Are We Wrong About Ray Tracing?

Added: 2026-05-09

[00:00:00]Welcome back to the Hardware Unbox podcast for episode 103. We made a video on Hardware Unbox talking about ray tracing which seems to have upset at least some people. It's gotten maybe mixed feedback is the best way of putting it. So, we're going to I guess expand upon our thoughts that we shared in that video. We're going to talk about some of the criticism. We're going to be talking about how we see ray tracing and largely how it relates to Nvidia's original marketing of it back in 2018 with the RTX 20 series, which was the original point of the video. So yeah, let's get into it. You know, Steve's made a video where that uh annoys people on the internet when I get a message early in the morning saying, "Oh, do you want to record a podcast?" And I'm like, "Hm, I reckon I know what this is about.

[00:00:41]I reckon this is about the ray tracing video that you made earlier on the hard runbox channel this week. Uh, and I feel like you have a few thoughts uh that you might want to share about some of the feedback to that video. Is that is have I gotten it right? Is that why I've been dragged in to do this podcast episode?

[00:00:58]>> Um, you've got it a little bit right when you say I made the video. I think you really should say we made the video.

[00:01:04]>> Well, that is probably something to get into, right?

[00:01:09]>> Yes.

[00:01:10]>> It was sort of it was sort of my idea. I led with it, but yeah, it was definitely a we uh content piece.

[00:01:16]>> Yeah, that's right. I did write some of the script. though for people that you know sometimes we see comments saying on either one of our videos you know oh you know Steve has such bad opinions Tim has good opinions or or vice versa um well it may be true in this case we actually did both write this script so um both of our opinions are in this one but of course we're talking about the was ray tracing a scam video which at least in the YouTube side of things actually got fairly standard feedback I would said a lot of people sort of maybe the content resonated with them or what they're feeling about the current PC gaming landscape, but then on other platforms, Reddit X/ Twitter, whatever. Um, you know, maybe a bit more negative is probably the best way of putting it. Um, so >> certainly accurate.

[00:02:05]>> Yeah. So, I mean, there's probably a few things that you want to lead off with in terms of this video. So, how did you see the feedback?

[00:02:12]>> Uh, highly predictable. I mean, we did talk about this before the video went live, and we're like, well, Reddit's not going to like this video. All the usual suspects on X aren't going to like this video, >> but I'm fairly confident the broader audience is going to be pretty much on the same page.

[00:02:31]>> Wasn't sure exactly how on the same page they were going to be, but I didn't think we missed the mark too badly.

[00:02:38]Anyway, as it turns out, it was people overwhelmingly agreed with the video and really seemed to appreciate and enjoy the video. Um, for those wondering, the like ratio was over 95% which is, you know, a healthy video. So, not controversial with the audience at at the present time, over 15,000 likes.

[00:03:01]It's approaching 200,000 views. So, it's been a successful video for us and, you know, the broader gaming community seems to very much agree with our opinions on ray tracing, but probably more to how it pertains to things like the GeForce RTX 20 series, how that all played out and >> how we saw that. And I think that was really my motivation for making this video and the main sort of yeah the the main motivation behind the video was to recap and look at how things played out based on what we were promised and just a it's it's a really rich history this because you know we got the promise of ray tracing it was a rocky start for Nvidia you know a few games supported it the ones that did not very good for the most part but there was this huge emphasis on ray tracing for reviews from that point forward. And I remember it was this sort of arm wrestle almost with the audience because people who didn't really know whether they wanted ray tracing or not wanted to see it tested more and featured more in the reviews >> and we're sort of sitting here going well you know ray tracing doesn't seem particularly practical on most of these GPUs. There are so few examples of games that support ray tracing. There are even fewer examples of games where we believe you should even entertain using ray tracing. So when you take you know gaming at large on board like you look at the you look at it through a broad lens not the narrow lens we're often accused of looking at gaming from.

[00:04:42]It's not it it didn't seem like a feature that you should be basing above all other features or even a primary feature whether it be now or in the future and we don't like making these future promises with reviews >> and it just seemed very self-evident that despite the fact that it was being pushed as this universal feature that was going to revolutionize computer graphics and you absolutely wanted a GPU that could do hardware accelerated rate tracing because bees knees or whatever they're trying to push And I'm sitting here going, "Yeah, okay. That's all neat and whatever, but I can't see this being a feature that anyone who primarily plays, let's say, competitive shooters or maybe strategy games is going to care all that much for. So, if that's the case, how much do we weigh our reviews on recommending this feature? If for a huge amount of gamers, it's probably going to be a useless feature, which in my opinion, 8 years later, it absolutely has proven to be a useless feature for competitive shooters. I I I think that's reasonable enough to say and if you agree with that then that is the very reason why we didn't heavily weight our reviews back then and even today on raid tracing though ra tracing has become as I said in the video um you know much more don't know the exact word to use I was going to say mainstream I wouldn't call it mainstream but it's become certainly become much more mainstream than it was back in 2018 2019 19 2020 for example.

[00:06:19]>> I think the the thing that's I don't know whether this surprised me or not based on the feedback to the video is I guess how narrow the view is of people critical of our views on ray tracing. So the people who are more positive towards ray tracing. I say that because you know PC gaming is not just immersive AAA single player games which I think is sort of the best case you know example of ray tracing. You know, people were sort of talking about our video being like, you know, why didn't you use examples like Resident Evil 9 or, you know, the these new games that support path tracing features and use you, you know, are sort of the better examples of ray tracing.

[00:07:01]But when you sort of go back and you have a look at what Nvidia was saying about ray tracing at the launch of the 20 series, it was never really with this caveat that it's for a certain audience of gamers. It was really more about, you know, this is the next big leap in gaming. Like the the 10 series is now extremely outdated because it doesn't support RTX features. The 20 series, this is the starting point for what is going to be an ongoing future of gaming.

[00:07:30]And people who say that those cards age really well might have a point based on the DLSS and upscaling side of things.

[00:07:38]On the ray tracing side of things, you know, I don't think, and this I guess was a lot of the point in the video, I don't think Nvidia has proven that ray tracing is necessary or good for a large number of games that people play. And while these like if I'm looking at for example this the Steam charts of what people are playing right now on PC on Steam, these are not games I personally would play. So my opinion towards what rate tracing does for the games I play is going to be different. But when you're you're reviewing a product, you kind of have to look at the overall market of what people are using games for. And the benchmarks that you do are designed to be representative of all types of games. And it it can be very difficult to test some of these games, which is why you might may swing more towards testing representative single player titles. But if you just look through the top 10 games that are played right now on Steam, the overwhelming most played game by far is Counterstrike 2. And then you've got games like Dota 2, PUBG, Apex Legends, Marvel Rivals, Rainbow Six Siege, Arc Raiders, Delta Force, Overwatch Warframe, and uh Rust.

