With IMG PowerVR mostly gone from Mediatek roadmap. Which means ARM Mali is effectively the GPU IP on Android, excluding Qualcomm Adreno which its market continue to shrink and concentrate on premium segment.
I wonder how far or how good Mali is now compared to others. I wish Chip and Cheese do compassion on GPU as well.
pjmlp 35 days ago [-]
If only that would mean a better driver story across devices and Android releases.
Unless it is a Pixel or Samsung Sxy flagship device, chances are the driver, which will never get updated, it a box full of interesting developer moments.
Just go to chrome://gpu to check the amount of workarounds enabled in Chrome alone.
MindSpunk 34 days ago [-]
Since when do Samsung ship driver updates? I'm being a bit hyperbolic but from my experience Samsung don't ship them very often either. To Google's credit, the Pixels get them quite frequently. Samsung is still better than most other Android vendors, who are somehow even worse.
It's depressing how bad the drivers are. They have 0 market pressure to improve the quality, unlike PC where the whiniest group on the internet (gamers on reddit) will crucify you for driver problems. I've spent too much time investigating and implementing workarounds. Though it does pay my bills...
pjmlp 34 days ago [-]
Since you own a S series device, and it gets shipped alongside OS updates.
Other Samsung devices aren't so lucky.
PC drivers are equally as bad when using laptops by the way.
While you can try to use the plain drivers from Intel, AMD and NVidia, usually the ones in the laptops have custom changes made by the OEM for the laptop motherboard design, and you can get into issues like thermal handling, when not using the drivers provided by the OEM update services.
catchnear4321 34 days ago [-]
> …a box full of interesting developer moments.
thank you, will be using this, it’s far more accurate than simply throwing the devs under the bus and ignoring all the unspoken context of said moments, while not papering over the… interesting developer moments.
teki_one 35 days ago [-]
Google just switched to PowerVR, didn't they?
throwa356262 35 days ago [-]
Given the horrible GPU performance as well as thermal issues in Tensor G5 and G6, Google will have to switch back to Arm in G7.
Example benchmark showing how extremely far Google is behind:
The Pixel 10 and 11 GPUs are offensively bad. Not only are the Power VR GPUs slow, and less capable feature wise than Mali and Adreno (Xclipse is still around too!), but the tile Google put in the Pixel 11 is actually an _older_ design than what they put in the Pixel 10. They just clocked it higher to make up the performance difference.
And then Google has the gall to charge basically flagship prices for their under powered junk.
Personally I don't buy flagship phones because I don't use their full compute capabilities anyway, but a Pixel 11 would cost 2x what I paid for my Pixel 8. For 0 GPU performance improvement.
Fr0styMatt88 34 days ago [-]
I have fond memories from back when Pixels were actually flagship. The Pixel 2 is my nostalgic pinnacle. I'd totally forgotten about that squeeze gesture until I got my old Pixel 2 out to erase.
ahknight 34 days ago [-]
Back when the point of Pixel was to tell the world: THIS is what you can do with Android.
Then Samsung got the message, ran with it, and Google went "Ehh, we're good now."
ksec 34 days ago [-]
>Xring O3.
I just can't wait to see it being tested in an actual phone. So far all the data are done on development board. If they are really as good as everything we have read so far, both Mediatek and Qualcomm are in big trouble.
my123 34 days ago [-]
it's available in retail (the foldable phone variant) in mainland China since today
throwa356262 34 days ago [-]
This Xiaomis second or third chip ever so I assume there will be problems.
34 days ago [-]
rjzzleep 34 days ago [-]
Why did that happen?
nubinetwork 34 days ago [-]
Panthor is supposedly pretty good, it's no rtx, but people do game on them.
33 days ago [-]
dbcooper 34 days ago [-]
Samsung is using AMD in upcoming premium chips? Small market share again.
