True. Optimization is completely dead. Long gone are the days of a game being amazing because the devs managed to pull crazy graphics for the current hardware.

Nowadays a game is only poorly optimized if it's literally unplayable or laggy, and you're forced to constantly upgrade your hardware with no discernible performance gain otherwise.

I feel like Steam Deck support is making developers optimize again.

Not to mention one of the "big three" console manufacturers building their business on older mobile hardware.

Crazy take, in the late 90s/early 00s your GPU could be obsolete 9 months after buying. The “optimisation” you talk about was the CPU in the ps4 generation was so weak and tech was moving so fast that any pc bought in 2015 onwards would easily brute force overpower anything that had been built for that generation.

> Crazy take, in the late 90s/early 00s your GPU could be obsolete 9 months after buying.

Not because the developers were lazy, but because newer GPUs were that much better.

There were lazy devs back then too but I feel lazy devs have become the norm now.

I work in gamedev, historically AAA gamedev.

If you think that the programmers are unmotivated (lazy) or incompetent; you’re wrong on both counts.

The amount of care and talent is unmatched in my professional career, and they are often working from incomplete (and changing) specifications towards a fixed deadline across multiple hardware targets.

The issue is that games have such high expectations that they didn’t have before.

There are very few “yearly titles” that allow you to nail down the software in a nicer way over time, its always a mad dash to get it done, on a huge 1000+ person project that has to be permanently playable from MAIN and where unit/integration tests would be completely useless the minute they were built.

The industry will end, but not because of “lazy devs”, its the ballooned expectations, stagnant revenue opportunity, increased team sizes and a pathological contingent of people using games as a (bad) political vehicle without regard for the fact that they will be laid off if they can’t eventually generate revenue.

—-

Finally, back in the early days of games, if the game didn’t work, you assumed you needed better hardware and you would put the work in fixing drivers and settings or even upgrading to something that worked. Now if it doesn’t work on something from before COVID the consensus is that it is not optimised enough. I’m not casting aspersions at the mindset, but it’s a different mentality.

> The amount of care and talent is unmatched in my professional career, and they are often working from incomplete (and changing) specifications towards a fixed deadline across multiple hardware targets.

I fully agree and I really admire people working on the industry. When I see great games which are unplayable in the low end because of stupidly high minimum hardware requirements, I understand game devs are simply responding to internal trends within the industry, and especially going for a practical outcome by using an established game engine (such as Unreal 5).

But at some time I hope this GPU crunch forces this same industry to allocate time and resources either at the engine or at the game level to truly optimize for a realistic low end.

the lead time for a new engine is about 7 years (on the low end).

I don’t think any company that has given up their internal engine could invest 7 years of effort without even having revenue from a game to show for it.

So the industry will likely rally around Unreal and Unity- and I think a handful of the major players will release their engines on license… but Unreal will eat them alive due to the investments in Dev UX (which is much-much higher than proprietary game engines IME). Otherwise the only engines that can really innovate are gated behind AAA publishers and their push for revenue (against investment for any other purpose).

All this to say, I’m sorry to disappoint you, its very unlikely.

Games will have to get smaller and have better revenues.

I'm not implying at all that every game company should develop their own in-house engine.

But maybe, just maybe, they could request Epic or Unity to optimize their engines better for the lower end.

You cant optimise the general case

Optimisation is almost universally about tradeoffs.

If you are a general engine, you can’t easily make those tradeoffs, and worse you have to build guardrails and tooling for many cases, slowing things down further.

The best we can hope for is even better profiling tools from Epic, but they’ve been doing that for the last couple of years since borderlands.

Most gamers don't have the faintest clue regarding how much work and effort a game requires these days to meet even the minimum expectations they have.

That's bullshit. I don't care about graphics, I play lots of indie games, some of them are made by a single person. There are free game engines, so basically all one needs for a successful game is just a good idea for the game.

And a friend of mine still mostly plays the goddamn Ultima Online, the game that was released 28 years ago.

and if a new game came out today that looked and played the same as Ultima online… What would you (and the rest of gamers) think about it?

Your expectations of that game are set appropriately. Same with a lot of Indy games, the expectation can be that its in early access for a decade+. You would never accept that from, say, Ubisoft.

Depends on what that game brings, I might like it a lot. Again, me and all my friends love indie games, most of them with pixel graphics or just low polygon. The market for such games is big enough. Just look up some popular indie games sales estimations.

