Comment by amlib

Yes, that's something I failed to address in my post. I myself have also been happier playing older or just simpler games than chasing the latest AAA with cutting edge graphics.

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.

Every generation thinks the current generation of graphics won't be topped, but I think you have no idea what putting realtime generative models into the rendering pipeline will do for realism. We will finally get rid of the uncanny valley effect with facial rendering, and the results will almost certainly be mindblowing.

That's the Nintendo way. Avoiding the photorealism war altogether by making things intentionally sparse and cartoony. Then you can sell cheap hardware, make things portable etc.

Unreal engine 1 looks good to me, so I am not a good judge.

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.

What really matters is the cost.

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.

Really strange that a huge pile of hacks, maths, and more hacks became the standard of "true" frames.

> Rendering a million photorealistic objects is not much more compute-intensive than rendering a hundred cartoon objects

Increasing the object count by that many orders of magnitude is definitely much more compute intensive.

> Rendering a million photorealistic objects is not much more compute-intensive than rendering a hundred cartoon objects

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?

>Consoles don't have that problem, because not providing perfect backwards compatibility for 20+ years of games isn't a dealbreaker there.

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.

Combining both ray tracing (including path tracing, which is a form of ray tracing) and rasterization is the most effective approach. The way it is currently done is that primary visibility is calculated using triangle rasterization, which produces perfectly sharp and noise free textures, and then the ray traced lighting (slightly blurry due to low sample count and denoising) is layered on top.

> 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.

That's also true for modern rasterization with virtual geometry. Virtual geometry keeps the number of rendered triangles roughly proportional to the screen resolution, not to the scene complexity. Moreover, virtual textures also keep the amount of texture detail in memory roughly proportional to the screen resolution.

The real advantage of modern ray tracing (ReSTIR path tracing) is that it is independent of the number of light sources in the scene.

So create a system RT only GPU plus a legacy one for the best of both worlds?

There is no real difference between "Ray Tracing" and "Path Tracing", or better, the former is just the operation of intersecting a ray with a scene (and not a rendering technique), the latter is a way to solve the integral to approximate the rendering equation (hence, it could be considered a rendering technique). Sure, you can go back to the terminology used by Kajiya in his earlier works etc etc, but it was only a "academic terminology game" which is worthless today. Today, the former is accelerated by HW since around a decade (I am cunting the PowerVR wizard). The latter is how most of non-realtime rendering renders frames.

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.

This is my take as well. I haven’t felt that graphics improvement has “wowed” me since the PS3 era honestly.

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.

"Nothing will ever come close to PS2 level sales again."

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

> Nothing will ever come close to PS2 level sales again.

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.

And what do you think to invest in for such times?

The future of gaming is the Grid-Independent Post-Silicon Chemo-Neural Convergence, the user will be injected with drugs designed by AI based on a loose prompt (AI generated as well, because humans have long lost the ability to formulate their intent) of the gameplay trip they must induce.

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.

Is this before or after fully autonomous cars and agi? Both should be there in two years right?

10 years ago people were predicting VR would be everywhere, it flopped hard.

Just because it's possible doesn't mean it is clearly the answer. Is a transformer model truly likely to require less compute than current methods? We can't even run models like Veo 3 on consumer hardware at their current level of quality.

Transformer maybe not, but neural net yes. This is profoundly uncomfortable for a lot of people, but it's the very clear direction.

The other major success of recent years not discussed much so far is gaussian splats, which tear up the established production pipeline again.

How much money are you willing to bet?

That's just not efficient. AAA games will use AI to pre-render assets, and use AI shaders to make stuff pop more, but on the fly asset generation will still be slow and produce low quality compared to offline asset generation. We might have a ShadCN style asset library that people use AI to tweak to produce "realtime" assets, but there will always be an offline core of templates at the very least.

This _might_ be true, but it's utterly absurd to claim this is a certainty.

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.

Be prepared to be shocked. This industry moves extremely slow.