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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?

#251

Post by rerdavies »

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.

That's not how it ACTUALLY worked. How it actually worked is that top video card manufactures would make multi-million dollar bids to to the devs of the three or four AAA games that were predicted to be best-sellers in order to get the devs to optimize their rendering for whatever this year's top video adapter was going to be. And nobody really cared if it didn't run on your crappy old last-year's card, because everybody undrerstood that the vast majority of games revenue comes from people who have just bought expensive new systems. (Inside experience, I lived it).

I don't think it has ever been the case that this year's AAA games play well on last year's video cards.

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

#252

Post by gmueckl »

imcritic wrote: post #223
gmueckl wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most gamers don't have the faintest clue regarding how much work and effort a game requires these days to meet even the minimum expectations they have.

That's bullshit. I don't care about graphics, I play lots of indie games, some of them are made by a single person. There are free game engines, so basically all one needs for a successful game is just a good idea for the game. And a friend of mine still mostly plays the goddamn Ultima Online, the game that was released 28 years ago.

You are a minor share of the overall market and the sad truth is that most indie games sell a pityfull handfull of copies and can't sustain their creators financially. And even indie games have to meet certain standards and given that they are developed nostly by single devs, meeting even those "minimal" standards takes years for many devs.

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

#253

Post by rasz »

ronsor wrote: post #57
batiudrami wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Crazy take, in the late 90s/early 00s your GPU could be obsolete 9 months after buying. The “optimisation” you talk about was the CPU in the ps4 generation was so weak and tech was moving so fast that any pc bought in 2015 onwards would easily brute force overpower anything that had been built for that generation.

> Crazy take, in the late 90s/early 00s your GPU could be obsolete 9 months after buying. Not because the developers were lazy, but because newer GPUs were that much better.

Because GPU developers started to be less lazy :)

No T&L meant everything was culled, clipped, transformed and per-vertex divided (perspective, lighting) on CPU.

Then you have brute force approach. Voodoo 1/2/3 doesnt employ any obvious speedup tricks in its pipeline. Every single triangle pushed into it is going to get textured (bilinear filtering, per pixel divide), shaded (lighting, blending, FOG applied) and then in the last step the card finally checks Z-buffer to decide between writing all this computed data to buffer or simply throwing it away.

It took a while before GPU devs started implementing low-hanging fruit optimizations https://therealmjp.github.io/posts/to-earlyz-or-not-to-early...

Hierarchical-Z, Fast Z clearing, Compressed Z buffer, Compressed Textures, Tiled shading. It all got added slowly one step at a time in early 2000.

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

#254

Post by PunchyHamster »

makeitdouble wrote: post #237
PunchyHamster wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't name one in last 5 that has been "pushing the envelope" that would actually wow me. And the ones that did, did it by artstyle, not sheer amount of polygons pushed to the screen. VR, sure, you want a lot of frames on 2 screens, that requires beef so the visual fidelity on same GPU will be worse than on screen, but other than that if anything graphical part of games have flatlined for me. Also, putting the mone…

> VR To note, cost and hardware availability is I think one half of the critical reasons people don't get into VR (other half being the bulkiness and puke ?). In a roundabout way, GPU melting games helped get better hardware at mainstream prices. Until crypto and AI happened. And now the Steam Frame faced with the RAM price situation. > 5 years I don't play it, but Infinite Nikki comes to mind, and the visuals are th…

> I don't play it, but Infinite Nikki comes to mind, and the visuals are the core experience. I wonder how much a game like Arcknight Enfield taxes the player hardware, given they're pushing the 3D modelling side.

Me neither but recommended requirements on Steam are like.. RTX 2060, so 6 years old mid grade video card. We really don't need more power than we already have to make beautiful games.

> It kinda makes me sad, like being told "8-bit art is enough for images, we should focus on composition, how many Vermeer or DaVinci like painters do we expect anyway ?"

Except it isn't ? At this point more power is only really needed if you want to go hardcore into photorealism, and to actually use all that power you need massive budget just to produce all the assets at required quality.

It's like saying "if only painters had even smaller brushes, we could get photographical quality paintings." Does it really make art that much better ?

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

#255

Post by jiggawatts »

Animats wrote: post #159
wmf wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not related to the DRAM shortage. Gaming dropped to ~10% of Nvidia's revenue a year or two ago due to AI and there was controversy years before that about most "gaming" GPUs going to crypto miners. They won't exit the gaming market but from a shareholder perspective it does look like a good idea.

