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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 m

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 to optimize for the low end and thus they end up gatekeeping games and excluding millions of devices because for recent games, a discrete GPU is required even for the lowest settings.

Bridged7756 10mo ago
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.
- archagon 10mo ago
  I feel like Steam Deck support is making developers optimize again.
  - jamesgeck0 10mo ago
    Not to mention one of the "big three" console manufacturers building their business on older mobile hardware.
- batiudrami 10mo ago
  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.
  - ronsor 10mo ago
    > 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.
    - jeltz 10mo ago
      There were lazy devs back then too but I feel lazy devs have become the norm now.
      - dijit 10mo ago
        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 have before. There are very few “yearly titles” that allow you to nail down the software in a nicer way over time, its always a mad dash to get it done, on a huge 1000+ person project that has to be permanently playable from MAIN and where unit/integration tests would be completely useless the minute they were built. The industry will end, but not because of “lazy devs”, its the ballooned expectations, stagnant revenue opportunity, increased team sizes and a pathological contingent of people using games as a (bad) political vehicle without regard for the fact that they will be laid off if they can’t eventually generate revenue. —- Finally, back in the early days of games, if the game didn’t work, you assumed you needed better hardware and you would put the work in fixing drivers and settings or even upgrading to something that worked. Now if it doesn’t work on something from before COVID the consensus is that it is not optimised enough. I’m not casting aspersions at the mindset, but it’s a different mentality.
        gmueckl 10mo ago
        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.
- pzmarzly 10mo ago
  > Long gone are the days of a game being amazing because the devs managed to pull crazy graphics for the current hardware. DOOM and Battlefield 6 are praised for being surprisingly well optimized for the graphics they offer, and some people bought these games for that reason alone. But I guess in the good old days good optimization would be the norm, not the exception.
- djmips 10mo ago
  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'.
- cycomanic 10mo ago
  This is such a funny take, I remember all throughout the 90s and 00s (and maybe even 10s, not playing much then anymore) you often could new games on acceptable settings with a 1-2 year old high spec machine, in fact to play at highest settings you often needed ridiculously spec'ed machines. Now you can play the biggest titles (CP77, BG3 ...) on 5-10 year old hardware (not even top spec), with non or minimal performance/quality impact. I mean I've been playing BG3 and CP77 on highest settings on a PC that I bought 2 years ago used for $600 (BG3 I was playing when it had just come out).
- rerdavies 10mo ago
  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.
forrestthewoods 10mo ago
> I think it would be a good thing. This is an insane thing to say. > Game and engine devs simply don't bother anymore to optimize for the low end All games carefully consider the total addressable market. You can build a low end game that runs great on total ass garbage onboard GPU. Suffice to say these gamers are not an audience that spend a lot of money on games. It’s totally fine and good to build premium content that requires premium hardware. It’s also good to run on low-end hardware to increase the TAM. But there are limits. Building a modern game and targeting a 486 is a wee bit silly. If Nvidia gamer GPUs disappear and devs were forced to build games that are capable of running on shit ass hardware the net benefit to gamers would be very minimal. What would actually benefit gamers is making good hardware available at an affordable price! Everything about your comment screams “tall poppy syndrome”. </rant>
- bombcar 10mo ago
  I wonder what Balatro dos that wouldn’t be possible on a 486.
  - duskwuff 10mo ago
    The swirly background (especially on the main screen), shiny card effects, and the CRT distortion effect would be genuinely difficult to implement on a system from that era. Balatro does all three with a couple hundred lines of GLSL shaders. (The third would, of course, be redundant if you were actually developing for a period 486. But I digress.)
  - oivey 10mo ago
    Virtually all the graphics? Modern computers are very fast.
    - bombcar 10mo ago
      Sure the effects, etc aren’t possible, nor would the resolutions of modern phones. But solitare ran on a 486 and I don’t see what of the gameplay requires massive CPU.
  - 10mo ago
georgefrowny 10mo ago
One wonders what would happen in a SHtF situation or someone stubs their toe on the demolition charges switch at TSMC and all the TwinScans get minced. Would there be a huge drive towards debloating software to run again on random old computers people find in cupboards?
- gunalx 10mo ago
  Until we end up spending trillions recreating the fab capacity of tsmc, they dont have a full monppoly (yet)
bilegeek 10mo ago
> 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. They'll just move to remote rendering you'll have to subscribe to. Computers will stagnate as they are, and all new improvements will be reserved for the cloud providers. All hail our gracious overlords "donating" their compute time to the unwashed masses. Hopefully AMD and Intel would still try. But I fear they'd probably follow Nvidia's lead.
