5 ms·

We have had a decade of performance stagnation. Compare PS1 with PS3 (just over 10 years apart). PS1: 0.03 GFLOPS (approx given it didn't really do FLOPS per

We have had a decade of performance stagnation. Compare PS1 with PS3 (just over 10 years apart). PS1: 0.03 GFLOPS (approx given it didn't really do FLOPS per se) PS3: 230 GFLOPS Nearly 1000x faster. Now compare PS4 with PS5 pro (also just over 10 years apart): PS4: ~2TFLOPS PS5 Pro: ~33.5TFLOPS Bit over 10x faster. So the speed of improvement has fallen dramatically. Arguably you could say the real drop in optimization happened in that PS1 -> PS3 era - everything went from hand optimized assembly code to running (generally) higher level languages and using abstrated graphics frameworks like DirectX and OpenGL. Just noone noticed because we had 1000x the compute to make up for it :) Consoles/games got hit hard by first crypto and now AI needing GPUs. I suspect if it wasn't for that we'd have vastly cheaper and vastly faster gaming GPUs, but when you were making boatloads of cash off crypto miners and then AI I suspect the rate of progress fell dramatically for gaming at least (most of the the innovation I suspect went more into high VRAM/memory controllers and datacentre scale interconnects).

cosmic_cheese 1y ago
Yeah there’s been a drop off for sure. Clearly it hasn’t been steep enough for game studios to not lean on anyway, though. One potential forcing factor may be the rise of iGPUs, which have become powerful enough to play many titles well while remaining dramatically more affordable than their discrete counterparts (and sometimes not carrying crippling VRAM limits to boot), as well as the growing sector of PC handhelds like the Steam Deck. It’s not difficult to imagine that iGPUs will come to dominate the PC gaming sphere, and if that happens it’ll be financial suicide to not make sure your game plays reasonably well on such hardware.
- martinald 1y ago
  I get the perhaps mistaken impression the biggest problem games developers have is making & managing absolutely enormous amounts of art assets at high resolution (textures, models, etc). Each time you increase resolution from 576p, to 720p to 1080p and now 4k+ you need a huge step up in visual fidelity of all your assets, otherwise it looks poor. And given most of these assets are human made (well, until very recently) this requires more and more artists. So I wonder if games studios are more just art studios with a bit of programming bolted on, vs before with lower res graphics where you maybe had one artist for 10 programmers, now it is more flipped the other way. I feel that at some point over the past ~decade we hit a "organisational" wall with this and very very few studios can successfully manage teams of hundreds (thousands?) of artists effectively?
  - cosmic_cheese 1y ago
    That depends a lot on art direction and stylization. Highly stylized games scale up to high resolutions shockingly well even with less detailed, lower resolution models and textures. Breath of the Wild is one good example that looks great by modern standards at high resolutions, and there’s many others that manage to look a lot less dated than they are with similarly cartoony styles. If “realistic” graphics are the objective though, then yes, better displays pose serious problems. Personally I think it’s probably better to avoid art styles that age like milk, though, or to go for a pseudo-realistic direction that is reasonably true to life while mixing in just enough stylization to scale well and not look dated at record speeds. Japanese studios seem pretty good at this.
  - spookie 1y ago
    Yeah, its flipped. Overall, it has meant studios are more and more dependent on third party software (and thus license fees), it led to game engine consolidation, and serious attrition when attempting to make something those game engines werent built for (non-pbr pipelines come to mind). It's no wonder nothing comes out in a playable state.
  - MindSpunk 1y ago
    This hits the nail pretty close to the head. I work on an in-house AAA engine used by a number of different games. It's very expensive to produce art assets at the quality expected now. Many AAA engine's number one focus isn't "performance at all costs", it's "how do we most efficiently let artists build their vision". And efficiency isn't runtime performance, efficiency is how much time it takes for an artist to create something. Performance is only a goal insofar as to free artists from being limited by it. > So I wonder if games studios are more just art studios with a bit of programming bolted on. Not quite, but the ratio is very in favor of artists compared to 'the old days'. Programming is still a huge part of what we do. It's still a deeply technical field, but often "programming workflows" are lower priority than "artist workflows" in AAA engines because art time is more expensive than programmer time from the huge number of artists working on any one project compared to programmers. Just go look at the credits for any recent AAA game. Look at how many artists positions there are compared to programmer positions and it becomes pretty clear.
SlowTao 1y ago