[00:08:47]A couple of these types of games, these are the titles that are by far the most successful at the moment and are ongoing successes for people. So, if you wanted to play a game, and you brought this up in in your video, like Apex Legends, you know, people aren't generally saying, "I want to play that at higher visual quality levels." They're more like, "What do I need to play this game at the levels of performance I need to be good and have a fun time playing that particular title?" And so I I feel like a lot of this criticism that's sort of going well you know you've sort of tried to make this point that you know multiplayer is not a good representation of ray tracing as if like oh s you know that shouldn't be a surprise to anyone that ray tracing is wasn't going to be good for rate for for multiplayer games at this point as if this is some sort of big point right but what was the first game that we got with ray tracing >> it was Battlefield 5 like the very first title that Nvidia used to demonstrate ray tracing was a multiplayer title and so >> and Battlefield 6 never got >> Battlefield. Yeah, they they removed the feature from the game in future versions of the game. I think Battlefield 2042 had a cut down version of ray tracing. I think they removed the reflections and they just offered ambient occlusion and they removed it entirely for Battlefield 6. So, this isn't I I feel like this shouldn't be overly controversial to say that it wasn't advertised as single player only back when it was first announced. It was announced as a thing for all gamers, a mustave for everyone.

[00:10:18]And I don't think you could say that it should be no surprise to anyone that it's not useful for multiplayer 8 years later because I don't think that's what was promised. I think it was promised that this is the direction gaming is moving in and all games are going to shift over to be using this technology.

[00:10:34]But I think in your video you made some really great points about how not only wouldn't you use it in multiplayer games because of the performance side of things, but also from the visual side, which is something I think gets lost a little bit with the sort of, you know, why do people use competitive settings?

[00:10:49]Why aren't people just cranking things up to ultra? Because the mentality for single player gamers is so different.

[00:10:54]you know, you you tend to want to run at the higher quality settings where possible. So, yeah, I think that that really is sort of Yeah, again, like I said, the feedback is just a little strange when PC gaming as a whole is not just the enthusiast gaming community playing the latest AAA single player titles. And maybe people don't realize how popular a lot of these PC games are.

[00:11:19]Like >> Counter Strike 2 is being played right now by more than double the amount of players than the second most popular game on Steam >> and more people play Fortnite.

[00:11:29]>> Yeah, that's right. So, >> so these are huge games. They're not niche games. They're not, you know, edge cases. And to add to what you were just talking about, which gets lost in this discussion and was again the focal point of the video, the video wasn't saying ray tracing was a scam, by the way. So, just to make that clear. Um, but the the criticism of how ray tracing was used was the fact that you were sold a product based on false claims of what it could do in relation to ray tracing, which is what the video opened with. I feel like I couldn't have made that much clearer. You know, back in 2018, Nvidia announced the GeForce RTX 20 series claiming that ray tracing would revolutionize computer graphics. They made many other claims. They absolutely marketed those GPUs as must buys to experience this new technology. Ray tracing, you know, how powerful it was, how much it was going to change games.

[00:12:30]Real time ray tracing was all the rage.

[00:12:32]And Nvidia was saying as much like the technology was used to sell you on these products that really outside of ray tracing weren't much better than Pascal for the most part. M >> like they were actually worse value. But how do you get someone to upgrade from Pascal to what is arguably a worse value product? You tell them this new product does something that Pascal can't do at all and you absolutely aren't going to want to miss out on that. And you know they use the media as they often do at least media that are compliant with that sort of thing to you know weaponize that messaging to you know encourage buying them pre-sale because what is it what was the saying you know how much of your life do you want to be >> oh yeah >> so we've seen that tactic used time and time again you know they did it more recently with the RTX 5060 launch but I don't want to get sidetracked the point is ray tracing like ray tracing was used to sell the RTX 20 series.

[00:13:33]>> Yeah.

[00:13:34]>> Like that that's why we are critical of those claims because it was used to extract money from gamers. And I I think don't think people quite get that with that. Like if Nvidia just said, "Hey, the new Turing architecture, it does this that and the other thing." And we're now offering hardware like hardware to support real-time ray tracing. Realtime ray tracing is an exciting feature you're going to start seeing in games in the future. And we are supporting it officially as of the RTX 20 series. something along those lines, you know, which doesn't sound as good as the claims that Jensen made because, you know, he's a salesman.

[00:14:13]>> But if they if they merely said, "We now have hardware support for feature," then we'd be like, "Okay, that's pretty neat.

[00:14:21]That's that's cool. We'll see. We're not expecting much to come of that for this generation, but, you know, it's something they're supporting." We wouldn't have too much problem with it, right? It wasn't something that was used. There there's all sorts of new architectural features that are put in that don't get huge raving reviews about like you know where was the pumping up of mesh shaders for example like that's a feature that is slowly becoming more used in games at a at a technical level but wasn't blasted around as this sort of next generation revolutionary feature. It just was something that the architecture could now support.

[00:14:56]>> Yeah. So the truth is it was weaponized.

[00:14:58]>> Yeah. it it there's no other way to put it and that's why we are critical of those claims and of those products because they didn't live up to the claims. Uh I mean as a reviewer I feel like that's what we should do.

[00:15:12]>> Mhm.

[00:15:13]>> And we were skeptical of those claims at the time and now looking back eight years we rightfully so.

[00:15:19]>> Yeah. Yeah, and I I think you need to review these things later on as well because a lot of the promise that was made about ray tracing, especially once it started to become criticized for the poor quality in games like Battlefield 5, was that it was this future-looking technology. So it wasn't like ah you know these are the this is all the really early stuff like yeah Battlefield 5 it runs like crap and the the reflections are extremely noisy and it's not a good experience but you know this is a look of you know no optimization work has been done over time this is going to get better and so if that is the claim it's being made it's fair to review it after a certain amount of time and sort of going well you know if the 20 series buyers were sold ray tracing and it was promised to be delivered at some point in the future did that future ever arrive I think that we've shown over a number of videos, the video I made a few years ago looking at the 2060s performance in modern ray tracing games and also just your video now has shown that yeah, those people that bought those products didn't really get too much of a rateracing experience. And some people, you know, they pointed to games that now use ray tracing by default and saying, well, you know, a 2060 can launch these products and those sorts of things, which I mean, I guess, fair enough. Uh, if you're talking six years or eight years later that your 2060 can now run modern games, I mean, that's nice, I guess, but is probably outside the lifespan of that product for most people. So, for most of the card's life, you know, most of the time people using those before they upgrade to something newer, yeah, the rate tracing experience hasn't been overly impressive in a lot of cases. And again, I think it it all goes back to the marketing and the stuff that you were talking about about how it was presented because there's really two worlds that we could have had, right?

