11 ms·

Could the PS6 be the last console generation with an expressive improvement in compute and graphics? Miniaturization keeps giving ever more diminishing returns

by amlib 1y ago

Could the PS6 be the last console generation with an expressive improvement in compute and graphics? Miniaturization keeps giving ever more diminishing returns each shrink, prices of electronics are going up (even sans tariffs), lead by the increase in the price of making chips. Alternate techniques have slowly been introduced to offset the compute deficit, first with post processing AA in the seventh generation, then with "temporal everything" hacks (including TAA) in the previous generation and finally with minor usage of AI up-scaling in the current generation and (projected) major usage of AI up-scaling and frame-gen in the next gen. However, I'm pessimistic on how this can keep evolving. RT already takes a non trivial amount of transistor budget and now those high end AI solutions require another considerable chunk of the transistor budget. If we are already reaching the limits of what non generative AI up-scaling and frame-gen can do, I can't see where a PS7 can go other than using generative AI to interpret a very crude low-detail frame and generating a highly detailed photorealistic scene from that, but that will, I think, require many times more transistor budget than what will likely ever be economically achievable for a whole PS7 system. Will that be the end of consoles? Will everything move to the cloud and a power guzzling 4KW machine will take care of rendering your PS7 game? I really can only hope there is a break-trough in miniaturization and we can go back to a pace of improvement that can actually give us a new generation of consoles (and computers) that makes the transition from an SNES to a N64 feel quaint.

