Is computer evolution slower then ever?

[d4rk3lf]

I mean, let's compare it like this.

- If you compare games from 1980 and 1990 - HUGE difference
- If you compare games from 1990 and 2000 - HUGE difference
- If you compare games from 2000 and 2010 - same as above

Now, if you look, for example, at Skyrim (that was released in 2011), and any new game for the past few years, I don't see any huge difference.
Yeah, the textures are bigger res, the resolutions are bigger, framerate is better, but overall I feel that progress last decade is very minor in comparison to previous decades.
Same for software....
-----------------

I feel almost same about hardware.
Last decade is just adding a few Mhz, or processors over time, more space, more Ram, better graphics... there's nothing "ground braking" for a very long time...
Man! Even our beloved Amiga lived not even a full decade (from start to end), and what was going on from 1985 to 1994 with all various computers and consoles, and these crazy positive times, and I am thinking now, that even retro scene, that started to become really huge at 2010-2011, already outlived whole Amiga era... how crazy is that?
Where is crazy scene now?

I might be missing something huge, but I just can't deny the feel, that (computer evolution) time is slower then ever.

[tero]

Originally Posted by d4rk3lf

... just adding a few Mhz, or processors over time, more space, more Ram, better graphics...

Isn't this exacly what made the huge steps back in the day? The difference is that Mhz, RAM etc were the limiting factor, so each step up on those made a huge difference. Nowadays that is not true anymore. A lot of games aren't even trying to hit the hardware limits.


Under the hood the changes are bigger.

A modern 4Ghz computer is faster than a 10yo 4Ghz machine.

The speed of a PCI-E 4 m.2 ssd is insanly fast compared to anything from 10 years ago.

Graphics wise hardware Raytracing is a very big step. The visual difference is not that big for most games, but from a techinical pov that is huge.

[gimbal]

The next evolution has to be content. I'm looking forward to Elden Ring, I believe that game is going to do something. It's just as graphically impressive as previous FromSoft games, but bigger and more animated. I am ready to immerse myself into that nightmarish fairy tale.

Skyrim is pretty stiff compared to modern games though. It might be a big world, but it's very, very empty. You need to add mods which basically double the system requirements to fill it up with neat stuff.

[wiser3]

Moore's law is the observation that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit doubles about every two years.

That has come to an end. Transister components are now so small that quantum effects come into play so progress on shrinking components has greatly slowed.

We still also get improvements in circuit design, chip size, etc... but overall performance increase isn't nearly as much as it used to be.

You also have to consider that we are getting closer to the limits of human eyes and ears. The human eye can't actually see 16.8 million different colours. However, progress can be made by continuing to make the brightest whites whiter and the darkest blacks blacker.

[Galahad/FLT]

It's part of the reason why I haven't gone out and bought a PS5 to replace the still working PS4.

I'm not seeing the leaps that other Playstation generations had.

"Compare this video, look how the shadows are sharper on the PS5 versus the PS4"...... er, i'm going to need a little more than that before I go spunk money on a new console when the old one is still providing a decent show of things!!!

All we can expect at the moment is slightly longer draw distances, maybe slightly higher resolution and more detail, but certainly so far, i've not seen any game on PS5 that makes me think "its going to look shit on PS4!"

[rothers]

What apple are doing with their switch to ARM is really exciting IMO.

[dreadnought]

Originally Posted by gimbal

Skyrim is pretty stiff compared to modern games though. It might be a big world, but it's very, very empty. You need to add mods which basically double the system requirements to fill it up with neat stuff.

Yeah, sure, Skyrim is so empty that people millions of people spend hundreds of hours playing it doing nothing, even on consoles without mods. Speaking of mods, that thing about them "doubling the requirements" is also bunk. Most gameplay mods don't weigh much, it's stuff like ENB which can seriously affect framerates - though not as much in 2021.