[00:17:03]There's the world we got, which is Jensen heavily advertising ray tracing as being this important future of gaming feature. And then there's your way that you thought would have been a more successful way, which was sort of the whole this is an optional feature that we're adding to our GPU hardware to enable the future of gaming at some point. sort of a more I guess dialed back tone for the whole thing. You know, when we you're talking about ray tracing examples today and you're sort of looking at it, yeah, there there are some great examples and if they if gaming went down the path you were saying, you know, the the more dialed back version, there would have been this slow acceptance of, you know, ray tracing is improving visuals. It's this top-end feature that high-end buyers can use. It's sort of the the cream of the cream on on top sort of thing. cherry on top of the cake that you can add in. And you know, over time, this will filter down to lower and lower tier hardware, but we're enabling these high quality features for the people that are spending the most money. Fair enough.

[00:18:02]But, you know, this isn't the the basis of our products, at least, you know, for 20 and 30 series buyers. But again, that's not that's not what happened though. That that isn't what happened.

[00:18:11]What happened was it was pushed as a major gamecher feature. And so it needs to be assessed based on it. Was it a major game-changing feature? And even for me as a single player gamer looking across a lot of the titles that I played, there are some great examples of ray tracing if you have high-end hardware to run path tracing and those sorts of features.

[00:18:33]>> But if you're trying to run games on like a 5060 Ti or or a 4060 from the previous generation, those features are still out of reach for a lot of gamers.

[00:18:42]And yes, again have to acknowledge that there are some games that use ray tracing by default like Assassin's Creed Shadows and Indiana Jones. And those games do run on low tier hardware, but that is not the current standard that we're seeing in the market at the moment. Most games do not at this stage use ray tracing by default. And so most games again throughout the lifespan of those cards had the option to not use ray tracing. and on lower tier hardware that was just a more I guess enjoyable better experience for those gamers and so >> yeah it you also have to ask the question have those games revolutionized computer graphics do you point to them as being significantly better than other games like you would be expecting based on what Jensen said back then as more of a night and day experience >> and I just don't think we've got that I think >> in a lot of these arguments you're almost splitting hairs and again there are some very impressive examples. I'm not saying there isn't, but I'm talking in more general terms. And even those games, you know, Star Wars Outlaws and stuff, I don't often open those games and think, whoa, this is a different caliber of game. Like, I'm running a 5090, >> got it at 4K, got everything cranked up, and I don't like it's a good they're good-look games, but I don't >> they don't seem to be a tier above other games. And even other games that don't use ray tracing at all, like some of the better examples we have graphically, I just I don't know. Am I crazy? I just I I don't I don't think wow this has revolutionized computer graphics. Like we are looking at something significantly different here. This is a bit special. I I don't get that at all.

[00:20:22]>> Yeah. I think what we've seen over the last maybe decade of gaming is and I know some people have sort of criticized when we sort of said you know maybe gaming graphics have reached a peak but what I mean by >> well we weren't saying that by the way gamers were saying that >> well yeah I mean yeah gamers have >> it was you were we were saying it was the sentiment from gamers >> yes that's right I mean and we can talk about that maybe because I do see a lot of comments saying that you know >> why I I guess the thing that I see from more mainstream gaming like outside of the PC gaming crowd is you So maybe from console gamers is this focus of like why are games being so expensive and taking so long to make when all they're working on are graphics features where when the game play you know is fairly similar to older games and also the graphics aren't as you sort of put it a revolutionary step. So why are they spending all this money and time on these these visual extravaganzas that maybe aren't as incredible considering the extra money and time that is being spent on them versus games from a decade ago. But to me at least, you know, I think you go back to like 2002 maybe and games were extremely basic and I think a lot of people when they remember a game from 2002 are not going to be like, "Wow, that was realistic visuals, right?"

[00:21:39]right? Like that was I was playing a game and you know maybe we switched over to the 3D era in that time. So gaming went from largely being 2D to 3D over the space of you know a many years. That is a pretty significant upgrade that you can remember and go okay games were 2D now they're 3D but they're not realistic 3D they're just 3D. But then as we sort of got to maybe 10 years ago, games moved into this era where they're approaching, they're not realistic obviously, but they're approaching a good enough level of realism that they can immerse you in the game in a way that feels like you're playing a realistic game.

[00:22:17]>> And so what I find a lot of people say is that they go, "Wow, didn't imagine a game from 10 years ago. Didn't that game look amazing?" And I don't think games look that different today. And that's an interesting thought because if you actually go back and look at games from a decade ago, you'll probably find that they look quite a bit worse than modern games in a lot of ways. Like they use very weird color filters, the lighting quality is really poor, texture quality is low, all those sorts of things. And there are some, you know, outlier examples that have held up really well.

[00:22:48]But the majority of games don't look that good. But people held it up in their minds as these sort of like >> these are these were realistic games when I played them. Therefore, the the memory that's gone into my brain as being I played a realistic game when I played Far Cry 3 or something right back in the day.

[00:23:05]>> Yeah, we've talked about the nostalgia thing. It happens with old movies as well.

[00:23:09]>> So, I think the sentiment that we're seeing from a lot of gamers today is that we're still in the almost real era.

[00:23:15]And so any change that you make in terms of the level of almost real that you're talking about doesn't affect people's memory of the games all that much. And so of course if you put a a modern game with path tracing effects up against a game from a decade ago. Path tracing games look significantly better in terms of the lighting quality, the realism, and everything. But I think there's this sentiment from gamers in general that feels like it hasn't been a significant upgrade because all of the memories that they've had slowly over the last decade of gaming have been well in 2013 I played a realistic looking game and then 2015 I played a realistic looking game so on and so on till 2026. And so if you're in that mindset and you're sort of thinking about gaming as a whole and you know have we got that step upgrade like 2D to 3D graphics that people can really point to and be like well that's when gaming changed like when I went from playing Mario in 2D to playing Mario in 3D that was a huge revolution for computer graphics at that time.

