Enthusiasts say no to paying extra for AI features TechPowerUP poll strongly suggests that there is no interest in AI among advanced PC users. Source: Wccftech A recent poll on TechPowerUp revealed that an overwhelming majority of PC users are not interested in paying extra for hardware with AI capabilities. According to the survey, 84% […]
I can’t tell how good any of this stuff is because none of the language they’re using to describe performance makes sense in comparison with running AI models on a GPU. How big a model can this stuff run, how does it compare to the graphics cards people use for AI now?
raytracing is something I’d pay for even if unasked, assuming they meaningfully impact the quality and dont demand outlandish prices.
And they’d need to put it in unasked and cooperate with devs else it won’t catch on quickly enough.
Remember Nvidia Ansel?
I don’t have a TV, but doesn’t a smart TV require internet access? Why not just… not give it internet access? Or do they come with their own mobile data plans now meaning you can’t even turn off the internet access?
They continually try to get ob the Internet, it’s basically malware at this point. The on board SoC is also usually comically underpowered so the menus stutter.
Mine still takes several seconds to boot android TV just so it can display the HDMI input, even if not connected to internet. It has to be always plugged on the power because if there is a power cut, it needs to boot android TV again.
My old dumb TV did that in a second without booting an entire OS. Next time I need a big screen, it will be a computer monitor.
Signage TVs are good for this. They’re designed to run 24/7 in store windows displaying advertisements or animated menus, so they’re a bit pricey, and don’t expect any fancy features like HDR, but they’ve got no smarts whatsoever. What they do have is a slot you can shove your own smart gadget into with a connector that breaks oug power, HDMI etc. which someone has made a Raspberry Pi Compute Module carrier board for, so if you’re into, say, Jellyfin, you can make it smart completely under your own control with e.g. libreELEC. Here’s a video from Jeff Geerling going into more detail: https://youtu.be/-epPf7D8oMk
Alternatively, if you want HDR and high refresh rates, you’re okay with a smallish TV, and you’re really willing to splash out, ASUS ROG makes 48" 4K 10-bit gaming monitors for around $1700 US. HDMI is HDMI, you can plug whatever you want into there.
Even switching to other stuff right after the boot (because the power-on can’t be called a simple power-on anymore) the tv is slow.
I recently had the pleasure of interacting with a TV from ~2017 or 2018. God was it slow. Especially loading native apps (Samsung 50"-ish TV)
I like my chromecast. At least that was properly specced. Now if only HDMI and CEC would work like I’d like to :|
Right now it’s easier to find projectors without it and a smart os. Before long tho it’s gonna be harder to find those without a smart os and AI upscaling
Even DLSS only works great for some types of games.
Although there have been some clever uses of it, lots of games could gain a lot from proper efficiency of the game engine.
War Thunder runs like total crap on even the highest end hardware, yet World of Warships has much more detailed ships and textures running fine off an HDD and older than GTX 7XX graphics.
Meanwhile on Linux, Compiz still runs crazy window effects and 3D cube desktop much better and faster than KDE. It’s so good I even recommend it for old devices with any kid of gpu because the hardware acceleration will make your desktop fast and responsive compared to even the lightest windows managers like openbox.
TF2 went from 32 bit to 64 bit and had immediate gains in performance upwards of 50% and almost entirely removing stuttering issues from the game.
Batman Arkham Knight ran on a heavily modified version of Unreal 3 which was insane for the time.
Most modern games and applications really don’t need the latest and greatest hardware, they just need to be efficiently programmed which is sometimes almost an art itself. Slapping on “AI” to reduce the work is sort of a lazy solution that will have side effects because you’re effectively predicting the output.
Look, me too, but, the average punter on the street just looks at AI new features and goes OK sure give it to me. Tell them about the dodgy shit that goes with AI and you’ll probably get a shrug at most
I’m fine with NPUs / TPUs (AI-enhancing hardware) being included with systems because it’s useful for more than just OS shenanigans and commercial generative AI. Do I want Microsoft CoPilot Recall running on that hardware? No.
However I’ve bought TPUs for things like Frigate servers and various ML projects. For gamers there’s some really cool use cases out there for using local LLMs to generate NPC responses in RPGs. For “Smart Home” enthusiasts things like Home Assistant will be rolling out support for local LLMs later this year to make voice commands more context aware.
So do I want that hardware in there so I can use it MYSELF for other things? Yes, yes I do. You probably will eventually too.
I wish someone would make software that utilizes things like a M.2 coral TPU, to enhance gameplay like with frame gen, or up scaling for games and videos. Some GPUs are starting to even put M.2 slots on the GPU, if the latency from Mobo M.2 to PCIe GPU would be too slow.
