The End of Hardware Limits: How Modern Tech Is Changing Game Design Forever
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- Опубліковано 24 тра 2023
- Maybe the PS6 will have smell-o-vision or something idek
Daisy 3D Animation: • daisy bell
Vib-Ribbon footage: • Grubhub Commercial but... - Ігри
Not a gtx 1650 but a gtx 960
no hardware limits -> new devs who doesn't put effort to learn how to optimize the game -> garbage game with high hardware requirements -> consumers can't keep up -> hardware limit
It happens on PC software too and it sucks. I did some perusing, and you should be able to have a desktop environment load in with no more than 100 MB if optimized correctly. Everything else is laziness and spyware.
To the dev's credit, the industry has become much more profit driven than before. That's led to more strict deadlines which means less time for optimization since the bulk of that is done towards the end of development.
@@danjoredd Those examples deserve individual videos in and of themselves lol
@@cinemintabsolutely, It's downright impresive how programmer inefficiency has been able to keep up with moore's law. Exponentialy wasting resources is hard, imagine your fridge using 1024 times more electricity than one you bought 20 years ago. Besides large programs like games, editors and specific software that have specific reasons for their demands to grow with the supply of computing power. there should be no reason your cpu isn't inactive 99.9% of the time
@@BenB21361 Electron as a framework is the most astonishing, flagrant waste of resources one could potentially devise. I'm actually impressed.
Thanks for the interesting essay, will throw in my two cents regarding modern game design: QoL is an abbreviation I've seen being mentioned more during recent years, so now that the hardware limits have technically ended, I guess developers are now trying to expand inclusivity and accessibility in games, albeit veeeeery gradually. I remember Mr Sakurai posting a video on his channel where he simply went through all the QoL options in a triple A game that I can't remember the name of, and there was a lot of stuff that could allow people with various conditions and disabilities to properly enjoy the game, something that wasn't always possible with older hardware. Basically my prediction for gamedev in 2020s is developers paying more attention to making their games accessible for everyone.
God, I'm glad someone is saying this. As a Gen X gamer who has gradually felt squeezed out of relevancy (fine, I'm getting old so gaming is not really for me anymore), being inundated by ads for AAA games over the last decade has been a chore. Identical vibes from 90% of them. Now, to be fair, I'm not playing them much (if at all) because story in games is not my thing, but I held out hope that the industry would grow out of its specs-chasing phase and it's just not. When ray tracing is a big factor in what makes your game different, you've already lost. I'd love to see AAA studios take it down a few notches and put ideas ahead of iteration. It feels like Hollywood, every release has the potential to bankrupt a studio and it doesn't need to be like that.
Old man yells at cloud, I know.
Nah, you're cool. There aren't nearly enough Gen X'ers already, let alone Gen X'ers speaking their mind. I'm 23 but I have Gen X parents and I'm very proud of them
The gaming scene has gotten to a really interesting point. Some games come out in horrible states, some games come out mostly great, and some bad games get fixed later. A few years ago, it seemed like almost every big AAA game was terrible, but it seems like AAA games have started to improve. I think these publishers are starting to make good use of the giant canvas you mentioned.
I agree with a lot of things but I disagree with others. I love the Nintendo switch, I have 2 of them. Tears of the Kingdom is an amazing game, and it looks really good. I also play the N64 regularity, and I’m a 3D artist. I love stylized games and non realistic looking games, and I don’t think realistic looking games are the end all be all of graphics, but I also really like when games are realistic. A lot of people see it as an issue of realism vs stylized beauty, and I just don’t understand why we can’t just embrace them both. Again, TOTK looks really good, and it’s quickly turning into my favorite game, but I often see jagged polygons or basic terrain lacking basic tessellation that sometimes do take me out of the game. Stylized games can be beautiful and incredible in a way that photorealistic games can’t be, while photorealistic games can be stunning and jaw dropping in a way I haven’t ever seen a stylized game be.