bob1029 1y ago
Gaming using weird tech is not a hardware manufacturer or availability issue. It is a game studio leadership problem. Even in the latest versions of unreal and unity you will find the classic tools. They just won't be advertised and the engine vendor might even frown upon them during a tech demo to make their fancy new temporal slop solution seem superior. The trick is to not get taken for a ride by the tools vendors. Real time lights, "free" anti aliasing, and sub-pixel triangles are the forbidden fruits of game dev. It's really easy to get caught up in the devil's bargain of trading unlimited art detail for unknowns at end customer time.
aurareturn 1y ago
Beyond the PS6, the answer is very clearly graphics generated in real time via a transformer model. I’d be absolutely shocked if in 10 years, all AAA games aren’t being rendered by a transformer. Google’s veo 3 is already extremely impressive. No way games will be rendered through traditional shaders in 2035.
- meindnoch 1y ago
  How much money are you willing to bet?
  - aurareturn 1y ago
    All my money.
    - CuriouslyC 1y ago
      Even in a future with generative UIs, those UIs will be composed from pre-created primitives just because it's faster and more consistent, there's literally no reason to re-create primitives every time.
    - bigyabai 1y ago
      Go short Nintendo and Sony today. I'm the last one who's going to let my technical acumen get in the way of your mistake.
      - aurareturn 1y ago
        Why would gaming rendering using transformers lead to one shorting Nintendo and Sony?
- Certhas 1y ago
  This _might_ be true, but it's utterly absurd to claim this is a certainty. The images rendered in a game need to accurately represent a very complex world state. Do we have any examples of Transformer based models doing something in this category? Can they do it in real-time? I could absolutely see something like rendering a simplified and stylised version and getting Transformers to fill in details. That's kind of a direct evolution from the upscaling approach described here, but end to end rendering from game state is far less obvious.
Uvix 1y ago
It sounds like even the PS6 isn’t going to have an expressive improvement, and that the PS5 was the last such console. PS5 Pro was the first console focused on fake frame generation instead of real output resolution/frame rate improvements, and per the article PS6 is continuing that trend.
- PaulHoule 1y ago
  What really matters is the cost. In the past a game console might launch at a high price point and then after a few years, the price goes down and they can release a new console at a high at a price close to where the last one started. Blame crypto, AI, COVID but there has been no price drop for the PS5 and if there was gonna be a PS6 that was really better it would probably have to cost upwards of $1000 and you might as well get a PC. Sure there are people who haven’t tried Steam + an XBOX controller and think PV gaming is all unfun and sweaty but they will come around.
  - Uvix 1y ago
    As long as I need a mouse and keyboard to install updates or to install/start my games from GOG, it's still going to be decidedly unfun, but hopefully Windows' upcoming built-in controller support will make it less unfun.
    - PaulHoule 1y ago
      Today you can just buy an Xbox controller and pair it with your Windows computer and it just works and it’s the same same with the Mac. You don’t have to install any drivers or anything and with the big screen mode in Steam it’s a lean back experience where you can pick out your games and start one up without using anything other than the controller.
      - withinboredom 1y ago
        If you have steam, ps4/ps5 controllers also work fine.
mielioort 1y ago
[dead]
Mistletoe 1y ago
Welcome to the Age of the Plateau. It will change everything we know. Invest accordingly.
- 64718283661 1y ago
  And what do you think to invest in for such times?
  - bitmasher9 1y ago
    Moats. Government relationships. Simple and unsexy. Hard assets.
  - Mistletoe 1y ago
    Hard assets and things with finite supply. Anything real. Gold, bitcoin, small cap value stocks, commodities, treasuries (if you think the government won't fail). https://portfoliocharts.com/2021/12/16/three-secret-ingredients-of-the-most-efficient-portfolios/ https://portfoliocharts.com/2021/12/16/three-secret-ingredie...
    - didibus 1y ago
      > Anything real > bitcoin :D
      - Mistletoe 1y ago
        If it isn't real, I invite you to get some easily or print more. https://www.investopedia.com/news/hyperinflation-produces-surge-bitcoin-trading-venezuela/ https://www.investopedia.com/news/hyperinflation-produces-su... https://decrypt.co/332083/billionaire-ray-dalio-urges-investors-to-allocate-15-of-portfolios-to-gold-and-bitcoin https://decrypt.co/332083/billionaire-ray-dalio-urges-invest...
        chowells 1y ago
        If the Internet goes away, Bitcoin goes away. That's a real threat in a bunch of conceivable societal failure scenarios. If you want something real, you want something that will survive the loss of the internet. Admittedly, what you probably want most in those scenarios is diesel, vehicles that run on diesel, and salt. But a pile of gold still could be traded for some of those.
Loic 1y ago
My kids are playing Fortnite on a PS4, it works, they are happy, I feel the rendering is really good (but I am an old guy) and normally, the only problem while playing is the stability of the Internet connection. We also have a lot of fun playing board games, simple stuff from design, card games, here, the game play is the fun factor. Yes, better hardware may bring more realistic, more x or y, but my feeling is that the real driver, long term, is the quality of the game play. Like the quality of the story telling in a good movie.
- flyinglizard 1y ago
  That's the Nintendo way. Avoiding the photorealism war altogether by making things intentionally sparse and cartoony. Then you can sell cheap hardware, make things portable etc.
  - xiande04 1y ago
    I.e., the uncanny valley.
    - gyomu 1y ago
      Cartoony isn’t the uncanny valley. Uncanny valley is attempted photorealism that misses the mark.
      - pipes 1y ago
        I think games like dishonoured also managed to side step the uncanny valley. Not cartoony, just their own thing (actually more like an oil painting).
  - tonyhart7 1y ago
    also nintendo vision which is "mobile gaming" are handheld devices like switch,steam deck etc is really the future while phone is also true for some extend but gaming on a phone vs gaming on a handheld is really world of a differences give it few generations then traditional consoles would obsolete, I mean we are literally have a lot of people enjoy indie game in steam deck right now
Keyframe 1y ago
not all games need horse power. We've now past the point of good enough to run a ton of it. Sure, tentpole attractions will warrant more and more, but we're turning back to mechanics, input methods, gameplay, storytelling. If you play 'old' games now, they're perfectly playable. Just like older movies are perfectly watchable. Not saying you should play those (you should), but there's not kuch of a leap needed to keep such ideas going strong and fresh.
- ad133 1y ago
  This is my take as well. I haven’t felt that graphics improvement has “wowed” me since the PS3 era honestly. I’m a huge fan of Final Fantasy games. Every mainline game (those with just a number; excluding 11 and 14 which are MMOs) pushes the graphical limits of the platforms at the time. The jump from 6 to 7 (from SNES to PS1); from 9 to 10 (PS1 to 2); and from 12 to 13 (PS3/X360) were all mind blowing. 15 (PS4) and 16 (PS5) were also major improvements in graphics quality, but the “oh wow” generational gap is gone. And then I look at the gameplay of these games, and it’s generally regarded as going in the opposite direction- it’s all subjective of course but 10 is generally regarded as the last “amazing” overall game, with opinions dropping off from there. We’ve now reached the point where an engaging game with good mechanics is way more important than graphics: case in point being Nintendo Switch, which is cheaper and has much worse hardware, but competes with the PS5 and massively outsells Xbox by huge margins, because the games are fun.
