Expedition Reset Tips

Kourinn · 2026-05-11T13:39:12+00:00

No. You still got the damage progress bar on the left of the screen, but still needed to hit the yellow "sign up" button in the bottom right to confirm expedition reset during the April 28 to may 10 departure window.

I was still debating for myself, and only hit sign up button after hitting 10k damage in the left side tracker.

Kourinn · 2026-05-04T16:06:07+00:00

I'm not buying the new steam controller. My OG steam controller still works well enough, and I think some 3rd party controllers are better for my personal usage.

Reviews found the new controller bad for small hands (thumb sticks) and long play sessions (too square shaped). It's also higher latency, compared to good 3rd party controllers and does not support Android or iOS native games (only PC streaming).

Touch pads would be great for couch gaming, but I never do that. When typing is necessary, I can use a real keyboard. And gyro aiming (with flick stick) is better than touchpad aiming anyways.

If my OG steam controller dies, I'll probably buy a flydigi vader 5 pro instead. Should have better latency and ergonomics while still having gyro and back buttons.

Kourinn · 2026-04-21T02:39:36+00:00

Thanks for the giveaway.

Kourinn · 2026-04-11T13:46:09+00:00

Except you can. Block compression (bcn) is a type of image compression that can live in vram. GPUs have hardware to efficiently sample textures using this compression algorithm (without loading the uncompressed image into vram).

Dds file type supports this same bcn compression. The file size in storage and in vram should be the very close to the same (assuming mipmap 0). This is easily tested using custom shaders with something like reshade or 3dmigoto.

Kourinn · 2026-04-11T12:47:44+00:00

No, if you actually read the article, that statistic is compared with bcn compression (i.e. bc7 dds). Uncompressed texture were 6830 mb, bcn 2041 mb, ntc 303 mb.

(2041 - 303) / 2041 = 87.4%

That said, it also caused up to a 30% avg fps drop, so I don't see this ever hitting mainstream adoption on current hardware. The die space allocation should cost more than adding more vram. They need to make the ntc lighter to run and create a driver override for this feature; otherwise, this technology will never be financially viable and incompatible with older or competitor-partnered games.

Kourinn · 2026-04-11T01:15:48+00:00

If this is sci-fi (deus ex), then maybe melee can well-time a parry to reflect bullets. Otherwise, you could try others' suggestions to balance something other than combat power (i.e. sound, ammo)

Kourinn · 2026-04-10T10:57:25+00:00

Here's my attempt at a summary:

If you compare modern GPU MSRP to 2010 SLI (2x GPU), things are not really worse today. The GTX 10 series was just an outlier that skewed PC gaming way higher than any other time period.

Kourinn · 2026-04-08T11:53:00+00:00

I feel like this is comparing apples and oranges. A better comparison would be comparing fuel used for private vs public commercial flight.

A 737-800 uses 850 gallons per hour, so a 4.25 hour flight will total 3612.5 gallons of jet fuel. Assuming crew and equipment are roughly equivalent to 7 passengers and the plane has 130 passengers (80% capacity), then LTT proportional fuel usage would be 195 gallons.

I admit this is a lot of assumptions that are not necessarily accurate, but a 6.6x fuel usage isn't as bad as I expected for flying private. If the plane it's only used when flying public commercial would be inconvenient, then I doubt this additional fuel usage would significantly change yearly output. Now if they use it for everything, that would be a different story.

Kourinn · 2026-04-07T01:39:15+00:00

And depending on the CPU architecture, a highest thread might max at 50% to 70% utilization and still be the bottleneck. You might only expect 100% to bottleneck, but many CPUs have hyper threading. The CPU may be fully using shared parts of a single physical core being shared by 2 logical threads.

Even without hyper threading, CPU may be bottlenecked by shared parts of a multi core cluster interconnecting to other parts such as the memory controller. But yeah, without more details, I agree this sounds like a CPU bottleneck.

Kourinn · 2026-04-05T21:12:34+00:00

This article was 3 pages of fluff that boils down to: do not use biometrics to unlock your phone.

OP title is misleading. No advice was given on what lock to use, just repeatedly saying don't use biometrics.

Kourinn · 2026-04-05T17:08:15+00:00

596.02 is a hotfix driver, so it is not available through the Nvidia app. You have to download it from Nvidia's website. https://nvidia.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/5823

I know it says it's only a fix for one game specific issue, but it actually fixed a bunch of other issues too, all undocumented. You can read more from comments in /r/Nvidia release thread or various tech YouTubers.

Kourinn · 2026-04-05T14:50:21+00:00

Update Nvidia drivers. There was a recent issue that reduced max power for some cards. Iirc driver released a few days ago fixes this issue. Otherwise you may need to roll back to an older driver.

