Next Big Change in Gaming Discussion Thread

Simple discussion sharing views on were you think gaming is going in the future. Ill put forth a few questions to help get the ball rolling and spark some awesome discussion hopefully.

Is single chip computers better for gaming? IE: GPU/CPU on one chip?
With an ever changing gaming community will "consoles in your pocket" start becoming more impressive with better graphics ?
Do you think Ray tracing is the future for lighting schemes or is there something just as good but cheaper on resources?
Will we ever move away from polygons or are we doomed to the traditional method of 3d?
Will 3d gaming eventually be the "defacto" or will multiple screens be more adopted?
Will games be mostly online and start killing of single player modes?
Digital Distribution is a hard pill to swallow for consumers and collectors alike, will there be a continual push for collectable hard copy media, or will stores like best buy eventually switch their consumer model and adopt digital download?
What do you think is instore for DX12, infinite textures? infinite Polygons?


Please keep it to on topic as much as possible.

 

I love having collectors edition games, to me its like a memento I mean my grandad bought a snes for himself (what a legend!) he gave it to me and I still play it everyday. 20 year old hardware rocks man!

I think 3D will be more prevalent than an eyefinity setup, but thats just me.
GPU/CPU on one chip, well it should increase gaming performance because you'll be able to squeeze more in there.

 

I think they will be. Direct link access between the CPU and GPU has the ability to significantly speed up gaming in the future. However, I think heat is the major issue to tackle. Top end CPU's and top end GPU's both require pretty hefty coolers individually, combined I'm afraid of what might happen. Closed loop water coolers being the new requirement, maybe? CPU/GPU combo chips shipping boxed with closed loop water coolers? :O

I think power is also a major issue. As it is we are seeing a big push to go to Micro-ATX instead of full ATX motherboards in desktops anymore. And we've also seen a problem with Micro-ATX boards sending enough power to the CPU socket to be able to handle quad and hexacore processors. This issue seems to have dwindled nowadays as I'm currently looking at a hexacore supporting mATX Gigabyte board, but this may be an issue for CPU's with integrated GPU's.. How will they provide enough power?

Tegra 2 seems very promising already. I think we will see console and handheld (as in DS/PSP/etc) gaming start dropping in numbers rapidly. Using a CPU with an integrated GPU might be the future of portable gaming, too. However, that being said, I think theres still a lot of work to do to make mobile gaming great. Shooters are, so far, very lackluster. They don't quite have the controls down very well for a lot of game types either. I'm excited to see the latest Sony Playstation Android phone pictures have dedicated controls again. First spy shots had a joystick and some buttons, then those disappeared, now it seems like a more finalized prototype popping up in China has lots of dedicated buttons which could really change the way we game on mobile phones.

This is an interesting topic. I think 3D gaming can be good, however, I think it will be difficult to adjust to for a lot of people. I personally prefer multiple screens but a multiscreen 3D setup seems like it would be absolutely amazing in terms of immersion. But I don't think this will be a very viable option or very profitable as it seems it would be very expensive and limiting on who can actually afford to do it. Keep in mind, the last time I saw Steam polls (several months ago) they still showed less than 1% of gamers (at least on Steam) have SLI... I imagine that has a lot to do with cost. How many will be willing to consume the cost to go to 3D, or multimonitor setups, or 3D multimonitor setups? We're talking multiple video cards to do it properly, huge power supplies, and a lot of incurred cost. And it will all be completely dependent on support in games, and quality of the video drivers to run these new technologies. We've seen how long it took Nvidia and ATI to make SLI & Crossfire stable and compelling. When these technologies first came out, you were paying twice as much for 2 video cards and only getting a 20% performance increase. Now we're seeing 80% performance increase in a lot of cases but its taken 6 years to get to this point! (Well, 12 years if you want to go back to the very origins of SLI on 3dfx).

I don't think we'll ever see single player modes completely gone.. but it seems like you can only ever have one or the other in video games. If you have a great single player, multiplayer will completely suck. If you have a great multiplayer than single player will completely suck (cough cough Bad Company 2).

In general it seems all media industries are moving away from hard copies. It costs more, designers and publishers make less money, and its usually much more of a pain to have a physical media copy of a game/music than it is to just buy it online. I think big box stores will eventually accept this and have to think of a creative method to still be able to sell these types of media. Gift cards or a retail box with a CD key for Steam.. something along those lines. I never want to go back to the days of buying retail copies of games and having to run 17 individual updates before I can play the game.