I’m generally opposed to anything that involves buying new hardware. This isn’t the 1980s. Computers are powerful as fuck. Stop making software that barely runs on them. If they can’t make ai more efficient then fuck it. If they can’t make game graphics good without a minimum of a $1000 gpu that produces as much heat as a space heater, maybe we need to go back to 2000s era 3d. There is absolutely no point in making graphics more photorealistic than maybe Skyrim. The route they’re going is not sustainable.
The point of software like DLSS is to run stuff better on computers with worse specs than what you’d normally need to run a game as that quality. There’s plenty of AI tech that can actually improve experiences and saying that Skyrim graphics are the absolute max we as humanity “need” or “should want” is a weird take ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The quality of games has dropped a lot, they make them fast and as long as it can just about reach 60fps at 720p they release it. Hardware is insane these days, the games mostly look the same as they did 10 years ago (Skyrim never looked amazing for 2011. BF3, Crysis 2, Forza, Arkham City etc. came out then too), but the performance of them has dropped significantly.
I don’t want DLSS and I refuse to buy a game that relies on upscaling to have any meaningful performance. Everything should be over 120fps at this point, way over. But people accept the shit and buy the games up anyway, so nothing is going to change.
The point is, we would rather have games looking like Skyrim with great performance vs ‘4K RTX real time raytracing ultra AI realistic graphics wow!’ at 60fps.
The quality of games has dropped a lot, they make them fast
Isn’t the public opinion that games take way too long to make nowadays? They certainly don’t make them fast anymore.
As for the rest, I also can’t really agree. IMO, graphics have taken a huge jump in recent years, even outside of RT. Lighting, texture quality shaders, as well as object density and variety have been getting a noticeable bump. Other than the occasional dud and awful shader compilation stutter that has plagued many PC games over the last few years (but is getting more awareness now) I’d argue that game performance is pretty good for most games right now.
That’s why I see techniques like DLSS/FSR/XeSS/TSR not as crutch, but as just as one of the dozen other rendering shortcuts game engines have accumulated over the years. That said, it’s not often we see a new technique deliver such a big performance boost while having almost no visual impact.
Also, who decided that ‘we’ would rather have games looking like Skyrim? While I do like high FPS very much, I also do like shiny graphics with all the bells and whistles. A Game like ‘The Talos Principle 2’ for example does hammer the GPU quite a bit on its highest settings, but it certainly delivers in the graphics department. So much so that I’ve probably spent as much time admiring the highly detailed environments as I did actually solving the puzzles.
Isn’t the public opinion that games take way too long to make nowadays? They certainly don’t make them fast anymore.
I think the problem here is that they announce them way too early, so people are waiting like 2-3 years for it. It’s better if they are developed behind the scenes and ‘surprise’ announced a few months prior to launch.
Graphics have advanced of course, but it’s become diminishing returns and now a lot of games have resorted to spamming post-processing effects and implementing as much foliage and fog as possible to try and make the games look better. I always bring Destiny 2 up in this conversation, because the game looks great, runs great and the graphical fidelity is amazing - no blur but no rough edges. Versus like any UE game which have terrible TAA, if you disable it then everything is jagged and aliased.
DLSS etc are defo a crutch and they are designed as one (originally for real-time raytracing), hence the better versions requiring new hardware. Games shouldn’t be relying on them and their trade-offs are not worth it if you have average modern hardware where the games should just run well natively.
It’s not so much us wanting specifically Skyrim, maybe that one guy, but just an extreme example I guess to put the point across. It’s obviously all subjective, making things shiny obviously attracts peoples eyes during marketing.
I see. That I can mostly agree with. I really don’t like the temporal artifacts that come with TAA either, though it’s not a deal-breaker for me if the game hides it well.
A few tidbits I’d like to note though:
they announce them way too early, so people are waiting like 2-3 years for it.
Agree. It’s kind of insane how early some games are being announced in advance. That said, 2-3 years back then was the time it took for a game to get a sequel. Nowadays you often have to wait an entire console-cycle for a sequel to come out instead of getting a trilogy of games on during one.
Games shouldn’t be relying on them and their trade-offs are not worth it
Which trade-offs are you alluding to? Assuming a halfway decent implementation, DLSS 2+ in particular often yields a better image quality than even native resolution with no visible artifacts, so I turn it on even if my GPU can handle a game just fine, even if just to save a few watts.
Which trade-offs are you alluding to? Assuming a halfway decent implementation, DLSS 2+ in particular often yields a better image quality than even native resolution with no visible artifacts, so I turn it on even if my GPU can handle a game just fine, even if just to save a few watts.