Skyrim is also a good example of what's wrong with modern gaming in the sense that it's a rare game which puts freeform gameplay first and is not trying to be a narrative driven Hollywood blockbuster. I've just finished one of my "modern gaming" periods, playing most of the releases from the last few years. Most of them are really boring, just following the same tedious template and not really pushing the gameplay envelope at all. Assassin Creed series is the best example here. So I ended up mostly playing the same games I did during my last modern phase: FO4/Skyrim, Watchdogs, No Man's Sky, Dying Light, Dark Souls - ie games where GAMEplay matters. Day's Gone was a one nice surprise, what with an unpredictable world requiring good resource management, but that got slated, so...



Yeah, Elden Ring will most likely be great, but hardly innovative (just like the whole DS series, which is pretty much the same as in King's Field days really). The truth is the big AAA publishers are absolutely terrified of experimenting or expanding gameplay systems, but why should they bother, really? The interactive narratives known as "games" sell very well and are much easier to make.

[Keops/Equinox]

Originally Posted by d4rk3lf

Last decade is just adding a few Mhz, or processors over time, more space, more Ram, better graphics...

Adding MHz is slowly hitting the wall of physics, it's not just about MHz anymore, it's about parallelization nowadays, and GPUs.

GPUs have really become incredibly powerful beasts and CPUs are all about intense multithreading. If you take the Xbox Seriex X, it's "just" around 4 GHz but you have 8 CPU cores and 16 threads.
On PS5, the speed of the SSD drive is insane compare to what you had on a regular hard drive 10 years ago, it allows to reach crazy streaming speeds, which will hopefully have more interesting world design in games.

Skyrim ran at 1280x720 = 921,600 pixels
Nowadays, games running in native 4k have 3840 x 2160 = 8,294,400
That's basically x9

The number of vertices in a scene has also skyrocketed (I'm not even talking about the Nanites tech from Epic Games in Unreal).
Same for the quality of materials. The days of diffuse map + normal maps are long gone, you can now have very complex materials in a game, reading A LOT of various textures.

Also, you might not notice it or you might have forgotten but nowadays games have a lot more details than they had 10 years ago: all the little things that make things look more natural (cloth simulation, physics, particles, VFX, animation, etc)
Nowadays, smoke is not just dull billboards/sprites anymore, it has per pixel lighting/shadowing, things like OIT (order independent transparency, to fix the increasingly complex sorting issues because games have more and more layers of particles) and in some cases even has fluid simulation on the GPU.

Lighting has also improved drastically. Ray tracing, global illumination, shadows, deferred lighting, forward+ rendering, physically based rendering, all that stuff has a cost. The number of lights in a scene has a increased a lot those past years, those multiple lights often casting shadows.

The number of bones, vertices and features to animate the face of a character nowadays is much more complex than what it was in Skyrim. Same for general animation, animation transitions etc..

Also all the stuff related to clouds, atmospheric scattering, etc...
Games had basic linear fog before, they now have volumetric fog, which looks really better but also costs much more.

The amount of power and work needed to add more details is basically exponential, possibly because human senses / perception of the world work in a logarithmic way, but you always need much more work / power to add actually more noticeable details

And no, devs are not lazy asses not pushing the hardware to its limits, people would actually be surprised if they knew how hard they usually work on each feature and optimize them.

Unfortunately, when games are ported to PC, new issues arise due to the unlimited number of PC configurations that gamedevs can't possibly test, but that's another topic

[Keops/Equinox]

Originally Posted by Galahad/FLT

All we can expect at the moment is slightly longer draw distances, maybe slightly higher resolution and more detail, but certainly so far, i've not seen any game on PS5 that makes me think "its going to look shit on PS4!"

Indeed we can't compare a game made at the end of the PS4 era and a game made at the beginning of the PS5 era.

The right comparison will be a PS4 game from 2020 VS a PS5 game from 2025

Also, if you check my post above, the difference in resolution is a good example:
720p VS 4k is basically 9x more pixels, but to the human eye / brain it doesn't look 9x "more detailed", so it somehow takes exponential efforts to show noticeable differences.