[00:24:14]People aren't they don't have those core memories to go back to to sort of accentuate that step change. And when you combine all of that with this feeling today that GPU hardware is so expensive, that you can't run games that a lot of people want to play on modest hardware and that, you know, optimization is really poor in a lot of games, Unreal Engine is ruining gaming or whatever people are claiming about that engine, right? You're kind of meshing all these opinions together and you can see why people are saying things like ray tracing is pointless and bad because I remember games from a decade ago being looking great, but all I'm experiencing today are games that run worse for no clear benefit to me as a gamer. And I just want to play whatever game I'm interested in at a good frame rate. I don't want to spend $600 on a new GPU to run this game. Why doesn't it run on my 3060 or whatever? And I I think that the performance thing that you touched on is important because if because I lived through this and I very closely monitored the performance throughout that time because I've been a hardware reviewer for over 20 years.

[00:25:21]When we got those massive visual improvements, those really that redefined gaming with it, we also got much more powerful GPUs that were affordable. M >> so not only did the games look significantly better but they played as well or if not better than the games that you were playing previously. Now those games on the same modern harbor also play faster of course but I'm talking about the sort of the relative experience through time. So you played sort of crappier games on crappier hardware and then you genuinely got better looking games on genuinely better hardware. So the entire experience was enriched.

[00:26:07]>> Whereas over the last whatever period you want to go 5 to 10 years the games have gotten a bit better in terms of looking you subjective. We can argue I'm I'm generalizing. I think it's safe to say generally they have gotten a bit better. And now people will disagree or agree or whatever.

[00:26:25]>> And while the hardware has gotten more powerful, it hasn't gotten more powerful to the extent that you're getting the same type of experience that we were getting 5 10 years ago.

[00:26:35]>> That's right.

[00:26:36]>> Like we'll get we're getting to a point in time where the push was for high refresh rate gaming. That that was exciting. The monitor we got past 60 Hz.

[00:26:43]It was huge. I I'd argue in a lot of ways that was a big that revolutionized gaming, at least in my opinion more.

[00:26:50]>> Going to the smooth motion, it was mind-blowing. I remember going to like 144 hertz for the first time. I couldn't believe it was like jumping off a hard drive and going to an SSD for example.

[00:26:59]>> That was massive and we were getting used to playing games at hundreds of frames per second and and it was great.

[00:27:07]And then now the graphics have improved, but now you're having to go, well, you know, my base frame rates 30 or 40, 50 fps. I add DLSS. That's gets gets me back above 60. So that's somewhat acceptable. And I guess I can enable frame generation. So I have the input latency of about 60 fps, but the visual smoothness of ideally the kind of performance that I really want. Is it what gamers want? Evidently, no. And that circles back to what I was talking about at the start of the discussion.

[00:27:37]When we first got ray tracing and people were were hyped about it, I think that's a good way to put it. When when all this happened, people were genuinely excited and hyped for this revolution in computer graphics. They they were all ready for it. They were pumped, prime, ready to go. And when we weren't fully drinking the Kool-Aid and jumping on board like maybe some others were, that's where we started to get a lot of criticism. Mhm.

[00:28:01]>> Uh, and I remember like the 20 series refresh when we were doing our data for that, we were heavily criticized uh, by it seemed like our own audience in the comment section as well as all these other places. But then we got to like the 30 series and I think it was still kind I don't know. Did you get the same vibe at the 30 series? we weren't pushing ray tracing as hard as maybe people were expecting and there was a lot of push back there like we were I don't know feel like there's a lot of criticism for not still being aboard the ray tracing train there more than >> more than I would expect based on the evidence at hand I guess is one way to put it and that's when we also coped the push back from Nvidia and I think then online perception started to change a bit but then by the time we got to the GeForce 40 series I noticed a really big shift in the way gamers how accepting they were of ray tracing or how how hyped how thirsty they were for ray tracing benchmarks it I don't know I noticed a big shift around that time >> where although we had better examples and I felt like we were finally starting to get there with ray tracing people seemed more uninterested than ever >> based on what we were seeing with polling data and just in the comment section And now, you know, we're in 2026 and we make this video that some people are very upset about or think is I don't know what they're not liking it. But then, as I said, we've got the overwhelming response in the comment section from thousands of comments has been really positive. People have left really thoughtful uh well- constructed comments where they're like, "Wow, you've really summarized my experience over the years as a Nvidia owner of like I don't know, someone said like a 4070 Super or something. This is really you've put into words my feelings." Like I was watching this video feeling like, "Yeah, this has been my lived experience." And it wasn't like one or two or a couple people saying that. There was a lot of people saying that. And again, we've seen this from the polling data. So I feel like in a lot of ways we have gotten this right over the years with how important ray tracing is and >> you know how much of a of a feature you know it it really is that you should um you know weigh up when buying a GPU. So I know that's just it's a weird situation where I would say we've definitely got some really transformative super impressive examples. Admittedly, you know, they're mostly mostly path path tracing examples where you need like a 4090 or a 5090 to truly enjoy. But, you know, depending on your standards and whatever, you can probably get away with it with a 570 Ti.

[00:30:50]But, I feel like we're starting to get there now. And people um yeah, like I said, are less interested than ever um on mass. And I don't know if you agree with this, but there seems to start it's it seems to be exposing this disconnect between like real hardcore PC enthusiasts. I don't even know if that's an an accurate way of putting it. I don't know, people that like to argue all day about PC hardware on Reddit and places like X and I'm not really sure what more to say about that, but those types of people, there seems to be a growing disconnect between them and then just I how do you want to >> the normies, >> gamers at large, normies, like >> like people who primarily just want to play the games. It's kind of like the whole um PC building like ex overclockers like tuners versus everybody else who just wants to build a computer and use and there's that huge divide these days.

[00:31:49]>> Yeah.

[00:31:50]>> And I'm seeing that more and more now like people because I don't we not really conning people here or saying something you can't verify for yourself.

[00:32:04]like we are presenting some of this information as our opinion.

[00:32:09]>> Mhm.

[00:32:10]>> And then some of the performance metrics or whatever, some some of the stuff is fact, but it's not like me telling you how good an RTX 5090 is or how fast a 9800X 3D is or some something where you physically need that specific piece of hardware to experience it. Now you do need a ray tracing capable GPU. Let's say like it has to be a a 9000 Radeon GPU or a GeForce GPU of the current or previous generation.

