 If you're listening to this on YouTube, this episode is one week delayed. Up to date, tech show but friendly episodes are on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or Google Podcasts. But however you listen to us, thanks for lending us your ear. Thank you for joining me on this holiday Friday, or whenever you're listening to this, this is Talk Show But Friendly, the podcast from Hardware Sugar, and this is Anton with Hardware News. Not that there's a lot of news now, but we will be talking about GPUs and one of the beefs or issues I have with GPUs in general. So diving right into it, NVIDIA recently published their hardware survey, or some of the results from their hardware survey on the adoption of ray tracing and DLSS. So these two technologies have been with us for quite a while now. Since the 20 series in NVIDIA, and of course the 30 series, now the latest 40 series. And it's interesting to note that the main claim to fame actually, especially with the 20 series, wasn't so much their raw performance, but the fact that they packaged or had available ray tracing. In some instances, in some games, the performance of a 20 series card was basically tie with its 10 series card, with its 10 series counterpart. Except the argument was being made that, well, but with a 20 series card, you have ray tracing. But per NVIDIA's numbers, not even a majority of users enabled ray tracing. For the 20 series, we have 37% of users turning on ray tracing with only 26% turning on DLSS. That rises significantly with the 30 series, that's 56% for ray tracing and 71% for DLSS. And an even higher adoption rate for the 40 series, with 83% turning on ray tracing and 79% turning on DLSS. So people are getting more comfortable with the technology, but it's curious to me that you would buy a 20 series card and not turn on ray tracing. Yes, especially in the early generations, there were some performance hits, some earlier games where the software wasn't that optimized. It wasn't running as efficiently because, well, developers had a shorter time to figure out how to use the software compared to titles being released now, hardware being released now. So there has been a clear maturity with RTX and with DLSS and that maturity is being seen in how many people, a vast majority of card users now adopting or turning on those two technologies, those two features. And I should note before going on that this is only a result of people who chose to participate in NVIDIA survey. So these numbers don't accurately reflect everybody who's using a RT series card, just those who chose to participate. But the trend is quite clear from the 20 series, then 30 series, then 40 series. The weird thing to me is that why would you buy a 20 series card if not for the RTX? Like you already have it, why not turn it on? For a vast majority of games, even with, say, the performance hit, you would still want the RT, you would still want RTX on. Like what would be the point of getting a 20 series card? Why not just go with a probably cheaper 10 series card? And I think the answer lies in the fact precisely you do need to turn it on. It's not something that was enabled by default when you go into game settings. And for GPUs in particular and computer hardware in general, I think that remains a problem where a lot of cool features come out and brands hype it up because they do want something to set their hardware apart from everybody else. At this point, I do have to apologize if you're hearing a ringing in the background. I think yung local mamang sorbitero natin medyo na iinitan na. I am actually recording this a bit earlier than usual. I think you can definitely hear some bells in the background. I'm recording this earlier than usual because I am out actually this Friday and I can't do it Thursday. I'm actually recording this Wednesday. I can't do it Thursday because we are doing a livestream of poede magtanong. So I don't usually, I try to record at a quieter time. I don't have a home studio. Everything is still kind of makeshift with hardware sugar where we shoot, where we record. And so there's a lot of backchatter like that. So I do apologize for the ice cream sounds. If you can hear them, although I just did a playback and apparently it's not discernible, although I'm not using headphones. So perhaps they are discernible over the headphones. But ice cream does sound like a good idea now considering how hot it's been lately. But getting back to computer hardware on the cool features of things, it's okay to have cool features but I wish it were easier to turn them on. Especially for people who aren't that familiar with all of the latest jargon, all of the latest advances, all of the latest and greatest things that you can get from your new CPU or your new SGPU. In essence, I wish you didn't need to tweak it as much and out of the box they were optimized to settings which the less technical advanced user would be able to appreciate. And I think that that's what reflects or that's the reason why the adoption rate for the 20 series was so low. 37% for RTX, 26% for DLSS because a lot of consumers didn't know what these settings were about. Maybe they heard about them but they didn't realize or didn't appreciate what they wanted to do. Perhaps they should have been turned on by default. Although props to NVIDIA, their marketing campaign really seems to have supplied consumers with the knowledge because with the latest generation you have sky high adoption rates. Over 80% for RTX, almost 80% for DLSS. But it seems like such a waste if you had a 20 series card why you wouldn't turn on RTX. And actually we've made a lot of great strides on that front but more on the software front rather than hardware. I notice when new features come out for hardware it's difficult to implement them automatically across the board. You need to fiddle with bios, you