  - musicale 1y ago
    FF12 and FF13 are terrific games that have stood the test of time. And don't forget the series of MMOs: FF11 merged Final Fantasy with old-school MMOs, notably Everquest, to great success. FF14 2.0 was literally A Realm Reborn from the ashes of the failed 1.0, and was followed by the exceptional Heavensward expansion. FF14 Shadowbringers was and is considered great.
crote 1y ago
Consoles are the perfect platform for a proper pure ray tracing revolution. Ray tracing is the obvious path towards perfect photorealistic graphics. The problem is that ray tracing is really expensive, and you can't stuff enough ray tracing hardware into a GPU which can also run traditional graphics for older games. This means games are forced to take a hybrid approach, with ray tracing used to augment traditional graphics. However, full-scene ray tracing has essentially a fixed cost: the hardware needed depends primarily on the resolution and framerate, not the complexity of the scene. Rendering a million photorealistic objects is not much more compute-intensive than rendering a hundred cartoon objects, and without all the complicated tricks needed to fake things in a traditional pipeline any indie dev could make games with AAA graphics. And if you have the hardware for proper full-scene raytracing, you no longer need the whole AI upscaling and framegen to fake it... Ideally you'd want a GPU which is 100% focused on ray tracing and ditches the entire legacy triangle pipeline - but that's a very hard sell in the PC market. Consoles don't have that problem, because not providing perfect backwards compatibility for 20+ years of games isn't a dealbreaker there.
- khalladay 1y ago
  > Rendering a million photorealistic objects is not much more compute-intensive than rendering a hundred cartoon objects Surely ray/triangle intersection tests, brdf evaluation, acceleration structure rebuilds (when things move/animate) all would cost more in your photorealistic scenario than the cartoon scenario?
  - reactordev 1y ago
    Matrix multiplication is all that is and GPUs are really good at doing that in parallel already.
    - oivey 1y ago
      So I guess there is no need to change any of the hardware, then? I think it might be more complicated than waving your hands around linear algebra.
EasyMark 1y ago
doubtful, they say this with every generation of console and even gaming pc systems. When it's popularity decreases then profits decrease and then maybe it will be "the last generation".
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
jayd16 1y ago
There's likely still room to go super wide with CPU cores and much more ram but everyone is talking about neutral nets so that's what the press release is about.
JoshTriplett 1y ago
After raytracing, the next obvious massive improvement would be path tracing. And while consoles usually lag behind the latest available graphics, I'd expect raytracing and even path tracing to become available to console graphics eventually. One advantage of consoles is that they're a fixed hardware target, so games can test on the exact hardware and know exactly what performance they'll get, and whether they consider that performance an acceptable experience.
- winterismute 1y ago
  There is no real difference between "Ray Tracing" and "Path Tracing", or better, the former is just the operation of intersecting a ray with a scene (and not a rendering technique), the latter is a way to solve the integral to approximate the rendering equation (hence, it could be considered a rendering technique). Sure, you can go back to the terminology used by Kajiya in his earlier works etc etc, but it was only a "academic terminology game" which is worthless today. Today, the former is accelerated by HW since around a decade (I am cunting the PowerVR wizard). The latter is how most of non-realtime rendering renders frames. You can not have "Path Tracing" in games, not according to what it is. And it also probably does not make sense, because the goal of real-time rendering is not to render the perfect frame at any time, but it is to produce the best reactive, coherent sequence of frames possible in response to simulation and players inputs. This being said, HW ray tracing is still somehow game changing because it shapes a SIMT HW to make it good at inherently divergent computation (eg. traversing a graph of nodes representing a scene): following this direction, many more things will be unlocked in real-time simulation and rendering. But not 6k samples unidirectionally path-traced per pixel in a game.
  - JoshTriplett 1y ago
    > You can not have "Path Tracing" in games It seems like you're deliberately ignoring the terminology currently widely used in the gaming industry. https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/should-you-bother-with-path-tracing https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/should-you-bother-with-path... https://gamingbolt.com/10-games-that-make-the-best-use-of-path-tracing https://gamingbolt.com/10-games-that-make-the-best-use-of-pa... (And any number of other sources, those are just the first two I found.) If you have some issue with that terminology, by all means raise that issue, but "You can not have" is just factually incorrect here.
dataangel 1y ago
they can't move everything to the cloud because of latency
ClimaxGravely 1y ago
I'd hesitate to call the temporal hacks progress. I disable them every time.
xiande04 1y ago
It's not just technology that's eating away at console sales, it's also the fact that 1) nearly everything is available on PC these days (save Nintendo with its massive IP), 2) mobile gaming, and 3) there's a limitless amount of retro games and hacks or mods of retro games to play and dedicated retro handhelds are a rapidly growing market. Nothing will ever come close to PS2 level sales again. Will be interesting to see how the video game industry evolves over the next decade or two. I suspect subscriptions (sigh) will start to make up for lost console sales.
- theshackleford 1y ago
  > Nothing will ever come close to PS2 level sales again. The switch literally has and according to projections the Switch 1 will in fact have outsold the PS2 globally by the end of the year.
- tonyhart7 1y ago
  "Nothing will ever come close to PS2 level sales again." ps2 sales number is iffy at very least, also ps2 sales has been dethrone "few times" quotation mark since when nintendo sales is creeping up, sony announced there are "few millions sales" added while they already didnt produce them years ago
dehrmann 1y ago
> non generative AI up-scaling I know this isn't an original idea, but I wonder if this will be the trick for step-level improvement in visuals. Use traditional 3D models for the broad strokes and generative AI for texture and lighting details. We're at diminishing returns for add polygons and better lighting, and generative AI seems to be better at improving from there—when it doesn't have to get the finger count right.
hakfoo 1y ago
I think there are a few factors that are likely to slow the pace down quite a bit soon: 1. We realistically aren't going much past 4k anytime soon. Even the few 8k sets on the market are sort of tech demos, because there isn't really the content for it. Maybe 120/240/etc FPS will be a thing, but that's really a linear growth, not exponential, and it has a pretty short path to go (will 500Hz displays ever become a big seller? 1kHz?) 2. The triple-A games market itself is strained-- too many big-money flops, and those are the ones that have historically substituted more triangles for better storytelling. So you're going to reach a point where the hardware isn't really limiting the designers' visions anymore. GenAI seems like a questionable approach for game rendering, both because of inefficiency and non-repeatability. If the AI renders the same scene slightly differently on two machines, it could cause bugs or unfair competitive edges. At most, we'd see AI during the development process to build assets, and that doesn't require a bigger local GPU.