[Foebane]

TL;DR

What I've noticed about PC CPU evolution is that for a long time the CPU chips were single cores which got more powerful and faster and more advanced, but then physical limitations meant they hit a dead end, so they started multiplying cores instead, so we had dual-core, quad-core, and I think now we even have eight-core. The downside of those is that there has to be extra circuitry to manage the communication between the cores, AND the software has to be written to support them, too.

[Foebane]

Originally Posted by Galahad/FLT

It's part of the reason why I haven't gone out and bought a PS5 to replace the still working PS4.

I'm not seeing the leaps that other Playstation generations had.

"Compare this video, look how the shadows are sharper on the PS5 versus the PS4"...... er, i'm going to need a little more than that before I go spunk money on a new console when the old one is still providing a decent show of things!!!

All we can expect at the moment is slightly longer draw distances, maybe slightly higher resolution and more detail, but certainly so far, i've not seen any game on PS5 that makes me think "its going to look shit on PS4!"

I will say one thing about these modern consoles: at least the games on each of them more or less look identical. Compare in the past with 8- and 16-bit computer versions, not to mention the consoles of the day: most of the time, there would be massive differences between them!

[aeberbach]

Why have "big" games stopped changing? They stopped being made by enthusiasts for enthusiasts when money stepped in. EA is a great example. Churn out the same easy (and I do mean EASY) games dumbed down for console control schemes, put them on Windows as well, sometimes Mac and Linux, and get rich. They think better means more resolution or more fancy shading or getting closer to the uncanny valley, but it's the same game whether you're a viking or a playa or a samurai, basically. I can think of one example with very pretty leaves blowing around while you fight - but it still the same old crap.

The big producers own the developers that didn't become big enough to go it alone by now. If a developer they bought doesn't deliver for a year, studio closed, people laid off, plenty more fresh bodies where they came form. Not that there's a lot to deliver in the sports franchise sector, just get the artists to tweak the assets and bump the year number on the cover.

It is incredibly hard for anyone to break into this because these so-called AAA games cost hundreds of millions of dollars to produce. And if the new game doesn't trigger the endorphins of the Mountain Dew-addled console jockeys and let them win just as easily as the competition, no chance.

There _is_ innovation but you have to dig. Darkest Dungeon is like not many other games. "Sir, You Are Being Hunted" is not like most other games. Just get on Steam and dig...

[freehand]

Originally Posted by tero

Isn't this exacly what made the huge steps back in the day? The difference is that Mhz, RAM etc were the limiting factor, so each step up on those made a huge difference. Nowadays that is not true anymore. A lot of games aren't even trying to hit the hardware limits.


Under the hood the changes are bigger.

A modern 4Ghz computer is faster than a 10yo 4Ghz machine.

The speed of a PCI-E 4 m.2 ssd is insanly fast compared to anything from 10 years ago.

Graphics wise hardware Raytracing is a very big step. The visual difference is not that big for most games, but from a techinical pov that is huge.

Very True I can now sit in the Cockpit of a f16 in dcs word with VR and my mind is blown away every time I fly.

[lmimmfn]

Is the law of dimenishing returns, compute power is higher but other than FPS increases theres very little visual improvements. Ray tracing obviously is the main change but its so expensive on consoles it will be used sparingly, mainly shadows etc.
Comment above on Moores law, well its got a bit more complicated, its based on transistors doubling and cost decreasing but Moores competitor has invested in chiplet technology which keeps wafer cost low instead of monolithic cpu's, has multiple chiplets and shared L2/L3 between them. I dont think this is covered by Moores law because you can have multiple CPUs within the same CPU. AMD are up to 64 core EPYX CPUs with 128 threads, mobos supporting 2 of these CPUs so its becoming insane.

Intrl havnt in their released CPUs deviated from huge monolithic CPU architectures and therefore more limited by Moores law, i. e. Theyre having problems shrinking the chip sizes.