It is not just GPU performance, it is that visually things are already very refined. A ten times leap in performance doesn't really show as ten times the visual spectical like it used to. Like all this path tracing/ray tracing stuff, yes it is very cool and can add to a scene but most people can barely tell it is there unless you show it side by side. And that takes a lot of compute to do. We are polishing an already very polished rock.
- martinald 1y ago
  Yes but in the PS1 days we were doing a 1000x compute performance a decade. I agree that 10x doesn't move much, but that's sort of my point - what could be done with 1000x?
Dylan16807 1y ago
You divided 230 by .03 wrong, which would be 10000-ish, but you underestimated the PS1 by a lot anyway. The CPU does 30 MIPS, but also the geometry engine does another 60 MIPS and the GPU fills 30 or 60 million pixels per second with multiple calculations each.
- deaddodo 1y ago
  Not to mention that few developers were doing hand optimized assembly by the time of PSX. They were certainly hand optimizing models and the 3D pipeline (with some assembler tuning), but C and SDKs were well in use by that point. Even Naughty Dog went with their own LISP engine for optimization versus ASM.
  - p_l 1y ago
    Naughty Dog's GOAL was PS2 specific and essentially chock full of what would be called intrinsics these days that let you interleave individual assembly instructions particularly for the crazy coprocessor setup of Emotion Engine. My understanding is that the mental model of programming in PS2 era was originally still very assembly like outside of few places (like Naughty Dog) and that GTA3 on PS2 made possibly its biggest impact by showing it's not necessary.
    - deaddodo 1y ago
      If by "mental model" you mean "low-level" programming, sure. But you might as well conflate "religion" with "Southern Baptist protestantism" then. You're working with the same building blocks, but the programming style is drastically different. The vast majority of PSX games were done completely in C, period. Some had small bits of asm here and there, but so do the occasional modern C/C++ apps. To your last point, before there was GOAL there was GOOL (from the horse's mouth itself): https://all-things-andy-gavin.com/tag/lisp-programming/ https://all-things-andy-gavin.com/tag/lisp-programming/ And it was used in all of Naughty Dog's PSX library.
      - p_l 1y ago
imtringued 1y ago
>I suspect if it wasn't for that we'd have vastly cheaper and vastly faster gaming GPUs This feels very out of touch since AMD's latest GPU series is specialized in gaming only, to the point where they sell variants with 8GB, which is becoming a bit tight if you want to play modern games.
- martinald 1y ago
  Yes but AMD also has an enterprise line of AI cards to protect. And regardless, if NVidia wasn't also making bank selling AI GPUs then we'd have seen them add more performance on gaming, which would have forced AMD to, etc.
PoshBreeze 1y ago
> Arguably you could say the real drop in optimization happened in that PS1 -> PS3 era - everything went from hand optimized assembly code to running (generally) higher level languages and using abstrated graphics frameworks like DirectX and OpenGL. Just noone noticed because we had 1000x the compute to make up for it :) Maybe / Kind of. Consoles in the PS1/N64 they were not running optimised assembly code. The 8bit and 16 bit machines were. As for DirectX / OpenGL / Glide actually massively improved performance over running stuff on the CPU. You only ran stuff with software rendering if you had a really low performance GPU. Just look at Quake running in software vs Glide. It easily doubles on a Pentium based system. > Consoles/games got hit hard by first crypto and now AI needing GPUs. I suspect if it wasn't for that we'd have vastly cheaper and vastly faster gaming GPUs, but when you were making boatloads of cash off crypto miners and then AI I suspect the rate of progress fell dramatically for gaming at least (most of the the innovation I suspect went more into high VRAM/memory controllers and datacentre scale interconnects). The PC graphics card market got hit hard by those. Console markets were largely unaffected. There are many reasons why performance has stagnated. One of them I would argue is the use of the Unreal 4/5 engine. Every game that runs either of these engines has significant performance issues. Just look at Star wars: Jedi Survivor and the previous game Star wars Jedi: Fallen Order. Both games run poorly even on a well spec'd PC and even runs poorly on my PS5. Doesn't really matter though as Jedi Survivor sold well and I think Fallen Order also sold well. The PS5 is basically a fixed PS4 (I've owned both). They've put a lot of effort into the PS5 into reducing loading times. Loading times on the PS4 were painful and were far longer than the PS3 (even games loading from Bluray). This was something Sony was focusing on. Every presentation about the PS5 talked about the new NVME drives and the external drive and the requirements for it. The other reason is that the level of graphical fidelity achieved in the mid-2000s to early-2010s is good enough. A lot of reasons why some games age worse than others is due to the art style, rather than the graphical fidelity. Many of the high earning games don't have state of the art graphics e.g Fortnite prints cash and the graphics are pretty bad IMO. Performance and Graphics just isn't the focus anymore. It doesn't really sell games like it used to.