need to download a software program that will allow you to tweak the hardware. And when I mention software, I'm specifically thinking about DirectX for those of you who have been doing computer or have been monkeying around with computer parts prior to Windows 95, you will remember what a pain in the butt it was to have to route through your auto-exec bat, your config.sys. Specifically this is for the DOS operating system. That's kind of a redundant, it's kind of like saying ATM because DOS literally stands for disk operating system. So it's kind of like DOS OS, disk operating system OS but anywhere. Windows 95, if my old man memory serves me correctly, it was the first implementation of DirectX and it has gotten a lot better over the years and a lot of us don't think about it anymore. We take it for granted just how interoperable a lot of the hardware is now. And don't get me wrong, of course there are still conflicts, hardware conflicts, IO conflicts that lead to blue screens of death but it's a lot more polished now than way back in the day. And I'm not an engineer, I don't quite understand why they wouldn't want to implement marquee features straight out of the box but I think that explains the low adoption rate for RTX and DLSS on the 20 series cards that a lot of people either A didn't know about the features or B were still unsure of the features. And if the default state was to turn them on rather than to leave them off, perhaps that would have allowed people quicker chance, a quicker way of experiencing these features because over time a lot of people, a lot of gamers have adopted them. So not just GPUs in particular but hardware in general, I wish we could see more of that where it was a bit more automatic. There's a lot of hype about AI now. I don't really need like super intelligent computers but maybe something that can do general tweaks for me rather than having to be super specialized, super technical about it and jumping into settings. That's something that I think a lot of users would appreciate and it doesn't take away from the hardcore guy who still wants to tinker. It's just making it more accessible to everyone else, to a wider audience, to a larger majority. Still on NVIDIA 40 series cards, apparently they're not in a hurry to ramp up production so they're happy to let suppliers sell off their 30 series card stock which has been happening. There are some 30 series cards which are a little hard to find or they're still a bit expensive like the 3080 but especially like the mainstream 3060 cards, 3060ti, there still is a lot of supply and the prices are pretty good at least compared to how they were during the GPU pandemic days. So NVIDIA is releasing new 40 series cards but apparently they're happy to keep the production level as is for now to allow people to purchase the lower so as not to compete, so as not to put too much price pressure on the 40 series compared to the 30 series. So if you're thinking of getting a 40 series card, prices probably will not be dropping significantly anytime soon. And for our last bit of hardware news, it stems from an ostensible April Fools joke but it turned out not to be. So ROG announced their ROG ally on April 1 which is basically like a steam deck on steroids. So it's something that can allow you to play PC games but on a handheld. And like I'm going to be upfront, I never quite understood the appeal of the steam deck because a lot of the appeal for me of a PC game is one the input devices, mouse and keyboard which you don't get on a handheld. A lot of games, first person shooters, very involved RPGs. I just like the mouse and keyboard IO method. I mean it's such an efficient way of having a lot of options literally at your fingertips. And I'm not, I mean if I wanted to play console, I would play console but I want to play PC. Why would I want to play PC using a console type of setup? And I know, I mean I'm not sure if I'm in the minority but certainly there are a lot of people who do prefer to game on a PC but using some kind of console input. Let's say controller, console controller. I do acknowledge that but I've never been one of those guys. So the steam deck for me was kind of like really this is something that a lot of people are interested in because number two, aside from the fact that actually two and three, two is the monitor. I like having a nice monitor which is why I was seduced with the ROG PG48UQ. I think having this really large screen capable of high refresh rates is something that you can only get on a computer. Yes, you can get it on console to a limited extent. You can do 4K, you can push the refresh rates although it's not as universal as it were. I mean with a PC if the as long as the game supports it, you can crank it up to 4K, you can go as high as your refresh rates, you can go as high as the software and as the GPU can spit out. So it's more practical to have a higher resolution, higher refresh rate monitor for a PC game. And finally, is the hardware the PC itself where you get a high-end gaming system? You're expecting to have that kind of gaming experience where you can have a rig, you can have hardware that can push the resolution and the refresh rate that you want. All of that is kind of stymied if you go with a handheld, you're limited to a very small screen. Refresh rate might be okay but it's not something that you can get or something comparable to a high-end gaming monitor and the hardware is limited to what you can cram into that handheld. But as with a lot of things hardware related or PC related in general, I seem to be in the minority because the steam deck was super popular. And now we have the ROG ally which is attempting the same concept but basically refining it. Supposedly it's going to be faster than the steam deck roughly around the same price because this is a very price sensitive product. Here