Intel’s Arc Alchemist graphics card effort has allegedly been wrought with delays, and now it seems that the company’s new AI-enhanced upscaling technology is no exception. Despite claiming that the game would launch with the feature this week in an interview with Wccftech, the developers behind Dolmen have now shared the disappointing news that their “terrifying” new futuristic action RPG will still release on May 20 as planned, but only with AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution (1.0) and NVIDIA DLSS. Massive Work Studios has confirmed that Intel XeSS won’t be added to the title until this summer, which suggests a debut somewhere between the end of June and late September. To be fair, Intel had originally promised that XeSS wouldn’t be released until “early summer.”
Intel XeSS will be available for Dolmen this summer! https://t.co/vWu7O0N2nO
— Dolmen (@DolmenGame) May 16, 2022
Will XeSS support be available at launch?
I think I can tell you that everything, including the partnership with Intel, will be released in the Day One patch.Does Dolmen support any other upscaling technologies, such as AMD’s FSR and NVIDIA’s DLSS?
Yes. The technologies you mentioned are in and will be working with the game.Okay, that’s nice. Are you planning to upgrade AMD FSR to the 2.0 version?
Dolmen will ship with FSR 1.0, but we have the intention to upgrade to 2.0, yes.
When I was a kid growing up, "Dolmen" was Swedish youth slang for "the penis".
For instance, during a game of dodgeball someone might say:
"Han tog bollen i dolmen" ~ "The ball hit him in the dick"
Originally it was the Swedish word for Dolma, the type of food traditionally made from meat rolled up in grape leaves (in Sweden they typically use cabbage leaves), but the foods elongated shape made it morph into a slang for penis among swedish kids in the 80's (and probably before). No idea if it is still in active use.
As the Swedish Game Reactor blog said (on the topic of funny product names)
"Dolmen
Vi måste ju ändå börja med spelet som nyligen släppes. Alla vi som skrev nyheter om spelet hade ju så kul med att vi äntligen skulle få se Dolmen, känna på den, att det var en upphetsande tanke att få se mer av Dolmen. Vill du se Dolmen har vi bilder i vår recension."
"The Dick
We have to start with the game that was recently released. All of us who wrote news about the game had so much fun, saying things like that we were finally going to get to see the dick, feel it, that it was an exciting thought to see more of the dick. If you want to see the dick, we have pictures in our review. "
https://www.thefpsreview.com/2022/05/14/dolmen-to-feature-support-for-xess-dlss-and-fsr-at-launch/
I think it is perfectly normal for there to be delays the first time you do something completely different from what you normally do, like Intel is doing with their new GPU's.
If anything I think they made public commitments on launch dates too soon for something so new that they don't have experience working with.
Unexpected delays as you discover new problems late in the cycle are the norm for novel products. I think they can learn fast from it though, and then proceed to tick-tock the **** out of the GPU's.
The question is, will they? With the worst of the extreme GPU crunch now behind us, and crazy prices starting to wind down, the question is if they still have the same incentive.
Intel has been making GPUs for a very, very long time, and (for good or worse) they have headhunted a ton of "talent" for the team. I don't allow them the excuse of "it's their first rodeo".
I'll give you that there are differences between a discrete and interated GPU. I won't accept that those differences require years, plural (Discrete Xe was first announced June 2018, and has probably been internally bantered for much longer - even Xe isn't their first attempt at discrete cards), to sort out and overcome the differences. Especially when you have access to all the required IP and manufacturing resources you could hope for.
They shouldn’t have thrown out arbitrary release dates if they don’t have confidence in hitting them.
Sure. They can claim they made them I guess. Limited release of one laptop only available to South Korea counts as a hard launch for a discrete GPU right?