Dark Arc

The problem is a hash algorithm is exactly the sort of thing that copyright would be horrible at protecting. The source code is hardly relevant at all, it’s the operations that matter.

A big part of patents is to allow private sector research to occur. RCA failed and maybe patents should just fail too.

like the umbrella wedge/spring to make it open automatically.

That to me is a very specific algorithm. It’s a simple mechanism but putting it together might be a bit tricky.

That’s very similar to SHA, it’s a fairly simple set of mechanisms but the actual composure of those ideas into something that works as well as SHA does takes very specific research experience. It’s not at all an abstract idea, it’s a very concrete and specific set of operations that you invented first.

Imagine if the patent was “an umbrella can open itself with the push of button” no further details. That’s close to the level of detail some software patents are argued at and effectively what the “put a game in your loading screen” patent was awarded on.

You can’t patent the idea that “an umbrella should be able to open [somehow]” so I likewise think it’s ridiculous that someone was able to parent “your game [somehow] runs another simpler game before it runs.”

Patents should be to protect very specific research so that the private sector can do said research and profit from it. Patents should not block out broad concepts. The patent in the video game situation was and should’ve been ruled as bogus. It’s not the type of thing anyone needed to research or think about, you just literally go “what if I added a game to my loading screen” and you’re in violation.

I think software patents should really only apply to extremely tricky algorithmic “discoveries” (which I would consider inventions, as someone that’s written a SHA256 implementation from reference material, nobody is “just coming up with that”).

“Ingenuity patents” like that loading screen game are everything that’s wrong with software patents. It’s not all that crazy of an idea to add a game while waiting to play the main game. There’s no radical research required there, just an idea.

I don’t think vague ideas like “a game in a loading screen” are sufficiently creative to warrant a patent.

Or at least the bar should be much much higher. Like if you’ve invented the SHA algorithm… Fine.

However, if you’ve just invented “a way to purchase something over the network via a phone”… That is not patent worthy.

Yes

No they really haven’t. They’ve given no numbers to quantify the problem.

This reads like “we don’t know if they are cheating, it’s hard to tell, and it’s getting harder to tell, so we’re just done.”

This reeks of a decision based on a feeling about the direction of cheating vs a significant move to reduce cheating.

I’m sure they’ll be back at the high end eventually…

Plus even if they aren’t year over year improvements will eventually result in them having a card that’s much better than what you have now. The ultra low end blows the mid 2000s GPUs out of the water.

Well then you’re probably the perfect customer for these 🙂

AMD has already confirmed that it has abandoned competing for the highest end of the graphics card market, so we’re not expecting it to unveil a product to compete with the likes of the Nvidia RTX 5090. Instead, it’s expected that a Radeon RX 8700 XT, Radeon RX 8800 XT, or Radeon RX 8900 XT will instead compete with a possible Nvidia RTX 5070 for overall performance. AMD is expected to offer significantly improved ray tracing performance with these new GPUs, though, potentially making them far more competitive overall.

From the article, but mostly already known…

I just upgraded to a 7900 XTX because for me, I don’t expect RTX to be a big deal anytime soon and it sounds like they’re just trying to make 7900 XTX performance cards with better ray tracing at a cheaper price point (which if it boosts their market share that would be amazing).

Which is totally great, but I’m not particularly hyped about the 8000 series for me personally.

It’s really not that noticable. I played destiny PVP with mouse and keyboard on there. Maybe a pro player would be able to tell, but your average gamer would not.

Their technology was way better than what Nvidia has on GeForce now; it was truly insanely good.

The user experience on stadia was by far the best cloud gaming experience. They also had the most consumer friendly business model.

What stopped them was interest rate hikes. What their biggest issue before hand was though was bad PR from a questionable launch where a bunch of people were like “but does it work on shitty office Wi-Fi!? No, well this is trash.”

Followed by the GPU shortage and the PS5 launch which put their hardware (which was better than PS4 hardware) behind.

Yes, sure something like that cheat could work… Since it’s information the game is already giving to the player, it’s kind of hard to stop. It’s also not a major cheat just a little assist.

In any case, you’re talking specialized hardware that’s harder to get a hold of and may be detectable (these capture card companies likely don’t want to get sued so they’d likely cooperate pretty quickly with game developers and publishers).

Here’s another point I’ll make… there are new anticheat approaches that come into play with algorithmic reactions.

You can for instance, modifying the rendering slightly in a way that wouldn’t mess with the player much if it all if you’re suspect of a cheater, but would act as a “honeypot” for cheaters (similar to how some developers have come up with “AI poison pills” to embed in images).

I have pretty high confidence that cloud gaming maybe wouldn’t totally solve the problem. However, removing access to the game code solves a lot of the cheating problem overnight.

Basically the only thing you can do reliably is subtle aim bots, no wall hacks, no spin bots, no mapping hacks, no packet reordering, no ping abusing, no malicious packet injection (e.g., spawning a bullet in front of everyone’s heads), invulnerability hacks, teleporting/movement hacks, etc.

A lot of that stuff can be blocked with just well designed net code, but with cloud gaming the net code design becomes much much less relevant instantly. Cheating in general becomes less “fun” and less ridiculous.

I think you’re massively overplaying “a lot.”

Maybe the cutting edge R&D of cheats uses that technique; AFAIK it’s far from mainstream.

Not to mention entire classes of cheats that require manipulating the rendering engine (e.g., wall hacks) just don’t work.

Also with Widevine DRM you can leverage all the crypto crap that the MPAA has forced into our computers over the years and protect the video stream between the GPU and display. That would more than likely screw over 99% of those capture cards.

The big problem seems to be that with current interest rates, breaking into cloud gaming with a whole new platform is just not profitable.

It stopped Google and now it’s looking like it’s stopping Netflix.

Gamers just don’t want to spend money on new platforms or platforms where their friends aren’t.

It’s a shame to some degree because Stadia was a cheat free paradise. There will always be latency concerns but I think streamed competitive gaming has a future, particularly as kernel anticheat fails to deliver and high end hardware gets more and more expensive.

I’m hoping Godot becomes a serious competitor but I’m also thinking CryEngine 6 might be a true UE5 competitor. It’s basically the WIP engine for Hunt Showdown and Crysis 4.

My frustration is they said “it’s going to be a massive ripoff” in response to an article that says absolutely nothing about price with 0 context to where they got pricing information.

Cool, thanks for not citing it beforehand or linking to it.

So … You have no source, just a feeling that because the 4000 series was really expensive the 5000 series is also going to be really expensive.

https://www.newegg.com/zotac-trinity-zt-d40820q-10p-nvidia-geforce-rtx-4080-super-16gb-gddr6x/p/N82E16814500581

Right … 2k…