Alpha3031 34 days ago [-]
Also mid-range, A57 uses Xclipse 550 (RDNA 3) and A37 uses previous generation Exynos with Xclipse 530 IIRC.
eptcyka 35 days ago [-]
What about support in mesa?
bigbaguette 35 days ago [-]
Give it a couple years before Valve starts sponsoring someone to reverse-engineer it
eptcyka 35 days ago [-]
I do not understand why vendors believe their software stack is a moat. It is an obstacle to me.
david-gpu 34 days ago [-]
If they open-sourced their userland drivers, and/or released their internal technical documentation, which would have a similar effect, they would open themselves to at least two big problems.
First, they would spill all of their secret sauce for others to "draw inspiration" from. And there is a lot of expensive secret sauce in there. Not all of it is protected by parents either; more on that below.
Second, they would make it a lot easier for competitors and patent trolls alike to seek litigation. One of the criteria thech companies have for filing a patent is how easy is it to detect when it is being violated. Open source your stuff, and you make it much easier for the competition to detect any violation.
And it is not like these companies are violating patents intentionally; much the opposite. But there are only so many ways to implement Vulkan or DirectX, and completely independent teams will come up with similar enough solutions, and with broad enough patents, that there will be overlap every now and then. That is why they file patents in the first place. Only the high cost of litigation and the risk of mutually-assured destruction keeps legitimate vendors from rattling sabers more often.
Then you have NVidia with their immense investment and advantage on the software side, from the CUDA runtime to countless libraries like CUBLAS and cuDNN. That investment goes much beyond a relatively simple Vulkan/DirectX driver.
So the question is less "why don't more of them open-source userland". The question is "why do any of them do it"?
Source: former insider with enough patents under my belt that I lost count.
eptcyka 34 days ago [-]
Do you have any thoughts on the question you posed? Amdgpu and mesa is working out fairly well for amd, but yes, there is also still a proprietary userland for it too. Intel I think is using mesa code for their Windows drivers too. How are they different?
david-gpu 34 days ago [-]
I genuinely don't know. They are smart people, they know the game. They must have figured out that there is an upside for them.
Just speculating here. Maybe they have big customers that communicated to them that they will choose them over the competition if they open more of their software stack. Maybe they are less afraid of being sued because they are the underdog and they believe that the authorities would not be kind to a behemoth suing them, or they believe that the behemoth would not sue them because of the bad press it would generate vs the settlement they would get.
I actually don't know. But I am sure they have good reasons, just like the corps that keep it closed also have good reasons. It is not "good" vs "evil".
ahartmetz 33 days ago [-]
>Maybe they have big customers that communicated to them that they will choose them over the competition if they open more of their software stack.
I do remember reading that that is the case for AMD, maybe one of their open source devs said it in an interview?
They've also been doing it for a long time now and the risks didn't seem to materialize, which surely helps with all the fears that you mentioned.
eptcyka 34 days ago [-]
Thank you for your input - it genuinely is very interesting.
amelius 34 days ago [-]
> If they open-sourced their userland drivers, and/or released their internal technical documentation, which would have a similar effect, they would open themselves to at least two big problems.
> First, they would spill all of their secret sauce for others to "draw inspiration" from. And there is a lot of expensive secret sauce in there. Not all of it is protected by patents either
Then why does Apple allow Asahi to reverse-engineer their low-level APIs? Are their lawyers not paying attention?
Because most game developers aren't religious about APIs, they implement an abstraction layer in their engine, a practice since the heterogeneous 8 and 16 bit days, where all major games were mostly coded in Assembly, and move on.
Any conference talk schedule at one of these conferences (https://gameconfguide.com) will prove the point of how little they care.
It is all about gameplay, taking advantage of gaming IP, franchaises, how to squeeze the ultimate performance out of specific hardware, user engagement,....
You will find an occasional talk about open APIs, probably even done by some Khronos folks, and that's it.
krautsauer 35 days ago [-]
opens wikipedia (Emphasis mine:)
> Moats were excavated around castles and other fortifications as part of the defensive system as an obstacle immediately outside the walls.