> Gaming dropped to ~10% of Nvidia's revenue a year or two ago due to AI Well, actually it's that the AI business made NVidia 10x bigger. NVidia now has a market cap of $4.4 trillion. That's six times bigger than General Motors, bigger than Apple, and the largest market cap in the world. For a GPU maker.

A GPU designer.

They don't make GPUs!

Well, technically, they do assemble some of them, but almost all of the parts are made by other companies.

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

#256

Post by Kirth »

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…

> Imagine that the only PC you could buy one day has everything tightly integrated with no user serviceable or replaceable parts without a high-end soldering lab.

So.. a smart phone?

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

#257

Post by j45 »

flopsamjetsam wrote: post #88
j45 wrote: post #81

It wouldn't be unheard of. Qualcomm before they made all the chips they do today, ran a pretty popular and successful email client called Eudora. Doing one thing well can lead to doing bigger things well. More realistically, if the top end chips go towards the most demanding work, there might be more than enough lower grade silicon that can easily keep the gaming world going. Plus, gamers rarely stop thinking in term…

I had completely forgotten about the existence of Eudora. Thanks friend, that lead me down a mental rabbit hole.

Glad you enjoyed. Steve Wozniaks review of audits was fun to read.

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

#258

Post by baobun »

ogogmad wrote: post #185
guerrilla wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's already here right now, unironically. There's no need for Windows for gaming now. I just build a new rig with a 7900 XTX and with Steam on Arch Linux everything just works with absolutely no hassle or thinking. This was the only value Windows still had and now that's over.

There are still some pain points with Linux distros: With some, an upgrade can leave you unable to boot into a graphical login screen. This can also happen if you leave a Linux installation, like Manjaro, alone for a year and then do an update.

This pain point being a common thing is mostly specific to Manjaro. Much more stable experience on any of the major vanilla distros.

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

#259

Post by makeitdouble »

PunchyHamster wrote: post #254
makeitdouble wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> VR To note, cost and hardware availability is I think one half of the critical reasons people don't get into VR (other half being the bulkiness and puke ?). In a roundabout way, GPU melting games helped get better hardware at mainstream prices. Until crypto and AI happened. And now the Steam Frame faced with the RAM price situation. > 5 years I don't play it, but Infinite Nikki comes to mind, and the visuals are th…

> I don't play it, but Infinite Nikki comes to mind, and the visuals are the core experience. I wonder how much a game like Arcknight Enfield taxes the player hardware, given they're pushing the 3D modelling side. Me neither but recommended requirements on Steam are like.. RTX 2060, so 6 years old mid grade video card. We really don't need more power than we already have to make beautiful games. > It kinda makes me s…

> Me neither but recommended requirements on Steam are like.. RTX 2060, so 6 years old mid grade video card. We really don't need more power than we already have to make beautiful games.

Steam's recommended specs are on the conservative side, usually adapted to play with the average settings.

Pushing the game setting to ultra at 4K gives it a mere 100fps on a RTX 4090 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rju22K1lfQY

That's a lot of dedication, but yes, some people will really enjoy the game in its full splendor. Telling them what they need or don't need, or what they should enjoy misses the point of games IMHO (avid players have probably already spent more than a top end gaming PC on the dresses)

> Does it really make art that much better ?

Putting a technical limit on what makes or doesn't make art better sounds fundamentally off to me.

I kinda understand your point on diminishing returns, except we haven't even reached a good frame rate at HDPI for 24~32"ish screens. And we'll always move to the next level.

"XXX should be enough for everyone" kind of assertions have never panned out well IMHO.

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

#260

Post by 3836293648 »

zozbot234 wrote: post #217
mikepurvis wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're not targeting high-end PCs. They're targeting current generation consoles, specifically the PS5 + 1080p. It just turns out that when you take those system requirements and put them on a PC—especially a PC with a 1440p or 2160p ultrawide—it turns out to mean pretty top of the line stuff. Particularly if as a PC gamer you expect to run it at 90fps and not the 30-40 that is typical for consoles.

1440p and 2160p is a total waste of pixels, when 1080p is already at the level of human visual acuity. You can argue that 1440p is a genuine (slight) improvement for super crisp text, but not for a game. HDR and more ray tracing/path tracing, etc. are more sensible ways of pushing quality higher.

I'm sorry, you need to go to an optician. I can see the pixels at a comfortable distance at 1440p.

Alternatively, you play modern games with incredibly blurry AA solutions. Try looking at something older from when AA actually worked.

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