by amlib 1y ago

bob1029 1y ago

Gaming using weird tech is not a hardware manufacturer or availability issue. It is a game studio leadership problem. Even in the latest versions of unreal and unity you will find the classic tools. They just won't be advertised and the engine vendor might even frown upon them during a tech demo to make their fancy new temporal slop solution seem superior. The trick is to not get taken for a ride by the tools vendors. Real time lights, "free" anti aliasing, and sub-pixel triangles are the forbidden fruits of game dev. It's really easy to get caught up in the devil's bargain of trading unlimited art detail for unknowns at end customer time.

aurareturn 1y ago

Beyond the PS6, the answer is very clearly graphics generated in real time via a transformer model. I’d be absolutely shocked if in 10 years, all AAA games aren’t being rendered by a transformer. Google’s veo 3 is already extremely impressive. No way games will be rendered through traditional shaders in 2035.

meindnoch 1y ago
How much money are you willing to bet?
- aurareturn 1y ago
  All my money.
  - CuriouslyC 1y ago
    Even in a future with generative UIs, those UIs will be composed from pre-created primitives just because it's faster and more consistent, there's literally no reason to re-create primitives every time.
  - bigyabai 1y ago
    Go short Nintendo and Sony today. I'm the last one who's going to let my technical acumen get in the way of your mistake.
    - aurareturn 1y ago
      Why would gaming rendering using transformers lead to one shorting Nintendo and Sony?
Certhas 1y ago
This _might_ be true, but it's utterly absurd to claim this is a certainty. The images rendered in a game need to accurately represent a very complex world state. Do we have any examples of Transformer based models doing something in this category? Can they do it in real-time? I could absolutely see something like rendering a simplified and stylised version and getting Transformers to fill in details. That's kind of a direct evolution from the upscaling approach described here, but end to end rendering from game state is far less obvious.

