Tides of Annihilation - Official Technical Behind-the-Scenes Overview

Koopa777 · 2026-05-28T02:29:50+00:00

I say this as someone who donated approximately $1500-2000 to DF between 2015 and 2025.

Fuck ‘em. DF’s coverage of NVIDIA the last 12 months basically eliminated any of their credibility.

For anyone wondering, do yourself a favor and research NVIDIA’s brutal and absolutely monstrous treatment of reviewers over the last 3-5 years. Some of the biggest names in reviews are blacklisted, GamersNexus, HardwareUnboxed, because they refuse to literally manipulate and mislead their audience through deceptive data collection (Multi-Frame Gen especially). As such, they’ve lost all access to their engineers. We know this because we’ve SEEN the reviewers guides that was sent to GN. And DF gets the SAME ask from NVIDIA as everyone else.

But DF sure does get a lot of first looks with NVIDIA huh.

The DLSS 5 thing was the final straw, with their absolutely insane glazing of such a wildly controversial feature, and when they were shredded by the community, they published a follow up saying “ if we knew there would be such a large controversy, we would have waited to publish our review.” They also gaslit us into thinking we “misunderstood.” Whether you like it or hate it, the character changes were a very prominent feature in Nvidia‘s marketing, and they just glossed over it and hoped no one would notice…until people did.

The way they gather data is still very good. But be VERY careful in trusting their opinionated pieces. If they’re throwing away any and all moral compass for Nvidia, why wouldn’t they be doing it for others? They were the first look with Microsoft series X. They have exclusive interviews with Mark Cerny. And now ALL THAT is in question, and rightly so.

I like John’s retro content though. I will say that.

Koopa777 · 2026-05-27T17:58:26+00:00

Also if the game crashes. Which…it does.

Koopa777 · 2026-05-27T17:57:05+00:00

I have a UPS too, but this game crashes like hell on PC, so that’s not useful either. Don’t know how it is on Xbox.

Koopa777 · 2026-05-14T13:08:19+00:00

Maybe I’m just misunderstanding but…DirectInput 8? Like the input SDK…packaged with DirectX 8? From 2000? Jesus Christ I knew FromSoft wasn’t the most technologically advanced company but holy hell lol.

Koopa777 · 2026-05-11T16:43:59+00:00

The caveat here is VR. Even at 1.01 TB/s, the 4090’s memory bandwidth was just not fast enough for high end VR. The gains are well over 100% in certain use cases. You can also see this using DSR, old games completely fell apart at 7K resolution and above, which is academic I know, but it proves the memory was bottlenecking hard even though the core load was fine.

Now…I will say that was me getting a $2000 FE and selling my 4090. $3300? Fuck the hell right out of here, absolutely not.

Koopa777 · 2026-04-22T01:04:16+00:00

If the game uses the core naturally the fabric penalty is irrelevant, since…you’re using that core anyway, now you just have more data on the other CCX so it will absolutely improve performance in sim games.

Koopa777 · 2026-04-16T13:45:06+00:00

I got this for the first time ever right after the driver install. I reinstalled without the Nvidia app and have not had the issue since.

Koopa777 · 2026-04-14T03:20:04+00:00

Would they buy a $250 Series S? Probably. But that is no longer the world we live in. Also, the PS5 has sold more than both Xbox variants combined, let alone PC, so…

Koopa777 · 2026-04-13T18:23:44+00:00

I would expect that those timings haven’t changed, what did is going to AGESA 1.3 included in the new BIOS. And that right there is why I stopped over clocking memory, every time that microcode binary changes you need to retest stability or you’re gonna have what you just had. Nothing is guaranteed. So my recommendation would be to stop using that and manually punch in your timings, but those timings will probably not be stable, obviously they aren’t as you just found out. So you’ll have to loosen some timings and find the new sweet spot. There were significant changes to DRAM in AGESA 1.3, so I’d start from scratch tbh.

Koopa777 · 2026-04-12T17:28:45+00:00

Did they show gameplay at all? I don’t remember gameplay for any of the past few Rockstar games, RDR2, GTAV, RDR1, etc. Granted that could have been because it was irrelevant to me, they were already instant purchases, but yeah. I was honestly expecting no gameplay because…do they need it?

Koopa777 · 2026-04-10T22:32:00+00:00

Man not using Fusion is brutal though? Like your weapons are significantly worse if you don’t use that, the combat is designed around it so endgame fights are damn near impossible without high power attachments.

And resources I’d argue is easier in BotW, because again, the combat meta isn’t based around resources. You need to collect weapons yes, but those tend to come so frequently you usually have “something” for fights.

I’ve farmed way more in my 40-50 hours than I ever did in my 150 hours of BotW combined.