remember, I think NVIDIA had something back in the day which was kind of something like this. Kind of like you could stream or you could play PC games on a handheld device. Was it the shield? I'm not even too sure. Again, I'm grasping here for memory because it's not something that I really took notice of since it's not something I would be interested in. But that was kind of pricey for its time. Apparently the stream deck has that good sweet spot of specs are decent, price is decent. Yes, I want to play my PC games on a handheld. So ROG ally seems to be coming along with better performance. I think steam deck is RDNA2 so it's based on an AMD platform versus RDNA3 for the ROG ally. So far the only two people I know or have count public that ASUS has approached them and said, hey, you can play around with this but we're going to watch you super closely was LTT and Dave2D. Although there is a third locally. So ASUS here gave a prototype version or allowed Gadget Pinas access to the prototype version. Although Gadget Pinas pointed out that this was a earlier rendition or earlier version of the ally compared to that shown to Linus and to Dave. But it's nice to see that we are at least locally, our local journalists were able to play around with the ROG ally. And essentially all of the impressions I've seen were, well, this is interesting. It's very comfortable, controller wise. No updates yet on the price, but the price seems to be apparently they're hinting it's going to be competitive, but they can't quite say what the price is as ASUS has not officially stated anything about it. And so why am I going on about the ally? Even though I have went on, I've said that I'm not really interested in the concept of being able to play PC games on a handheld. It's because I've had a change of heart. Lately when I've been playing, I've been playing a lot of Death Stranding if you've been following our gaming streams and you can kind of feel the incredulity in my voice because I thought I would be over with the game. But it's such a long game. It's like Lord of the Rings where I think it's going to end and then, oh, there's another ending. Oh, there's another ending. And I'm spending a lot of time, basically I'm feeling a little burnt out at my computer, spending a lot of time working on it. And then when I do play on it, sometimes it's starting to feel very restrictive. Like I'm in this chair again, I'm playing this game. To be fair, maybe it's the game's fault because a lot of the game feels like work a lot of the time. It's work that I enjoy. The career job going through the scenery of Death Stranding can be a rewarding experience, but it can feel like drudgery from time to time, which I think was the point of Hideo Kojima when he made the game. That there's this element, there is the grind element. There is the element of there's a lot of go-to tasks where there's not a lot of shooting, there's just a lot of walking or driving or things like that. So I'm starting to feel a little bit like my gaming is in a rut and I don't want to do indie games. And when I was thinking about the indie games I wanted to do, I thought about it and I'm going to say, well, I could play this on the couch like lying down. I don't need to be sitting at my computer. It would work just as well. And since they're indie games, they don't need like super high end specs. And I was like, yeah, okay, maybe I can see this working just from the format of I don't want to be stuck to my desk. Like I want to lie down. And it's really reached that point, at least for me, where getting to the computer and like having to go through the messages and all of the comments and thinking about what we need to post. And that's just a tip of the iceberg. So a lot of it's work. And then even when I game, I feel that sometimes the gaming is also work. So I'm a little just tad bit burnt out with this format of sitting down at my desk and the keyboard and the mouse and things like that. So I am a little bit of a convert. Like I might be interested in going or experiencing this kind of format. So I'm watching it with interest. Although to be honest, I think I've seen prices floating around like $650. That's a bit too high for me. And if you know me, I'm quite cheap. So I don't mind getting it second hand. Maybe I'll wait a little bit. And like couple of years or so or yunga, I'm not, it's not something that I really need to experience right now, right now. But a lot of people are interested in this gaming format. So this gaming medium. So I thought I would mention it on textual but friendly and just give my two cents that I can't quite see the appeal, but I'm coming around to it. But still not there that I would pay something like $650. I mean, that is that's a new GPU already. I mean, you know, that is a that's a new rig for some people. So that is a little expensive for me from the point of view that I wouldn't really be using this like a lot, a lot. But if that's your cup of tea, I think you would be very excited with the ROG ally coming pretty soon supposedly from ASUS ROG. All right. So that's it for me. Thank you for listening to another episode of textual but friendly. We are thinking of having another guest on and will hopefully we can do that soon. Although for me, the appeal of this podcast is that it's relatively easy to produce. And so having guests on a lot increases the time and time is something in quite short supply, at least for me with all of the things that I need to juggle. So we will be we are planning to have another guest on, but it's not something that we would we think will be doing on a regular basis. So like a sporadic basis. But so definitely the guests we have are like the ones that we really want to have on. So stick around for that. Thanks for watching. Have a good holiday. Have a good day. Whenever you're listening to this, stay safe, guys.