Weekend tech reading: PC could learn something about 4K from PS4 Pro, build your own VPN

[Matthew DeCarlo]

4K gaming: what can PC learn from PlayStation Pro? Checkerboarding, upscaling, temporal anti-aliasing, dynamic resolution. Let's give credit where it's due: at its best, PlayStation 4 Pro's utilisation of these techniques produces some impressive results for 4K displays - no mean feat considering that the Pro's GPU is relatively underpowered compared to today's mainstream PC graphics hardware. And this led us to wonder - what if those techniques were rolled out in the PC space? Could the cost of admission to the world of 4K gaming drop dramatically if the techniques championed by Sony worked just as effectively for PC gamers? EuroGamer

Report: More than half of streaming users are sharing their passwords There’s no denying that the television landscape is changing the days, with cable TV putting up dismal numbers (their worst ever, actually). But as more people migrate to streaming video, the scenery there is changing as well. Nearly 3 out of every 4 (72% exactly) Americans who have cable also have access to at least one streaming service and 8% of cable subscribers plan to eliminate their service in the next year. But that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re paying for their streaming service. Streaming Observer

A year of Google & Apple maps Shortly after I published my Cartography Comparison last June, I noticed Google updating some of the areas we had focused on: Coincidence or not, it was interesting. And it made me wonder what else would change, if we kept watching. Would Google keep adding detail? And would Apple, like Google, also start making changes? So I wrote a script that takes monthly screenshots of Google and Apple Maps.1 And thirteen months later, we now have a year’s worth of images... Justin O'Beirne

How Facebook's tentacles reach further than you think Facebook's collection of data makes it one of the most influential organisations in the world. Share Lab wanted to look "under the bonnet" at the tech giant's algorithms and connections to better understand the social structure and power relations within the company. A couple of years ago, Vladan Joler and his brainy friends in Belgrade began investigating the inner workings of one of the world's most powerful corporations. BBC

Google's AlphaGo retires on top after humbling world No. 1 The Google-owned computer algorithm AlphaGo is retiring from playing humans in the ancient Chinese game of Go after roundly defeating the world's top player this week, its developer said Saturday. AlphaGo defeated brash 19-year-old world number one Ke Jie of China on Saturday to sweep a three-game series that was closely watched as a measure of how far artificial intelligence (AI) has come. Phys.org

How to build your own VPN if you’re (rightfully) wary of commercial options In the wake of this spring's Senate ruling nixing FCC privacy regulations imposed on ISPs, you may be (even more) worried about how your data is used, misused, and abused. There have been a lot of opinions on this topic since, ranging from "the sky is falling" to "move along, citizen, nothing to see here." Ars Technica

The 1961 Mobot Mark II had all the moves In the late 1950s, Sandia Laboratory was looking for a way to handle radioactive materials without putting humans in danger. The answer was the Mobot—short for either “remote robot” or “mobile robot”—a remotely operated system designed by Hughes Aircraft Co. in 1959 that offered a unique and effective combination of strength and dexterity. IEEE Spectrum

Faster, more nimble drones on the horizon There’s a limit to how fast autonomous vehicles can fly while safely avoiding obstacles. That’s because the cameras used on today’s drones can only process images so fast, frame by individual frame. Beyond roughly 30 miles per hour, a drone is likely to crash simply because its cameras can’t keep up. MIT

How Anker is beating Apple and Samsung at their own accessory game Steven Yang quit his job at Google in the summer of 2011 to build the products he felt the world needed: a line of reasonably priced accessories that would be better than the ones you could buy from Apple and other big-name brands. These accessories — batteries, cables, chargers — would solve our most persistent gadget problem by letting us stay powered on at all times. The Verge

Apple is working on a dedicated chip to power AI on devices Apple Inc. got an early start in artificial intelligence software with the 2011 introduction of Siri, a tool that lets users operate their smartphones with voice commands. Now the electronics giant is bringing artificial intelligence to chips. Apple is working on a processor devoted specifically to AI-related tasks, according to a person familiar with the matter. Bloomberg

The history of RPGs Computers and RPGs have always gone hand-in-hand. Even when the best adventurers could hope for visually was a few letters and numbers on a screen, what better way could there be to handle stats, die-rolls and complex calculations? Soon enough, though, computer RPGs were capable of doing much more. PC Gamer

Nanogenerators could charge your smartphone Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have been exploring the applications and commercial potential for triboelectric nanogenerators (TENGs) since 2012. These so-called TENGs essentially harvest static electricity from friction. IEEE Spectrum

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https://www.techspot.com/news/69487-weekend-tech-reading-pc-could-learn-something-about.html

 

[TomSEA]

Loved the "History of RPG's" article. My favorite genre and that article touched on virtually every game I've played including when I was learning to code on mainframes back in the 70's.