Photorealism is obviously more demanding, and this is obvious when you compare Wind Waker to Twilight Princess. Twilight princess aged far worse than Wind Waker due to the limitations of the hardware and the art style. You mentioned that in order for wind waker HD to look better they had to mostly just make it widescreen, but you neglected to mention that the game went from fitting in a 1.46GB disc to being ~4GB. Higher resolutions necessitates higher resolution textures, not to mention the fact that modern graphics require the use of PBR textures, which lead to at the very least 3 of these texture files per material. 8k resolution is stupid, but 4k does need way higher resolution materials than, for example, the ps3’s 720p. Yes I’m going for the SSD thing. While, sure, it’d probably be possible to do something similar to what was actually done in Ratchet and Clank with that hardware, it would have not been possible to do if they had actually not made the rifts mandatory. What I mean is a game where the devs don’t know exactly what rift you’re gonna jump through next. This game may not exist yet, but it sure is something that would not be possible on prior hardware. And I’m not even mentioning the fact that modern materials are far bigger which would make it even harder on old systems. What about VR? VR requires a stupid amount of horsepower, high quality textures due to you being able to get as close to the surfaces as you want, the need for crazy resolution and refresh rate, and real time tracking of the hardware or alternatively hand tracking. However that’s an all new type of experience like you described, yet didn’t mention.
Forspoken requires an ungodly amount of storage, and that should be shunned. Modern materials require far more space than older textures, but modern game developers are clearly using it as an excuse and getting lazy, and I completely agree with that. However the other specs are not as outrageous seeing how those specs are not the ones needed to play at 720p, which is what the switch displays when handheld. (Are we also going to pretend TOTK runs flawlessly?). This means that if we were to play forspoken in a 720p screen, it would definitely run on far inferior hardware, while being more impressive visually. The ram requirements drop to 16GB of ram and a GTX1060, which are higher than TOTK, sure, but it’s clear you have decided in your video to show it in the worst light.
Regardless, this is turning into a bit of a messy rant, let me just conclude this novel of a comment I’ve written. So, the way I see it, both realistic and stylized games are equally valid and beautiful, just in different ways. Realistic games require far more storage and horsepower just by the nature of their being, but some developers are using this as an excuse to be lazy over things such as UV optimization, polygon count and texture resolution of background objects, and code optimization. There have been legitimate jumps in tech that do allow for new gameplay experiences, regardless of them being properly implemented or not yet, or the tech not being mainstream.
if the switch has the equivalent of the 1650 im gonna highly question the porgramming abilty of anyone at nintendo
Hey, that's what my research seemed to imply, but of course it isn't a 1 to 1. The 1650 is designed and exclusively used with the x86_64 architecture while the switch is very much ARM.
Though apparently someone else has a different opinion about the GPU. I went ahead and pinned it.
@@cinemint yea always forget that consoles share the same main and video ram, but what ive seen from the switch is closer to a 650 than a 1650
Great video, as someone who is currently working on an AAA game I feel the pain of game size even more than the average person might know. The raw files for the game itself are over 900gb. This includes a lot of dev files that will never make it into the final game, and most of the textures, 3D models, etc... will end up getting compressed to around 20% of their original file size, but I must warn you that big games are not going away. Engines like Unreal Engine 5 are only making this worse, as even highly optimized games are still going to be using 150gb+ storage on your device. This is just a simple fact of using photo realistic assets in games, Nanite, Unreal Engine's new mesh tech allows for meshes with massive numbers of polygons. They look amazing, but all that data needs to be stored somewhere. As long as games keep looking better, they are going to need more storage. Games like BTOW and TOTK are big games, but their visual quality is very low when compared to the stuff coming out of unreal engine right now. Dispite them looking beautiful, those games are basically a modern mobile game when it comes to graphical complexity, the Nintendo Switch is leagues behind modern hardware especially on PC. That being said, I think gamers focus way too much on visuals, and they are in fact not needed to make a good game. Honestly working with such massive files wastes precious development time and gpu rendering resources that could be used on making more complex and fun game mechanics. I personally believe this is one of the big reasons why AAA games are just generally worse, the focus on the wrong things and it actually limits the functionality of the final product.
Also you need to buy a pop filter for your mic, I kept thinking someone was thumping on the floor above me.
Not a bad idea about the pop filter, I'll definitely invest in one of those.
Man, I wish we could make due with fewer polygons. For me, what makes games pop isn't the meshes as often as it is the lighting techniques. Minecraft with RTX is absolutely gorgeous.
I wish more studios would make do with simpler, more consistent art direction that takes advantage of built-in lighting techniques and then put the rest of the effort into making games people actually want to play.
Beautifully edited and structured work, I hope this garners the attention it deserves
I have two little corrections to make :
- The Switch isn't comparable to a GTX 1650 and the 4GB of RAM is also used for VRAM so this is shared RAM, I think the video implies that the console has 4GB of RAM and 4 additionnal for VRAM.
- Warzone doesn't take 175GB, Modern Warfare does with everything installed (Campaign, Survival, Co-op, Multiplayer, "Base Game" (which includes every weapons for MW2019, BOCW, Vanguard and Caldera for Warzone)) Warzone actually "only" takes 75GB.
