I agree that remakes sound straightforward and it's baffling that Ubisoft couldn't get this one out the door: there are rumors that even before its announcement in 2020, the Sands of Time remake had been started, scrapped, and restarted. But even Nightdive Studios, a perennial remaster maker, struggled for many years with their System Shock remake [2] so it must be harder than it sounds.

I'd love to hear the inside story from folks who've worked on remakes (both released and cancelled) about why they aren't as straightforward as fans expect. Nightdive recently discussed the emotional toll from dealing with angry fans [3] but I haven't seen any interviews discussing the development challenges.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_remake#Remaster [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_Shock_(2023_video_game) [3] https://frvr.com/blog/system-shock-remake-lead-couldnt-sleep...

I admire Rtings' attempts to add more and more graphs to quantify everything from VRR flicker to raised black levels. They were helpful when I last shopped for a monitor. But the most valuable information came from veteran monitor review sites such as Monitors Unboxed and TFTCentral.

- F1 2024 didn't load due to anti-cheat

- Dragon's Dogma 2 and Resident Evil 4 had non-functional raytracing

- Cyberpunk 2077 with raytracing on consistently crashes when reloading a save game

- Dying Light 2 occasionally freezes for a whole minute

- Starfield takes 25 minutes to compile shaders on first run, and framerates for Nvidia are halved compared to Windows

- Black Myth: Wukong judders badly on Nvidia cards

- Baldur's Gate 3 Linux build is a slideshow on Nvidia cards, and the Windows build fails for some AMD cards

If you research these games in discussion forums, you can find some configuration tweaks which might fix the issues. ProtonDB's rating is not a perfect indicator (BM:W is rated "platinum").

And while Steve says measurements from Linux and Windows are not directly comparable, I did so anyway and saw that Linux suffers a 10-30% drop in average FPS across the board when compared to Windows, depending on the game and video card.

[1] https://mashable.com/archive/disney-animation-app

Also, could you share some relevant info about your processor, mainboard, and UEFI? I see many internet commenters question whether their ECC is working (or ask if a particular setup would work), and far fewer that report a successful ECC consumer desktop build. So it would be nice to know some specific product combinations that really work.

Noise is reduced to make the frame more compressible. This reduces the resolution of the original only because it inevitably removes some of the signal that can't be differentiated from noise. But even after noise reduction, successive frames of a still scene retain some frame-to-frame variance, unless the noise removal is too aggressive. When you play back that sequence of noise-reduced frames you still get a temporal dithering effect.

Regarding aesthetics, I don't think AV1 synthesized grain takes into account the size of the grains in the source video, so chunky grain from an old film source, with its big silver halide crystals, will appear as fine grain in the synthesis, which looks wrong (this might be mitigated by a good film denoiser). It also doesn't model film's separate color components properly, but supposedly that doesn't matter because Netflix's video sources are often chroma subsampled to begin with: https://norkin.org/pdf/DCC_2018_AV1_film_grain.pdf

Disclaimer: I just read about this stuff casually so I could be wrong.

Look around you: nearly all surfaces have some kind of fine texture and are not visually uniform. When this is recorded as video, the fine texture is diminished due to things like camera optics, limited resolution, and compression smoothing. Film grain supplies some of the high frequency visual stimulus that was lost.

Our eyes and brains like that high frequency stimulation and aren't choosy about whether the exact noise pattern from the original scene is reproduced. That's why the x265 video encoder (which doesn't have grain synthesis since it produces H.265 video) has a psy-rd parameter that basically says, "try to keep the compressed video as 'energetic' as the original, even if the energy isn't in the exact same spot", and even a psy-rdoq parameter that says, "prefer higher 'energy' in general". These parameters can be adjusted to make a compressed video look better without needing to store more data.

[1] TechPowerUp and ComputerBase have the most thorough collections of power consumption measurements, but compare them to each other and you'll see how much it depends on the test setup.

[2] Nvidia's latest 5000 series cards buck this trend. The 9070 XT's direct competitor, the 5070 Ti, has especially high idle consumption for no clear reason.

For less patient readers, note that the concise summary is at the bottom of the post, not the top.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_rotoscoped_works#Anima...

https://itch.io/docs/general/faq#why-buy-on-itchio

Can you imagine Apple or Nintendo doing such a thing?

https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/keys

Here is a link to the relevant part of his presentation: https://youtu.be/zjkBMFhNj_g?t=2120

It's the only DOS game I played that needed >600K of conventional memory, and I too remember the struggle to free that much.