- pegasus 10mo ago
  Is remote rendering a thing? I would have imagined the lag would make something like that impractical.
  - WackyFighter 10mo ago
    The lag is high. Google was doing this with stadia. A huge amount of money comes from online multiplayer games and almost all of them require minimal latency to play well. So I doubt EA, Microsoft, Activision is going to effectively kill those cash cows. Game streaming works well for puzzle, story-esque games where latency isn't an issue.
    - filleduchaos 10mo ago
      Hinging your impression of the domain on what Google (notoriously not really a player in the gaming world) tried and failed will not exactly give you the most accurate picture. You might as well hinge your impression of how successful a game engine can be on Amazon's attempts at it. GeForce NOW and Xbox Cloud are much more sensible projects to look at/evaluate than Stadia.
      - WackyFighter 10mo ago
        It doesn't matter who does it. To stream you need to send the player input across the net, process, render and then send that back to the client. There is no way to eliminate that input lag. Any game that is requires high APM (Action Per Minute) will be horrible to play via streaming. I feel as if I shouldn't really need to explain this on this site, because it should be blindingly obvious that this will always be an issue with any streamed games for the same reason you have a several seconds lag between what happening on a live sports event and what you see on the screen.
vachina 10mo ago
You wish. Games will just be published cloud-only and you can only play them via thin clients.
- iwontberude 10mo ago
  This hurt my soul. Kudos.
- treyd 10mo ago
  It's pretty consistently been shown that this just can't provide low-enough latency for gamers to be comfortable with it. Every attempt at providing this has experience has failed. There's few games where this can even theoretically be viable. The economics of it also have issues, as now you have to run a bunch more datacenters full of GPUs, and with an inconsistent usage curve leaving a bunch of them being left idle at any given time. You'd have to charge a subscription to justify that, which the market would not accept.
  - Imustaskforhelp 10mo ago
    I am pretty sure that the current demand of gpu's can pretty much eat the left idle time issue at major datacenters because of the AI craze. Not that its good or bad tho but we could probably have something more akin to spot instances of gpu being given for gaming purposes. I do see a lot of company are having GPU access costs per second/instant shutdown/restart I suppose but overall I agree My brother recently came for the holidays and I played ps5 for the first time on his mac connected to his room 70-100 kms away and honestly, the biggest factor of latency was how far the wifi connection (which was his phone's carrier) and overall, it was a good enough experience but I only played mortal kombat for a few minutes :)
    - cyber_kinetist 10mo ago
      Current datacenter GPUs are optimized for LLM compute, not for real-time rendering. The economics for running such beefy GPUs just for game streaming won't add up.
    - 10mo ago
mikepurvis 10mo ago
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.
- nerdsniper 10mo ago
  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.
  - futureshock 10mo ago
    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.
    - mikepurvis 10mo ago
      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.
    - Retric 10mo ago
      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.
    - encrypted_bird 10mo ago
      > You have to sit very close to a 4k display to be able to perceive the full resolution. Wait, are you sure you don't have that backward? IIUC, you don't[] notice the difference between a 2K display and a 4K display until you get up to larger screen sizes (say 60+ inches give or take a dozen inches; I don't have exact numbers :) ) and with those the optimal viewing range is like 4-8 feet away (depending on the screen size). Either that or am I missing something... []Generally, anyway. A 4K resolution should definitely be visible at 1-2 feet away as noticeably crisper, but only slightly.
venturecruelty 10mo ago
[flagged]
- sombragris 10mo ago
  I fail to see how my comment could be construed as being pro-monopoly. There are a huge number of onboard GPUs being left out of even minimum requirements for most recent games. I'm just saying that maybe this situation could led game devs to finally consider such devices as legitimate targets and thus make their games playable on such devices. This is by no means a pro-monopolistic take.
preisschild 10mo ago
I agree re "optimizations", but I dont think there should be compromises on quality (if set to max/ultra settings)
g947o 10mo ago
Gaming performance is so much more than hardware specs. Thinking that game devs optimizing their games on their own could fundamentally change the gaming experience is delusional. And anyone who knows just a tiny bit of history of nvidia would know how much investment they have put into gaming and the technology they pioneered.
nsxwolf 10mo ago
I have a 9 year old gaming PC with an RX480 and it is only now starting to not be able to run certain games at all (recent ones that require ray tracing). It can play Cyberpunk and Starfield on low settings very acceptably.
jayd16 10mo ago
Consoles and their install base set the target performance envelope. If your machine can't keep up with a 5 year old console then you should lower expectations. And like, when have onboard GPUs ever been good? The fact that they're even feasible these days should be praised but you're imagining some past where devs left them behind.

