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The value of your time and video games. : thedivision
Main Post: The value of your time and video games. : thedivision
[Video] Explaining why 0 IVs have value
Main Post: [Video] Explaining why 0 IVs have value
Top Comment: Hey, that's the logo I made however many years ago! Neat to see it making the rounds.
Video Card selection / benchmarks / value
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Hi Folks,
I am looking to purchase a new video card for Video Enhance AI use. Can someone offer some more detailed feedback on what benchmarks to use for evaluating options? I am not wanting to compete with crypto miners or high end gamers at the upper end of the GPU market. I am really trying to find the best choices in the sub $300 USD range (ideally less, tbh) but there doesn't seem to be any clear guidance as far as what specs to look for in a card.
For reference, I am (laughably) using an AMD R7 240, which is way under powered for VEAI. I suspect even a modest card by current standards would handily outperform what I am using currently. Just trying to determine the best value proposition here as I do not game and have limited use for a high end card other than for VEAI.
Top Comment:
I have been using VEAI for over a year now and found the best performance for the money is to use a M1 Mac Mini. I realize this is more than your targeted $300 range but well worth the money! It out performs my Nvidia RTX 2080 Super system on Windows 10 (but not my RTX 3080 system though) and costs a fraction of the cost (and electricity usage!). Probably any M1 laptop would work but Mac Mini is probably the cheapest option.
I see that the M1 Mac Mini base model is $699 USD new but can probably find it cheaper used.
I am not a Mac guy but decided to purchase a M1 Mac Mini back in November 2021 and the performance is awesome for what it cost! I never feel the Mac Mini get warm to the touch and I will run it sometimes for 15+ hours processing VEAI jobs. I only use Mac for VEAI and Windows is my main computer for daily use.
The new Mac Mini's with M1 Pro/Max are supposed to be announced by Apple possibly as early as March 8th.
If you are able to purchase a M1 Mac Mini either second hand at a good deal or new (to at least try and return if it doesn't work out for you), you won't be disappointed!
For reference, I have the M1 Mac Mini with 16gb RAM and 512gb HDD. I have been using the VEAI betas with the Mac Mini, so not sure the performance on the general release versions but betas have been working fine for me.
whats the best CQ value for down scaling VR video?
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i've got a bunch of videos that are vr that i want to play on my phone with my vr headset they range in quality file size and resolution anywhere between 4k and 8k 60fps 180 degrees and i plan to reduce these to my phones maximum resolution (slightly higher at about 1480p to match the width of 2960 and slightly exceed its height of 1440p) i plan to use h265 and in all my tests i dont really see a huge difference between say 18cq and 10 cq or 10 and 5. keep in mind the original test file here was an 8k 60mbps file of 20gb in size. so the file size savings are huge and the quality seemed ok on all of these settings at least until i tried 22 24 26 just to see how bad it could look and even with that it wasnt horrendous but i do want the files to look good. h265 does a good job but i dont want to sit here and make a billion previews for each file i plan to compress is there a basic setting i should shoot for since i dont care about the file size and it seems like its going to be small anyways? i was thinking of just doing everything on like cq 7 or 8. just to ensure every file looks good.
Top Comment: This can't be answered objectively, and will vary depending on content. You'll have to experiment and decide what you prefer. At least the preview function saves you time as opposed to encoding something in its entirety just to form an opinion on it. I would try to preview a section I'd think would be the most difficult to encode or would show flaws most easily, find the CQ number where I can start to see artifacts, then go one tick higher quality and fully encode with that. But it's really up to you.
Modern video games really forgot the value of a good introduction.
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Do you know the hamburger analogy when writing essays? It seems like many video games nowadays (starfield etc) take it to heart and don't understand the value of having a "meat" in the intro, instead treating a video game like a movie or book where things should start slow
Homefront the revolution is probably one of the biggest offenders for its intro , yet it mimicks so many new releases.
first we get this giant exposition dump which was pretty cool along with an ok news ancor broadcast scene which ends with a character throwing the tv playing it and starts talking to us.
