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The post-GeForce era: What if Nvidia abandons PC gaming?

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Re: The post-GeForce era: What if Nvidia abandons PC gaming?

#171

Post by wnevets »

TehCorwiz wrote: post #108

If they do it'll likely be part of an industry wide push to kill off the home-built PC market. It's no secret that MS and others want the kind of ecosystem Apple has and governments want more backdoor access to tech. And which mfg wouldn't want to eliminate partial upgrades/repairs. Imagine that the only PC you could buy one day has everything tightly integrated with no user serviceable or replaceable parts without a…

You're not thinking big enough. Their ultimate goal is gaming (or any computing really) available only in the cloud.

Re: The post-GeForce era: What if Nvidia abandons PC gaming?

#172

Post by mikepurvis »

futureshock wrote: post #146
nerdsniper wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without disagreeing with the broad strokes of your comment, it feels like 4K should be considered standard for consoles nowadays - a very usable 4K HDR TV can be had for $150-500.

Thats a waste of image quality for most people. You have to sit very close to a 4k display to be able to perceive the full resolution. On PC you could be 2 feet from a huge gaming monitor, but an extremely small percentage of console players have the tv size and distance ratio where they would get much out of full 4k. Much better to spend the compute on higher framerate or higher detail settings.

I think higher detail is where most of it goes. A lower resolution, upscaled image of a detailed scene, at medium framerate reads to most normal people as "better" than a less-detailed scene rendered at native 4k, especially when it's in motion.

Re: The post-GeForce era: What if Nvidia abandons PC gaming?

#173

Post by djmips »

Bridged7756 wrote: post #43
sombragris wrote: post #33

I doubt that this would ever happen. But... If it does, I think it would be a good thing. The reason is that it would finally motivate game developers to be more realistic in their minimum hardware requirements, enabling games to be playable on onboard GPUs. Right now, most recent games (for example, many games built on Unreal Engine 5) are unplayable on onboard GPUs. Game and engine devs simply don't bother anymore…

True. Optimization is completely dead. Long gone are the days of a game being amazing because the devs managed to pull crazy graphics for the current hardware. Nowadays a game is only poorly optimized if it's literally unplayable or laggy, and you're forced to constantly upgrade your hardware with no discernible performance gain otherwise.

A lot of people who were good at optimizing games have aged out and/or 'got theirs' and retired early or just got out of the demanding job and secured a better paying job in a sector with more economic upside and less churn. On the other side there's an unending almost exponential group of newcomers into the industry who are believe the hype given by engine makers who hide the true cost of optimimal game making and sell on 'ease'.

Re: The post-GeForce era: What if Nvidia abandons PC gaming?

#174

Post by jabroni_salad »

newsclues wrote: post #8
pjmlp wrote: post #7

It means people get to enjoy more indie games with good designs, instead of having FOMO for cool graphics without substance.

It means lots of people will give up the hobby. Let's be real, the twitch FPS CoD players aren't going to give that up and play a boring life simulator. This has the potential to harm a lot of businesses from hardware to software companies, and change the lives of millions of people.

CoD is currently 300GB on disk due to all the textures. I suspect a lot of players would be happy with a modest regression in fidelity if it means the game can run smoothly on affordable devices and leave some room for their other games too.

Re: The post-GeForce era: What if Nvidia abandons PC gaming?

#175

Post by Retric »

futureshock wrote: post #146
nerdsniper wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without disagreeing with the broad strokes of your comment, it feels like 4K should be considered standard for consoles nowadays - a very usable 4K HDR TV can be had for $150-500.

Thats a waste of image quality for most people. You have to sit very close to a 4k display to be able to perceive the full resolution. On PC you could be 2 feet from a huge gaming monitor, but an extremely small percentage of console players have the tv size and distance ratio where they would get much out of full 4k. Much better to spend the compute on higher framerate or higher detail settings.

Assuming you can render natively at high FPS, 4k makes a bigger difference on rendered images than live action because it essentially brute forces antialiasing.

Re: The post-GeForce era: What if Nvidia abandons PC gaming?

#176

Post by partomniscient »

They probably won't. They'll just change things so their hardware becomes a subscription-style model rather than proper outright ownership by the purchaser, which is to a limited degree the case when it comes to their hardware drivers anyway.

Fuck this future.

Re: The post-GeForce era: What if Nvidia abandons PC gaming?

#177

Post by ogogmad »

wnevets wrote: post #171
TehCorwiz wrote: post #108

If they do it'll likely be part of an industry wide push to kill off the home-built PC market. It's no secret that MS and others want the kind of ecosystem Apple has and governments want more backdoor access to tech. And which mfg wouldn't want to eliminate partial upgrades/repairs. Imagine that the only PC you could buy one day has everything tightly integrated with no user serviceable or replaceable parts without a…

You're not thinking big enough. Their ultimate goal is gaming (or any computing really) available only in the cloud.

Maybe then the year of Linux (or OpenBSD?) on the desktop would finally arrive. Maybe anti-trust could get used. Maybe parts could get scrapped from data centres.

Interesting times they would be!

Re: The post-GeForce era: What if Nvidia abandons PC gaming?

#178

Post by reactordev »

wnevets wrote: post #171
TehCorwiz wrote: post #108

If they do it'll likely be part of an industry wide push to kill off the home-built PC market. It's no secret that MS and others want the kind of ecosystem Apple has and governments want more backdoor access to tech. And which mfg wouldn't want to eliminate partial upgrades/repairs. Imagine that the only PC you could buy one day has everything tightly integrated with no user serviceable or replaceable parts without a…

You're not thinking big enough. Their ultimate goal is gaming (or any computing really) available only in the cloud.

This. Your home PC is just another appliance now. Welcome to your Copilot future.

Re: The post-GeForce era: What if Nvidia abandons PC gaming?

#179

Post by jamesgeck0 »

archagon wrote: post #47
Bridged7756 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True. Optimization is completely dead. Long gone are the days of a game being amazing because the devs managed to pull crazy graphics for the current hardware. Nowadays a game is only poorly optimized if it's literally unplayable or laggy, and you're forced to constantly upgrade your hardware with no discernible performance gain otherwise.

I feel like Steam Deck support is making developers optimize again.

Not to mention one of the "big three" console manufacturers building their business on older mobile hardware.

Re: The post-GeForce era: What if Nvidia abandons PC gaming?

#180

Post by sombragris »

dijit wrote: post #116
jeltz wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There were lazy devs back then too but I feel lazy devs have become the norm now.

I work in gamedev, historically AAA gamedev. If you think that the programmers are unmotivated (lazy) or incompetent; you’re wrong on both counts. The amount of care and talent is unmatched in my professional career, and they are often working from incomplete (and changing) specifications towards a fixed deadline across multiple hardware targets. The issue is that games have such high expectations that they didn’t ha…

> The amount of care and talent is unmatched in my professional career, and they are often working from incomplete (and changing) specifications towards a fixed deadline across multiple hardware targets.

I fully agree and I really admire people working on the industry. When I see great games which are unplayable in the low end because of stupidly high minimum hardware requirements, I understand game devs are simply responding to internal trends within the industry, and especially going for a practical outcome by using an established game engine (such as Unreal 5).

But at some time I hope this GPU crunch forces this same industry to allocate time and resources either at the engine or at the game level to truly optimize for a realistic low end.

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