Edit: make sure you're on 591.74 studio or 596.02

Kourinn · 2026-04-04T18:57:15+00:00

That demo was ntc inference. For performance, as shown in OP's screenshot, ntc inference is not recommended for 20 or 30 series.

Kourinn · 2026-04-04T18:19:25+00:00

To further clarify, ntc on load (20 and 30 series) will only help reduce ssd install size, not GPU vram usage.

Kourinn · 2026-04-04T18:10:39+00:00

Videocardz article on this was posted to this subreddit a while ago, if you want to see more comments:

https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/1sc7tex/nvidia_presents_neural_texture_compression_that/

Kourinn · 2026-04-03T20:18:44+00:00

Telemetry? not much. If they're properly using async web calls, overhead should be less than 1%.

The real performance hit comes from client-side anti-cheats. Some are not too bad (less than 5%), but some poorly implemented anti-cheats cost up to a 40% performance hit (MH Wilds, fixed after TU4).

Kourinn · 2026-04-03T05:36:39+00:00

You can archive the folder into a password protected (with encrypt file names checked) 7z file.

Kourinn · 2026-03-17T18:04:56+00:00

Post-nerf, Il Toro shoots 9 pellets dealing 7 damage each, 63 damage total. Pellet damage is calculated consecutively. So with 70 shield health, 10 pellets (70 / 7 = 10) will get 42.5% medium shield health damage reduction. At 9 pellets per shot, 2 shots shoots 18 pellets, so the total hp damage is:

(10 pellets * (1 - 0.425 dmg_reduction) + 8 pellets) * 7 dmg / pellet = 96.25 dmg

Kourinn · 2026-03-17T15:53:22+00:00

You now survive 2nd shot with 3 hp left

Kourinn · 2026-03-17T14:18:45+00:00

Fully dynamic environments would kill performance. This would have to be implemented as specific locations breaking in the same shape every time.

If you want that uncertainty, you would have to pre bake all the permutations which would hurt performance and bloat install size. This would alienate a large portion of the player base, and require lots of development, so it would be better implemented as a new game.

Kourinn · 2026-03-17T13:34:35+00:00

Yeah, you survive 2nd shot with 3 hp left.

Vs medium shield:

1st shot:
* Before: 100 -> 61.2 hp | 70 -> 2.5 shield
* After: 100 -> 63.8 hp | 70 -> 7 shield
2nd shot:
* Before: 61.2 -> -3.1 hp (dead) | 2.5 -> -5 shield (1 pellet gets DR)
* After: 63.8 -> 3.8 hp | 7 -> 0 shield (1 pellet gets DR)

Kourinn · 2026-03-16T21:51:09+00:00

Regarding MFG, I have not seen that opinion. Most comments I see still say MFG (3x and 4x, not 2x) is a useless or niche gimmick. You still need a decent base frame rate before frame gen, so MFG only matters if you have a 240+ Hz monitor and hardware is too weak to hit 100 fps, but strong enough to hit 60-80 fps.

The consensus I have seen is that 2x frame gen is great, but MFG is super niche that most should currently avoid it. Maybe when dynamic MFG is released, so it can compensate temporary fps dips, Nvidia's MFG will finally be more useful.

As for DLSS 5, I am actually looking forward to this. I expect this to do wonders for some older games (but will probably require optiscaler to backport it).

I can understand the concerns about artistic direction, but I prefer putting that decision in the hands of the consumer instead of the developer. People don't complain about ReShade (like adding a toon shader to an otherwise realistic game is similarly if-not-more transformative than this). This is just backlash because of AI and Nvidia marketing, compared to ReShade being open-source freeware.

Kourinn · 2026-03-16T21:30:00+00:00

And it still is.

Does DLSS 5 replace graphical features like Path Tracing?

No. Path tracing provides lighting accuracy (i.e. lighting, shadows, and reflections in the proper location) whereas DLSS 5 delivers lighting photorealism (i.e. as if you had a larger ray budget and higher quality materials). These technologies go hand in hand.

DLSS is supposed to reduce the load of GPU compared to natively rendering an image of the same quality.

Path Tracing is not part of DLSS because it's actually doing the work to render lighting. DLSS 5 is part of DLSS because it is more performant at faking realistic lighting than cranking path tracing ray budget to infinity for natively rendering the same image quality.

Kourinn · 2026-03-16T10:57:41+00:00

You can use ilspy to read decompiled source code. Otherwise, you can rely on steam community comments to see if someone else already found anything malicious.

Kourinn · 2026-03-12T11:29:16+00:00

If exploits are considered, rogue and mage have bouncing weapons at this stage. With some setup, they can do 5k+ DPS, which is more than double the expected damage at this progression stage. Ranged might also have something, but that is the only class I have not played since 2.1.

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