[00:32:42]But there are a lot of people like and again if you if you believe the market research stuff what is it 95 or 99% or some some crazy high 90% figure of people own a GeForce GPU. So, we're talking to most people or about most people over this 8-year period, whether it's been the last few years, which is what I'm saying, where the sentiment has changed, people have gotten the hardware. Like, the gamers we're talking to have the gaming hardware. It's not like something that they have yet to experience for themselves. So, so many people have bought RTX 4070s, 4070 Supers, you name it. pick a model.

[00:33:26]People have bought it. They've bought the games. They've tried it with and without ray tracing. They've, you know, some people do like the experience. Like the opinions on this vary from I've tried ray tracing in a whole heap of games on my GeForce GPU and I've concluded it sucks. I don't like the performance hit. I want to be able to enjoy high refresh rate gaming. It's not worth it. Or I don't like the noise or whatever. And then there are people who are like, I actually really like the ray tracing in these games, but the problem is it's just these games and not all of the games I like to play. And that's a another point that gets lost in this.

[00:34:03]Like the people who like to defend ray tracing or whatever and say that we don't know what we're talking about and we're crazy, they'll point to like four different games that we agree are truly transformative that are four wildly different games. And it's unlikely that you are going to play all four of those games as a GeForce owner, thoroughly enjoy them, and sink a huge amount of time into all of them. Like, imagine if the truly transformative experience was Fortnite and I don't know, Cyberpunk. There's not going to be possibly a huge amount of uh overlap where like which for example, you would certainly play one of those games and not the other. M >> so realistically for you there's not two transformative examples there's one.

[00:34:51]>> So >> I think over time there's been and sort of going back to your point about you know the whole gamers turning on it a little bit.

[00:35:01]>> I think what you see from a lot of the enthusiast crowd that gets really upset about I don't know criticism of ray tracing and that sort of thing is that enthusiasts you know they spend a bit more on their PC hardware. They're more into it. uh you know it's the the main hobby of those people or whatever and they generally have better rigs and so there's if you have over time bought relatively high-end Nvidia hardware so 2080 Ti back in the day maybe you moved to a 3080 or 3090 and you continued at that top class of GeForce GPUs >> over time you have been able to experience ray tracing in games at the time to some degree especially if you've bought the the flagship GPU use because of course games over time they haven't really released features that have just been completely unusable on the GPUs at the time but often the highest end rate tracing features have required 3090s or whatever. So if you're in that class you're going to have a very different opinion on how usable a feature like ray tracing is because you've had the hardware to actually run it and experience it in a way that isn't completely awful and >> but you'd also have to be a type of gamer that's played those specific and enjoyed them. I'm just saying that for for people who are really into PC gaming, they're more likely to be the gamers with the best of the best hardware and, you know, joining in discussions about hardware, about ray tracing, more likely to be owners of these expensive GPUs. And certainly our audience is is as well probably more skewed towards the higherend buyers than the general market. I think what this has really exposed and the reason why we see a lot of the difference in feedback between the enthusiast communities and more general gamers is that there is a ray tracing class divide. If you've been a high-end gamer for all that time, ray tracing has been accessible to you. But if you've been a mid-range to lower spec gamer buying things like 4060s and that class of hardware, ray tracing has largely been unaccessible to you. So, as you said about how people have been buying GPUs and they now have the opportunity to use ray tracing for themselves because they own an RTX GPU and they're playing games where this feature is available. If you're doing that on 4060 class hardware, it's no surprise that you don't think the experience is that great because the g the game is like modern games, a lot of them struggle to run at good resolutions and frame rates on that tier of hardware without ray tracing. So, there's no real room to run ray tracing. And so this creates this big divide between the the people that can do it and the people that can't. And because the people that own mid-range to lower tier hardware is the vast majority of the PC gaming market. Like you can look at the Steam hardware surveys. You know what Valve has claimed about the Steam machine about how you know 50% of people or whatever they claimed was the percentage was that have hardware that's as good or worse than the Steam machine which is a very lowspec piece of hardware by modern standards. you these are the gamers that can use these features now and can experience it for themselves and are not getting necessarily the best experience.

[00:38:04]And I think the reason why it's all turned is that back in the day, right, the 20 series tech demo for people buying a 2060, but there was the promise that some point in the future, someone buying an affordable GPU will be able to use ray tracing to a decent extent. And you probably would have thought that three generations of GPU hardware later in the 50 series that that might have been somewhat of a reality because I think that's a fair enough amount of time to get large performance improvements in the low end of the hardware so that you can run these features. But know what hasn't happened?

[00:38:38]Improvements to mid-range and low tier hardware. That is the missing the key missing ingredient that Nvidia and I guess AMD to some degree as well haven't been able to deliver to actually deliver on the rate tracing promise. If you're going to promise this as a feature that all gamers are going to use but then eight years later you're not providing the hardware that get so that gamers can actually use the feature, you failed.

[00:39:03]>> There's just no way around that. Like the the the lack of adv and this is something we've been banging on for so long now. the lack of advancement in mid-range to low tier hardware, the widening of the gap, the making of those higher GPUs more and more expensive, trying to encourage people into higher tiers.

[00:39:21]First of all, it doesn't really work cuz people just still buy the low tier hardware. And then it means that these features that you've sold people on, people start getting frustrated in because they they're seeing a feature and they're like, I've heard about this ray tracing thing, you know, my new everyone's talking about RTX and stuff, but why can't my 4050 or 40 or 5050 do it >> and it's because of VRM?

[00:39:43]>> It's because it's a low it's because it's a low-end GPU that isn't designed, hasn't been built to do it necessarily all that well. But then again, like what you were saying from maybe 20 years ago, when we got these big hardware, when we got these big graphical advancements, we also got big hardware advancements. And so people on more modest hardware wasn't necessarily buying, well, first of all, the high-end stuff wasn't as expensive, but also people just buying generally a GPU could enjoy a lot of these new features. But because things have stagnated, they're trying to, you know, Nvidia's trying to ring money out of you. They're trying to extract as many dollars as they possibly can from you.

[00:40:18]It's yeah it's created this ecosystem where people like I said the class divide that people are turning on it a little bit and the general sentiment from people that don't have this incredible high-end hardware is that ray tracing hasn't done all that much for the games that they want to play and if anything the the focus of developers on ray tracing and on making games you know you know using Unreal Engine enabling all the lumen features and nanite and everything has made games less accessible harder to less enjoyable on mid-range hardware.

[00:40:51]And you know, we see all that sentiment with all this talk of optimization. You know, games are poorly optimized now.