Unfortunate wording?
dbdr 35 days ago [-]
Moats are supposed to be obstacles for your competitors, not your consumers.
buran77 34 days ago [-]
Moats are obstacles against something you're trying to avoid. It can be competitors coming in, or customers going out. A moat could surround a prison to keep prisoners in. Some companies just choose to treat their customers as prisoners.
entrope 33 days ago [-]
The usual metaphor for keeping customers is a walled garden, right? I think it's useful to distinguish them by default.
ImHereToVote 34 days ago [-]
It's akin to building a moat inside the castle.
wang_li 34 days ago [-]
That's called a Lazy River.
throwa356262 35 days ago [-]
Why?
I thought these GPU were open source with mainline kernel support?
adrian_b 34 days ago [-]
All the mainline kernel support is reverse-engineered. No help from Arm.
Thus there is a considerable lag for the support of newer Mali generations.
Some Linux distributions for various embedded computers with Arm-based CPUs and GPUs use closed-source GPU drivers from Arm, not the reverse-engineered Linux drivers, when the Mali versions are newer than supported by the kernel and Mesa.
The Arm GPUs do not have public technical documentation, not even at the level of NVIDIA, much less something comparable with AMD and Intel.
ginko 34 days ago [-]
>All the mainline kernel support is reverse-engineered. No help from Arm.
That's not true. Arm has been supporting the open source driver effort for the last couple years, but it's still behind the closed source one in terms of performance, features, and HW support.
Most Mali drivers from the kernel are not contributed by Arm, but you are right that nowadays some contributors from Arm have appeared for the older reverse-engineered GPU drivers, like Panfrost and Panthor, and now there are also a few GPU-related drivers, like HDLCD and MALI-DP, which have indeed been contributed by Arm.
Besides the Mali generations that are supported in the mainline kernel, there are many other Mali generations for which Arm has not provided anything else except closed-source drivers for Android, in a few cases also closed-source drivers for Linux. However, there are many other reverse-engineered Mali drivers, besides those from the mainline kernel.
It is good that Arm has begun to contribute to the kernel DRM drivers, but these drivers do little else except providing the means to communicate with the GPUs. The complex work is done in the user-space GPU drivers from Mesa.
The Mesa Lima driver, for older generations of Mali, does not have any contribution from Arm.
In the past, Mesa Panfrost was also completely reverse-engineered. Seeing that now Arm has begun to contribute to the kernel Panfrost DRM, I do not know whether they have started to contribute also to the Mesa Panfrost.
In any case, while some contributions to the previously reverse-engineered drivers are much better than nothing, what would have been much better is to publish the technical documentation of the Mali GPUs, in which case it would not have mattered whether Arm contributes something or not, as anyone could have written the drivers.
fuzzfactor 34 days ago [-]
I liked it better when electronic components which didn't have very thorough detailed documentation were instantly recognizable as completely unsuitable for a production BOM. :\
35 days ago [-]
curiobleak 35 days ago [-]
The headline seems like a way to set themselves up to fail. The advancements are great, those features are definitely something a lot of developers and players are interested in, but comparing it to desktop immediately just sets the bar too high.
swiftcoder 34 days ago [-]
The average desktop has an anaemic integrated GPU - so it sort of depends how one defines "desktop-class"
broken-kebab 34 days ago [-]
What are dedicated neural accelerators? What exactly do they accelerate?
yhjc2692 34 days ago [-]
Matrix multiply-accumulate operations, possibly at reduced precision (8- or 16-bit). The most common name for this is NPU but the description applies to other things too (eg NVIDIA’s tensor cores, Google’s TPUs, Apple’s ANE to a lesser extent, etc)
jasomill 34 days ago [-]
It's hard for me to imagine desktop-class GPU performance on a mobile power/thermal budget.
If true, why aren't they marketing it to datacenters?
SideQuark 32 days ago [-]
Datacenters don’t run on desktop class GPUs. They’re well past that. It’s why NVidia moved most production of desktop GPUs to data center class hardware.
pavlov 34 days ago [-]
All the hoopla about "neural graphics" just seems to mean various forms of upscaling (spatial, temporal, denoising).