In general with PS4 and Xbone, the cpu's we're poor, a as me for the previous console gen so advancements in anything other than gfx were held back, i. e. We had huge physics advancements in the late 2000's but that stagnated, but hopefully will pickup again but consoles are now trying to leverage that CPU power for 120Hz gaming rather thsn advancements.

[Foebane]

I've more or less given up on modern PC games, as they have no appeal to me, and the sheer expensiveness of the graphics cards has been out of my reach.

In fact, my current PC has no external connections from the motherboard at all, except for the power cables and those attaching fans and front panel connectors. I don't have a graphics card at all but use the Intel integrated graphics instead, which is fine for Amiga use, and my SSD is an NVMe screwed directly onto the motherboard, so the drive bays are also completely empty.

I can still play older PC games, up to around 2013 before I have to degrade graphics settings, but as I said, I don't care for modern games. I think it was Doom Eternal that made me decide to give up on PC gaming, as I didn't like the direction it was going in, nor the hardcore nature of the gameplay, and it was Doom (1993) that got me into the PC scene in the first place. So I thought, start with a Doom game, end with a Doom game.

[gimbal]

Originally Posted by dreadnought

Yeah, sure, Skyrim is so empty that people millions of people spend hundreds of hours playing it doing nothing, even on consoles without mods. Speaking of mods, that thing about them "doubling the requirements" is also bunk. Most gameplay mods don't weigh much, it's stuff like ENB which can seriously affect framerates - though not as much in 2021.

Not it's not bunk for me, since I'm speaking from experience.

[d4rk3lf]

Originally Posted by gimbal

I'm looking forward to Elden Ring, I believe that game is going to do something. .

Lol, you're kidding, right?
I saw the trailer few days a go, and t looks (visually) to me, like some game from 2005. I can't understand the praise. Lot's and lot's of low polygon stuff on the screen all the time.
Maybe the game will be masterpiece in storytelling and gameplay... but visually... oh boy... I wonder how they are not ashamed to show that in 2021.
And the fact Martin is involved in it, is, for me, very discouraging, because of what he did with Got. Killing main characters for shock purposes, and not finding proper ways of justify it.

Originally Posted by Galahad/FLT

"Compare this video, look how the shadows are sharper on the PS5 versus the PS4"......

Lol, exactly my thought's when some people showcasing Unreal 5 power.
"Look this scene and how is masterfully lit with UE5 real-time lighting"
I look at it and think: "Well, this is really bad. I saw better lit scenes, not only in UE4, but in UE3".

Originally Posted by dreadnought

Skyrim is also a good example of what's wrong with modern gaming

Actually, I only mention Skyrim because of the overall visual comparison to modern games.
Personally, the whole Elder Scroll franchise, is very dull and boring to me (I am a Gothic fan).

Originally Posted by Keops/Equinox

On PS5, the speed of the SSD drive is insane compare to what you had on a regular hard drive 10 years ago, it allows to reach crazy streaming speeds, which will hopefully have more interesting world design in games.

10 years a go, you also had SSD's, and they weren't very rare.

Originally Posted by Keops/Equinox

Skyrim ran at 1280x720 = 921,600 pixels
Nowadays, games running in native 4k have 3840 x 2160 = 8,294,400
That's basically x9

Are you sure that Skyrim didn't run on fullHD?
But nevertheless, the visual difference between modern games and Skyrim, are nothing compared to visual difference between games from 2001 and 2011.

Originally Posted by Keops/Equinox

all the little things that make things look more natural (cloth simulation, physics, particles, VFX, animation, etc)

True, but the impact is very little visually rewarding.
Actually, in some cases realtime cloth sim's are worse then pre-simulated (vertex baked anims) loops of cloth anims.

