The fact that developers would rely on this is in itself a risk, but the context is that hardware is now having a hard time keeping up with expectations. The move towards 4K has gone well for video/streaming, but it’s a different story for gaming. Even with the 4090, some games are far from being available at 4K/120fps, or 4K/60fps/ray tracing. Meanwhile, 4K has been around for about 10 years now, and running that resolution in modern games is still not entirely common (or comes with limitations and compromises).

Hardware can no longer continue to evolve as it did from the first graphics processing units. We have reached the limits in terms of miniaturization, heat, size, affordability and the like. The next generation step in GPUs is becoming more and more expensive, when they used to cost about the same prices. This is partly due to shareholder-driven growth and inflation, but also partly due to the significant leaps that have already been made. Each next step is harder and harder. This contributes to the need for resolution scaling, frame interpolation, and ray tracing tricks (so that fewer rays need to be drawn to get the same result). Simply adding a few thousand cores to a GPU cannot continue indefinitely. Certainly not with current silicon and transistor logic, which may eventually require a “post-silicon” solution.

Game developers also face the problem that development costs a lot of time/money. Hundreds or even thousands of people have to do a lot of manual work to get the game right which leads to a high demand for lighting in this area. This quickly comes at the expense of performance. For example, there is now the UE5 Nanite and Lumen; This makes game development faster and easier, but is more burdensome on the end user.

This is not so much laziness. Something has to change here between now and then, because game development is actually very expensive and risky (millions of working hours for one game, and if it turns out to be mediocre, you will lose 50 million euros or much more). This makes the industry very risk averse and clumsy. If dozens of people can create a AAA game in a few years, it will benefit the entire industry and the player greatly.

So the gamer wants modern 4K with ray tracing and 60/120 fps, but the hardware just doesn’t make that possible for all games, and developers are looking to ease the workload. This makes this period technically challenging, and makes some games very difficult for our computers. I think super resolution definitely helps with this, especially if artifacts and ghosting are reduced further. I’m not yet convinced that framerates are adequate for games that require fast response.

[Reactie gewijzigd door geert1 op 29 september 2023 11:09]