Trade-offs being the artifacts, while not that noticable to most, I did try it and anything in fast motion does suffer. Another being the hardware requirement. I don’t mind it existing, I just don’t think mid-high end setups should ever have to enable it for a good experience (well, what I personally consider a good experience :D).
A big letdown for me is, except with some rare cases, those extra AI features useless outside of AI. Some NPUs are straight out DSPs, they could easily run OpenCL code, others are either designed to not be able to handle any normal floating point numbers but only ones designed for machine learning, or CPU extensions that are just even bigger vector multipliers for select datatypes (AMX).
As with any proprietary hardware on a GPU it all comes down to third party software support and classically if the market isn’t there then it’s not supported.
Assuming theres no catch-on after 3-4 cycles I’d say the tech is either not mature enough, too expensive with too little results or (as you said) theres generally no interest in that.
Maybe it needs a bit of marturing and a re-introduction at a later point.
I figure they’re those “early adopters” who buy the New Thing! as soon as it comes out, whether they need it or not, whether it’s garbage or not, because they want to be seen as on the cutting edge of technology.
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I can’t tell how good any of this stuff is because none of the language they’re using to describe performance makes sense in comparison with running AI models on a GPU. How big a model can this stuff run, how does it compare to the graphics cards people use for AI now?
I am generally unwilling to pay extra for features I don’t need and didn’t ask for.
raytracing is something I’d pay for even if unasked, assuming they meaningfully impact the quality and dont demand outlandish prices.
And they’d need to put it in unasked and cooperate with devs else it won’t catch on quickly enough.
Remember Nvidia Ansel?
I’d pay extra for no AI in any of my shit.
I would already like to buy a 4k TV that isn’t smart and have yet to find it. Please don’t add AI into the mix as well :(
I don’t have a TV, but doesn’t a smart TV require internet access? Why not just… not give it internet access? Or do they come with their own mobile data plans now meaning you can’t even turn off the internet access?
Anti Commercial-AI license
A lot of TVs are requiring an account login before being able to use it.
OK, that’s really fucked. What the hell? Wait a moment… that means they could turn the use of the TV into a subscription at any time! That’s crazy…
Anti Commercial-AI license
They continually try to get ob the Internet, it’s basically malware at this point. The on board SoC is also usually comically underpowered so the menus stutter.
I never needed a TV, but now I for sure am not getting one.
Anti Commercial-AI license
IDK why people are downvoting you, I am sure you’re not alone with that sentiment.
Look into commercial displays
I just bought a commercial display directly from the Bengal stadium. Still has Wi-Fi.
The simple trick to turn a “smart” TV into a regular one is too cut off its internet access.
I got a roku tv and i don’t even know what that means cuz my tele will never see the outside world
Except it will still run like shit and may send telemetry via other means to your neighbors same brand TV
I’ve never heard of that. Do you have a source on that? And how would it run like shit if you’re using something like a Chromecast?
https://www.amazon.com/Amazon-Sidewalk/b?ie=UTF8&node=21328123011
https://aws.amazon.com/iot-core/features/
I don’t know about the telemetry, but my smart tv runs like shit after being on for a few hours. Only a full power cycle makes it work properly again.
Mine still takes several seconds to boot android TV just so it can display the HDMI input, even if not connected to internet. It has to be always plugged on the power because if there is a power cut, it needs to boot android TV again.
My old dumb TV did that in a second without booting an entire OS. Next time I need a big screen, it will be a computer monitor.
Still uses the shitty ‘smart’ operating system to handle inputs and settings.
Signage TVs are good for this. They’re designed to run 24/7 in store windows displaying advertisements or animated menus, so they’re a bit pricey, and don’t expect any fancy features like HDR, but they’ve got no smarts whatsoever. What they do have is a slot you can shove your own smart gadget into with a connector that breaks oug power, HDMI etc. which someone has made a Raspberry Pi Compute Module carrier board for, so if you’re into, say, Jellyfin, you can make it smart completely under your own control with e.g. libreELEC. Here’s a video from Jeff Geerling going into more detail: https://youtu.be/-epPf7D8oMk
Alternatively, if you want HDR and high refresh rates, you’re okay with a smallish TV, and you’re really willing to splash out, ASUS ROG makes 48" 4K 10-bit gaming monitors for around $1700 US. HDMI is HDMI, you can plug whatever you want into there.
I just disconnected my smart TV from the internet. Nice and dumb.
Still slow UI.
If only signage displays would have the fidelity of a regular OLED consumer without the business-usage tax on top.