I think for gameplay experience the biggest thing is vr, which is becoming more accessible. RTX is interesting but ultimately hasn't manifested as a game play change as much as an enhancement. Also, while we're already seeing it on the PS5, reduction, or in some cases removal, of loading screens is cool.
I'm a little more hesitant about the loading screen situation. Cartridge based consoles don't have loading screens, and fourth generation consoles have near instant load times. I noticed my Xbox One only started taking 30 minutes to load once the Series X came out.
I don't see a good reason why modern consoles need loading time aside from poor optimization. Take a look at Tears of the Kingdom - there are barely any loading screens, and the screens it has are negligible. We need better programmers, not necessarily more expensive hardware.
Aside from that, VR can't be the future until they get the motion sickness problem resolved. I can't use VR without getting queasy.
True. Shortly:
-PS1/486 -generation make practical to move camera and play video/cutscenes
-Voodoo2/PS2/early Xbox -generation added fidelity. From 200/240p -> 480p. That increased view distance and allowed complex scenes
-Xbox 360/PS3 -generation added fidelity, widescreen playing was practical and that incresed view distance to similar to modern console games. Almost every game ever created can be made to run this hardware generation. GTA 5 shows that. Asset generation was very similar today as it was to this generation.
After thatgeneration we see maturity in technology... More memory and performance. No need to fit everything to 256Mb texture memory. Biggest change for game development was not the hardware improvements, it was availability of tools.
Great video! This sense of limitlessness is a big contributor to games coming out of the oven only half-baked. There’s an expectation of limitlessness because of the technology, so AAA companies think that THEY are limitless, and thus bite off more than they can chew in a normal development cycle and digest before they lose ROI.
How have I not seen one of your videos, it completely matches my watching style!
Unrelated to the contents, but holy carp how does this video have so few views?? Literally felt like a million view type of video
3:35 Wasn't expecting Bomba Estereo here
Game design around hardware limitations is endlessly fascinating, as is making games from scratch. There are so many forgotten or underused techniques not explored by people coding to the engine rather than the hardware, and so for people who love computers, it’s like exploring the catacombs of digital history.
More of these kinds of video please! They're fantastic!
Now games will go after photorealism and physics realism
It seems as though indie devs went from hardware limitations to self-imposed limitations, be it art style, budgets , genre conventions and sometimes even size and skills of the development team. The best indie games I've ever played all follow the trend of having a singular, strong idea or concept and sticking to it, throwing away everything that doesn't reinforce it. Granted it's not a new concept, but back in the day you had no choice, but to oblige thanks to hardware limitations.
At the same time though, there is a reason certain genres like roguelite deck builders and retro first person shooters had a huge resurgence recently, because these are are proven formulas with proven game designs and concepts. Change the art style, maybe add a unique thing to it, change the pacing or level design and you've still got a good game. You don't have to reinvent the wheel. Indie games are still stuck in the gaming past and it'll be another decade or so before we come back to Halo-style shooters instead. Actually, we might already be at the beginning of this era.
Really good video, keep it up!
Unrelated but i've always wanted a game about designing locomotives that has a built in train simulator you can just mess around with. thought it would be neat.
Nah that is definitely related, I'd play that
It's a great thing to see SSD (NVMe) drives become the default in some current gen consoles, such as the PS5. This is truly a game changer in every sense of the word. Just as hdds allowed for new game design advances with the original Xbox in 2000, games which fully take advantage of the new SSDs are 1. Allowing for games for be as much as 10 times smaller in size than they previously were. EX: Spider-Man. No longer do developers have to duplicate the same assets over and over again in order to have them load fast enough to keep up with the game. Such as with mail boxes, garbage cans, window textures, and so on. Now, the drives are so fast they can just pull them up as needed, such as when the main character turns their head. This should also do away with the video game meme of "elevator load times", Where a long elevator ride is used to mask long loading times. Or when a character, such as Kratos, in GOW, needs to slowly squeeze through a narrow part of a cave. These types of designs are added to try and mask loading, but they are no longer needed! Elevator rides can now be saved for beat 'em ups!
Or we could put games on cartridges and have zero load times. There are no loading screens in my GBA game.
I'm all for that. :) But it need to be real cartridges. none of that Switch "cartridge" nonsense. Those flash carts can have an awful lot of loading. Let's go back to huge dual board maskrom Neo•Geo carts. I took on two jobs in 1990 to buy that system and the games. Good times.