Bridged7756 10mo ago

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.

archagon 10mo ago
I feel like Steam Deck support is making developers optimize again.
- jamesgeck0 10mo ago
  Not to mention one of the "big three" console manufacturers building their business on older mobile hardware.
batiudrami 10mo ago
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.
- ronsor 10mo ago
  > 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.
  - jeltz 10mo ago
    There were lazy devs back then too but I feel lazy devs have become the norm now.
    - dijit 10mo ago
      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 have before. There are very few “yearly titles” that allow you to nail down the software in a nicer way over time, its always a mad dash to get it done, on a huge 1000+ person project that has to be permanently playable from MAIN and where unit/integration tests would be completely useless the minute they were built. The industry will end, but not because of “lazy devs”, its the ballooned expectations, stagnant revenue opportunity, increased team sizes and a pathological contingent of people using games as a (bad) political vehicle without regard for the fact that they will be laid off if they can’t eventually generate revenue. —- Finally, back in the early days of games, if the game didn’t work, you assumed you needed better hardware and you would put the work in fixing drivers and settings or even upgrading to something that worked. Now if it doesn’t work on something from before COVID the consensus is that it is not optimised enough. I’m not casting aspersions at the mindset, but it’s a different mentality.
      - gmueckl 10mo ago
        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.
pzmarzly 10mo ago
> Long gone are the days of a game being amazing because the devs managed to pull crazy graphics for the current hardware. DOOM and Battlefield 6 are praised for being surprisingly well optimized for the graphics they offer, and some people bought these games for that reason alone. But I guess in the good old days good optimization would be the norm, not the exception.
djmips 10mo ago
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'.
cycomanic 10mo ago
This is such a funny take, I remember all throughout the 90s and 00s (and maybe even 10s, not playing much then anymore) you often could new games on acceptable settings with a 1-2 year old high spec machine, in fact to play at highest settings you often needed ridiculously spec'ed machines. Now you can play the biggest titles (CP77, BG3 ...) on 5-10 year old hardware (not even top spec), with non or minimal performance/quality impact. I mean I've been playing BG3 and CP77 on highest settings on a PC that I bought 2 years ago used for $600 (BG3 I was playing when it had just come out).
rerdavies 10mo ago
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.

forrestthewoods 10mo ago

> I think it would be a good thing. This is an insane thing to say. > Game and engine devs simply don't bother anymore to optimize for the low end All games carefully consider the total addressable market. You can build a low end game that runs great on total ass garbage onboard GPU. Suffice to say these gamers are not an audience that spend a lot of money on games. It’s totally fine and good to build premium content that requires premium hardware. It’s also good to run on low-end hardware to increase the TAM. But there are limits. Building a modern game and targeting a 486 is a wee bit silly. If Nvidia gamer GPUs disappear and devs were forced to build games that are capable of running on shit ass hardware the net benefit to gamers would be very minimal. What would actually benefit gamers is making good hardware available at an affordable price! Everything about your comment screams “tall poppy syndrome”. </rant>

bombcar 10mo ago
I wonder what Balatro dos that wouldn’t be possible on a 486.
- duskwuff 10mo ago
  The swirly background (especially on the main screen), shiny card effects, and the CRT distortion effect would be genuinely difficult to implement on a system from that era. Balatro does all three with a couple hundred lines of GLSL shaders. (The third would, of course, be redundant if you were actually developing for a period 486. But I digress.)
- oivey 10mo ago
  Virtually all the graphics? Modern computers are very fast.
  - bombcar 10mo ago
    Sure the effects, etc aren’t possible, nor would the resolutions of modern phones. But solitare ran on a 486 and I don’t see what of the gameplay requires massive CPU.
- 10mo ago

georgefrowny 10mo ago

One wonders what would happen in a SHtF situation or someone stubs their toe on the demolition charges switch at TSMC and all the TwinScans get minced. Would there be a huge drive towards debloating software to run again on random old computers people find in cupboards?

gunalx 10mo ago
Until we end up spending trillions recreating the fab capacity of tsmc, they dont have a full monppoly (yet)

bilegeek 10mo ago

> 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. They'll just move to remote rendering you'll have to subscribe to. Computers will stagnate as they are, and all new improvements will be reserved for the cloud providers. All hail our gracious overlords "donating" their compute time to the unwashed masses. Hopefully AMD and Intel would still try. But I fear they'd probably follow Nvidia's lead.

