Even in the latest versions of unreal and unity you will find the classic tools. They just won't be advertised and the engine vendor might even frown upon them during a tech demo to make their fancy new temporal slop solution seem superior.
The trick is to not get taken for a ride by the tools vendors. Real time lights, "free" anti aliasing, and sub-pixel triangles are the forbidden fruits of game dev. It's really easy to get caught up in the devil's bargain of trading unlimited art detail for unknowns at end customer time.
I’d be absolutely shocked if in 10 years, all AAA games aren’t being rendered by a transformer. Google’s veo 3 is already extremely impressive. No way games will be rendered through traditional shaders in 2035.
Now that will be peak power efficiency and a real solution for the world where all electricity and silicon are hogged by AI farms.
/s or not, you decide.
The other major success of recent years not discussed much so far is gaussian splats, which tear up the established production pipeline again.
10 years ago people were predicting VR would be everywhere, it flopped hard.
10 years ago, people were predicting that deep learning will change everything. And it did.
Why just use one example (VR) and apply it to everything? Even then, a good portion of people did not think VR would be everywhere by now.
It is odd how many people don't realize how developed self-driving taxis are.
I think most people will consider self driving tech to be a thing when it's as widespread as TVs were, 20 years after their introduction.
Fully autonomous in select defined cities owned by big corps is probably a reasonable expectation.
Fully autonomous in the hands of an owner applied to all driving conditions and working reliably is likely still a distant goal.
Those with the real vested interest don't care if that flops, while zealous worshippers to the next brand new disruptive tech are just a free vehicle to that end.
The images rendered in a game need to accurately represent a very complex world state. Do we have any examples of Transformer based models doing something in this category? Can they do it in real-time?
I could absolutely see something like rendering a simplified and stylised version and getting Transformers to fill in details. That's kind of a direct evolution from the upscaling approach described here, but end to end rendering from game state is far less obvious.
I’m really curious why this would be preferable for a AAA studio game outside of potential cost savings. Also imagine it’d come at the cost of deterministic output / consistency in visuals.
I could absolutely see something like rendering a simplified and stylised version and getting Transformers to fill in details. That's kind of a direct evolution from the upscaling approach described here, but end to end rendering from game state is far less obvious.
The main rendering would be done by the transformer.
Already in 2025, Google Veo 3 is generating pixels far more realistic than AAA games. I don't see why this wouldn't be the default rendering mode for AAA games in 2035. It's insanity to think it won't be.
Traditional rendering techniques can also easily exceed the quality of AAA games if you don't impose strict time or latency constraints on them. Wake me up when a version of Veo is generating HD frames in less than 16 milliseconds, on consumer hardware, without batching, and then we can talk about whether that inevitably much smaller model is good enough to be a competitive game renderer.
You conflate the challenge of generating realistic pixels with the challenge of generating realistic pixels that represent a highly detailed world state.
So I don't think your argument is convincing or complete.
That’s because games are "realtime", meaning with a tight frame-time budget. AI models are not (and are even running on multiple cards each costing 6 figures).
I’m so excited to be charged AAA prices for said wonderful experience.
For Genie to exceed AAA Graphics in 2035 at 60 to 120fps per second would require a breakthrough of efficiency that is at least an order of magnitude, and much higher for it to be cost effective.
The gaming industry for AAA titles requires at least 3-4 years in making. Which means AAA titles studios would need to start working on it in 2031. Possibility of All AAA games in 2031 are made with LLM model is practically zero.
We are talking 10 years from now.
And unfortunately 10 years isn't that long time in many industries. We are barely talking about 3 cycles.
It will be AI all the way down soon. The models internal world view could be multiple passes and multi layer with different strategies... In any case; safe to say more AI will be involved in more places ;)
I think it's reasonable to assume we won't see this tech replace game engines without significant further breakthroughs...
For LLMs agentic workflows ended up being a big breakthrough to make them usable. Maybe these World Models will interact with a sort of game engine directly somehow to get the required consistency. But it's not evident that you can just scale your way from "visual memory extending up to one minute ago" to 70+ hour game experiences.
The answer is clearly transformer based.
Competition works wonders.
In the past a game console might launch at a high price point and then after a few years, the price goes down and they can release a new console at a high at a price close to where the last one started.