Awesome vid fam
"The end of hardware limits"
Infinity is not a point you can reach... Tech may have improved a lot, it still very much has limits.
It's just a dramatic title for the video essay lol
I click on these videos, thinking it's some big game design youtuber and it's you
I love this diversity
Also only the rog ally is equivalent of a gtx1650, and it is barely that. Handhelds are still incredibly limited in terms of power. I remember getting my steam deck and honestly being unimpressed with the visuals.
Good video, thanks for your efforts 👍
Even though we may have peaked in hardware, we still have a peak human limit in my opinion. Just look at Cyberpunk 2077. Even with all the money, manpower, and time thrown at it, it had (and still has!) numerous bugs and could barely fill its promises that the designers and PR team bestowed upon it. I think there's a fundamental limit to the complexity of video games simply from the fact that humans are making them, and this will force even AAA gamedevs to focus on innovating in the realm of gameplay, writing, and style. Or at least I hope so.
Great point.
5:33 it's 1.02 GHZ not 1.5, i wish it was 1.5, as developing for it is pure pain, also the GPU use shared memory DDR4 with CPU which is way slower than dedicated video memory, if anything it's more comparable to a 1030 than a 1650, it only makes Zelda TTOK more impressive
The Switch has a GPU equivalent to a mobile GTX 830m
The Switch is actually much weaker than a 1650. The PS4 was similar to a 750 ti, which is well under half the performance of a 1650. The Switch is even weaker than that. I might say it’s close to a GT 1030 if I’m feeling generous. (Of course that only adds to your point)
(Also you could fit TOTK 3 times over on a Blu Ray, which is crazy)
Better physics, heavy simulation, nagurla language processing, there ar eplenty of stuff that need sbetter hardware to workm
Have you seen GPT4ALL yet? You can get a ChatGPT-like experience running on a Pixel 3 in realtime. I tend to think that our current hardware is perfectly capable of just about any simulation we would need in order to play any type of game, perhaps with a handful of exceptions. You just need to optimize your code. It would be a pretty hard sell to buy all new hardware for a new physics game, though.
@@cinemint PhysX cards used to be a thing in the past.
While I agree for the most part with all of your points, I think you've overlooked the fact that there is one type of video game that cannot be played on most systems due to hardware limitations, VR. If there will ever be another big jump in gaming like the 2D to 3D shift, it will be with VR. If you don't believe me, take half-life alyx. It is a game so different from the ones before it and is the first real major leap forward in gaming. I do agree that for the most part machines are at a point where they are powerful enough for almost every game experience, with VR as the exception. VR does require pretty intense specs in order for it to work, and that's not just a PC master-race take. I don't usually care about frame rate, but VR just doesn't work if it's unstable. And while VR does require top end hardware, it doesn't force developers to work with limitations. They are forced to use every ounce of computing power because it's the only type of game that requires it all. Overall I really liked your video, and would like to see more from you!
Unfortunately, I can't use VR because it makes me too nauseous, even when I'm just sitting stationary. Until they can get over that (and I doubt it'll happen), it won't be usable by 1/3 of the population. I thought the same thing at first, but it may still be a novelty for the time being.
Tears if the kingdom takes up 16 gigs, cause it is a mobile game that has no high res textures or anything. The legend of zalda is also a prettty empty world.
Like for real, pubg mobile takes up more storage on my ipad, even genshin takes up more storage. There is a point where storage limits how games look. Just look at most mobile games. If these devices came with 256gb-512g instead of 64gb as a base, cheap phones games would be a lot more detailed istead of being inreadibly limited.
Also forespoken is like less than 150, it is 87gb, I have it on my steam deck, I think you are getting that mixed up with forza horizon 5, gta5 or uncharted 4. Those take up over 100 gigabytes
Make more ps2 era video games small scale great execution
great video, but bro plz get a good pop filter for that mic. I can hear every plosive sound deep in my soul 💀
no worries fam, I've heard this often enough it's definitely going to happen lol
We are not done with making components smaller, we can still make transistors several times smaller even though we are 99.99% of the way there.
We are currently at 3nm, the node size for silicon is unlikely to reach 1nm. Switching to other materials might allow marginal gains but at the end of the day we are reaching a physical limit caused by the effects of quantum physics. Soon the only way to increase compute performance will be to increase the size of the die, increase clock speeds or fundamentally change the way processors work.
@@mark63424able Quantum computers?
@@mark63424able These numbers are not tied to actual physical size as much as before, we can still shrink it quite a bit more, and the quatum tubbeling thing is a treatable problem, Gate all around and etc.
