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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 25th, 2023

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  • It’s confusing because both AMD and Nvidia call both frame gen and upscaling as the same thing.

    Upscaling: GPU renders game at low resolution (eg, 720p), and then (semi) smartly guesses what’s in the pixels that weren’t rendered. You get improved framerates because the GPU is doing less work per frame. The downside is typically that the image is typically a bit blurrier, and depending on how the GPU guesses the missing pixels, you might also get ghosting, which is where moving objects leave a smear trail behind them. The general consensus is that if you plan to use an upscaler, you should only use the highest quality mode on the upscaler. Any lower and the blurring becomes too significant

    Use when:

    • your GPU isn’t powerful enough to drive your monitor at its native resolution (ie you were going to run the game at a lower resolution anyways)
    • your game isn’t running as fast as you’d like, but turning down the settings would result in too noticeable of a drop in visual quality
    • your game doesn’t support your monitor’s native resolution (common in older games)

    Do not use when:

    • you could turn down the settings and still be satisfied with the visual quality

    Frame gen: GPU renders a frame, holds on to the frame, renders the next frame, and then guesses at what happened between the two frames. The framerate is improved because the GPU is inserting an entirely guessed frame in between every rendered frame. The downside is that because the GPU has to hold on to a frame, the latency is increased. More specifically, the time between when you move your mouse and when your camera moves will be increased with frame gen.

    Use when:

    • your game isn’t latency-sensitive (eg puzzle games, strategy games, some adventure games)
    • you have a high refresh rate monitor (higher refresh rates typically lead to less added latency)

    Do not use when:

    • your frame rate (without frame gen) is below 60 fps (added latency becomes too noticeable)
    • your game is latency-sensitive (eg competitive multiplayer games)

    Terminology:

    • AMD FSR 1: semi-dumb upscaler

    • AMD RSR: literally just FSR 1

    • AMD FSR 2: semi-smart upscaler

    • AMD FSR 3: very slightly smarter upscaler than FSR 2, and comes with semi-smart frame generation

    • AMD AFMF: literally just the frame generation part of FSR 3, but slightly dumber

    • nVidia DLSS 1: semi-dumb upscaler

    • nVidia NSR: literally just DLSS 1

    • nVidia DLSS 2: semi-smart upscaler

    • nVidia DLSS 3: smarter upscaler than DLSS 3, and comes with semi-smart frame generation

    • Intel XeSS: semi-smart upscaler









  • Flying is definitely the first challenge that players tend to meet. Just use autopilot. You can cancel the autopilot mid-flight, and you absolutely should cancel the autopilot if you start to see that a planet is getting in your way. Most people just fly with the autopilot, and that’s really my biggest advice.

    If you really insist on flying manual, don’t treat it like driving a car. Spaceships (both real and in-game) drift most of the time. You want to get up to speed (400 m/s is a good top speed most of the time) and then drift the rest of the way to your destination. Do you see the white dotted arrows coming out from the planet that you’re targeting? You want to get those arrows to be as short as possible. If the arrows are visible, that means you’re not lined up with the planet and you’ll miss the planet



  • Yeah, people tend to have that problem, especially if they’re treating it like driving a car. If you want to fly manual, never fly more than 400 m/s, because then you won’t have enough time to slow down.

    My actual advice though is to just use autopilot. People seem to forget that you can cancel autopilot. If you start to see that there’s something getting in your way, cancel the autopilot and push the ship to the left or right (it’s easier to go around the planet than to slow down). Once you’re clear, resume autopilot.



  • There’s a technique in science that’s commonly used called blotting. It is basically exactly what it sounds like. You transfer a biological sample to a sheet of paper by pressing the paper into your sample.

    The person who first developed blotting was a guy with the last name Southern, and he did it to transfer DNA into paper. So that became known as a Southern Blot.

    Then someone else decided to try the same thing with RNA, and so they called it Northern Blot, because ofc North is opposite of South. Then someone else tried it with proteins, and that became known as a Western Blot. I think now there’s even Northeastern Blots


  • Not insane. This is true. Iirc, there’s some hormonal changes in the urine that causes the wheat/barley to grow first, depending on the sex of the fetus.

    The accuracy of this method is overexaggerated, though. Iirc, when tested, it was found to be something like 75% accurate. For what it’s worth, that’s pretty accurate for the ancient world



  • Yes, and people do do it. It’s just incredibly difficult to do it even for relatively simple programs, and the more complex the program is, the more exponentially hard the reverse engineering will be.

    The problem is not necessarily turning it into code, since many decompilers do it already for you nowadays. The issue is understanding what in the world the code is supposed to do. Normally, open source code would be commented and there would be documentation, so it’s easy to edit or build on the code. Decompiled code comes with no documentation or comments, and all the variable names are virtually illegible.

    It’s sometimes easier to build something new than to fix what’s broken, and this would be one of those cases where it’s true




  • Size matters. I built a small form factor pc exactly because I knew I would probably move it a lot. I find that 10-15 L cases can be fit into a large backpack with some care, and 8 L cases can be fit into backpacks relatively easily.

    You probably won’t need it to fit into a backpack, but regardless, you will probably want to remove any unnecessary space to make carrying and transport easier. For what it’s worth, I believe 15 L cases can generally fit into luggages, and I would be more inclined to trust that a PC is undamaged if left in a luggage. Especially if the remaining space is well padded