I also think getting rid of physical media has some other benefits to it. If we can get rid of CD/DVD drives completely it free's up a LOT of room for other devices and/or cooling in laptops. Replace that CD drive with a second GPU in a 13-14" frame. Or a second hard drive. Or a big video card in a smaller frame. In addition, we can now cram some more USB ports on your notebook as half of one side isn't taken up by an optical drive. Netbooks were (and, to some degree, still are) EXTREMELY successful and they didn't include optical drives so why can't we see full size get rid of them, too?

 

Great point about the laptop space usage, never thought of the space that would be saved. Even in desktops the whole front when could be cut off effectively. I think box stores could do a pc terminal, with usb 3 then light peak, you bring a portable SSD to a store get a key and the full download transfered to your hard drive, then you transfer it back to your comp or console or what ever at home and bam got your game day one, no latency or server errors.

The PSPhone had me interested but the spec sheet leaves much to be desired, and it seems to be a different sku then the psp2, which makes no sense from an economical point of view but im not a ceo at sony. It sounds like it might just be a psp 1 in a phone, rather then a psp2 which everones gloating of its near ps3 esque graphics. I think we are all slowly becoming an on the go society and would be nice to get a dedicated game experience on my hour bus ride to school.

I agree with the multi monitor over the 3d, but 3d has alot of industry support which might be the deciding factor. Id personally rather have a bigger screen( bigger then my 52inch) rather than 3d or even multi monitor any day. I think we may all eventually move to head mounted displays, sony has a lovely 720p head mounted display they showed this ces and to think, 100 720p screen, everything else blacked out of site, you surround sound headsets and the game, thats it.

I think there will alway sbe place for a good story aswell in gaming. Gaming is turning into an art and im sure we can all think of games that we can list under this catagory for numerous reaosns, and I think that alone will bring in more creative story tellers and maybe even traditional writters being able to breathe life into their creations.

I also agree with all your points on the two in one chip, lots of pros and cons aswell, we may have to invent a new cooling system too if need be, new technology needs new technology and not shackled to old ways of doing them. I think the sharing of memory could pose another problem aswell.

Now orange canary I def agree with you too, holding a disc or a cart is just unreplacable, slowly becoming a pc gamer its hard to just download the game and not actually get anything other then the game. Booklets minicomics, smalll character busts, and even a nice case to hold the game cant be replaced, but maybe along with my new proposed model for box stores they could also continue to have these special edition items that can accompany your in store download. best of both worlds?

 

Future of gaming? Steam

 

steam and onlive will likely be a big part of the future of gaming

and it might also be the enf the little line on the box of every game that tels mobile version of these card might be suported but ...

 

Yea I'm very very very excited to see where Onlive goes. Windows games on Mac and, someday, Linux. If they could merge or integrate their system into Steam it would be perfect. Play all my Steam games locally on my more powerful rigs and in the Cloud on my portable machines. Would also be great on a mobile system if mobile internet ever becomes stable/powerful enough.

They have the iPad client but on every iPad and wireless connection I've tried it on I've gotten an error that says the connection isn't strong enough.

 

I've never used a 3D monitor but I don't think I would like it. Every time I watch a movie in IMAX 3D, I get whoozy and dizzy from the amazing 3D experience. My eyes lose focus afterwards. I love 3D but the after effects are a little too overwhelming for me.

I think we'll switch to digital-only eventually. I trust Steam, but the only reason I hold onto a physical copy only for adding to my collection.

 

Hrm, from your list...:
- I do see a move towards single chips for mainstream, but gaming rigs will always have separate ones; they will work in tandem and improve physic heavy calcs in games
- Yes, but so will "classic" gaming. Gaming on phones/portables will always be behind laptops/computers/consoles, for as long as both exist.
- By the time ray tracing is implemented we'll have something better on the horizon
- Can't stay with polygons forever...
- Neither. 3D is gimmicky parlor tricks at best, and harmful to some peoples' eyes at worst. Likewise some people simply can't do multiple screens. As long as there are screens involved, mainstream will be a single screen.
- It's already become that way on the PC, consoles will follow. It's not enough to simply beat DA:O anymore; you need to be logged in so you can show off your achiev to the rest of the internets. And you log in because.. well, you don't know why, you just do.
- Digital distro a hard pill? If you live in nicaragua, maybe. Or if you work in the retail business. The only thing stopping everything from going digital distro is human sentiment over physical things and isp's who restrict bandwidth beyond reason.
- DX12 will have unicorns.

