Why is the tech slowing down?

holymonk

holymonk

holymonk

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Back in the day I was regularly upgrading my pc to meet ever evolving gaming demands. But the last time I upgraded from ocuk must have been about 4 years ago and I don't feel my rig getting old anytime soon. Have we reached the plateau until something truly groundbreaking is released?
 
There's not the same demand for faster processors either driving innovation. The kind of processors industry are looking for are either lower power or massively parallel (ie GPU) where I don't think there's been the same sort of slow down compared to desktop CPUs.
 
I think most performance gains tended to be driven by increasingly complex gaming graphics and PC gaming visuals have stagnated over the past few years so there's not as much drive other than the usual Graphics Card wars. Other than my graphics card my basic setup hasn't changed in 3 years as a 4 core chip OC'd to 4.6Ghz with 16GB of RAM is still powerful enough to run everything I use.
 
holymonk said:
Back in the day I was regularly upgrading my pc to meet ever evolving gaming demands. But the last time I upgraded from ocuk must have been about 4 years ago and I don't feel my rig getting old anytime soon. Have we reached the plateau until something truly groundbreaking is released?
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Pretty much yes, 99% of PCs are Facebook machines, they don't need more power, my 6 year old rig doesn't really need an upgrade as it still handles most games with ease and the CPU on my mobile phone can calculate pi to 1 million decimals faster than my PC can.
 
Global illumination is the next big thing in graphics, it's basically an algorithm that represents how light interacts with objects, creating shadows, caustics and other cool lightning phenomena, it's known how to do it however it's estimated it could take up to 100x the processing power to truly show it in all it's glory giving animated movie like photorealistic graphics. Games can be partially GI'ed however. We are in a sense at a plateau. I will try and dig out a Tim Sweeney video for you, he addresses pretty much what you are asking.

When we reach 8k screens @ 120Hz the human eye cannot distinguish any more depth than that, we have surround sound, and also 3d sound is breaking through. AI has some work to do, but yes a high end PC can handle pretty much all the current data that is thrown at it. The next stage is much more photorealism more sophisticated AI, and even more ambitious 3d worlds.

These worlds are not easy to create, many man hours of creating models and animating them are involved, every detail has to be emulated.

Before that textures, physics, AI, rigging, animation, scripting, sound were all dumbed down, then GPU's became more advanced in their architecture, system and GPU memory & GPUCPU and CPU power increased, API's improved(DirectX and OpenGL), operating systems improved.

.........

EDIT: Here the video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XiQweemn2_A

EDIT AGAIN: Here's another good video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00gAbgBu8R4
 
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Because it hasn't ate it's vegetables and also does not have legs because of this can not move meaning it's not actually slowing down but is just not moving
 
GPUs certainly haven't slowed down, quite the opposite. It's probably the only component you could do with updating every 1 or 2 years depending on how much of a gamer you are.
 
I remember in 2003, OcUK was selling Intel CPUs in multiples of 200MHz e.g. 2.8GHz, 3.0GHz, 3.2GHz, 3.4GHz, 3.6GHz, then it petered off at 3.8GHz and that was the highest clockspeed Intel reached. 2004 onwards, it was all about extra cache, hyperthreading, then more cores and then a combination of all the above. What is the best scientific unit to quantify CPUs these days? Floating point?
 
I would guess the CPU market is being driven by number crunching such as scientific modelling and simulation (CFD etc)... Number of cores is more critical than clock speed.
 
Isn't it more of a case of the effort required to get a game that complex graphically requires a level of time & investment which out-scales the expected return?.

Some of the top end tech demos are well ahead of games, as are many films - but they are both linear, short or have huge budgets.
 
Totally agree with the OP. My PC (spec below) plays everything on the highest settings in full HD. I can remember upgrading every year, but i haven't for a couple of years now.
 
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