I guess that's nice and makes sense on mobile, but it somehow feels a bit disappointing that realtime 3D is shifting from modeling to slop filters.
mepian 34 days ago [-]
Pretty much all of graphics research now revolves around machine learning, whether it’s neural networks or something like Gaussian splatting.
cubefox 34 days ago [-]
These three forms are trained in order to approximate the ground truth, and they perform significantly better than their non-neural counterparts which do the same thing but worse. Moreover, neither of them is a pure postprocess, since they receive various rendering passes as input, like the depth buffer. They don't really hallucinate anything, just interpolate.
This is another story with DLSS 5, which doesn't reconstruct some ground truth and which is a pure post-processing effect. It just makes the final image look more photo-like in a vague sense. This is more of a "slop filter".
zamadatix 34 days ago [-]
You can always run with those features disabled if you find it less disappointing.
touisteur 34 days ago [-]
Any foundry in Europe able or going to manufacture a chip with this on ?
peacefulnerd 34 days ago [-]
"European Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (ESMC) is a joint venture between TSMC, Bosch, Infineon and NXP to establish an advanced semiconductor fab in Dresden, Saxony, Germany."
https://www.esmc.eu/en/index.html If that's the best ARM chip (not counting Intel Ireland) factory in Europe, it's 12 nanometers. That's a decade obsolete and I'm not sure the blueprints were designed for such an old foundry.
touisteur 34 days ago [-]
Thanks. I was just wondering, since I think I saw NXP had Arm SKUs with Mali GPU and had some hope someone here would Cunningham's Law me.
cubefox 35 days ago [-]
This should have happened years ago.
mschuster91 34 days ago [-]
"AI-native graphics" good lord, this just reeks of "we're doing something with AI, give us some of that money".
BoingBoomTschak 34 days ago [-]
Fun thing, both SA and ChipsAndChesse similarly dunked on that presentation:
Once one is over the odor of the headline, the announcement reads:
* Neural Super Sampling (NSS) reconstructs higher-resolution images from lower-resolution renders, reducing the amount of conventional rendering work needed to produce a high-quality final image.
* Neural Frame Rate Upscaling (NFRU) generates intermediate frames to increase frame rates and deliver smoother gameplay.
* Neural Super Sampling and Denoising (NSSD) combines neural upscaling with denoising to improve image quality in demanding ray-traced scenes with complex lighting and shadows.
chrisjj 34 days ago [-]
So, image processing and no intelligence.
And nor is reconstructs true.
mschuster91 34 days ago [-]
So yeah, more uncanny valley garbage. Yuck.
SideQuark 32 days ago [-]
Pretty much all cutting edge graphics papers now use some form of NN. To ignore the techniques and gains at the cutting edge would leave any hardware mfr behind. It’s not nonsense or marketing speak. It’s genuine capability improving technology.
To see a representative stream of papers, go to arxiv and look through the recent graphics papers.
alescalaios 34 days ago [-]
[dead]
HNSheldonImpost 34 days ago [-]
"Ai-NaTiVe"
gitowiec 34 days ago [-]
The worst opening ever "Demands from mobile users continue to grow.". I stopped reading bullshit
chromehearts 34 days ago [-]
This is probably not about "mobile users" as in Android Phones & iPhone users .. but about the current (trendy) rise of handheld consoles ? Atleast that's what I think
SideQuark 32 days ago [-]
As someone making mobile apps used by billions, demands from mobile users certainly grow and want this class of hardware capability. We spend significant effort trying to figure out how to deliver features asked for by our users for high end phones and cutting edge hardware, while not alienating the wider user base without these capabilities. Competitors do exactly the same.
f6v 34 days ago [-]
What's up with that? Younger generations don't even play on PCs anymore.
pjmlp 33 days ago [-]
What I find funny is the whole "PC gaming is growing" kind of speech, as some generations abandon consoles for PCs.
I and most of my peers have been playing home computers, since the 8 bit days, eventually moved into PC gaming with a 386SX in 1991.