[00:40:56]Game developers are lazy. They don't put any time and effort into Unreal Engine sucks. All that argument again stems back to all the it's all a similar sort of I guess opinion in in the way that I see it. So >> I guess that's sort of my thoughts on on why yeah we might be seeing the and and why at least there's such a large difference between the opinions that you can read from maybe mainstream gamers versus the people commenting on Reddit for example.

[00:41:24]>> Yep. Yeah. I would just again touch on just to summarize it. You know example I saw a lot of criticism that we used Fortnite that discredits us straight away. so on and so forth. Just for those interested, you know, Fortnite was used as an example of a competitive shooter that does actually support hardwarebased raid tracing, but no one, I would say, serious about playing the game, like if you really want to win the game, would actually use it. And I gave clear examples in the video for why that would be. It places you at multiple different serious disadvantages.

[00:41:59]and and therefore ray tracing hasn't revolutionized gaming as a whole and it certainly doesn't make a game like Fortnite better to play. But Fortnite was just one example. You know, I gave another example in Call of Duty that also has ray tracing, but again, you wouldn't use ray tracing in Call of Duty unless you're playing maybe the single player campaign, but >> I don't think it's even at least the modern ones. I don't think you can even use it in the multiplayer mode. No, I was talking about, you know, when they got it for Shadows in Modern Warfare and so anyway, but that they were two examples that I gave within the video, but I focused more on Fortnite because that's >> that's still a current example, I suppose, is one way to put it. But then, as we've touched on, a lot of those games don't even support ray tracing because it doesn't make sense for them to support ray tracing, which includes popular games like Apex Legends, Valerant, um, Counter-Strike 2, and Battlefield 6, which we've touched on.

[00:42:55]So, Fortnite was just used as an example of a genre style of game where ray tracing isn't used because it doesn't really make sense to. Now, like if we got to a future, however many years into the future, where these game engines just used ray tracing by default because it was easier to, you know, do lighting and things and that was the the the baseline, the default because eventually we will get to that reality like games will just be better than they are today because of, you know, hardware and progress and whatnot. then fine. That doesn't really help out someone who bought an RTX 20 series or 30 series GPU. So when we were asking the question was ray tracing a scam essentially our answer was gamers who bought into like bought an early RTX GPU specifically for ray tracing because I mean that was the primary promise the primary feature of those GPUs. DLSS turned out to be, you know, a great feature, which we've been pretty on board with since they got to DLSS 2.0. But we were saying those people essentially got scammed as those particular GPUs were never powerful enough to play modern ray trace games and since then the technology hasn't become like a universal baseline that Nvidia promised eight years ago now. So, we were reviewing eight years of that progress, which is why again we didn't focus on path tracing in the latest games because as noted in that video, we do deem those to be transformative with a few caveats like you need high-end hardware.

[00:44:39]>> Path racing wasn't available or even really on the horizon at the launch of the RTX.

[00:44:43]>> Yeah, it's a totally different thing.

[00:44:44]And and the video clearly wasn't talking about that because >> it wasn't the video wasn't is ray tracing a scam on a technical level, you know, does it work or not work? It was was it advertised to gamers in a way that was scamlike. That that was the point of the video.

[00:45:02]>> Uh yeah, I I think I think it's fair to say Nvidia tried to weaponize ray tracing. They absolutely shoved it down the throats of gamers. And worst of all, well, yeah, they try, they did their absolute best to manipulate reviewers.

[00:45:17]>> Mhm.

[00:45:18]>> Um, lots of reviewers were pressured by Nvidia to start using ray tracing 100% for their benchmarking. They tried that with us >> and when we resisted that, they did blacklist us.

[00:45:32]>> Mhm. So, I mean, people will get up in arms and because I said Nvidia tried to weaponize ray tracing and they'll be oh, they'll lose their minds, but they blacklisted us for not pushing ray tracing on our audience back then.

[00:45:49]>> And now today, the vast majority of people seem to agree with our stance on it.

[00:45:55]>> Yeah. I mean, again, you're sort of bringing up, you know, these games like Fortnite and stuff and Battlefield 6 don't use rate tracing. It kind of again just goes back to my point about how mid-range hardware has an advance.

[00:46:07]Because if Nvidia had given gamers much more powerful mid-range and entry- level hardware that was rateracing capable, you might have seen a game like Battlefield 6 move towards using RA tracing in all of the modes. But because they haven't done that. They haven't they haven't given you what you actually need to use the feature that they promised. There's it's worse for a game developer to integrate rate tracing into those titles because the only path to success for a multiplayer game at the moment is getting the game into as the hands of as many gamers as possible. You need to target as the widest possible user base. And that means having a game engine that's extremely efficient, scales really well to very low tier hardware, and just gives you a nice stutter-free, enjoyable experience. And if you look at all the popular games and most of the multiplayer games coming out today, they all fit that criteria.

[00:46:59]They're designed specifically to target a wide audience. And that wide audience, if mid-range and entry- level hardware was much better today than it was all those years ago, that that audience they could have targeted might have been ray tracing hardware, >> but it's not because they didn't give us better mid-range and entry- level hardware. And then again, like for some types of games, for some styles of games, even with ray tracing in the game engine by default, it may not necessarily have needed ray tracing from a visual standpoint. you know, the way that they're implementing shadows or other lighting effects might have been done using rasterization easily. Of course, I guess the point at that point would be, well, ray tracing is, you know, even more efficient and easy for developers to use, so that's why you'd put it into the engine, but certainly a game like, you know, Counter Strike 2, I wouldn't have thought would ever require ray tracing level visuals for the style that they went with for that game. A game like Dota 2 doesn't need ray tracing to be an enjoyable experience in that game. And for the visuals, it doesn't really like there's no reason to put that feature in the game. Especially because today ray tracing is I would describe as I guess fairly inefficient compared to rasterization to get that level of visuals. Like if you're targeting fairly basic lighting, nothing crazy is going on. I don't really see why you would use ray tracing when efficient rasterization exists and allows you to run the game at a much higher frame rate. Ray tracing is really to do things beyond what rasterization is capable of. Um, you know, in terms of the accuracy and realism of lighting and so yeah, I mean, >> yeah, that's that's an interesting one.

[00:48:44]I I haven't played Counter Well, I haven't played Counter-Strike 2 really.

