Gaming is obviously meant to be fun, but even if you're a seasoned vet, the alphabet soup of
gaming acronyms can be a little mystifying, from technical terms to shorthand you see in
Discord to jargon thrown in angry game reviews. So let's demystify some of these acronyms right
now, starting with the dreaded QTE, which stands for Quick Time Event. This has nothing to do with
that old video player from Apple, but it does have to do with cutscenes. Instead of giving us a cutscene
to advance the plot and then just getting back to the game, some developers had the genius idea of
making gamers press a button during a cutscene to make something happen on the screen. The whole
press F to pay respects fiasco from a few years ago has become the quintessential example of an
extremely stupid quick time event. The acronym QTE isn't disparaging in and of itself, but the vast
majority of times you see it, no one's going to have anything positive to say. Here's another
popular one, MOBA, or Multiplayer Online Battle Arena. These are games based around fighting
through three lanes as a team to destroy the opposing team's base. The game, Dota, or Defense of the
Asians, is widely credited with popularizing the genre. And fun fact, Dota was actually a mod for
Warcraft 3, but it became so popular that a standalone sequel called Dota 2 was developed.
Today, Dota 2, League of Legends, and Arena of Valor are three extremely popular MOBA games that
are common in eSports competitions, though many other titles do exist. So for something more
technical, DLSS and FSR, which stand for Deep Learning Super Sampling and Fidelity FX Super
Resolution respectively, are the next acronyms on our list. These are two technologies designed to
deliver better image quality without putting a huge load on your graphics card. DLSS is developed
by NVIDIA and is only available on 2000 series and newer cards, and as the name suggests, it uses
machine learning to train an AI on what a game should look like, meaning the card can use AI
cores to upscale the game instead of forcing the GPU to do tons of raw computation, meaning higher
frame rates and higher quality than traditional rendering. FSR, on the other hand, is from AMD,
and unlike DLSS, it does not use machine learning, but it does have special AMD-specific algorithms
baked in that allow it for better upsampling without putting too much extra work on the GPU.
For your game to support DLSS or FSR, the game itself has to support it, so it's mostly found on
newer titles. Some games only support one or the other, while other titles support both.
Another graphical acronym that's sneakily important is FOV or Field of View. This is a setting that
determines how much of your surroundings you can see. The common wisdom is to set it higher if you're
sitting close to the screen and lower if you're farther away. Setting it too low when you're close
to the display, as is often the case when you're gaming on a PC, is actually a common cause of
motion sickness, so try turning it up if you're feeling queasy. Of course, turning it up too
much can make the game look like you're viewing it through a fisheye lens, so watch out for that as
well. Do you have any gaming acronyms that confuse the heck out of you? Let us know down in the
comments section and you might see an explainer in a future episode. So thanks for watching guys,
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