 

no such thing.

 

The next big change will be the PS4 and new Xbox.

The current consoles are holding back all multiplat titles. The next-gen consoles will be making 3 to 5 generational leap in graphics power, and PC gaming will benefit greatly.

 

Next gen in gaming will be like watching a hollywood movie..

 

You mean most of it will be boring, heavily borrowed from other content, over-sensationalized, entirely too much bad CGI, overpriced, poorly scripted, poorly written, and complete drivel? O wait...there are already games like that lol. Sorry but sadly most Hollywood content is utter tripe, and only a few movies that could be counted on the fingers of a single hand usually come out that are worth more than a cursory glance. The rest of it is full of movies that exist only for 3D, <Insert category here> Movie 31, the fifth or sixth sequel to a movie series that went stale after the first two, CGI fests with nary a plot (usually with 3D also), or just generally the same old worn-out plot that we've seen 1000000000000x before, just in a slightly different wrapper (but the movie has all the same actors who can't act that are in all the other movies that are the same).

The past 2 generations of consoles, at least, have brought small, incremental and at best very conservative changes hardware-wise to the market. It is not likely that the PS4 and the Xbox 720 (for the sake of giving it a name) will greatly change gaming as we know it. They'll probably be somewhere in the mid-range of the current generation graphics cards and processors that PCs will have, and they'll have a fraction of the memory because they won't need to run a full PC OS on top of games. They'll likely have slightly redesigned controllers but nothing revolutionary. If the Kinect/Move succeeds they might be more integrated into the base system. Nintendo's offering will be significantly behind the other two in hardware but will be more stable and probably have a better selection of games at launch. They might even use some newfangled media that holds more data (Blu-Ray isn't doing as great as Sony wishes it was; it's also slow).

The truth is that consoles have almost never been a big change. The biggest was possibly the Wii having true motion control as the main controller for the system (it wasn't the first time motion control was implemented, just the first time it was made the main form) and that was on hardware that was hardly a step away from the Gamecube. It is true that multi-platform titles will be helped a tiny amount by new consoles, but they will still be held back by them because the hardware in the consoles will be outdated by at least 6 months before the consoles even come out, at least compared to what PCs will have available.

My sincere hope is that console gaming dies the horrible terrible death it has needed to for at least a decade or so. The PC will always be much further ahead than a console will ever be and tying all software to one or two sets of already outdated hardware for the next 5-10 years is just silly.

Don't get me wrong, I don't want it to go back to the days when PC games were being made all over the place that weren't even usable on most of the highest end hardware either. I'd just like to see things gravitate back to PC and away from locked-in hardware. Course, that involves a discussion on one of the many reasons that developers choose console over PC, that being DRM and copy protection, but that's a discussion for another thread.

O...and I want to see more games that fully support OpenGL and Linux kernels. It would be nice to do away with Windows entirely at some point (although Win7 is indeed much better than it's predecessors).

I don't really see mobile gaming becoming the end all and be all of gaming. Most mobile gaming is gravitating towards touch screen phones, which are great for some very specific types of games, and very very terrible for many others. Many games (especially FPS/RTS/etc) require a full keyboard or at the very least a full controller with all the buttons (no skimping on analog sticks like the current PSPs do, or missing shoulder buttons etc). Unless they find a way to project holograms on thin air, bigger screens will also always be better for your viewing pleasure.

I do see laptops mostly replacing desktops though, that's already happening. Heck, I don't own a desktop anymore and I used to be a diehard desktop only kind of guy. Of course, my 'laptop' is hardly a sub-15" plastic piece of junk either.