Uvix 1y ago

It sounds like even the PS6 isn’t going to have an expressive improvement, and that the PS5 was the last such console. PS5 Pro was the first console focused on fake frame generation instead of real output resolution/frame rate improvements, and per the article PS6 is continuing that trend.

PaulHoule 1y ago
What really matters is the cost. In the past a game console might launch at a high price point and then after a few years, the price goes down and they can release a new console at a high at a price close to where the last one started. Blame crypto, AI, COVID but there has been no price drop for the PS5 and if there was gonna be a PS6 that was really better it would probably have to cost upwards of $1000 and you might as well get a PC. Sure there are people who haven’t tried Steam + an XBOX controller and think PV gaming is all unfun and sweaty but they will come around.
- Uvix 1y ago
  As long as I need a mouse and keyboard to install updates or to install/start my games from GOG, it's still going to be decidedly unfun, but hopefully Windows' upcoming built-in controller support will make it less unfun.
  - PaulHoule 1y ago
    Today you can just buy an Xbox controller and pair it with your Windows computer and it just works and it’s the same same with the Mac. You don’t have to install any drivers or anything and with the big screen mode in Steam it’s a lean back experience where you can pick out your games and start one up without using anything other than the controller.
    - withinboredom 1y ago
      If you have steam, ps4/ps5 controllers also work fine.

mielioort 1y ago

[dead]

Mistletoe 1y ago

Welcome to the Age of the Plateau. It will change everything we know. Invest accordingly.

64718283661 1y ago
And what do you think to invest in for such times?
- bitmasher9 1y ago
  Moats. Government relationships. Simple and unsexy. Hard assets.
- Mistletoe 1y ago
  Hard assets and things with finite supply. Anything real. Gold, bitcoin, small cap value stocks, commodities, treasuries (if you think the government won't fail). https://portfoliocharts.com/2021/12/16/three-secret-ingredients-of-the-most-efficient-portfolios/ https://portfoliocharts.com/2021/12/16/three-secret-ingredie...
  - didibus 1y ago
    > Anything real > bitcoin :D
    - Mistletoe 1y ago
      If it isn't real, I invite you to get some easily or print more. https://www.investopedia.com/news/hyperinflation-produces-surge-bitcoin-trading-venezuela/ https://www.investopedia.com/news/hyperinflation-produces-su... https://decrypt.co/332083/billionaire-ray-dalio-urges-investors-to-allocate-15-of-portfolios-to-gold-and-bitcoin https://decrypt.co/332083/billionaire-ray-dalio-urges-invest...
      - chowells 1y ago
        If the Internet goes away, Bitcoin goes away. That's a real threat in a bunch of conceivable societal failure scenarios. If you want something real, you want something that will survive the loss of the internet. Admittedly, what you probably want most in those scenarios is diesel, vehicles that run on diesel, and salt. But a pile of gold still could be traded for some of those.

Loic 1y ago

My kids are playing Fortnite on a PS4, it works, they are happy, I feel the rendering is really good (but I am an old guy) and normally, the only problem while playing is the stability of the Internet connection. We also have a lot of fun playing board games, simple stuff from design, card games, here, the game play is the fun factor. Yes, better hardware may bring more realistic, more x or y, but my feeling is that the real driver, long term, is the quality of the game play. Like the quality of the story telling in a good movie.

