Not in an ideal world. Ray tracing is how light actually works in real life. Everything we do with global illumination right now is a compromised workaround, since doing a lifelike amount of ray tracing in real time, at reasonable framerates, is still to much for our hardware.

You just described ray tracing. The problem is, it’s incredibly computationally expensive. That’s why DLSS and FSR were created to try and make up for the slow framerates.

Does the balance at least accumulate until you do hit the threshold, or is the money just gone?

I was thinking about desktops, where the fan would be physically plugged into a fan controller instead of into the motherboard. Not sure what that would look like with a laptop.

I was mainly asking because some of those fan controllers default to full on when the usb connection is absent, and Windows doesn’t enable all usb connections until after the user logs into the system.

Do you have your fans controlled by the bios or a fan controller?

For single player games, I absolutely agree. If you’re going to stop supporting the game, send out one last patch turning off any always online DRM and let people keep playing their game.

For multiplayer games, it seems like it’s a bit more complicated. Who should be shouldering the cost to keep the game servers alive?

Depending on how much time your server spends with those CPUs actually under load, newer processors may not really help your energy bills. Even old processors idle at single digits wattages. Most of the idle power consumption (where most home servers spend 99% of their time) on the server will be coming from fans, RAM, and storage.

This happens every time AMD starts cutting into Intel’s market share. Competition is a wonderful thing.