You are a minor share of the overall market and the sad truth is that most indie games sell a pityfull handfull of copies and can't sustain their creators financially. And even indie games have to meet certain standards and given that they are developed nostly by single devs, meeting even those "minimal" standards takes years for many devs.

Because GPU developers started to be less lazy :)

No T&L meant everything was culled, clipped, transformed and per-vertex divided (perspective, lighting) on CPU.

Then you have brute force approach. Voodoo 1/2/3 doesnt employ any obvious speedup tricks in its pipeline. Every single triangle pushed into it is going to get textured (bilinear filtering, per pixel divide), shaded (lighting, blending, FOG applied) and then in the last step the card finally checks Z-buffer to decide between writing all this computed data to buffer or simply throwing it away.

It took a while before GPU devs started implementing low-hanging fruit optimizations https://therealmjp.github.io/posts/to-earlyz-or-not-to-early...

Hierarchical-Z, Fast Z clearing, Compressed Z buffer, Compressed Textures, Tiled shading. It all got added slowly one step at a time in early 2000.

Obsolete in that you’d probably not BUY it if building new, and in that you’d probably be able to get a noticeably better one, but even then games were made to run in a wide gamut of hardware.

For awhile there you did have noticeable gameplay differences- those with GL quake could play better kind of thing.

The GP was talking about Unreal Engine 5 as if that engine doesn't optimize for low end. That's a wild take, I've been playing Arc Raiders with a group of friends in the past month, and one of them hadn't upgraded their PC in 10 years, and it still ran fine (20+ fps) on their machine. When we grew up it would be absolutely unbelievable that a game would run on a 10 year old machine, let alone at bearable FPS. And the game is even on an off-the-shelf game engine, they possibly don't even employ game engine experts at Embark Studios.

>And the game is even on an off-the-shelf game engine, they possibly don't even employ game engine experts at Embark Studios.

Perhaps, but they also turned off Nanite, Lumen and virtual shadow maps. I'm not a UE5 hater but using its main features does currently come at a cost. I think these issues will eventually be fixed in newer versions and with better hardware, and at that point Nanite and VSM will become a no-brainer as they do solve real problems in game development.

> it still ran fine (20+ fps)

20 fps is not fine. I would consider that unplayable.

I expect at least 60, ideally 120 or more, as that's where the diminishing returns really start to kick in.

I could tolerate as low as 30 fps on a game that did not require precise aiming or reaction times, which basically eliminates all shooters.

On 10 years old hardware?

> your GPU could be obsolete 9 months after buying

Or even before hitting the shelves, cue Trio3D and Mystique, but tha's another story.

> Long gone are the days of a game being amazing because the devs managed to pull crazy graphics for the current hardware.

DOOM and Battlefield 6 are praised for being surprisingly well optimized for the graphics they offer, and some people bought these games for that reason alone. But I guess in the good old days good optimization would be the norm, not the exception.

A lot of people who were good at optimizing games have aged out and/or 'got theirs' and retired early or just got out of the demanding job and secured a better paying job in a sector with more economic upside and less churn. On the other side there's an unending almost exponential group of newcomers into the industry who are believe the hype given by engine makers who hide the true cost of optimimal game making and sell on 'ease'.

This is such a funny take, I remember all throughout the 90s and 00s (and maybe even 10s, not playing much then anymore) you often could new games on acceptable settings with a 1-2 year old high spec machine, in fact to play at highest settings you often needed ridiculously spec'ed machines. Now you can play the biggest titles (CP77, BG3 ...) on 5-10 year old hardware (not even top spec), with non or minimal performance/quality impact. I mean I've been playing BG3 and CP77 on highest settings on a PC that I bought 2 years ago used for $600 (BG3 I was playing when it had just come out).

That's not how it ACTUALLY worked. How it actually worked is that top video card manufactures would make multi-million dollar bids to to the devs of the three or four AAA games that were predicted to be best-sellers in order to get the devs to optimize their rendering for whatever this year's top video adapter was going to be. And nobody really cared if it didn't run on your crappy old last-year's card, because everybody undrerstood that the vast majority of games revenue comes from people who have just bought expensive new systems. (Inside experience, I lived it).

I don't think it has ever been the case that this year's AAA games play well on last year's video cards.

> I think it would be a good thing.

This is an insane thing to say.

> Game and engine devs simply don't bother anymore to optimize for the low end

All games carefully consider the total addressable market. You can build a low end game that runs great on total ass garbage onboard GPU. Suffice to say these gamers are not an audience that spend a lot of money on games.