flyinglizard 1y ago
That's the Nintendo way. Avoiding the photorealism war altogether by making things intentionally sparse and cartoony. Then you can sell cheap hardware, make things portable etc.
- xiande04 1y ago
  I.e., the uncanny valley.
  - gyomu 1y ago
    Cartoony isn’t the uncanny valley. Uncanny valley is attempted photorealism that misses the mark.
    - pipes 1y ago
      I think games like dishonoured also managed to side step the uncanny valley. Not cartoony, just their own thing (actually more like an oil painting).
- tonyhart7 1y ago
  also nintendo vision which is "mobile gaming" are handheld devices like switch,steam deck etc is really the future while phone is also true for some extend but gaming on a phone vs gaming on a handheld is really world of a differences give it few generations then traditional consoles would obsolete, I mean we are literally have a lot of people enjoy indie game in steam deck right now

Keyframe 1y ago

not all games need horse power. We've now past the point of good enough to run a ton of it. Sure, tentpole attractions will warrant more and more, but we're turning back to mechanics, input methods, gameplay, storytelling. If you play 'old' games now, they're perfectly playable. Just like older movies are perfectly watchable. Not saying you should play those (you should), but there's not kuch of a leap needed to keep such ideas going strong and fresh.

ad133 1y ago
This is my take as well. I haven’t felt that graphics improvement has “wowed” me since the PS3 era honestly. I’m a huge fan of Final Fantasy games. Every mainline game (those with just a number; excluding 11 and 14 which are MMOs) pushes the graphical limits of the platforms at the time. The jump from 6 to 7 (from SNES to PS1); from 9 to 10 (PS1 to 2); and from 12 to 13 (PS3/X360) were all mind blowing. 15 (PS4) and 16 (PS5) were also major improvements in graphics quality, but the “oh wow” generational gap is gone. And then I look at the gameplay of these games, and it’s generally regarded as going in the opposite direction- it’s all subjective of course but 10 is generally regarded as the last “amazing” overall game, with opinions dropping off from there. We’ve now reached the point where an engaging game with good mechanics is way more important than graphics: case in point being Nintendo Switch, which is cheaper and has much worse hardware, but competes with the PS5 and massively outsells Xbox by huge margins, because the games are fun.
- musicale 1y ago
  FF12 and FF13 are terrific games that have stood the test of time. And don't forget the series of MMOs: FF11 merged Final Fantasy with old-school MMOs, notably Everquest, to great success. FF14 2.0 was literally A Realm Reborn from the ashes of the failed 1.0, and was followed by the exceptional Heavensward expansion. FF14 Shadowbringers was and is considered great.

crote 1y ago

Consoles are the perfect platform for a proper pure ray tracing revolution. Ray tracing is the obvious path towards perfect photorealistic graphics. The problem is that ray tracing is really expensive, and you can't stuff enough ray tracing hardware into a GPU which can also run traditional graphics for older games. This means games are forced to take a hybrid approach, with ray tracing used to augment traditional graphics. However, full-scene ray tracing has essentially a fixed cost: the hardware needed depends primarily on the resolution and framerate, not the complexity of the scene. Rendering a million photorealistic objects is not much more compute-intensive than rendering a hundred cartoon objects, and without all the complicated tricks needed to fake things in a traditional pipeline any indie dev could make games with AAA graphics. And if you have the hardware for proper full-scene raytracing, you no longer need the whole AI upscaling and framegen to fake it... Ideally you'd want a GPU which is 100% focused on ray tracing and ditches the entire legacy triangle pipeline - but that's a very hard sell in the PC market. Consoles don't have that problem, because not providing perfect backwards compatibility for 20+ years of games isn't a dealbreaker there.

khalladay 1y ago
> Rendering a million photorealistic objects is not much more compute-intensive than rendering a hundred cartoon objects Surely ray/triangle intersection tests, brdf evaluation, acceleration structure rebuilds (when things move/animate) all would cost more in your photorealistic scenario than the cartoon scenario?
- reactordev 1y ago
  Matrix multiplication is all that is and GPUs are really good at doing that in parallel already.
  - oivey 1y ago
    So I guess there is no need to change any of the hardware, then? I think it might be more complicated than waving your hands around linear algebra.

EasyMark 1y ago

doubtful, they say this with every generation of console and even gaming pc systems. When it's popularity decreases then profits decrease and then maybe it will be "the last generation".

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

jayd16 1y ago

There's likely still room to go super wide with CPU cores and much more ram but everyone is talking about neutral nets so that's what the press release is about.