Originally Posted by Keops/Equinox

Nowadays, smoke is not just dull billboards/sprites anymore, it has per pixel lighting/shadowing, things like OIT (order independent transparency,

No, it's not.
Smoke is still dull billboard sprites in vast majority of cases, because our hardware are still not enough powerful to do real-time fluids sims, and real-time fluid sims are not yet researched enough in software terms.
What you're saying I just saw on Ember software examples, and they are just real-time fluid sims ALONE in the scene, so GPU power is focused only on that.
Point me to a modern game that have real-time smoke sim, because I haven't seen any.

Originally Posted by Keops/Equinox

Lighting has also improved drastically. Ray tracing, global illumination, shadows, deferred lighting, forward+ rendering, physically based rendering, all that stuff has a cost.

No, it's not.
Bioshock from 2005. can still teach a lesson of proper lighting and mood to many modern games. Besides, realtime GI is visually not much difference, in comparison with baked lightning.
It's maybe even worse, because it still can't catch up with details of prebaked lightning.

Originally Posted by Keops/Equinox

And no, devs are not lazy asses not pushing the hardware to its limits, people would actually be surprised if they knew how hard they usually work on each feature and optimize them.

I never said dev's are lazy asses, and I congratulate every step they make.
I am not blaming anyone.
It's just my observation that last decade is way slower then before in computer terms.

[Havie]

Originally Posted by Galahad/FLT

It's part of the reason why I haven't gone out and bought a PS5 to replace the still working PS4.

I'm not seeing the leaps that other Playstation generations had.

"Compare this video, look how the shadows are sharper on the PS5 versus the PS4"...... er, i'm going to need a little more than that before I go spunk money on a new console when the old one is still providing a decent show of things!!!

All we can expect at the moment is slightly longer draw distances, maybe slightly higher resolution and more detail, but certainly so far, i've not seen any game on PS5 that makes me think "its going to look shit on PS4!"

That's because you can't buy one!

We have a PS5 in the house and I agree - graphics are better and ray tracing is there but not a significant leap from PS4. Where there is significant improvement is on the controller - it really is that good. And playing PSVR for the first time was a revelation (something I haven't really had in gaming for a very long time) - you genuinely feel that you are there and it is completely immersive (and this is from someone who doesn't have binocular vision).

With regards to PCs - yes they may be faster and load quicker but are they a significant step up from 5/10 years ago? Probably not. My 1060, 8400, 16gb seems to be enough for now and can't get excited about upgrading, especially when you look at the cost!

Putting an accelerator in an Amiga made a huge difference but buying a faster PC really doesn't unless you are obsessed with FPS!

[Galahad/FLT]

Originally Posted by Keops/Equinox

Indeed we can't compare a game made at the end of the PS4 era and a game made at the beginning of the PS5 era.

The right comparison will be a PS4 game from 2020 VS a PS5 game from 2025

Also, if you check my post above, the difference in resolution is a good example:
720p VS 4k is basically 9x more pixels, but to the human eye / brain it doesn't look 9x "more detailed", so it somehow takes exponential efforts to show noticeable differences.

I disagree. The technology hasnt changed much, the underlying hardware of both the Xbox and PS are the same as their previous generations, I.e. we should be expecting this new generation to hit their stride much quicker than the previous generation, I would certainly expect more than smoother shadows.

The other problem I didnt mention is that, PS1 helped herald FPS games in a big way, they were still in their infancy with Doom and other clones.

We are not going to see such strides again, we are simply going to see the same games, the same franchises, just slightly shinier.

I can see this generation being the start of a slide in popularity, as casual gamers dont bother, bored of playing the same games.

[Foebane]

Originally Posted by Galahad/FLT

We are not going to see such strides again, we are simply going to see the same games, the same franchises, just slightly shinier.

I can see this generation being the start of a slide in popularity, as casual gamers dont bother, bored of playing the same games.

Hmm. This must be why I'VE gone off new PC games. As it is, I have no interest in these franchises like Fortnite and previously Overwatch, I just tended to stick to what I knew in the 1990s and early Noughties. But even they let me down with their latest releases.