What do you use the UI for? I just turn my TV on and off. No user interface needed. Only a power button on the remote.
Even switching to other stuff right after the boot (because the power-on can’t be called a simple power-on anymore) the tv is slow.
I recently had the pleasure of interacting with a TV from ~2017 or 2018. God was it slow. Especially loading native apps (Samsung 50"-ish TV)
I like my chromecast. At least that was properly specced. Now if only HDMI and CEC would work like I’d like to :|
All TVs are dumb TVs if they have no internet access
We got a Sceptre brand TV from Walmart a few years ago that does the trick. 4k, 50 inch, no smart features.
I was just thinking the other day how I’d love to “root” my TV like I used to root my phones. Maybe install some free OS instead
You can if you have a pre-2022 LG TV. It’s more akin to jailbreaking since you can’t install a custom OS, but it does give you more control.
https://rootmy.tv
I’m sure that’s coming up.
As a yearly fee for DRMd televisions that require Internet access to work at all maybe
Right now it’s easier to find projectors without it and a smart os. Before long tho it’s gonna be harder to find those without a smart os and AI upscaling
Bro, just add it to the pile of rubbish over there next to the 3D movies and curved TVs
I don’t think the poll question was well made… “would you like part away from your money for…” vaguely shakes hand in air “…ai?”
People is already paying for “ai” even before chatGPT came out to popularize things: DLSS
Even DLSS only works great for some types of games.
Although there have been some clever uses of it, lots of games could gain a lot from proper efficiency of the game engine.
War Thunder runs like total crap on even the highest end hardware, yet World of Warships has much more detailed ships and textures running fine off an HDD and older than GTX 7XX graphics.
Meanwhile on Linux, Compiz still runs crazy window effects and 3D cube desktop much better and faster than KDE. It’s so good I even recommend it for old devices with any kid of gpu because the hardware acceleration will make your desktop fast and responsive compared to even the lightest windows managers like openbox.
TF2 went from 32 bit to 64 bit and had immediate gains in performance upwards of 50% and almost entirely removing stuttering issues from the game.
Batman Arkham Knight ran on a heavily modified version of Unreal 3 which was insane for the time.
Most modern games and applications really don’t need the latest and greatest hardware, they just need to be efficiently programmed which is sometimes almost an art itself. Slapping on “AI” to reduce the work is sort of a lazy solution that will have side effects because you’re effectively predicting the output.
The other 26% were bots answering.
16%
I was recently looking for a new laptop and I actively avoided laptops with AI features.
Look, me too, but, the average punter on the street just looks at AI new features and goes OK sure give it to me. Tell them about the dodgy shit that goes with AI and you’ll probably get a shrug at most
I’m fine with NPUs / TPUs (AI-enhancing hardware) being included with systems because it’s useful for more than just OS shenanigans and commercial generative AI. Do I want Microsoft CoPilot Recall running on that hardware? No.
However I’ve bought TPUs for things like Frigate servers and various ML projects. For gamers there’s some really cool use cases out there for using local LLMs to generate NPC responses in RPGs. For “Smart Home” enthusiasts things like Home Assistant will be rolling out support for local LLMs later this year to make voice commands more context aware.
So do I want that hardware in there so I can use it MYSELF for other things? Yes, yes I do. You probably will eventually too.
I wish someone would make software that utilizes things like a M.2 coral TPU, to enhance gameplay like with frame gen, or up scaling for games and videos. Some GPUs are starting to even put M.2 slots on the GPU, if the latency from Mobo M.2 to PCIe GPU would be too slow.
I’m generally opposed to anything that involves buying new hardware. This isn’t the 1980s. Computers are powerful as fuck. Stop making software that barely runs on them. If they can’t make ai more efficient then fuck it. If they can’t make game graphics good without a minimum of a $1000 gpu that produces as much heat as a space heater, maybe we need to go back to 2000s era 3d. There is absolutely no point in making graphics more photorealistic than maybe Skyrim. The route they’re going is not sustainable.
The point of software like DLSS is to run stuff better on computers with worse specs than what you’d normally need to run a game as that quality. There’s plenty of AI tech that can actually improve experiences and saying that Skyrim graphics are the absolute max we as humanity “need” or “should want” is a weird take ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
We should have stopped with Mario 64. Everything else has been an abomination.
The quality of games has dropped a lot, they make them fast and as long as it can just about reach 60fps at 720p they release it. Hardware is insane these days, the games mostly look the same as they did 10 years ago (Skyrim never looked amazing for 2011. BF3, Crysis 2, Forza, Arkham City etc. came out then too), but the performance of them has dropped significantly.