JoshTriplett 1y ago

After raytracing, the next obvious massive improvement would be path tracing. And while consoles usually lag behind the latest available graphics, I'd expect raytracing and even path tracing to become available to console graphics eventually. One advantage of consoles is that they're a fixed hardware target, so games can test on the exact hardware and know exactly what performance they'll get, and whether they consider that performance an acceptable experience.

winterismute 1y ago
There is no real difference between "Ray Tracing" and "Path Tracing", or better, the former is just the operation of intersecting a ray with a scene (and not a rendering technique), the latter is a way to solve the integral to approximate the rendering equation (hence, it could be considered a rendering technique). Sure, you can go back to the terminology used by Kajiya in his earlier works etc etc, but it was only a "academic terminology game" which is worthless today. Today, the former is accelerated by HW since around a decade (I am cunting the PowerVR wizard). The latter is how most of non-realtime rendering renders frames. You can not have "Path Tracing" in games, not according to what it is. And it also probably does not make sense, because the goal of real-time rendering is not to render the perfect frame at any time, but it is to produce the best reactive, coherent sequence of frames possible in response to simulation and players inputs. This being said, HW ray tracing is still somehow game changing because it shapes a SIMT HW to make it good at inherently divergent computation (eg. traversing a graph of nodes representing a scene): following this direction, many more things will be unlocked in real-time simulation and rendering. But not 6k samples unidirectionally path-traced per pixel in a game.
- JoshTriplett 1y ago
  > You can not have "Path Tracing" in games It seems like you're deliberately ignoring the terminology currently widely used in the gaming industry. https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/should-you-bother-with-path-tracing https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/should-you-bother-with-path... https://gamingbolt.com/10-games-that-make-the-best-use-of-path-tracing https://gamingbolt.com/10-games-that-make-the-best-use-of-pa... (And any number of other sources, those are just the first two I found.) If you have some issue with that terminology, by all means raise that issue, but "You can not have" is just factually incorrect here.

dataangel 1y ago

they can't move everything to the cloud because of latency

ClimaxGravely 1y ago

I'd hesitate to call the temporal hacks progress. I disable them every time.

xiande04 1y ago

It's not just technology that's eating away at console sales, it's also the fact that 1) nearly everything is available on PC these days (save Nintendo with its massive IP), 2) mobile gaming, and 3) there's a limitless amount of retro games and hacks or mods of retro games to play and dedicated retro handhelds are a rapidly growing market. Nothing will ever come close to PS2 level sales again. Will be interesting to see how the video game industry evolves over the next decade or two. I suspect subscriptions (sigh) will start to make up for lost console sales.

theshackleford 1y ago
> Nothing will ever come close to PS2 level sales again. The switch literally has and according to projections the Switch 1 will in fact have outsold the PS2 globally by the end of the year.
tonyhart7 1y ago
"Nothing will ever come close to PS2 level sales again." ps2 sales number is iffy at very least, also ps2 sales has been dethrone "few times" quotation mark since when nintendo sales is creeping up, sony announced there are "few millions sales" added while they already didnt produce them years ago

dehrmann 1y ago

> non generative AI up-scaling I know this isn't an original idea, but I wonder if this will be the trick for step-level improvement in visuals. Use traditional 3D models for the broad strokes and generative AI for texture and lighting details. We're at diminishing returns for add polygons and better lighting, and generative AI seems to be better at improving from there—when it doesn't have to get the finger count right.

hakfoo 1y ago

I think there are a few factors that are likely to slow the pace down quite a bit soon: 1. We realistically aren't going much past 4k anytime soon. Even the few 8k sets on the market are sort of tech demos, because there isn't really the content for it. Maybe 120/240/etc FPS will be a thing, but that's really a linear growth, not exponential, and it has a pretty short path to go (will 500Hz displays ever become a big seller? 1kHz?) 2. The triple-A games market itself is strained-- too many big-money flops, and those are the ones that have historically substituted more triangles for better storytelling. So you're going to reach a point where the hardware isn't really limiting the designers' visions anymore. GenAI seems like a questionable approach for game rendering, both because of inefficiency and non-repeatability. If the AI renders the same scene slightly differently on two machines, it could cause bugs or unfair competitive edges. At most, we'd see AI during the development process to build assets, and that doesn't require a bigger local GPU.