Comment by nottorp
8 days ago
With the discrete GPUs pricing themselves out of the consumer space, we may actually need to switch back to software rendering :)
8 days ago
With the discrete GPUs pricing themselves out of the consumer space, we may actually need to switch back to software rendering :)
That's too much of a stretch, but I believe games of the next era will be optimized more towards integrated GPUs (such as AMD's iGPU in the Steam Deck and Steam Machine).
When hardware is priced out for most consumers (along with a global supply chain collapse due to tariffs and a potential Taiwan invasion), a new era awaits where performance optimization is going to be critical again for games. I expect existing game engines like Unity and Unreal Engine falling out because of all the performance issues they have, and maybe we can return to a temporary "wild west" era where everyone has their own hacky solution to cram stuff into limited hardware.
> everyone has their own hacky solution to cram stuff into limited hardware
Limited hardware gave us a lot of classic titles and fundamental game mechanics.
Off the top of my head:
Metal Gear's stealth was born because they couldn't draw enough enemy sprites to make a shooting game. Instead they drew just a few and made you avoid them.
Ico's and Silent Hill's foggy atmosphere is partially determined by their polygon budget. They didn't have the hardware to draw distant scenery so they hid it in fog.
That's wishful thinking. The reality is that your iGPU will be used to decode the video stream of an Unreal game running on a dedicated GPU on some cloud server which you pay a monthly subscription fee for.