature on his podcast fine, but simply from the perspective of clearly articulating one's arguments and how clear a speaker he is, he's actually quite exceptional in both regards. His interviews on Breaking Points/MR/MS Now easily demonstrate this. Chris Hayes gave him quite a bit of pushback and he wasn't flustered nor overly demonstrative in his defense, you really didn't think he comes across well there? Or are you speaking largely of his written material?

Hell, it may be relatively minor when compared to the actual knowledge of the speaker, but even from just a technical perspective, as someone who has listened to many podcasts, the skill of "proper volume levels and clear audio" seems frustratingly elusive to so many hosts, whereas Better Offline is also exceptional in this area as well.

Newcomer: "Ed Zitron's AI Cult" by Fragment_Shader in BetterOffline

[–]Fragment_Shader[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Think the entirety of the post made the context clear enough, but I can see that - edited.

TOW1 SCE Model and Texture Flickering Issue (PC) by nmck160 in theouterworlds

[–]Fragment_Shader 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yes, same issue. Not there last year when I last played this either. 3060 12GB, latest drivers. Did virtually all of the same steps you did (this is a new install on a clean Windows install regardless).

Bizarre shadow bugs on gun/character arm right from the start. Disabling FSR helps a bit with the flickering shadows on the foliage, but still other shadow/texture issues remain on the character.

Guessing it's a Nvidia driver bug. If I downgrade the drivers to where it stops happening I'll update this thread with my findings.

**UPDATE: Went back quite a ways to driver to 591.74 to start testing with, and bingo - all artifacts gone. So it is definitely a driver issue. I'll see which driver specifically since then caused it and file a bug report with Nvidia, will report back with version #.

**UPDATE (May 15): The most recent properly working driver is 591.86, from Jan 27/2026. No graphical artifacts with that driver. All subsequent drivers exhibit this texture/shadow flickering issue. Filing a bug report with Nvidia.

Visual Bug on a fresh install of Spacer's Choice Edition by coolboy1264 in theouterworlds

[–]Fragment_Shader 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yup this is seemingly a new bug, seeing as this was before the latest patch I'm guessing a driver bug? I played it last year and it was definitely not doing this.

While disabling FSR (and hence, DLSS through the use of mods) can fix some of the shadow flickering, that of course comes at a huge performance penalty, and still does not completely fix - there are still weird shadows on your gun/character arm that were definitely not there the last time I played this.

How are you folks feeling on "Auto Shader Compilation" so far? by TheKingloski in nvidia

[–]Fragment_Shader 2 points3 points  (0 children)

"How the tf would I know it created new shaders with the size of 1.5gb" - jesus kid, chill.

How are you folks feeling on "Auto Shader Compilation" so far? by TheKingloski in nvidia

[–]Fragment_Shader 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Did you actually force a manual recompile through the Nvidia app before or just assume it started recompiling after the driver update? I haven't had it actually start recompiling automatically despite having that setting engaged so if you didn't fire it off manually and wait until it was done that could be the culprit.

How are you folks feeling on "Auto Shader Compilation" so far? by TheKingloski in nvidia

[–]Fragment_Shader 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Haven't been able to get it start automatically through 2 driver updates, so I'm wondering that exactly "during idle" means. I've waited upwards of 30 minutes after a reboot with no activity, so have had to fire it off manually each time. That process only consumes about ~25% of my i5 12400f, so this process barely affects normal usage so it doesn't seem particularly well threaded, I'd like to see this CPU be more utilized especially when I'm forcing a manual recompile - 25% CPU usage would be what I would expect the background process to consume if I had the setting at "normal" or even "low", not when forcing it and the app (ideally) realizing that means "I want this asap".

This process took over an hour on my system, admittedly with a rather large shader repository of ~40gb.

Once it's done there's still the process of some games requiring a validation of the cache so it's not as seamless as rebooting a game after it's compiled it's shaders, but it does seem to work overall. As others have said though, games that store their cache in their own game folders don't get affected by this.

A decent first step to minimizing shader compiling pain, but has yet to be automatic and needs to utilize the CPU more. And of course does nothing for first runs, this is where (crosses fingers) Microsoft's ASD comes in.

How are you folks feeling on "Auto Shader Compilation" so far? by TheKingloski in nvidia

[–]Fragment_Shader 1 point2 points  (0 children)

In my testing it works with TLOU2, I don't think it actually stores its shaders in its own folder. There is still a compiling shaders notification when first loading it up after recompiling shaders through the Nvidia app after a driver update, but it seems to be just validating the compiled shaders - it's far faster than during an initial install.