cosmic_cheese 1y ago

Yeah there’s been a drop off for sure. Clearly it hasn’t been steep enough for game studios to not lean on anyway, though. One potential forcing factor may be the rise of iGPUs, which have become powerful enough to play many titles well while remaining dramatically more affordable than their discrete counterparts (and sometimes not carrying crippling VRAM limits to boot), as well as the growing sector of PC handhelds like the Steam Deck. It’s not difficult to imagine that iGPUs will come to dominate the PC gaming sphere, and if that happens it’ll be financial suicide to not make sure your game plays reasonably well on such hardware.

martinald 1y ago
I get the perhaps mistaken impression the biggest problem games developers have is making & managing absolutely enormous amounts of art assets at high resolution (textures, models, etc). Each time you increase resolution from 576p, to 720p to 1080p and now 4k+ you need a huge step up in visual fidelity of all your assets, otherwise it looks poor. And given most of these assets are human made (well, until very recently) this requires more and more artists. So I wonder if games studios are more just art studios with a bit of programming bolted on, vs before with lower res graphics where you maybe had one artist for 10 programmers, now it is more flipped the other way. I feel that at some point over the past ~decade we hit a "organisational" wall with this and very very few studios can successfully manage teams of hundreds (thousands?) of artists effectively?
- cosmic_cheese 1y ago
  That depends a lot on art direction and stylization. Highly stylized games scale up to high resolutions shockingly well even with less detailed, lower resolution models and textures. Breath of the Wild is one good example that looks great by modern standards at high resolutions, and there’s many others that manage to look a lot less dated than they are with similarly cartoony styles. If “realistic” graphics are the objective though, then yes, better displays pose serious problems. Personally I think it’s probably better to avoid art styles that age like milk, though, or to go for a pseudo-realistic direction that is reasonably true to life while mixing in just enough stylization to scale well and not look dated at record speeds. Japanese studios seem pretty good at this.
- spookie 1y ago
  Yeah, its flipped. Overall, it has meant studios are more and more dependent on third party software (and thus license fees), it led to game engine consolidation, and serious attrition when attempting to make something those game engines werent built for (non-pbr pipelines come to mind). It's no wonder nothing comes out in a playable state.
- MindSpunk 1y ago
  This hits the nail pretty close to the head. I work on an in-house AAA engine used by a number of different games. It's very expensive to produce art assets at the quality expected now. Many AAA engine's number one focus isn't "performance at all costs", it's "how do we most efficiently let artists build their vision". And efficiency isn't runtime performance, efficiency is how much time it takes for an artist to create something. Performance is only a goal insofar as to free artists from being limited by it. > So I wonder if games studios are more just art studios with a bit of programming bolted on. Not quite, but the ratio is very in favor of artists compared to 'the old days'. Programming is still a huge part of what we do. It's still a deeply technical field, but often "programming workflows" are lower priority than "artist workflows" in AAA engines because art time is more expensive than programmer time from the huge number of artists working on any one project compared to programmers. Just go look at the credits for any recent AAA game. Look at how many artists positions there are compared to programmer positions and it becomes pretty clear.

SlowTao 1y ago

It is not just GPU performance, it is that visually things are already very refined. A ten times leap in performance doesn't really show as ten times the visual spectical like it used to. Like all this path tracing/ray tracing stuff, yes it is very cool and can add to a scene but most people can barely tell it is there unless you show it side by side. And that takes a lot of compute to do. We are polishing an already very polished rock.

martinald 1y ago
Yes but in the PS1 days we were doing a 1000x compute performance a decade. I agree that 10x doesn't move much, but that's sort of my point - what could be done with 1000x?