[00:48:47]I played the original Counter-Strike quite a bit with friends, but this is going back a very long time. And if you had really realistic lighting and you know bloom effects and stuff that could create like a map imbalance where peeking on certain spots that would either benefit the peaker or disadvantage them depending on whether like the sun's shining in their face or not >> that could create some weird map imbalances. Not sure about that one. I again I haven't played enough. But in a game like Fortnite, for example, which you to sort of touch on what you were just speaking about in that example, I actually would rather Fortnite be the ray traced version. I think it looks way better. I think >> I think the game looking visually better despite the fact that it does make the game harder to play is kind of neat.

[00:49:38]>> Like I like that. I would prefer if you gave me the option of everyone playing in performance mode or the epic settings with ray tracing enabled. I'd actually pick the ray tracing option because it looks amazing >> and it's harder to play. Now, I would like the performance of performance mode is in the frame rates, >> but I prefer the look of the ray tracing. I think it looks amazing.

[00:50:00]>> Yeah. You're saying that if both modes were at the exact same performance, >> you would pick purely based on visuals the ray tracing option.

[00:50:08]>> Yes. But but but everybody that would have to be the minimum spec >> because you at a competitive disadvantage so you would never use >> Yeah.

[00:50:16]>> That's right. So if you had some mod that strip stuff out that would be cheating and you'd be banned for it. So by default the minimum spec would be what we see with the ray tracing visuals. I would be all I'd be all for that. The game would be more difficult to play but it would be more difficult to play for everybody. Um, and it would it would just yeah, it it just looks better. And I don't think the game would play any worse for having to wait another second for builds to clear when they're broken, >> like having an actual animation effect rather than just flat disappear, which is what they do in the performance mode.

[00:50:52]So yeah, I'm not against ray tracing, but it doesn't make sense in a game like for Fortnite when you can use the performance mode. And people will say, well, why do they have the performance mode? you know that that should be the base. Yeah. And the reason for that is is because for example in Fortnite using the epic quality settings with ray tracing at 1440p you're getting under 100 frames per second with a 5070 Ti or a 9070 XT. So with like I don't know quality upscaling you'll get just over 100 frames per second which sounds like a lot but you want 1% lows of 200 FPS in Fortnite. So, at 1440p in the performance mode, you're getting 1% lows with a 9800 X3D of almost 400 FPS, which is more than I need, but I need a minimum. I can I can very much tell the difference from 100 to 200, like it's night and day. Even from 150 to 200 is is a big difference.

[00:51:50]>> So, the reason they have the performance mode is which you just said, Tim, is so people can play it like >> so they can they can cater to a wider audience.

[00:51:59]So, if PC hardware was much better than it is today, which would make console hardware better, right? It would make all hardware better. Um, we might have that future where you could >> play Fortnite using ray tracing as it stands.

[00:52:16]>> I mean, multiplayer games at some point are going to do that. It's just it requires the baseline level of hardware.

[00:52:22]And I think we're probably I would say maybe two console generations away from that being a reality for multiplayer games just at a guess. So we're probably talking we're talking 15 years. And the reason why I'm saying that is >> you know the I think it's quite likely when the the next generation consoles the PlayStation 6 or whatever comes out that a lot of the multiplayer games will be crossplatform for for a long time.

[00:52:47]So, running on both the PlayStation 6 and the PlayStation uh 5. Of course, the PlayStation 5 is not really sufficient for ray tracing in a multiplayer game at high frame rates. So, um I I would think that yeah, games are going to maybe give an optional better quality mode if you're playing it on a PS6, but the the base spec for those games is still going to be PS5 level. And so it'll really take until the PS7 which will then have the PS6 as the base spec which appar because apparently the next consoles are going to have much better ray tracing hardware in them and all that sort of thing. So, I think it'll be by the time that we see the PlayStation 7 being released that that is when the majority of people's base hardware that they're playing games on will be sufficient to allow developers to create multiplayer titles where ray tracing is the minimum spec for everyone where there's not massive visual downgrades for people on the level of Fortnite's, you know, performance mode sort of thing. Um because again there's probably game engines that are being worked on for multiplayer titles that are rateracing only. But I think that for the low spec gamers, they're probably looking at fairly low quality implementations of ray tracing. Like, you know, if you go into Star Wars Outlaws and run on the low preset or Avatar on the low preset, those sort of games, you know, they're not exactly amazing showcases of ray tracing when you use those configurations, but the engine obviously still uses it. So, um, yeah, I think that's probably how far away we are from, uh, the multiplayer side of things becoming sort of this ray tracing era.

[00:54:19]So, 15 years, um, which will be a total.

[00:54:23]Yeah. It'll be like almost >> Yeah.

[00:54:26]>> 23 years, something like that.

[00:54:27]>> Something like that. Yeah. So, it's it's a long >> over 20 years, safe to say. Yeah. It's Well, >> I I I am sure back then we said this will be at least two decades away. I I know we've said that multiple times. M >> um there's no guarantee it'll be that by the way, but it'll be at least that.

[00:54:44]>> Yeah.

[00:54:45]>> So, we'll see.

[00:54:47]>> Well, unless you have any further thoughts about ray tracing, we can probably put that conversation to bed for this year. Hopefully, we don't have to revisit this anytime soon because we set our piece on ray tracing for now.

[00:54:57]But, you know, >> well, we'll see. But, no, that's that's pretty much what I wanted to discuss about the the feedback from the video and just what we've been seeing.

[00:55:06]>> Yeah. Well, hopefully people enjoyed our expanded thoughts on that topic. We'll take a break and we'll come back and we'll talk about our boring lives.

[00:55:18]All right, Steve, you're going to have to carry this section because like last week, you know, I'm a new father, so that's my whole life now. That's all I've been doing really apart from making videos for the channel. So, what on earth have you been up to?

[00:55:32]>> Yeah, I've been doing more than just nappies and bottle feeding. Yeah. Um, but no, that that's all good stuff. Uh, I what have I done? I've done a few different things. I for we got Mother's Day coming up.

[00:55:45]>> And my wife has a table that she's wanted to sort of restore, renovate, whatever you want to call it, uh, for many, many, many years. So, it's got a bit of a history this table. But, she she decided to finally bite the bullet.

[00:56:00]We took it outside. She sanded it all down. And the idea was to take it was like a dark stain. I don't know if I've got a photo of what it used to look like. If I do, maybe we'll put it in the uh YouTube version, but it was a it was a dark stained timber and we've gone for sort of a light, more natural timber finish in the house after renovating it.