Blame crypto, AI, COVID but there has been no price drop for the PS5 and if there was gonna be a PS6 that was really better it would probably have to cost upwards of $1000 and you might as well get a PC. Sure there are people who haven’t tried Steam + an XBOX controller and think PV gaming is all unfun and sweaty but they will come around.
Thus the PS6 should be around 699 at launch.
Typically, you should be receiving at least an annual cost of living increase each year. This is standard practice for every company I’ve ever worked for and it’s a common practice across the industry. Getting a true raise is the amount above and beyond the annual cost of living increase.
If your company has been keeping your salary fixed during this time of inflation, then you are correct that you are losing earning power. I would strongly recommend you hit the job market if that’s the case because the rest of the world has moved on.
In some of the lower wage brackets (not us tech people) the increase in wages has actually outpaced inflation.
That makes sense. The market for remote jobs has been shrinking while more people are competing for the smaller number of remote jobs. In office comes with a premium now and remote is a high competition space.
If you've got a decent tech job in Canada your marginal tax rate will be near 50%. Any new income is taxed at that rate, so that 3% COL raise, is really a 1.5% raise in your purchasing power, which typically makes you worse off.
Until you're at a very comfortable salary, you're better off job hopping to boost your salary. I'm pretty sure all the financial people are well aware they're eroding their employees salaries over time, and are hoping you are not aware.
In the US the bottom tax brackets where 10% under 2020 $19,750 then 12% next bucket, in 2025 it’s 10% under $23,850 then 12% next bracket. https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/historical-income...
PS1: 24.32 grams at launch
PS5 (disc): 8.28 grams at launch
(So I guess that if what one uses for currency is a sock drawer full of gold, then consoles have become a lot cheaper in the past decades.)
You don’t have to install any drivers or anything and with the big screen mode in Steam it’s a lean back experience where you can pick out your games and start one up without using anything other than the controller.
The "it just works" factor and not having to mess with drivers is a huge advantage of consoles.
Apple TV could almost be a decent game system if Apple ever decided to ship a controller in the box and stopped breaking App Store games every year (though live service games rot on the shelf anyway.)
DualSense 4 and 5 support under Linux is rock-solid, wired or wireless. That's to be expected since the drivers are maintained by Sony[1]. I have no idea about the XBox controller, but I know DS works perfectly with Steam/Proton out of the box, with the vanilla Linux kernel.
My experience with Steam Input is ... OK in some cases. It's annoying that it seems to break games that actually do support the DualSense properly (though full haptics only work in wired mode) like FFXIV.
Somewhere between 60 hz and 240hz, theres zero fundamental benefits. Same for resolution.
It isnt just that hardware progress is a sigmoid, our experiential value.
The reality is that exponential improvement is not a fundamental force. Its always going to find some limit.
Resolution-wise, it depends a lot on the kind of content you are viewing as well. If you're looking at a locally-rendered UI filled with sharp lines, 720p is going to look horrible compared to 4k. But when it comes to video you've got to take bitrate into account as well. If anything, a 4k movie with a bitrate of 3Mbps is going to look worse than a 720p movie with a bitrate of 3Mbps.
I definitely prefer 4k over 720p as well, and there's a reason my desktop setup has had a 32" 4k monitor for ages. But beyond that? I might be able to be convinced to spend a few bucks extra for 6k or 8k if my current setup dies, but anything more would be a complete waste of money - at reasonable viewing distances there's absolutely zero visual difference.
We're not going to see 10.000Hz 32k graphics in the future, simply because nobody will want to pay extra to upgrade from 7.500Hz 16k graphics. Even the "hardcore gamers" don't hate money that much.
There's a noticeable and obvious improvement from 720 to 1080p to 4k (depending on the screen size). While there are diminishing gains, up to at least 1440p there's still a very noticeable difference.
> Somewhere between 60 hz and 240hz, theres zero fundamental benefits. Same for resolution.
Also not true. While the difference between 40fps and 60fps is more noticeable than say from 60 to 100fps, the difference is still noticeable enough. Add the reduction in latency that's also very noticeable.
The difference between 60 and 120hz is huge to me. I havent had a lot of experience above 140.
