Let's Talk About Games

I think we are entering a different era.

Once upon a time shrinking nodes came with cost reductions for the same amount of compute.

With the new bleeding edge nodes, this is not so true, you can increase compute density, but the cost of new nodes is astronomical, so prices go up too.

Many improvements recently are more architectural in nature, like zen ccds to decrease costs.

The architectural improvements will continue to scale, but node improvements are slowing, we are right on the edge of what is physically possible with silicon.

The improvements in games have slowed a ton too.

Each new generation of consoles has started to reach diminishing returns for graphics. Ray tracing seems more like a technology that is being pushed to sell hardware, rather than actually improving graphics efficiently.

The next high compute case might need more creative solutions other than throwing more compute at it. Like eye tracking for VR which reduces compute demand greatly

Are there TVs with who support 120fps??

I don't think consoles can play all games at 4k60fps yet right?

Far from it. PS5 PRO runs Alan Wake 2 at 1536x864 60fps (aka below 1080p, closer to 720p)

Also, the technical limitations and specifications of each console gave the games a distinct look. You can tell a SNES from a Genesis game, a PS1 from a N64. Even just game ports had their own charme, differing sometimes less, sometimes wildly between each console.

It all converged in the PS2 era and now it's just differently branded PCs.

Definitely. Diminishing returns applies to everything to such an extent I almost consider it a law of nature, and we're definitely hitting that zone with both polygons and pixel density in my opinion.

I wonder how far away we are from just putting a prompt in for the kind of game you’d like to play and it just being procedurally generated for you.

Also when are we getting haptic suit porn games where my game station sucks my dick? Best I’ve got so far is lubing up the vaccuum while I stream Baywatch on my VR headset

Even using ai for environments. Plenty of open world games will have you looking at the exact same patch of grass and the exact same trees. Even getting ray traced lighting effects to work at life-like settings, running at at least 4k90, will take a lot of computing horsepower. The price to do these things is still prohibitive, but game devs will absolutely try doing those things in the future, so the console hardware will have to keep up.

What I can see them doing is taking a more passive approach, and waiting for the hardware to develop on its own, and just using "off the shelf" parts, instead of paying to have custom hardware developed.

But does that make the game more fun, or does it lower the barrier of entry for smaller studios to make high-quality games?

Arguably, ray-tracing does lower the barrier to entry. You place lights where they really are in a scene, boom, everything is light perfectly. Art assets and tuning up lighting are a huge time cost in current AAA games; making that much easier might benefit gaming in general.

Having improved physics modelling might improve physics-based games, but something like Angry Birds doesn't need a supercomputer anyway, and for most games it's just added prettiness that greatly increases the production cost

if only that's actually what they did, instead they add 2x as many strands of grass and skip out on optimization because they no longer need to do it.

I think that Mariokart 8 and Super Mario 3d world have some of the best video game graphics simply because they make very efficient use of the hardware by using baked lighting and good textures and can render at the console's native res at a locked 60fps. Running on a smartphone processor (tegra x1).

I don't know how people stand TAA, it looks awful. Whenever I get the option, I turn it off because I would MUCH rather see aliasing than having an image that looked like someone used the smear tool in Photoshop.

I think game asset quality is prioritized for big studio games since asset creation can easily scale across many artists and pretty assets look great in trailers to sell the game.