 

[Evernessince]

"what if those techniques were rolled out in the PC space?"

They were already rolled out in the PC space first. Oblivion and Skyrim both have a mod that dynamically changes the resolution based on the FPS. It comes with trade-offs like stuttering which is especially noticeable with high FPS and a loss of visual fidelity.


Also, don't set up your own VPN. You are setting yourself up for failure

"By co-operating with the authorities and with legal requests they avoid lengthy and expensive legal wrangling, and by identifying individual offenders they move the responsibility away from themselves onto the offender
Higher tier internet providers unhappy with accusations of copyright infringement and other illegal activity can cut off (or threaten to cut off) a VPN provider’s internet access
To protect themselves from retroactive changes to the law. Just because a provider is acting within the law as it stands, does not guarantee it will not face prosecution. A good example of this LimeWire, who were successfully sued for “inducing infringement”, even through no such crime existed at the time of the ‘offence’ taking place
US authorities have a bad track record for raiding servers and performing surveillance(most notoriously highlighted by the NSA ‘warrantless wiretapping’ scandal)"

Unless you think you are a top security expert with lots of money, you're likely not going to secure your network perfectly nor do you likely have the money for a legal battle all by yourself.

 

[BSim500]

"4K gaming: what can PC learn from PlayStation Pro?"

If you're referring to 4K @ 30fps or upscaled fake "4K", then absolutely nothing. I'll take 1080 @ 60fps over 65536K @ 20-30fps any day. Tacking on motion blur and other fake effects are workarounds of lacking horsepower, not a clever feature to be desired as a substitute for picking the right hardware for desired resolution, and the PC has had the same thing for decades:-

Upscaling - Go into into your GPU drivers, set resolution to 720p on your 1080p monitor, enable "upscaling on GPU". Congratulations, you've achieved the "brand new" console upscaling feature.

Dynamic resolution - Comes with more stutter as the game doesn't change resolution internally fast enough to deal with short spikes, only prolonged lag. It's also extremely obvious, noticeably blurrier (moreso than running it at a native lower res on a native lower res monitor) and highly irritating when it happens.

Temporal AA - Often has odd "ghosting" style artifacts of its own which many people find far more annoying than using an even lighter weight post-process AA like SMAA / FXAA.

I'll never understand this tunnel-vision marketing obsession with "4K" when in order to reach it on low-end hardware, you have to motion-blur 30fps / under-render + upscale until everything looks far worse (see a zoomed section of 4K PS4 PRO upscaled vs 4K PC) which completely defeats the whole purpose of wanting higher resolutions for sharper images that only come with native-res rendering...

 

[kapital98]

"4K gaming: what can PC learn from PlayStation Pro?"

If you're referring to 4K @ 30fps or upscaled fake "4K", then absolutely nothing. I'll take 1080 @ 60fps over 65536K @ 20-30fps any day. Tacking on motion blur and other fake effects are workarounds of lacking horsepower, not a clever feature to be desired as a substitute for picking the right hardware for desired resolution, and the PC has had the same thing for decades:

Agreed about 4k. I'll take 1080p in high detail and 60fps (or higher) any day over 4k with those tradeoffs. I don't understand why something has to be 4k unless it looks better. Now, there are times when 4k does look better but it's fairly rare and situational.

The current iteration of the PS4 Pro is not by any means the same things as PC 4k gaming. Not at least in the way enthusiasts describe. Playstation is trying to latch onto that for marketing reasons.

I do disagree about the usefulness of optimizations. Your examples are stark and generally far more extreme than what they suggested. They wanted continual minor tweaks that prevent major performance hits while maintaining near original fidelity. This is impressive considering the cost/benefit.

A great thing about PC gaming is that most games can be customized extensively. There doesn't seem to be any good reason to prevent the suggested customizations in different games.

My only fear is that games will start to relying on these PS4 Pro-type tweaks to hide the requirements of their own game. Most 'optimizations' are nothing more than cutting back on fidelity -- not making the game more efficient when using resources.

 

[Someone8MyPosts]

"PC could learn something about 4K"

Yeah, like do not try this at home. It'll just come off stupid.