2nd February 2010, 1:35 AM
That development issue isn't limited to PCs. As you mentioned PCs have been getting steadily more powerful, but have the games actually been making use of that? Not many compaired to the ones being made for the lowest common denominator, consoles. Part of that is just that it's cheaper to produce the same game, but another part is very likely the same reason a new generation isn't good right now, costs in developing for the latest and greatest video cards to take full advantage.
One thing I'm looking forward to is the upcoming big push to merge GPUs with CPUs. Right now, video cards are practically computers unto themselves that you stick in your machine. Just about everything in modern games is being shunted off to functions being replicated on the video cards. It started with giving video cards their own RAM to speed up access, then they started adding logic processors to remove the bottleneck of communicating with the main processor, and so on. At this point, the difference between a computer running different processors is not nearly as noticable, in games, as a difference in video cards.
Video card makers are realizing that this is a pretty stupid and wasteful state of affairs. There's all this RAM and a whole processor being almost ignored in favor of shunting it all to the video card, and they basically realized that the easy solution is to reverse the trend by just putting all those subroutines onto the main processor. Since main processors, just like video card GPUs, are now sporting multiple processing cores, this is a transition that should be pretty easy, as the typical processing will not be hindered with a different core or cores managing video processing. Since "physics processing" has already been shoved into video cards, that too will be getting merged with CPUs. Another big advantage is the removal of the need for special "video RAM" as it'll have the CPU's extremely fast access to standard RAM. Aside from all this, this will make computers run cooler, with less energy, and it'll take up a lot less room. All they need to do is design motherboards with this in mind, which they are already starting on. Oh, and it needs to be said that for games, this will mean no more worrying about making sure that the images are synched up with whatever logic processing the CPU is doing. Being all on the same processor means a lot of the timing issues can be more automated, and much more quickly communicated between cores so there should be noticable performance increases.
All I'm waiting for is for Creative to get in on the act and work to merge sound processing subroutines into the main processor so that high quality sound processing will just mean dedicating one of the CPU cores to the task, and again speedy communication between what sounds need to be played and what's going on in the game logic will resolve certain timing issues. Both AMD-ATI, Intel, and Nvidia are involved in this push.
Things are sure to get interesting. Oh, and I'm sure that there will still be stripped down cheaper CPUs intended purely for typical work that don't have these pathways installed, so that's not really a concern. Really I'm surprised it's taken so long, but then again it took this long for the situation of modern GPUs to get so ridiculous as to seem like a second computer attached to your actual computer.
One thing I'm looking forward to is the upcoming big push to merge GPUs with CPUs. Right now, video cards are practically computers unto themselves that you stick in your machine. Just about everything in modern games is being shunted off to functions being replicated on the video cards. It started with giving video cards their own RAM to speed up access, then they started adding logic processors to remove the bottleneck of communicating with the main processor, and so on. At this point, the difference between a computer running different processors is not nearly as noticable, in games, as a difference in video cards.
Video card makers are realizing that this is a pretty stupid and wasteful state of affairs. There's all this RAM and a whole processor being almost ignored in favor of shunting it all to the video card, and they basically realized that the easy solution is to reverse the trend by just putting all those subroutines onto the main processor. Since main processors, just like video card GPUs, are now sporting multiple processing cores, this is a transition that should be pretty easy, as the typical processing will not be hindered with a different core or cores managing video processing. Since "physics processing" has already been shoved into video cards, that too will be getting merged with CPUs. Another big advantage is the removal of the need for special "video RAM" as it'll have the CPU's extremely fast access to standard RAM. Aside from all this, this will make computers run cooler, with less energy, and it'll take up a lot less room. All they need to do is design motherboards with this in mind, which they are already starting on. Oh, and it needs to be said that for games, this will mean no more worrying about making sure that the images are synched up with whatever logic processing the CPU is doing. Being all on the same processor means a lot of the timing issues can be more automated, and much more quickly communicated between cores so there should be noticable performance increases.
All I'm waiting for is for Creative to get in on the act and work to merge sound processing subroutines into the main processor so that high quality sound processing will just mean dedicating one of the CPU cores to the task, and again speedy communication between what sounds need to be played and what's going on in the game logic will resolve certain timing issues. Both AMD-ATI, Intel, and Nvidia are involved in this push.
Things are sure to get interesting. Oh, and I'm sure that there will still be stripped down cheaper CPUs intended purely for typical work that don't have these pathways installed, so that's not really a concern. Really I'm surprised it's taken so long, but then again it took this long for the situation of modern GPUs to get so ridiculous as to seem like a second computer attached to your actual computer.
"On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." ~ Charles Babbage (1791-1871)