pegasus 10mo ago
Is remote rendering a thing? I would have imagined the lag would make something like that impractical.
- WackyFighter 10mo ago
  The lag is high. Google was doing this with stadia. A huge amount of money comes from online multiplayer games and almost all of them require minimal latency to play well. So I doubt EA, Microsoft, Activision is going to effectively kill those cash cows. Game streaming works well for puzzle, story-esque games where latency isn't an issue.
  - filleduchaos 10mo ago
    Hinging your impression of the domain on what Google (notoriously not really a player in the gaming world) tried and failed will not exactly give you the most accurate picture. You might as well hinge your impression of how successful a game engine can be on Amazon's attempts at it. GeForce NOW and Xbox Cloud are much more sensible projects to look at/evaluate than Stadia.
    - WackyFighter 10mo ago
      It doesn't matter who does it. To stream you need to send the player input across the net, process, render and then send that back to the client. There is no way to eliminate that input lag. Any game that is requires high APM (Action Per Minute) will be horrible to play via streaming. I feel as if I shouldn't really need to explain this on this site, because it should be blindingly obvious that this will always be an issue with any streamed games for the same reason you have a several seconds lag between what happening on a live sports event and what you see on the screen.

vachina 10mo ago

You wish. Games will just be published cloud-only and you can only play them via thin clients.

iwontberude 10mo ago
This hurt my soul. Kudos.
treyd 10mo ago
It's pretty consistently been shown that this just can't provide low-enough latency for gamers to be comfortable with it. Every attempt at providing this has experience has failed. There's few games where this can even theoretically be viable. The economics of it also have issues, as now you have to run a bunch more datacenters full of GPUs, and with an inconsistent usage curve leaving a bunch of them being left idle at any given time. You'd have to charge a subscription to justify that, which the market would not accept.
- Imustaskforhelp 10mo ago
  I am pretty sure that the current demand of gpu's can pretty much eat the left idle time issue at major datacenters because of the AI craze. Not that its good or bad tho but we could probably have something more akin to spot instances of gpu being given for gaming purposes. I do see a lot of company are having GPU access costs per second/instant shutdown/restart I suppose but overall I agree My brother recently came for the holidays and I played ps5 for the first time on his mac connected to his room 70-100 kms away and honestly, the biggest factor of latency was how far the wifi connection (which was his phone's carrier) and overall, it was a good enough experience but I only played mortal kombat for a few minutes :)
  - cyber_kinetist 10mo ago
    Current datacenter GPUs are optimized for LLM compute, not for real-time rendering. The economics for running such beefy GPUs just for game streaming won't add up.
  - 10mo ago

mikepurvis 10mo ago

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.

nerdsniper 10mo ago
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.
- futureshock 10mo ago
  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.
  - mikepurvis 10mo ago
    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.
  - Retric 10mo ago
    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.
  - encrypted_bird 10mo ago
    > You have to sit very close to a 4k display to be able to perceive the full resolution. Wait, are you sure you don't have that backward? IIUC, you don't[] notice the difference between a 2K display and a 4K display until you get up to larger screen sizes (say 60+ inches give or take a dozen inches; I don't have exact numbers :) ) and with those the optimal viewing range is like 4-8 feet away (depending on the screen size). Either that or am I missing something... []Generally, anyway. A 4K resolution should definitely be visible at 1-2 feet away as noticeably crisper, but only slightly.

venturecruelty 10mo ago

[flagged]

sombragris 10mo ago
I fail to see how my comment could be construed as being pro-monopoly. There are a huge number of onboard GPUs being left out of even minimum requirements for most recent games. I'm just saying that maybe this situation could led game devs to finally consider such devices as legitimate targets and thus make their games playable on such devices. This is by no means a pro-monopolistic take.

preisschild 10mo ago

I agree re "optimizations", but I dont think there should be compromises on quality (if set to max/ultra settings)

g947o 10mo ago

Gaming performance is so much more than hardware specs. Thinking that game devs optimizing their games on their own could fundamentally change the gaming experience is delusional. And anyone who knows just a tiny bit of history of nvidia would know how much investment they have put into gaming and the technology they pioneered.

nsxwolf 10mo ago

I have a 9 year old gaming PC with an RX480 and it is only now starting to not be able to run certain games at all (recent ones that require ray tracing). It can play Cyberpunk and Starfield on low settings very acceptably.

jayd16 10mo ago

Consoles and their install base set the target performance envelope. If your machine can't keep up with a 5 year old console then you should lower expectations. And like, when have onboard GPUs ever been good? The fact that they're even feasible these days should be praised but you're imagining some past where devs left them behind.