While I owned a few consoles, the PC remained the main gaming platform.
Do agree that younger generations are mostly playing mobile games.
SideQuark 32 days ago [-]
PC sales peaked 15 years ago, and have been declining ever since. Most of the best selling PC games are from 15-30 years ago.
pjmlp 32 days ago [-]
Laptops are also PCs.
Yeah, that is why no one uses Steam, only old games there.
SideQuark 31 days ago [-]
Laptops are already counted in PC sales, since they are PCs.
Games doubling in price hides less copies bought, much like movies selling far less tickets yet having higher revenues.
No matter how you count it, PC gaming has been in decline for a long time.
gilbetron 31 days ago [-]
I think your maybe counting just physical sales? 15 years ago was the start of the shift to digital sales, which have greatly grown. Just steam (which is the bulk of digital PC sales):
Steam units sold: 402M (2019) → 704M (2024), up 21% in 2024 alone.
Steam peak concurrent users: 3.52M in January 2011 → 42,042,778 on January 11, 2026. Roughly twelvefold, directly measured from Valve's API.
Valve's own disclosed number, which isn't an estimate by anyone: between August 2024 and August 2025, Steam averaged 109,000 people making their first ever purchase every day. That's about 40 million brand-new paying customers in one year.
Games released on Steam: ~8,100 in 2019 → 20,282 in 2025.
Some of the best selling games did come out roughly 15 years ago, but that's because they've been selling consistently ever since. Like Minecraft, the Witcher, etc.
SideQuark 28 days ago [-]
Not counting physical, which certainly died.
Games released is not indicative of revenues: 80% of steam games make < $5k, and median steam game makes at most a few hundred $. So that doesn't really tell much about sales.
Recent data seems available in reports from Newzoo: their The PC & Console Gaming Report 2025 states there was 1.2% total PC growth 2021-2024 in nominal dollars (40.5B to $40-42B). In real dollars that is around -15%, so enough shrinkage that many industries would really feel the pain. In smaller sections, their 2014, 2017, 2024 reports show PC share of global games spend fell 17%. They (and SuperData) data show premium PC fell a few percent (nominal, more in real $). Playtime per player fell 26% (Newzoo 2024, 2025).
Also, around 50-60% of revenue, which is nice, is not new game sales, but microtransactions, and these are extremely weighted to the largest few games. Of the remaining, around 10-15% is subscription fees, also not new sales.
Using Steam as a proxy for the whole industry hides losses if more title % moved to Steam, since then the numbers you posted are not comparing like to like.
Some Newzoo data is easily found, use AI to find copies of their closed reports floating around the internet.
gilbetron 28 days ago [-]
[flagged]
mobelkh 34 days ago [-]
the switch, steam deck and competitors will likely look into ARM, the cheaper ones already use it, flagship and gaming phones, the latter is bigger than you think, normal mobile gaming is big in third world countries and china, and emulation continuous to get better, I can ToTK and The Witcher 3 (windows version) on my phone, and it's a few years old flagship
mrheosuper 34 days ago [-]
Why is it bullshit ? Just because you dont need does not mean it’s not real
Rendered at 19:01:58 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
I wonder how far or how good Mali is now compared to others. I wish Chip and Cheese do compassion on GPU as well.
Unless it is a Pixel or Samsung Sxy flagship device, chances are the driver, which will never get updated, it a box full of interesting developer moments.
Just go to chrome://gpu to check the amount of workarounds enabled in Chrome alone.
It's depressing how bad the drivers are. They have 0 market pressure to improve the quality, unlike PC where the whiniest group on the internet (gamers on reddit) will crucify you for driver problems. I've spent too much time investigating and implementing workarounds. Though it does pay my bills...
Other Samsung devices aren't so lucky.
PC drivers are equally as bad when using laptops by the way.
While you can try to use the plain drivers from Intel, AMD and NVidia, usually the ones in the laptops have custom changes made by the OEM for the laptop motherboard design, and you can get into issues like thermal handling, when not using the drivers provided by the OEM update services.
thank you, will be using this, it’s far more accurate than simply throwing the devs under the bus and ignoring all the unspoken context of said moments, while not papering over the… interesting developer moments.