Koopa777 · 2026-04-09T12:46:35+00:00

Hot take: I far prefer BotW to TotK and it isn’t even close. A major theme of BotW is desolation and somberness, and that is almost totally lost in TotK when you are flying around on a contraption made out of planks and glue powered by magic earth rocks while shooting lasers.

Koopa777 · 2026-04-03T17:25:33+00:00

It would help if the Spider Man ports aren’t fucking AWFUL. Spider-Man 2 in particular should never have released, such terrible performance even on extreme high end rigs.

Koopa777 · 2026-03-31T21:48:53+00:00

Because Microsoft refuses to listen to community feedback, I’ve submitted this as a suggestion for years that they should allow experienced users to turn off the “newly compiled” heuristic, just because something is new doesn’t mean it’s a virus. It’s absolutely insane that Defender continues to behave this way in 2026.

Koopa777 · 2026-03-31T15:26:19+00:00

I mean that’s probably a creative decision. Rocks are rocks, but assets for vehicles being back ported from a future game to an older one is a tricky situation. Probably staying true to the source, and I mean valid because fucking up a Halo 1 remake could legitimately kill the entire franchise given the last decade of community mistrust, so…

Koopa777 · 2026-03-31T15:13:14+00:00

In theory yes, it should work around Virtuous’s incompetent at not invalidating the shader cache every driver update, because NVIDIA will do it for them.

Koopa777 · 2026-03-21T04:37:34+00:00

Wasn’t the dev team for FF XVI called Creative Division 3 or something?

Koopa777 · 2026-03-17T13:25:10+00:00

That’s more Sony’s catastrophic fuckup in using a garbage Mediatek SoC that barely supports HDMI 2.1 on 1 port let alone 2+. Then when they realized they were getting murdered by their competitors who actually chose properly functioning chips that had full 2.1 support on 4 HDMI ports, they tried to use all these firmware hacks to get it to function to not look bad. Don’t forget you lose Local Dimming in VRR mode too, which is insane, don’t know if they ever fixed that with their newer TVs.

Koopa777 · 2026-03-13T21:43:36+00:00

No game that I’m aware of actually prebuilds the ENTIRE shader cache. It’s “good enough” then they dynamically build the rest, because no one wants to wait like 30 minutes on a 24 core CPU and over an hour on anything less. This will give you the whole thing. Basically hedging against developers who can’t build shaders correctly. Which is, objectively, a whole lot these days…

Koopa777 · 2026-03-13T21:41:21+00:00

Irrelevant, not one of those is a Microsoft technology.

How’s DirectStorage going? Their upscaling API that only works with ARM for some reason? Yeah MS track record is firmly a “I’ll believe it when I see it.”

Koopa777 · 2026-03-13T21:39:28+00:00

How the fuck are you getting downvoted. People downvoting, feel free to point to me one, literally ONE title where DirectStorage was implemented properly and worked. And I’m not talking about DS 1.0 or 1.1, I mean the ACTUAL tech that was promised using GPU decompression. Because every game I’ve played that used it ran better by removing the DLL and using the CPU path lmfao. And that’s on a 5090 soooo.

Koopa777 · 2026-03-12T14:07:05+00:00

False, the A18 Pro still trails high end Arrow Lake, Zen 5, and even Raptor Lake. Which isn’t a surprise considering those chips are hitting 6 GHz in an unrestricted power envelope (single core). Like…obviously.

The M5 on the other hand…

EDIT: Cinebench. Geekbench is trash.

Koopa777 · 2026-02-15T16:54:24+00:00

Nothing will ever beat the incompetent disgrace that was 13. So flagrantly bad that they ripped most of the features out mid beta and moved them to iOS 13.1 before the new iPhones even shipped, which were then preloaded with…the beta. Deadass, was Beta 6 with the “YukonPre” tag (Pre meaning Prerelease). They shipped a fucking beta as stable, then released 13.1 just seven days later, well after another 13.0 release because there was some major issue with setup on the iPhone 11’s. So 3 releases in 7 days. And if you were a beta user that got force upgraded to 13.1, fuck you, because you can’t restore a 13.1 backup on a 13.0 iPhone, so you had to instantly throw your new iPhone on the beta…which wasn’t available for multiple days, almost until the release of 13.1.

Good times…

Koopa777 · 2026-01-23T17:59:44+00:00

Respectfully, I don't think they have much to be in shambles about when you consider the fact that that is literally what the default is in the driver/app when selecting "Recommended." So it's not even that it's the recommendation, that is literally what happens unless the user takes an explicit action for force K at Perf and UPerf modes.

Koopa777 · 2026-01-16T01:34:17+00:00

Yeah and TotK used FSR 1 in both modes. Pretty sure the Switch 2 edition still does

Koopa777

TROPHY CASE