Dylan16807 1y ago

You divided 230 by .03 wrong, which would be 10000-ish, but you underestimated the PS1 by a lot anyway. The CPU does 30 MIPS, but also the geometry engine does another 60 MIPS and the GPU fills 30 or 60 million pixels per second with multiple calculations each.

deaddodo 1y ago
Not to mention that few developers were doing hand optimized assembly by the time of PSX. They were certainly hand optimizing models and the 3D pipeline (with some assembler tuning), but C and SDKs were well in use by that point. Even Naughty Dog went with their own LISP engine for optimization versus ASM.
- p_l 1y ago
  Naughty Dog's GOAL was PS2 specific and essentially chock full of what would be called intrinsics these days that let you interleave individual assembly instructions particularly for the crazy coprocessor setup of Emotion Engine. My understanding is that the mental model of programming in PS2 era was originally still very assembly like outside of few places (like Naughty Dog) and that GTA3 on PS2 made possibly its biggest impact by showing it's not necessary.
  - deaddodo 1y ago
    If by "mental model" you mean "low-level" programming, sure. But you might as well conflate "religion" with "Southern Baptist protestantism" then. You're working with the same building blocks, but the programming style is drastically different. The vast majority of PSX games were done completely in C, period. Some had small bits of asm here and there, but so do the occasional modern C/C++ apps. To your last point, before there was GOAL there was GOOL (from the horse's mouth itself): https://all-things-andy-gavin.com/tag/lisp-programming/ https://all-things-andy-gavin.com/tag/lisp-programming/ And it was used in all of Naughty Dog's PSX library.
    - p_l 1y ago

imtringued 1y ago

>I suspect if it wasn't for that we'd have vastly cheaper and vastly faster gaming GPUs This feels very out of touch since AMD's latest GPU series is specialized in gaming only, to the point where they sell variants with 8GB, which is becoming a bit tight if you want to play modern games.

martinald 1y ago
Yes but AMD also has an enterprise line of AI cards to protect. And regardless, if NVidia wasn't also making bank selling AI GPUs then we'd have seen them add more performance on gaming, which would have forced AMD to, etc.

PoshBreeze 1y ago

> Arguably you could say the real drop in optimization happened in that PS1 -> PS3 era - everything went from hand optimized assembly code to running (generally) higher level languages and using abstrated graphics frameworks like DirectX and OpenGL. Just noone noticed because we had 1000x the compute to make up for it :) Maybe / Kind of. Consoles in the PS1/N64 they were not running optimised assembly code. The 8bit and 16 bit machines were. As for DirectX / OpenGL / Glide actually massively improved performance over running stuff on the CPU. You only ran stuff with software rendering if you had a really low performance GPU. Just look at Quake running in software vs Glide. It easily doubles on a Pentium based system. > Consoles/games got hit hard by first crypto and now AI needing GPUs. I suspect if it wasn't for that we'd have vastly cheaper and vastly faster gaming GPUs, but when you were making boatloads of cash off crypto miners and then AI I suspect the rate of progress fell dramatically for gaming at least (most of the the innovation I suspect went more into high VRAM/memory controllers and datacentre scale interconnects). The PC graphics card market got hit hard by those. Console markets were largely unaffected. There are many reasons why performance has stagnated. One of them I would argue is the use of the Unreal 4/5 engine. Every game that runs either of these engines has significant performance issues. Just look at Star wars: Jedi Survivor and the previous game Star wars Jedi: Fallen Order. Both games run poorly even on a well spec'd PC and even runs poorly on my PS5. Doesn't really matter though as Jedi Survivor sold well and I think Fallen Order also sold well. The PS5 is basically a fixed PS4 (I've owned both). They've put a lot of effort into the PS5 into reducing loading times. Loading times on the PS4 were painful and were far longer than the PS3 (even games loading from Bluray). This was something Sony was focusing on. Every presentation about the PS5 talked about the new NVME drives and the external drive and the requirements for it. The other reason is that the level of graphical fidelity achieved in the mid-2000s to early-2010s is good enough. A lot of reasons why some games age worse than others is due to the art style, rather than the graphical fidelity. Many of the high earning games don't have state of the art graphics e.g Fortnite prints cash and the graphics are pretty bad IMO. Performance and Graphics just isn't the focus anymore. It doesn't really sell games like it used to.