Example benchmark showing how extremely far Google is behind:
And then Google has the gall to charge basically flagship prices for their under powered junk.
Personally I don't buy flagship phones because I don't use their full compute capabilities anyway, but a Pixel 11 would cost 2x what I paid for my Pixel 8. For 0 GPU performance improvement.
Then Samsung got the message, ran with it, and Google went "Ehh, we're good now."
I just can't wait to see it being tested in an actual phone. So far all the data are done on development board. If they are really as good as everything we have read so far, both Mediatek and Qualcomm are in big trouble.
First, they would spill all of their secret sauce for others to "draw inspiration" from. And there is a lot of expensive secret sauce in there. Not all of it is protected by parents either; more on that below.
Second, they would make it a lot easier for competitors and patent trolls alike to seek litigation. One of the criteria thech companies have for filing a patent is how easy is it to detect when it is being violated. Open source your stuff, and you make it much easier for the competition to detect any violation.
And it is not like these companies are violating patents intentionally; much the opposite. But there are only so many ways to implement Vulkan or DirectX, and completely independent teams will come up with similar enough solutions, and with broad enough patents, that there will be overlap every now and then. That is why they file patents in the first place. Only the high cost of litigation and the risk of mutually-assured destruction keeps legitimate vendors from rattling sabers more often.
Then you have NVidia with their immense investment and advantage on the software side, from the CUDA runtime to countless libraries like CUBLAS and cuDNN. That investment goes much beyond a relatively simple Vulkan/DirectX driver.
So the question is less "why don't more of them open-source userland". The question is "why do any of them do it"?
Source: former insider with enough patents under my belt that I lost count.
Just speculating here. Maybe they have big customers that communicated to them that they will choose them over the competition if they open more of their software stack. Maybe they are less afraid of being sued because they are the underdog and they believe that the authorities would not be kind to a behemoth suing them, or they believe that the behemoth would not sue them because of the bad press it would generate vs the settlement they would get.
I actually don't know. But I am sure they have good reasons, just like the corps that keep it closed also have good reasons. It is not "good" vs "evil".
I do remember reading that that is the case for AMD, maybe one of their open source devs said it in an interview?
They've also been doing it for a long time now and the risks didn't seem to materialize, which surely helps with all the fears that you mentioned.
> First, they would spill all of their secret sauce for others to "draw inspiration" from. And there is a lot of expensive secret sauce in there. Not all of it is protected by patents either
Then why does Apple allow Asahi to reverse-engineer their low-level APIs? Are their lawyers not paying attention?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49610136
Any conference talk schedule at one of these conferences (https://gameconfguide.com) will prove the point of how little they care.
It is all about gameplay, taking advantage of gaming IP, franchaises, how to squeeze the ultimate performance out of specific hardware, user engagement,....
You will find an occasional talk about open APIs, probably even done by some Khronos folks, and that's it.
> Moats were excavated around castles and other fortifications as part of the defensive system as an obstacle immediately outside the walls.
Unfortunate wording?
I thought these GPU were open source with mainline kernel support?
Thus there is a considerable lag for the support of newer Mali generations.
Some Linux distributions for various embedded computers with Arm-based CPUs and GPUs use closed-source GPU drivers from Arm, not the reverse-engineered Linux drivers, when the Mali versions are newer than supported by the kernel and Mesa.
The Arm GPUs do not have public technical documentation, not even at the level of NVIDIA, much less something comparable with AMD and Intel.
That's not true. Arm has been supporting the open source driver effort for the last couple years, but it's still behind the closed source one in terms of performance, features, and HW support.
Mali drivers are contributed by Arm:
https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/MAINTAINERS
Besides the Mali generations that are supported in the mainline kernel, there are many other Mali generations for which Arm has not provided anything else except closed-source drivers for Android, in a few cases also closed-source drivers for Linux. However, there are many other reverse-engineered Mali drivers, besides those from the mainline kernel.
