NVIDIA: Shift In Relevance Away From Games
I'm playing in beautiful 1920x1200 res on a 24" LCD, full detail on Dead Space and Far Cry 2, on roughly $800 worth of hardware (e8600, GF260, 4GB). I don't need to spend any more than $250 each on CPU or GPU, which means I certainly don't need SLI/Crossfire or anything like that. And the problem is that that's not going to change anytime soon. After all, there will never be another Crysis or Doom 3, where these brilliant technical developers are pushing the bar on gaming technology. These guys don't care anymore about that stuff, because no one pays them for it. They end up building crappy games with the tech that they develop and no one buys it, so they go make console games. It's sick how many times that happens.
That's what the market-at-large wants, though, right? The vast majority of consumers don't want to spend a lot of money on their PC, even to run these "technically" beautiful games (I've got people on twitter asking me if ION is a good gaming platform, for goodness sake), so game developers are just listening to their customers and writing software that their customers want, because they want to make money just like everyone else. Who's going to fault them for that?
But that means that at least 30%+ of NVIDIA's business, the hardcore PC gamer, has no reason to spend any money, and NVIDIA (and anyone else that makes high-end PC products, like Intel and AMD) is in big trouble. The current hardware survey on Steam shows only 1% of gamers have more than one GPU, and the most popular GPU by a landslide is still 8800 series. We need games that will take advantage of as much power as is available in hardware, so we can have some reason to sell high-end GPU's. Recession or not, the games are the problem -- our "killer app" is gone!
No wonder Jen-Hsun is up there with Charlie Rose waving ION around! He goes, "This is the Atom processor. It's my favorite processor in the world." lol! NVIDIA is running full speed away from the gaming market and into the arms of GPGPU and IGP's! And as Jen-Hsun talks about what the paradigm shift of relevance for his company is, every god-fearing, self-respecting PC-head looks into the dim, brooding future and sees the dark age of PC gaming looming over him, with cackling, half-naked imps holding XBOX controllers dancing around him.
There's a lot of people who do want to pay for this stuff, but there is just no reason to right now. So, maybe NVIDIA needs to buy some developers and start making some games (I promise I'll buy them, even if they suck), because no one else in the gaming world gives a crap whether they live or die right now. They've all got their own problems... and NVIDIA knows it.
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I just feel like the relentless pursuit of graphical achievement is dead, like free market capitalism. Anyone who ventures down that path again would be stupid to do so.
Games aren't supposed to be about graphics and technical achievement alone.
Furthermore, if the next generation of consoles is as much of a step forward technically as the current gen, there will barely be any more room for purely technical achievement in graphics. id tech 6 will be capable of INFINITE geometric detail (via streaming voxel tech), and will probably use raytracing for lighting.
Taking advantage of the tech we have now is a huge problem for 99% of developers. Realistically, if we had infinite memory bandwidth and storage medium bandwidth, games could be perfectly photoreal on Xbox 360. The single biggest bottleneck in graphics today is storage medium read speeds.
@Jigen, I agree that ALL games shouldn't be about graphics and technical achievement. Some titles thrive on artistic style and story, etc, and are really the next generation of interactive cinema. That's all great, and I love that stuff myself, as well.
But there are also games that really do rely on graphics and technical achievement -- or at least used to. RTS games like World in Conflict and Company of Heroes have definitely been pushing the bar with visuals and physics. And you definitely have FPS fans, like the crowd of people who are drawn to games like Crysis, who crave that as well.
You say there isn't room for technical achievement in graphics, and I'm not a game developer, but I think there's a ton of room. First, I'd say NOTHING is photorealistic at 720p, so the PC is where that's going to happen because that's the only place were pushing resolutions high enough. And, what I saw in Far Cry 2 -- with the advanced AI, weather, animals -- that whole aspect of realism is only just starting to be approached. We've got a long way to go for fully inhabited and destructible environments where all materials look and feel real, and AI enemies and NPC's that can think at a level that makes them look much more realistic.
Game developers are in the business of innovating virtual reality, right? I'd let them figure out how to push the bar -- but I think we can assume that it can be pushed indefinitely.
Crysis' level of quality (1920x1200 w/ everything turned up) is getting pretty close to "good enough" for me, but I still won't be truly satisfied until I can have that at a resolution of 5000x5000+ per eye full stereo at 60+ fps. So... "...pursuit of graphical achievement is dead..." Could not disagree more with that! We've still got plenty of room for hardware to improve! I mean -- never-minding my crazy expectations mentioned above -- real-time, full-screen, high-res ray tracing is kinda the Holy Grail here, and the hardware is only barely getting to the point where that's becoming feasible.
And yeah, it doesn't matter how nifty consoles become if the max resolution stays at only 1080p. Real Life isn't limited to 1080p! Plus you have to put up with those lame controllers... =P
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