[00:56:19]So, she wanted to sand it down, see what it looked like, and then just give it like a a clear coat, a durable clear coat. So, that's what that's what she did. Uh the problem we had with the table was it was very warped. So the little the history on this table was when we first bought when we built our first house and all that about 15 years ago now. Didn't have that much money to spend on furniture. So we did like you know the eBay the secondhand furniture shopping thing. And we went to we ended up driving out with a trailer to one of the wealthier suburbs. A lady was selling a hardwood table like a 2.4 meter by 1.2 meterish table. Quite a large kitchen table. She said she paid thousands of dollars for it, which I absolutely believed. We ended up getting her $50.

[00:57:04]>> So, it was >> good deal.

[00:57:06]>> Yeah. It was like Christmas Eve or leading up to that. She had ordered and she was she was hosting Christmas or something. She'd ordered a new very fancy expensive table. Had to get rid of this one. We'd been watching it. It was up in eBay a few weeks prior. Started like $500. Then she dropped it to 300. I messaged her like a couple of days before Christmas and said, >> um, "Hey, would you take $50 for it?"

[00:57:30]Sort of a cheeky kind of, you know, low extreme lowball offer. And she's like, "If you can take it tonight, it's yours." I was like, "Done." So, we grabbed the uh uh in-laws trailer, chucked it on the car, drove like an hour or so down there, got this table, was pretty impressed with the quality of, like I said, hardwood kitchen table.

[00:57:49]Quite nice. 50 bucks. Absolute ripper.

[00:57:52]And we've had it in our house now for about 15 years.

[00:57:55]But because the table would be a few decades old now and where it is in our kitchen, it gets hit with direct light in the afternoons. Uh the timber had sort of started to warp just a little bit. Um well actually quite a lot to be fair cuz it's quite like I said it's 2.4 m long. So on the 2.4 m axis it had bernarded like caved in like a bowl in the middle. I would say close to 10 mil over the 2.4 meters by the middle. So, it was quite a big dip.

[00:58:27]Didn't really notice it right away, but if you're looking for it, you'd notice it. And then in the middle, it kind of bowed inwards as well. So, it was it was caving in on itself a bit. The timber reinforcing it had underneath wasn't particularly great. So, I said to my wife, "We'll strip we'll take the whole table apart. You re sand the whole thing down and I will weld up a steel reinforced frame for it and we'll panel bond that and then screw it to the underside of the um essentially laminated hardwood paneling which will hopefully straighten it out. I don't know. We'll see. So anyway, yesterday I weld that whole frame up for her cuz that was like her Mother's Day present.

[00:59:07]That's what she really wanted.

[00:59:08]>> Oh yeah. Nice. So, I I I uh put work on pause for a couple of hours, welded up a nice square flat frame, and yeah, used um some panel bond glue and then a couple of hundred small like 20 mil screws cuz I couldn't go the whole way through. That was that was another challenge. Anyway, I did that. Um we left a ton of we basically emptied the the harbor and box gym of all of its plate weights, chucked it all over the steel frame. So, I flattened I put the glue on it, then flattened the timber down with the frame and then screwed it once it was flattened down and then left it there for 24 hours for the panel bond to go off and all that. Anyway, flipped it over. It's like flat as attack. You can walk on it now. It's that strong with the uh steel structure under it.

[00:59:55]And you can't see the steel. So, it's hidden within the table. Looks really good. Uh and yeah, just got to give it one more sand down, another uh clear coat, and it it should be good to go.

[01:00:05]So, she's extremely happy. She's over the moon with it. So, >> nice. Yeah, it sounds like a good little project there.

[01:00:11]>> Yeah, it work came out came out really well. So, I mean, it's probably not going to appeal to everyone. Some people would probably prefer the darker stain, which she could have done. She could have stained the timber again, but she wanted to go with the natural um sanded timber look and then just clear coat it.

[01:00:26]It does match the floors pretty well.

[01:00:28]Anyway, she's happy with it. So, that's the main thing. I don't I don't really care. It looks better. There was also some splits in the the the timber as well. Um which you know we used some timber glue and and clamped them back up and fixed all of that and that um to my surprise worked a treat.

[01:00:44]>> Nice.

[01:00:44]>> It's flawless now. Have we I don't even know where they were. It worked that well. There was two big splits in it.

[01:00:50]>> So yeah um restored the table. It didn't really take too long. Admittedly my wife did 90% 99% of all the hard work of sanding the whole thing back and and whatever. It's part partly a gift and partly go to work doing stuff to make your gift a reality sort of thing.

[01:01:07]>> Well, she was like, I need to get a little warping out of it. There's no point putting it back together the way it was. And she couldn't fix the splits in it. So, she's like, you fix the splits in it, and can you come up with some way of making this timber not warped?

[01:01:21]>> I was like, well, >> that's a challenge. But anyway, it it it went incredibly well. So, to my surprise, it it turned out very good.

[01:01:30]So anyway, that's that's one of my my boring life stories. I we restored a table. So rather than spend thousands of dollars on a new one and get some new timber in and have other trees cut down for that, we have, you know, restored a a decades old hardwood table and it'll have um well, it I if it's kept inside, this thing should last forever cuz the steel frame I put under there uh it ain't warping again. Like it ain't splitting. It ain't waring. That table is Yeah, it's I've done it pretty much the way it should have been done from the start. Um because it just the the timber structure that was used to reinforce the table just wasn't going to be strong enough long term. It just sagged with the table.

[01:02:13]>> Yeah. Okay.

[01:02:14]>> Whereas now you could use it as a tap dancing stage if you wanted to. Like it's that solid. It's absurd. But it's good. So >> nice.

[01:02:22]>> She's happy. That's the main thing. So I get to live another day. Tim >> sounds good to me.

[01:02:27]>> Yeah. Right. Well, that that's there's not too much to talk about in the the boring life section at the moment. So, that'll probably do it for this week's episode. Um, again, we're just sort of taking it easy up until the leadup to Computex because not a whole lot is happening. So, there'll be episodes every now and then, but then at Computex, yeah, we'll see what's going to happen then because may not be the most exciting show, but we'll get back into the swing of it around then. So, thanks everyone that's listened to the podcast to the end of this episode. We always appreciate everyone improving the watch time on our channel, let's be honest. Um, but apart from that, if you do want to support Hardware Unbox, we got Patreon. You can sign up in the description. Uh, if you join, you get access to the ad free version of this podcast and several other benefits. You know, the usual Discord stuff, all the things you hear on our normal main channel videos. So, yeah, that'll do it for this one. Thanks for listening and we'll see you in the next one.