It’s totally fine and good to build premium content that requires premium hardware.

It’s also good to run on low-end hardware to increase the TAM. But there are limits. Building a modern game and targeting a 486 is a wee bit silly.

If Nvidia gamer GPUs disappear and devs were forced to build games that are capable of running on shit ass hardware the net benefit to gamers would be very minimal.

What would actually benefit gamers is making good hardware available at an affordable price!

Everything about your comment screams “tall poppy syndrome”. </rant>

> This is an insane thing to say.

I don't think it's insane. In that hypothetical case, it would be a slightly painful experience for some people that the top end is a bit curtailed for a few years while game developers learn to target other cards, hopefully in some more portable way. But also feeling hard done by because your graphics hardware is stuck at 2025 levels for a bit is not that much of hardship really, is it? In fact, if more time is spent optimising for non-premium cards, perhaps the premium card that you already have will work better then the next upgrade would have.

It's not inconceivable that the overall result is a better computing ecosystem in the long run. The open source space in particular, where Nvidia has long been problematic. Or maybe it'll be a multi decade gaming winter, but unless gamers stop being willing to throw large amounts of money chasing the top end, someone will want that money even if Nvidia didn't.

There is a full actual order of magnitude difference between a modern discrete GPU and a high end card. Almost two orders of magnitude (100x) compare to an older (~2019) integrated GPU.

> In fact, if more time is spent optimising for non-premium cards, perhaps the premium card that you already have will work better then the next upgrade would have.

Nah. The stone doesn’t have nearly that much blood to squeeze. And optimizations for ultralow-end may or may not have any benefit to high end. This isn’t like optimizing CPU instruction count that benefits everyone.

I wonder what Balatro dos that wouldn’t be possible on a 486.

The swirly background (especially on the main screen), shiny card effects, and the CRT distortion effect would be genuinely difficult to implement on a system from that era. Balatro does all three with a couple hundred lines of GLSL shaders.

(The third would, of course, be redundant if you were actually developing for a period 486. But I digress.)

Virtually all the graphics? Modern computers are very fast.

Sure the effects, etc aren’t possible, nor would the resolutions of modern phones.

But solitare ran on a 486 and I don’t see what of the gameplay requires massive CPU.

Some fans ported Balatro to the VBA if you want a comparison of what is possible.

But the buffer for a full HD screen fill most of the memory of a typical 486 computer I think

I always chuckle when I see an entitled online rant from a gamer. Nothing against them, it's just humorous. In this one, we have hard-nosed defense of free market principles in the first part worthy of Reagan himself, followed by a Marxist appeal for someone (who?) to "make hardware available at an affordable price!".

TIL: being anti-monopoly is both entitled and Marxist.

...what exactly about "make hardware available at an affordable price" is "Marxist"?

The appeal for some un-named power to intervene and force Nvidia to provide gamers with cheap gaming PC hardware

One wonders what would happen in a SHtF situation or someone stubs their toe on the demolition charges switch at TSMC and all the TwinScans get minced.

Would there be a huge drive towards debloating software to run again on random old computers people find in cupboards?

Until we end up spending trillions recreating the fab capacity of tsmc, they dont have a full monppoly (yet)

> The reason is that it would finally motivate game developers to be more realistic in their minimum hardware requirements, enabling games to be playable on onboard GPUs.

They'll just move to remote rendering you'll have to subscribe to. Computers will stagnate as they are, and all new improvements will be reserved for the cloud providers. All hail our gracious overlords "donating" their compute time to the unwashed masses.

Hopefully AMD and Intel would still try. But I fear they'd probably follow Nvidia's lead.

Is remote rendering a thing? I would have imagined the lag would make something like that impractical.

The lag is high. Google was doing this with stadia. A huge amount of money comes from online multiplayer games and almost all of them require minimal latency to play well. So I doubt EA, Microsoft, Activision is going to effectively kill those cash cows.

Game streaming works well for puzzle, story-esque games where latency isn't an issue.

Hinging your impression of the domain on what Google (notoriously not really a player in the gaming world) tried and failed will not exactly give you the most accurate picture. You might as well hinge your impression of how successful a game engine can be on Amazon's attempts at it.

GeForce NOW and Xbox Cloud are much more sensible projects to look at/evaluate than Stadia.

It doesn't matter who does it. To stream you need to send the player input across the net, process, render and then send that back to the client. There is no way to eliminate that input lag.