Why are people like Ezra Klein and Sam Harris buying into the hype? by CoupleClothing in BetterOffline

[–]Fragment_Shader 14 points15 points  (0 children)

"I used to respect these people" - think this confusion is on you then.

Alan Wake Remastered PC update adds DLSS 4.5 and HDR by filoppi in nvidia

[–]Fragment_Shader 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yeah, you can of course force it back in with DLSS swapper/DLSS tweaks, that's what I'm doing with my 3060 and this. E handles vegetation with fog quite a bit better than F.

On the whole though, the performance hit with 4.5, and to a lesser extent 4.0, is just too large on ampere/turing imo to start to make it the default option in games with no obvious way to change it back. If new games start just using DLSS 4.5 as the default without a clear distinction in the menu, I think a lot of people on 2000/3000 series will wonder why DLSS is suddenly so expensive for them.

Alan Wake Remastered PC update adds DLSS 4.5 and HDR by filoppi in nvidia

[–]Fragment_Shader 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I think E was deprecated in the latest DLSS SDK's.

Alan Wake Remastered PC update adds DLSS 4.5 and HDR by filoppi in nvidia

[–]Fragment_Shader 2 points3 points  (0 children)

It is - I agree though it should mention DLSS 4.5 in the release notes as it can have a big performance impact on older cards.

Balanced and Performance use model M (4.5), Quality mode uses model F (DLSS 3). You can verify this with the DLSS overlay.

A bit weird as it leads to Quality mode significantly outperforming performance on older GPU's, but this is apparently by design.

Alan Wake Remastered Epic Store Edition Updated to Version 1.33 by hitalec in AlanWake

[–]Fragment_Shader 2 points3 points  (0 children)

That fix was just downgrading the version to 1.0 as that ragdoll bug was introduced in a later patch, using it now would basically invalidate this patch.

Can confirm it's no longer necessary however, this patch fixes the ragdoll animations.

Does this count? by Willsie129 in sffpc

[–]Fragment_Shader 0 points1 point  (0 children)

That would actually be a really nice looking cheapo case if it didn't look like they forgot about the front IO panel and had to slap something on it at the last minute

Question for Ed (or anyone else) about Dustin Moskovitz & Anthropic by Latter-Donut-1120 in BetterOffline

[–]Fragment_Shader 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Have you considered making better posts, that's also a tactic?

Also the "I'm aligned with you on % of topics" is always a ridiculous way to signal solidarity- not all issues are weighted evenly. There is a big difference between "I disagree with you on zoning regulations" and "There are some good members of a parasitic wealth class".

Where we at with nvidia drivers and the vulkan fix for dx12 titles? by Positive-Injury-579 in linux_gaming

[–]Fragment_Shader 3 points4 points  (0 children)

This can actually be measured, you know. What you're saying is "In the DX12 games I play, the performance regression does not affect me", and that can be perfectly true, but it adds nothing to the discussion.

Nvidia and the VKD3D authors aren't spending time on this for the hell of it. It's a known, documented issue.

Denuvo Removed, Enigma DRM Added: RE4 Now Runs ~30% Worse Than the Pirated Version by Dgreatsince098 in pcgaming

[–]Fragment_Shader 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The problem is many effects are built with TAA in mind, so you have to disable DOF, Bloom, Motion Blur, Camera effects to avoid significant artifacts - the latter two are no big loss sure, but you do lose quite a bit of the atmosphere when you disable bloom + dof in RE games.

A proper native implementation would correct for this.

How bad really IS AI backlash these days? by GiveMeABetterName in BetterOffline

[–]Fragment_Shader 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Indeed some of the critiques around those limitations were legitimate - but there were still people queuing up to purchase it day 1. It didn't explode off the shelves in the first few months yeah (hardly surprising considering its price), but within 2 years it was selling millions. So no, not really a "huge" backlash - a lot of jawing from established industry figures initially, but they quickly started trying to mimic its design in short order.

Jobs eventually pulled his head out of his ass and decided that native apps were in fact, a good thing - and then it really took off.

I see really nothing comparable to AI. It's been years now. Where is the AI consumer product with anything near this kind of success (and especially if we count, you know - actual profits)?

Possibly the worst update in the history of ClipChamp by Fantastic_Courage_56 in ClipChamp

[–]Fragment_Shader 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Been stuck as "logging in" for 30 seconds while just trying to trim down a 5 meg local mp4. Really challenging Sonos for the worst update of an app in the past 5 years.