@@sulaimation6253 Quantum computers will always be highly specialised, they aren't designed for general-purpose computing. I think we will see a transition to so-called "thin clients" where you essentially rent computing power. This already exists in the enterprise space through services like Microsoft's Azure Virtual Desktop. We are even beginning to see it in the consumer market with streaming services like GeForce Now. I think as we hit these physical boundaries and performance plateaus Microsoft, Amazon and Google will start marketing their enterprise cloud computing services to regular consumers. That way compute power can continue to increase by adding more processors on the back-end where "size" and "battery life" are not a concern.
Games going forward may have less hardware limitations, but now more than ever the limitations are the developers. I predict that games will have less and less unconnected side content or odd minigames for systems like hacking or fishing, as those could be the result of developer capability exceeding the limits of the hardware, so such capability is turned from focusing on the main thesis of the game to more esoteric or unconnected parts of the game.
I'm going to miss those a bit. My favorite Mortal Kombat game was Deception, which was infamous (and panned) for its diversions. It had an entire Tetris clone and open world built into the game. And you know what? It made the experience much more fun.
Forspoken is honestly probably the worst example you could've used. It is the single _worst_ optimized game of this generation so far. Cyberpunk is less than half of the size of it, and I believe the actual world is both larger and denser. Games actually haven't really blown up that much in the last several years. If a game really is that large, is _usually_ because little effort was put into the game
It was the worst example, so I thought it compared to Zelda would make for the most dramatic dichotomy. Fortunately you are right - many AAA games are not nearly as poorly optimized. Nevertheless, the point stands that the limit is now, more or less, our imagination.
@@cinemint That is an interesting point. The limit now does seem to be whether or not developers bite off more than they can chew.
Good video but you're completely over looking VR and how much compute is required to get a good experience. While VR may currently be functional, there's a long way to go before it can be a universal experience. Current specs make it almost impossible for a decent chunk of people to play without some serious draw backs, and without a significant jump in resolution, framerate, and fov, among some other clever solutions, they may never be able to play
Heaven knows, current VR makes me vomit even when I'm sitting down lol. We've got a ways to gol
I'll tell you where we go from here: we use the medium a hell of a lot more meaningfully than we have in the past. It's about time we move on from the novelty of video games.
Maybe we can start making meaningful games that have actual emotional impacts and empathetic elements in them? 🤔
I agree with this. I _think_ publishers are finally starting to get it too, which is great. Outside of some very notable exceptions...
Video game stories are still centuries behind the quality of story telling available in other mediums. Now, being an interactive medium, it can increase the impact of those stories and characters and your attachment to them. But even games that bring me to tears, are still working with extremely basic story telling compared to literature or film. I say this not to shit on games, but to say that we are in the very early beginnings of what the medium can become. It's too new to come into it's own at this time but we are headed for great things.
I think one thing out of many holding storytelling in games back, is the need to shove combat into almost every game. When your only verb is violence, it severely limits the types of stories and emotions that can be communicated.
Now, I love me some combat in games, many of my favorite games I love because of the gameplay. But the fact that AAA games more or less need combat to sell, hurts the medium overall. I think that's starting to change, and indie devs are making it more normal to have games without combat. But we have a ways to go till it's normalized.
@@leftovernoise Centuries? I mean, it really depends on what you play. Xenoblade has one of the best stories I've ever experienced while Skyrim's story is incredibly basic. When it comes to storytelling, JRPGs tend to be ahead of the curb.
@@TheAbsol7448 Even great jrpgs, are still really really behind compared to the the greats of literature and film. I'm not saying that as an insult, it's a new medium, people have been writing books for a really fuckin long time. If you were to put a great gamee story in a book, unrelated to the game, it would be considered, an ok story. And in some cases, like kingdom hearts, it would be considered an unreadable mess. But most are very basic "there's a bad guy. There's a good guy, maybe a romantic interest, probably a betrayal of some kind, maybe a single morally gray choice to spice it up. As a book, it would be just ok, but the fact that it's experienced first hand, elevates the emotions, making it feel more substantial. Again I'm not saying this to shit on games. I'm just waiting for the day that game writing improves to the point where it can surpass storytelling in other mediums, which I believe it has the potential to do.
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Could you add a high pass filter to remove more of the bass frequencies in your vocal recording? A lot of the plosives you created were quite boomy
@@gray.crawford Sure thing.
UA-cam ruined the dislike feature is the most dumbest "update" thay have ever done lol