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You can never have enough cpu power in gaming. You can always use more. The faster computers get, the more interesting games can get.

by meagain20000 11y ago

anon4 11y ago
Not until content creation tools get smarter. When your level is made of simple tiles in 2D top-down perspective, you can have large levels with lots of sprites, but when each character has to be a fully rigged 3D model and each tree rather than being an 8x8 pixel smudge is instead a fully 3D physical object with leaves that respond realistically to wind... Well, it's hard to make them by hand.
coldtea 11y ago
>The faster computers get, the more interesting games can get. I've found the opposite. The faster computers get, the more games are all about BS graphics and nice explosions. Back in my day we had real interesting adventure games, now get off my lawn.
- meagain20000 11y ago
  Back in your day minecraft would not be possible
  - coldtea 11y ago
    Considering that it's quite inefficient and written in Java, it might very well be. Especially graphics wise, it's nothing that mid to late nineties GPUs couldn't handle.
    - chipsy 11y ago
      Minecraft was memory-bound and bandwidth-bound such that it only really became possible in the late 2000's. A typical PC in 2000 would have, if generous, 128 or 256 megabytes of RAM. A typical connection, if any, would be dial up, with some ADSL and ISDN folks. Minecraft worlds, on the other hand, easily run into the gigabytes. Not to mention that all of its word of mouth came from popular Youtube videos. You can definitely find examples of earlier voxel renderers that are also more efficient than Minecraft(e.g. Ken Silverman's VOXLAP), but memory limits and networking gaps would remain real and intractable, limiting its potential popularity.
      - coldtea 11y ago
        >but memory limits and networking gaps would remain real and intractable Those don't have much to do with Moore's law though.
        amaranth 11y ago
        Moore's law is about transistor counts and DRAM is made of transistors so it really does.
- CaptSpify 11y ago
  Mainstream games, sure. But what about indie games? Those have exploded due to computers becoming fast and cheap.

You can never have enough cpu power in gaming. You can always use more. The faster computers get, the more interesting games can get.

anon4 11y ago

Not until content creation tools get smarter. When your level is made of simple tiles in 2D top-down perspective, you can have large levels with lots of sprites, but when each character has to be a fully rigged 3D model and each tree rather than being an 8x8 pixel smudge is instead a fully 3D physical object with leaves that respond realistically to wind... Well, it's hard to make them by hand.

coldtea 11y ago

>The faster computers get, the more interesting games can get. I've found the opposite. The faster computers get, the more games are all about BS graphics and nice explosions. Back in my day we had real interesting adventure games, now get off my lawn.

meagain20000 11y ago
Back in your day minecraft would not be possible
- coldtea 11y ago
  Considering that it's quite inefficient and written in Java, it might very well be. Especially graphics wise, it's nothing that mid to late nineties GPUs couldn't handle.
  - chipsy 11y ago
    Minecraft was memory-bound and bandwidth-bound such that it only really became possible in the late 2000's. A typical PC in 2000 would have, if generous, 128 or 256 megabytes of RAM. A typical connection, if any, would be dial up, with some ADSL and ISDN folks. Minecraft worlds, on the other hand, easily run into the gigabytes. Not to mention that all of its word of mouth came from popular Youtube videos. You can definitely find examples of earlier voxel renderers that are also more efficient than Minecraft(e.g. Ken Silverman's VOXLAP), but memory limits and networking gaps would remain real and intractable, limiting its potential popularity.
    - coldtea 11y ago
      >but memory limits and networking gaps would remain real and intractable Those don't have much to do with Moore's law though.
      - amaranth 11y ago
        Moore's law is about transistor counts and DRAM is made of transistors so it really does.
CaptSpify 11y ago
Mainstream games, sure. But what about indie games? Those have exploded due to computers becoming fast and cheap.