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.

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.

> 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.

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.

>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.

Because optimized games aren’t completely extinct and there’s titles with similar levels of size, fidelity, and feature utilization with dramatically differing performance profiles.

Nanite has a performance overhead for simple scenes but will render large, complex scenes with high-quality models much more efficiently, providing a faster and more stable framerate.

It’s also completely optional in Unreal 5. You use it if it’s better. Many published UE5 games don’t use it.

Well yeah, features that push the graphics card typically incur performance hits.

PS4 wasnt too terrible but jumping back to PS3... wow I completely forgot how memory starved that machine was. Working on it, we knew at the time but in retro spect it was just horrible.

Small RAM space with the hard CPU/GPU split (so no reallocation) feeding off a slow HDD which is being fed by an even slower Bluray disc, you are sitting around for a while.

Bloodborne when it came out was around 1 minute between deaths.

Did you forget that on the N64, load times were near instantaneous?

I have played through CP2077 with 40, 30 and 25 fps. A child doesn't care if Zelda runs with low FPS.

The only thing I value is a consistent stream of frames on a console.

Also FPS just requires throwing more compute at it.

Excessively high detail models require extra artist time too.

That talk predates the death of SRAM scaling. I will not bother wasting my time watching a video that is out of date.

That said, you should read that I did not say Moore’s Law was entirely dead. It is dead for SRAM and IO logic, but is still around for compute logic. However, pricing is shooting upward with each die shrink far faster than it did in the past.

Hardware improvements only matter to the extent software is actually able to make use of them.

Yeah. Only problem is that overly aggressive TAA implementations blur the whole frame during camera rotation. The thing that is even better than standard TAA is a combination of TAA and temporal upscaling, called TSR in Unreal. Still better is the same system but performed by an ML model, e.g. DLSS. Though this requires special inference hardware inside the GPU.

In the past, MSAA worked reasonably well, but it was relatively expensive, doesn't apply to all forms of high frequency aliasing, and it doesn't work anymore with the modern rendering paradigm anyway.

ThreatInteractive is an anti-TAA developer/YouTuber. They make a compelling argument against TAA and present an alternative they are working on for Unreal.

Erm your description of MSAA isn't quite correct, it has nothing to do with vertices and doesn't increase vertex processing cost..

It's more similar to supersampling, but without the higher pixel shader cost (the pixel shader still only runs once per "display pixel", not once per "sample" like in supersampling).

A pixel shader's output is written to multiple (typically 2, 4 or 8) samples, with a coverage mask deciding which samples are written (this coverage mask is all 1s inside a triangle and a combo of 1s and 0s along triangle edges). After rendering to the MSAA render target is complete, an MSAA resolve operation is performed which merges samples into pixels (and this gives you the smoothed triangle edges).

> solves the same problem set with the same or better performance

The games industry has spent the last decade adopting techniques that misleadingly inflate the simple, easily-quantified metrics of FPS and resolution, by sacrificing quality in ways that are harder to quantify. Until you have good metrics for quantifying the motion artifacts and blurring introduced by post-processing AA, upscaling, and temporal AA or frame generation, it's dishonest to claim that those techniques solve the same problem with better performance. They're giving you a worse image, and pointing to the FPS numbers as evidence that they're adequate is focusing on entirely the wrong side of the problem.

That's not to say those techniques aren't sometimes the best available tradeoff, but it's wrong to straight-up ignore the downsides because they're hard to measure.

  > Fully dynamic interactive environments are liberating. Pursuing them in is the right thing to do.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ed4vNNQwCDU

I agree. UE3 was made for Gears of War (pretty much) and as a result the components were there to make Mass Effect.