Any game that is requires high APM (Action Per Minute) will be horrible to play via streaming.

I feel as if I shouldn't really need to explain this on this site, because it should be blindingly obvious that this will always be an issue with any streamed games for the same reason you have a several seconds lag between what happening on a live sports event and what you see on the screen.

GeForce NOW is supposedly decent for a lot of games (depending on connection and distance to server), although if Nvidia totally left gaming they'd probably drop the service too.

It will be if personal computing becomes unaffordable. The lag is simply mitigated by having PoP everywhere.

You wish. Games will just be published cloud-only and you can only play them via thin clients.

It's pretty consistently been shown that this just can't provide low-enough latency for gamers to be comfortable with it. Every attempt at providing this has experience has failed. There's few games where this can even theoretically be viable.

The economics of it also have issues, as now you have to run a bunch more datacenters full of GPUs, and with an inconsistent usage curve leaving a bunch of them being left idle at any given time. You'd have to charge a subscription to justify that, which the market would not accept.

I am pretty sure that the current demand of gpu's can pretty much eat the left idle time issue at major datacenters because of the AI craze.

Not that its good or bad tho but we could probably have something more akin to spot instances of gpu being given for gaming purposes.

I do see a lot of company are having GPU access costs per second/instant shutdown/restart I suppose but overall I agree

My brother recently came for the holidays and I played ps5 for the first time on his mac connected to his room 70-100 kms away and honestly, the biggest factor of latency was how far the wifi connection (which was his phone's carrier) and overall, it was a good enough experience but I only played mortal kombat for a few minutes :)

Current datacenter GPUs are optimized for LLM compute, not for real-time rendering. The economics for running such beefy GPUs just for game streaming won't add up.

Wait what? Mac and ps5 can ‘crossplay’ video games? Or is ps5 a game?

ps5 as in playstation 5

and I meant that I think that the ps5 can run far away and you can still connect to it from your laptop and even connect a controller to your laptop (as my brother did) to play with a controller which runs on a mac and then it uses the ps5 itself

All in all, I found it really cool for what its worth.

Like ‘remote play’?

This hurt my soul. Kudos.

More like they wish. That would mean a globally good internet infrastructure which is absolutely never happening.

They're not targeting high-end PCs. They're targeting current generation consoles, specifically the PS5 + 1080p. It just turns out that when you take those system requirements and put them on a PC—especially a PC with a 1440p or 2160p ultrawide—it turns out to mean pretty top of the line stuff. Particularly if as a PC gamer you expect to run it at 90fps and not the 30-40 that is typical for consoles.

Without disagreeing with the broad strokes of your comment, it feels like 4K should be considered standard for consoles nowadays - a very usable 4K HDR TV can be had for $150-500.

Thats a waste of image quality for most people. You have to sit very close to a 4k display to be able to perceive the full resolution. On PC you could be 2 feet from a huge gaming monitor, but an extremely small percentage of console players have the tv size and distance ratio where they would get much out of full 4k. Much better to spend the compute on higher framerate or higher detail settings.

I think higher detail is where most of it goes. A lower resolution, upscaled image of a detailed scene, at medium framerate reads to most normal people as "better" than a less-detailed scene rendered at native 4k, especially when it's in motion.

Assuming you can render natively at high FPS, 4k makes a bigger difference on rendered images than live action because it essentially brute forces antialiasing.

> You have to sit very close to a 4k display to be able to perceive the full resolution.

Wait, are you sure you don't have that backward? IIUC, you don't[] notice the difference between a 2K display and a 4K display until you get up to larger screen sizes (say 60+ inches give or take a dozen inches; I don't have exact numbers :) ) and with those the optimal viewing range is like 4-8 feet away (depending on the screen size).

Either that or am I missing something...

[]Generally, anyway. A 4K resolution should definitely be visible at 1-2 feet away as noticeably crisper, but only slightly.

My first 4K screen was a 24" computer display and let me tell you, the difference between that and a 24" 1080p display is night and day from 1-2 feet away. Those pixels were gloriously dense. Smoothest text rendering you've ever seen.

I didn't use it for gaming though, and I've "downgraded" resolution to 2x 1440p (and much higher refresh rates) since then. But more pixels is great if you can afford it.

It's one thing to say you don't need higher resolution and fewer pixels works fine, but all the people in the comments acting like you can't see the difference makes me wonder if they've ever seen a 4K TV before.