Likewise, 4k is a huge difference in font rendering, and 1080->1440 is big in gaming.
If you have this combination and you play with it for an hour and you go back to a locked 100hz Game you would never want to go back. It's rather annoying in that regard actually.
Yes.
> The OP said "somewhere between 60hz and 240hz" and I agree.
Plenty of us dont. A 240hz OLED still provides a signifacntly blurrier image in motion than my 20+ year old CRT.
It didnt have too.
> Something other than framerate is at play here.
Yes, sample and hold motion blur, inherent to all modern display types commonly in use for the most part.
Even at 240hz, modern displays can not match CRT for motion quality.
The resolution part is even sillier - you literally get more information per frame at higher resolutions.
Yes, the law of diminishing returns still applies, but 720p@60hz is way below the optimum. I'd estimate 4k@120hz as the low end of optimal maybe? There's some variance w.r.t the application, a first person game is going to have different requirements from a movie, but either way 720p ain't it.
If a console designed to break even is $1,000 then surely an equivalent PC hardware designed to be profitable without software sales revenue will be more expensive.
Economists use the consumer price index, which tracks a wide basket of goods and services.
Comparing console prices to a single good is nonsense, even if the good has 6000 of years of history, it's not a good comparison to a single good in a vacuum.
pc get cheaper but the gpu isnt
https://portfoliocharts.com/2021/12/16/three-secret-ingredie...
> bitcoin
:D
https://www.investopedia.com/news/hyperinflation-produces-su...
https://decrypt.co/332083/billionaire-ray-dalio-urges-invest...
But in any case, if OP meant deflationary, I don't think "real" is a good synonym.
It felt like "real" referred to the physical: gold, food, energy, minerals, real physical things that people have a constant demand for.
It was funny to spot the odd entry, where bitcoins are fully digital and have a very socially dependent agreement and entire digital infrastructure required to keep them functioning.
Gold has a bit of a social agreement as well, but it's social agreement dates thousands of years and even if it broke away still has value as a physical material.
We also have a lot of fun playing board games, simple stuff from design, card games, here, the game play is the fun factor. Yes, better hardware may bring more realistic, more x or y, but my feeling is that the real driver, long term, is the quality of the game play. Like the quality of the story telling in a good movie.
handheld devices like switch,steam deck etc is really the future while phone is also true for some extend but gaming on a phone vs gaming on a handheld is really world of a differences
give it few generations then traditional consoles would obsolete, I mean we are literally have a lot of people enjoy indie game in steam deck right now
I keep thinking there is going to be a video game crash soon, over saturation of samey games. But I'm probably wrong about that. I just think that's what Nintendo had right all along: if you commoditize games, they become worthless. We have endless choice of crap now.
In 1994 at age 13 I stopped playing games altogether. Endless 2d fighters and 2d platformer was just boring. It would take playing wave race and golden eye on the N64 to drag me back in. They were truly extraordinary and completely new experiences (me and my mates never liked doom). Anyway I don't see this kind of shift ever happening again. Infact talking to my 13 year old nephew confirms what I (probably wrongly) believe, he's complaining there's nothing new. He's bored or fortnight and mine craft and whatever else. It's like he's experiencing what I experienced, but I doubt a new generation of hardware will change anything.
But we did hit a point where the games were good enough, and better hardware just meant more polygons, better textures, and more lighting. The issues with Unreal Engine 1 (or maybe just games of that era) was that the worlds were too sparse.
> over saturation of samey games
So that's the thing. Are we at a point where graphics and gameplay in 10-year-old games is good enough?
Personally, there are enough good games from the 32bit generation of consoles, and before, to keep me from ever needing to buy a new console, and these are games from ~25 years ago. I can comfortably play them on a MiSTer (or whatever PC).
???? hmm wrong??? if everyone can make game, the floor is raising making the "industry standard" of a game is really high
while I agree with you that if everything is A then A is not meaning anything but the problem is A isn't vanish, they just moved to another higher tier
Gunpei yokoi said something similar here:
https://shmuplations.com/yokoi/
Yokoi: When I ask myself why things are like this today, I wonder if it isn’t because we’ve run out of ideas for games. Recent games take the same basic elements from older games, but slap on characters, improve the graphics and processing speed… basically, they make games through a process of ornamentation.