I don’t want DLSS and I refuse to buy a game that relies on upscaling to have any meaningful performance. Everything should be over 120fps at this point, way over. But people accept the shit and buy the games up anyway, so nothing is going to change.
The point is, we would rather have games looking like Skyrim with great performance vs ‘4K RTX real time raytracing ultra AI realistic graphics wow!’ at 60fps.
Isn’t the public opinion that games take way too long to make nowadays? They certainly don’t make them fast anymore.
As for the rest, I also can’t really agree. IMO, graphics have taken a huge jump in recent years, even outside of RT. Lighting, texture quality shaders, as well as object density and variety have been getting a noticeable bump. Other than the occasional dud and awful shader compilation stutter that has plagued many PC games over the last few years (but is getting more awareness now) I’d argue that game performance is pretty good for most games right now.
That’s why I see techniques like DLSS/FSR/XeSS/TSR not as crutch, but as just as one of the dozen other rendering shortcuts game engines have accumulated over the years. That said, it’s not often we see a new technique deliver such a big performance boost while having almost no visual impact.
Also, who decided that ‘we’ would rather have games looking like Skyrim? While I do like high FPS very much, I also do like shiny graphics with all the bells and whistles. A Game like ‘The Talos Principle 2’ for example does hammer the GPU quite a bit on its highest settings, but it certainly delivers in the graphics department. So much so that I’ve probably spent as much time admiring the highly detailed environments as I did actually solving the puzzles.
I think the problem here is that they announce them way too early, so people are waiting like 2-3 years for it. It’s better if they are developed behind the scenes and ‘surprise’ announced a few months prior to launch.
Graphics have advanced of course, but it’s become diminishing returns and now a lot of games have resorted to spamming post-processing effects and implementing as much foliage and fog as possible to try and make the games look better. I always bring Destiny 2 up in this conversation, because the game looks great, runs great and the graphical fidelity is amazing - no blur but no rough edges. Versus like any UE game which have terrible TAA, if you disable it then everything is jagged and aliased.
DLSS etc are defo a crutch and they are designed as one (originally for real-time raytracing), hence the better versions requiring new hardware. Games shouldn’t be relying on them and their trade-offs are not worth it if you have average modern hardware where the games should just run well natively.
It’s not so much us wanting specifically Skyrim, maybe that one guy, but just an extreme example I guess to put the point across. It’s obviously all subjective, making things shiny obviously attracts peoples eyes during marketing.
I see. That I can mostly agree with. I really don’t like the temporal artifacts that come with TAA either, though it’s not a deal-breaker for me if the game hides it well.
A few tidbits I’d like to note though:
Agree. It’s kind of insane how early some games are being announced in advance. That said, 2-3 years back then was the time it took for a game to get a sequel. Nowadays you often have to wait an entire console-cycle for a sequel to come out instead of getting a trilogy of games on during one.
Which trade-offs are you alluding to? Assuming a halfway decent implementation, DLSS 2+ in particular often yields a better image quality than even native resolution with no visible artifacts, so I turn it on even if my GPU can handle a game just fine, even if just to save a few watts.
Trade-offs being the artifacts, while not that noticable to most, I did try it and anything in fast motion does suffer. Another being the hardware requirement. I don’t mind it existing, I just don’t think mid-high end setups should ever have to enable it for a good experience (well, what I personally consider a good experience :D).
A big letdown for me is, except with some rare cases, those extra AI features useless outside of AI. Some NPUs are straight out DSPs, they could easily run OpenCL code, others are either designed to not be able to handle any normal floating point numbers but only ones designed for machine learning, or CPU extensions that are just even bigger vector multipliers for select datatypes (AMX).
As with any proprietary hardware on a GPU it all comes down to third party software support and classically if the market isn’t there then it’s not supported.
Assuming theres no catch-on after 3-4 cycles I’d say the tech is either not mature enough, too expensive with too little results or (as you said) theres generally no interest in that.
Maybe it needs a bit of marturing and a re-introduction at a later point.
Not even on my phone
deleted by creator
Only 7% say they would pay more, which to my mind is the percentage of respondents who have no idea what “AI” in its current bullshit context even is
Or they know a guy named Al and got confused. ;)
A man walks down the street He says why am I short of attention Got a short little span of attention And woe my nights are so long
Maybe I’m in the minority here, but I’d gladly pay more for Weird Al enhanced hardware.
Hardware breaks into a parody of whatever you are doing
Me - laughing and vibing
I figure they’re those “early adopters” who buy the New Thing! as soon as it comes out, whether they need it or not, whether it’s garbage or not, because they want to be seen as on the cutting edge of technology.