It is good that Arm has begun to contribute to the kernel DRM drivers, but these drivers do little else except providing the means to communicate with the GPUs. The complex work is done in the user-space GPU drivers from Mesa.
The Mesa Lima driver, for older generations of Mali, does not have any contribution from Arm.
In the past, Mesa Panfrost was also completely reverse-engineered. Seeing that now Arm has begun to contribute to the kernel Panfrost DRM, I do not know whether they have started to contribute also to the Mesa Panfrost.
In any case, while some contributions to the previously reverse-engineered drivers are much better than nothing, what would have been much better is to publish the technical documentation of the Mali GPUs, in which case it would not have mattered whether Arm contributes something or not, as anyone could have written the drivers.
If true, why aren't they marketing it to datacenters?
I guess that's nice and makes sense on mobile, but it somehow feels a bit disappointing that realtime 3D is shifting from modeling to slop filters.
This is another story with DLSS 5, which doesn't reconstruct some ground truth and which is a pure post-processing effect. It just makes the final image look more photo-like in a vague sense. This is more of a "slop filter".
https://www.semiaccurate.com/2026/09/07/arms-2026-tech-day-i...
https://chipsandcheese.com/p/arms-c2-ultra-g2-ultra-nx-and-c...
* Neural Super Sampling (NSS) reconstructs higher-resolution images from lower-resolution renders, reducing the amount of conventional rendering work needed to produce a high-quality final image.
* Neural Frame Rate Upscaling (NFRU) generates intermediate frames to increase frame rates and deliver smoother gameplay.
* Neural Super Sampling and Denoising (NSSD) combines neural upscaling with denoising to improve image quality in demanding ray-traced scenes with complex lighting and shadows.
And nor is reconstructs true.
To see a representative stream of papers, go to arxiv and look through the recent graphics papers.
I and most of my peers have been playing home computers, since the 8 bit days, eventually moved into PC gaming with a 386SX in 1991.
While I owned a few consoles, the PC remained the main gaming platform.
Do agree that younger generations are mostly playing mobile games.
Yeah, that is why no one uses Steam, only old games there.
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/video-game-industry-revenue...
No matter how you count it, PC gaming has been in decline for a long time.
Steam units sold: 402M (2019) → 704M (2024), up 21% in 2024 alone.
Steam peak concurrent users: 3.52M in January 2011 → 42,042,778 on January 11, 2026. Roughly twelvefold, directly measured from Valve's API.
Valve's own disclosed number, which isn't an estimate by anyone: between August 2024 and August 2025, Steam averaged 109,000 people making their first ever purchase every day. That's about 40 million brand-new paying customers in one year.
Games released on Steam: ~8,100 in 2019 → 20,282 in 2025.
Steam gross revenue: $4.5B (2019) → roughly $16.9B (2025).
Some of the best selling games did come out roughly 15 years ago, but that's because they've been selling consistently ever since. Like Minecraft, the Witcher, etc.
Games released is not indicative of revenues: 80% of steam games make < $5k, and median steam game makes at most a few hundred $. So that doesn't really tell much about sales.
Recent data seems available in reports from Newzoo: their The PC & Console Gaming Report 2025 states there was 1.2% total PC growth 2021-2024 in nominal dollars (40.5B to $40-42B). In real dollars that is around -15%, so enough shrinkage that many industries would really feel the pain. In smaller sections, their 2014, 2017, 2024 reports show PC share of global games spend fell 17%. They (and SuperData) data show premium PC fell a few percent (nominal, more in real $). Playtime per player fell 26% (Newzoo 2024, 2025).
Also, around 50-60% of revenue, which is nice, is not new game sales, but microtransactions, and these are extremely weighted to the largest few games. Of the remaining, around 10-15% is subscription fees, also not new sales.
Using Steam as a proxy for the whole industry hides losses if more title % moved to Steam, since then the numbers you posted are not comparing like to like.
Some Newzoo data is easily found, use AI to find copies of their closed reports floating around the internet.