Even AAAs aim to create new levels of spectacle (much like blockbuster movies), even if they don’t innovate on gameplay.
The fatigue is real (and I think it’s particularly bad for this generation raised to spend all their gaming time inside the big 3), but there’s something for you out there, the problem is discoverability, not a lack of innovation.
Maybe if there's a fundamental leap in AI. It's still undecided if larger datasets and larger models will make these problems go away.
You only need to apply generative AI to game assets that do not do well with the traditional triangle rasterization approach. Static objects are already at practically photorealistic level in Unreal Engine 5. You just need to apply enhancement techniques to things like faces. Using the traditionally rendered face as a prior for the generation would prevent hallucinations.
There's a reason why such "build your own story" games like Dwarf Fortress are fairly niche.
The quest for graphical realism in games has been running against a diminishing-returns-wall for quite a while now (see hardware raytracing - all that effort for slightly better reflections and shadows, yay?), what we need most right now is more risk-taking in gameplay by big budget games.
What I see as a problem though is that the incumbent console manufacturers, sans Nintendo, have been chasing graphical fidelity since time immemorial as the main attraction for new generations of consoles and may have a hard time convincing buyers to purchase a new system once they can't irk out expressive gains in this area. Maybe they will successfully transition into something more akin to what Nintendo does and focus on delivering killer apps, gimmicks and other innovations every new generation.
Or perhaps they will slowly fall into irrelevance and everything will converge into PC/Steam (I doubt Microsoft can pull off whatever plan they have for the future of xbox) and any half-decent computer can run any game for decades to come and Gabe Newell becomes the richest person in the world.
Are they planning on competing with steam and that's how they'll make money? I have a steam deck and I've zero interest in the Rog ally, windows 11 is bad enough on my work pc.
I’m a huge fan of Final Fantasy games. Every mainline game (those with just a number; excluding 11 and 14 which are MMOs) pushes the graphical limits of the platforms at the time. The jump from 6 to 7 (from SNES to PS1); from 9 to 10 (PS1 to 2); and from 12 to 13 (PS3/X360) were all mind blowing. 15 (PS4) and 16 (PS5) were also major improvements in graphics quality, but the “oh wow” generational gap is gone.
And then I look at the gameplay of these games, and it’s generally regarded as going in the opposite direction- it’s all subjective of course but 10 is generally regarded as the last “amazing” overall game, with opinions dropping off from there.
We’ve now reached the point where an engaging game with good mechanics is way more important than graphics: case in point being Nintendo Switch, which is cheaper and has much worse hardware, but competes with the PS5 and massively outsells Xbox by huge margins, because the games are fun.
And don't forget the series of MMOs:
FF11 merged Final Fantasy with old-school MMOs, notably Everquest, to great success.
FF14 2.0 was literally A Realm Reborn from the ashes of the failed 1.0, and was followed by the exceptional Heavensward expansion.
FF14 Shadowbringers was and is considered great.
Ray tracing is the obvious path towards perfect photorealistic graphics. The problem is that ray tracing is really expensive, and you can't stuff enough ray tracing hardware into a GPU which can also run traditional graphics for older games. This means games are forced to take a hybrid approach, with ray tracing used to augment traditional graphics.
However, full-scene ray tracing has essentially a fixed cost: the hardware needed depends primarily on the resolution and framerate, not the complexity of the scene. Rendering a million photorealistic objects is not much more compute-intensive than rendering a hundred cartoon objects, and without all the complicated tricks needed to fake things in a traditional pipeline any indie dev could make games with AAA graphics. And if you have the hardware for proper full-scene raytracing, you no longer need the whole AI upscaling and framegen to fake it...
Ideally you'd want a GPU which is 100% focused on ray tracing and ditches the entire legacy triangle pipeline - but that's a very hard sell in the PC market. Consoles don't have that problem, because not providing perfect backwards compatibility for 20+ years of games isn't a dealbreaker there.
Increasing the object count by that many orders of magnitude is definitely much more compute intensive.
Surely ray/triangle intersection tests, brdf evaluation, acceleration structure rebuilds (when things move/animate) all would cost more in your photorealistic scenario than the cartoon scenario?