I still use 4K@24", unfortunately they're getting scarce. 4K@27" is where it's at now unfortunately. But I'll never go back to normal DPI. Every time at the office it bugs me how bad regular DPI is.

That's fair, but it makes me wonder if perhaps it's not the resolution that makes it crisper but other factors that come along with that price point, such as refresh rate, HDR, LCD layer quality, etc.

For example, I have two 1920x1080 monitors, but one is 160 Hz and the other is only 60 Hz, and the difference is night and day between them.

It’s best to think about this as angular resolution. Even a very small screen could take up an optimal amount of your field of view if held close. You get the max benefit from a 4k display when it is about 80% of the diagonal screen distance away from your eyes. So for a 28 inch monitor, that’s a little less then 2 feet, pretty typical desk setup.

Hmm... I still have my doubts, but you make a good point. I'll have to think on this a bit. Thanks for clarifying!

I think you're underestimating the computing power required to render (natively) at 4K. Some modern games can't even natively render at 1440p on high-end PCs.

1440p and 2160p is a total waste of pixels, when 1080p is already at the level of human visual acuity. You can argue that 1440p is a genuine (slight) improvement for super crisp text, but not for a game. HDR and more ray tracing/path tracing, etc. are more sensible ways of pushing quality higher.

You sounded like someone who doesn’t have 1440p or 2160p.

I have a 77’ S95D and my 1080p Switch looked horrible. Try it also with a 1080p screen bigger than 27 inch.

I also have a 77” OLED and there’s no question that 4K content is noticeably better looking on it that 1080p content.

You are absolutely wrong on this subject. Importantly, what matters is PPI, not resolution. 1080P would look like crap in a movie theater or on a 55" TV, for example, while it'll look amazing on a 7" monitor.

> 1440p and 2160p is a total waste of pixels, when 1080p is already at the level of human visual acuity.

Wow, what a load of bullshit. I bet you also think the human eye can't see more than 30 fps?

If you're sitting 15+ feet away from your screen, yeah, you can't tell the difference. But for most people, with their eyes only being 2-3 feet away from their monitor, the difference is absolutely noticeable.

> HDR and more ray tracing/path tracing, etc. are more sensible ways of pushing quality higher.

HDR is an absolute game-changer, for sure. Ray-tracing is as well, especially once you learn to notice the artifacts created by shortcuts required to get reflections in raster-based rendering. It's like bad kerning. Something you never noticed before will suddenly stick out like a sore thumb and will bother the hell out of you.

Text rendering alone makes it worthwhile. 1080p densities are not high enough to render text accurately without artefacts. If you double pixel density, then it becomes (mostly) possible to renderi text weight accurately, and things like "rythm" and "density" which were things that real typographers concerned themselves with start to become apparent.

I'm sorry, you need to go to an optician. I can see the pixels at a comfortable distance at 1440p.

Alternatively, you play modern games with incredibly blurry AA solutions. Try looking at something older from when AA actually worked.

You're probably looking up close at a small portion of the screen - you'll always be able to "see the pixels" in that situation. If you sit far back enough to keep the whole of the screen comfortably in your visual field, the argument applies.

Oh goodness no, I sit way further away from the screen than most people. People always drag my screens closer when they have to borrow my desk

I agree re "optimizations", but I dont think there should be compromises on quality (if set to max/ultra settings)

I haven't been on HN even 60 seconds this morning and I've already found a pro-monopoly take. Delightful.

I fail to see how my comment could be construed as being pro-monopoly.

There are a huge number of onboard GPUs being left out of even minimum requirements for most recent games. I'm just saying that maybe this situation could led game devs to finally consider such devices as legitimate targets and thus make their games playable on such devices. This is by no means a pro-monopolistic take.

Gaming performance is so much more than hardware specs. Thinking that game devs optimizing their games on their own could fundamentally change the gaming experience is delusional.

And anyone who knows just a tiny bit of history of nvidia would know how much investment they have put into gaming and the technology they pioneered.

I have a 9 year old gaming PC with an RX480 and it is only now starting to not be able to run certain games at all (recent ones that require ray tracing). It can play Cyberpunk and Starfield on low settings very acceptably.

Consoles and their install base set the target performance envelope. If your machine can't keep up with a 5 year old console then you should lower expectations.

And like, when have onboard GPUs ever been good? The fact that they're even feasible these days should be praised but you're imagining some past where devs left them behind.