(Big fail already, its called show don't tell, you really needed a 4K cutscene to tell us how they took over? Can't you maybe have historic broadcasts and NPC dialouge ? You basically killed all sense of curiousty for the game in the first 5 minutes, imagine if Halo started with like a giant map explaning the covenants conquest and what are spartans and who is cortana )
We can see resistance soldiers fill up Molotovs on the table while talking about how this important resistance guy is in towns and how the mayor is scared of it, so the player is hyped up, what is it? An assassin mission that goes loud? A motorcade attack? Is the safe house gonna get busted than we are going to have to shoot our way out? No a flashbang goes off and you get arrested by the state immediately, that entire cutscene was literally just made to cause another cutscene where you get tied up by this generic bad guy so the main leader can show up and save you and than take you to YET ANOTHER SAFE HOUSE, than you have to run around town for 15 minutes fetch questing and you still haven't got a weapon yet btw just to find some random stash houses, than once you do all the games tutorial the leader guy gets busted and you are basically just thrown into the world and told to do whatever.
(Again another massive fail, you basically spent 20 minutes making cutscenes that do nothing, and you also ruined another sense of mystery by showing us who the leader of the resistance was and letting us see him face to face, why not have him be a mystery figure that we only meet mid way through the game? )
ALSO THEY SOMEHOW MANAGED TO COMBINE THE TWO WORST TYPES OF INTROS (Incredibly slow) AND (Dumping the player in a free world and telling him to do whatever).
I mean really, do game devs take it as a given that people will play the game anyway and tell other people “it gets really good after 10 hours “ that they don't even bother revising one of the most important parts of a game?
Why not just have the news broadcast intro, have it end by the player closing the phone it plays on and reveal they are standing right next to where the mayor is going to have a motorcade, give the player a machine gun or sniper to provide cover fire as you help the resistance leader and get to see all the big bad enemy units the game completely fumble your plan and have the prologue end with you learning about stealth mechanics trying to sneak past the city and see how terrible everything is and hear some crazy old hobos talking about what happened that it got to this point. NOW YOU HAVE ACTION, MEMORABILITY, THE PLAYER MEET THE CAST AND YOU DIDNT HAVE TO DO AN EXPOSITON DUMP CUTSCENE THAT BASICALLY JUST SAID AMERICA IS TAKEN OVER BY NORTH KOREA.
Do you think the last of us , half life or MGR would be the same if they didnt have their amazing intros and instead had like 50 cutscenes and then fetch quests.
Top Comment:
Funny you mention Half-Life, considering I hate the intro train sequence on repeat playthroughs and wish I could skip it. It might as well be a cutscene considering all you can really do is move five feet in the tiny car and look around.
Yet I'd still rather take that over 10-15 minutes of cinematic cutscene and doing nothing like in many modern games. At least the train sequence is only just over five minutes long.
Value GPU for 4K video editing, preferably with 12GB of ram?
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I am looking to upgrade the GPU on my 4 year old system (AMD Ryzen 5 2600x on a B450-A Pro, with a "that will do" 2GB 1030. PSU is 550w bronze) to be able to better edit 4K video using either Adobe Premiere Pro or Davinci Resolve.
I have been leaning towards a Nividia card with 12GB. I really haven't been looking at anything Radeon, as they are poor performers with Davinci Resolve.
I know y'all hate the 4070, but is that really I have to choose from? I had considered a 3060 (with 12GB) or a 3060 TI but am wondering whether they are now a poor proposition, based on their age.
Anything else I should be considering?
Top Comment: Depending on your budget I would try to squeze ryzen 5 5600 somewhere in there, I have no expierence in video editing so I can't recommend something that would be best. Depending on your budget try to get cpu upgrade too and rest in gpu, but definetly nvidia for your case