I'm not sure that's actually true for Sony. You can currently play several generations of games on the PS5, and I think losing that on PS6 would be a big deal to a lot of people.
However I suspect that this isn't as cost and space effective as it used to be.
And while consoles usually lag behind the latest available graphics, I'd expect raytracing and even path tracing to become available to console graphics eventually.
One advantage of consoles is that they're a fixed hardware target, so games can test on the exact hardware and know exactly what performance they'll get, and whether they consider that performance an acceptable experience.
You can not have "Path Tracing" in games, not according to what it is. And it also probably does not make sense, because the goal of real-time rendering is not to render the perfect frame at any time, but it is to produce the best reactive, coherent sequence of frames possible in response to simulation and players inputs. This being said, HW ray tracing is still somehow game changing because it shapes a SIMT HW to make it good at inherently divergent computation (eg. traversing a graph of nodes representing a scene): following this direction, many more things will be unlocked in real-time simulation and rendering. But not 6k samples unidirectionally path-traced per pixel in a game.
It seems like you're deliberately ignoring the terminology currently widely used in the gaming industry.
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/should-you-bother-with-path...
https://gamingbolt.com/10-games-that-make-the-best-use-of-pa...
(And any number of other sources, those are just the first two I found.)
If you have some issue with that terminology, by all means raise that issue, but "You can not have" is just factually incorrect here.
It is not incorrect because, at least for now, all those "path tracing" modes do not do compute multiple "paths" (with each being made of multiple rays casted) per pixel but rasterize primary rays and then either fire 1 [in rare occasions, 2] rays for such a pixel, or, more often, read a value from a local special cache called a "reservoir" or from a radiance cache - which is sometimes a neural network. All of this goes even against the defition your first article gives itself of path tracing :D
I don't have problems with many people calling it "path tracing" in the same way I don't have issues with many (more) people calling Chrome "Google" or any browser "the internet", but if one wants to talk about future trends in computing (or is posting on hacker news!) I believe it's better to indicate a browser as a browser, Google as a search engine, and Path Tracing as what it is.
The switch literally has and according to projections the Switch 1 will in fact have outsold the PS2 globally by the end of the year.
ps2 sales number is iffy at very least, also ps2 sales has been dethrone "few times" quotation mark since when nintendo sales is creeping up, sony announced there are "few millions sales" added while they already didnt produce them years ago
I know this isn't an original idea, but I wonder if this will be the trick for step-level improvement in visuals. Use traditional 3D models for the broad strokes and generative AI for texture and lighting details. We're at diminishing returns for add polygons and better lighting, and generative AI seems to be better at improving from there—when it doesn't have to get the finger count right.
1. We realistically aren't going much past 4k anytime soon. Even the few 8k sets on the market are sort of tech demos, because there isn't really the content for it. Maybe 120/240/etc FPS will be a thing, but that's really a linear growth, not exponential, and it has a pretty short path to go (will 500Hz displays ever become a big seller? 1kHz?)
2. The triple-A games market itself is strained-- too many big-money flops, and those are the ones that have historically substituted more triangles for better storytelling.
So you're going to reach a point where the hardware isn't really limiting the designers' visions anymore.
GenAI seems like a questionable approach for game rendering, both because of inefficiency and non-repeatability. If the AI renders the same scene slightly differently on two machines, it could cause bugs or unfair competitive edges. At most, we'd see AI during the development process to build assets, and that doesn't require a bigger local GPU.
However, I'm pessimistic on how this can keep evolving. RT already takes a non trivial amount of transistor budget and now those high end AI solutions require another considerable chunk of the transistor budget. If we are already reaching the limits of what non generative AI up-scaling and frame-gen can do, I can't see where a PS7 can go other than using generative AI to interpret a very crude low-detail frame and generating a highly detailed photorealistic scene from that, but that will, I think, require many times more transistor budget than what will likely ever be economically achievable for a whole PS7 system.
Will that be the end of consoles? Will everything move to the cloud and a power guzzling 4KW machine will take care of rendering your PS7 game?
I really can only hope there is a break-trough in miniaturization and we can go back to a pace of improvement that can actually give us a new generation of consoles (and computers) that makes the transition from an SNES to a N64 feel quaint.