3D is a gimmick. 3D will always be a gimmick. At least until Star Trek style holodecks become real (which, due to unfortunate limitations on physics, electromagnetic radiation, particles, waves, insert sciency stuff here, will never happen unless we somehow come across another extreme breakthrough in science dealing with these things (we might)). Otherwise it's something to hurt people's eyes and either make them wear funny glasses, use Geordi La Forge like temple implants that make you blink like crazy (do a search for the video, it's nuts), and/or multiple screens. All of these are cruddy workarounds to something that the media industry has been trying to shove down our throats for at least 40 years (longer than I've been alive). All of these heavily depend on the people viewing them to be viewing them from very narrow and specific angles. All of them cause extreme eyestrain. Etc...

I think things like the Kinect, if properly implemented and with good games to boot (that don't just involve jumping around, waving your arms, but with actual intricate control including the fingers and facial expressions (which some homebrewers are doing)) might do a lot to change things. It won't work for everything, most likely. Although running in place to move around in Call of Duty 12: Operation Sandbox Extreme XXXX might cause some of us to lose a few pounds,..

TL;DR Who the heck knows? Gonna be interesting. If there's one thing I've learned from the entertainment industry, they like change to come slow and easy, and controlled. Change is risky, especially with a population that is conditioned against change (read my comments on 3D, I'll probably sound like an old fogey in a decade or so). It'll be a fun ride though. If it's truly innovative, we will all be completely blindsided by it. This post isn't meant to be nearly as pessimistic as it probably sounds.

 

The next gen of PC Gaming will be, GO BACK IN TIME! Game content first, gimmicks last on priority! And develop PC games for PC users. OMG! What a brilliant idea. PC gamers are tired of console porting? No way!

 

Wouldn't that be nice. Goes back to my comment on innovation and change in the entertainment industry. They don't like to take risks. Madden 8x/9x/0x, CoD 1/2/3/4/5/6/etc, FIFA, NFS, and a few other games have rehashed the same stuff over and over again, for a couple of decades now. These games sell. Mostly the just update the graphics and change the setting a little, and that's it.

 

Like dual GPU's on PS4 Maybe after 5 years?

 

Virtual Reality part of the game where we can't tell the difference between gaming and real life

 

Well I think Virtual private servers will run most everything like hamachi in the future similar to what onlive does along with cloud gaming. There will be no need for harddrives per se but people will still use them for there own things. Video cards will be no more, the entire computer will be one solid unit I think.

The gaming industry is very much in an infancy stage. When you think of the amount of time games have been around there is x1000 more interesting and ventures to continue on with. In this aspect, gaming as we know it will be completely different down the road along with what is used to run it.

 

The only way the GPU on the CPU die will help is if discrete GPU's support both switchable graphics as well as a hybrid SLI to make use of both GPU's to give an added boost. Unfortunately Intel probably won't play too well in that regard, but let nVidia work around it like they did with the Ion.

 

The only part of your post I find agreeable is the part about Intel and Nvidia not working together to implement a form of Hybrid SLi. That just can't effectively happen with Intel's existing IGP architecture....and should Intel develop an arch where it would work, they'd be past the point where they'd need Nvidia to build them a discrete GPU. Intel would just make their own.


While I wouldn't classify it as the next big change since it's already gradually happening, I believe we'll see a continued shift towards AMD for gaming hardware. Not because AMD will have one single component that will crush Nvidia or Intel but because it can put together a complete package platform that no other brand can match.

In AMD's arsenal they've got:
-a new, potentially competitive x86 CPU architecture
-a better GPU architecture
-a better Fusion IGP
-the hybrid technology to get both working together
-the chipsets to get switchable graphics working with dual discrete GPU
-lower costs
-Eyefinity
-XGP


...and if the rumors turn out true at least two of the three next-gen consoles using AMD APU hardware...meaning shared platforms with PC; meaning lower development costs (for game devs too); meaning shorter life-cycles between console upgrades.

In the other corners, Nvidia has their hands tied on the x86 CPU, IGP, and chipsets, and Intel is at least a few years away from having their own GPU.

 

It's just a hardware problem. Eventually, this will be better, because the chips keep getting faster and smaller and the amount of information the different chips need to share keeps growing.

sure. of course? portable consoles keep getting better. gameboy -> nintendo ds / psp / ipod touch / android / iphone / other faster portable consoles

Ray tracing is definitely the future for games. you pretty much just need sufficiently fast hardware to make ray tracing work well. Getting other forms of lighting to look good (like ray tracing) requires a lot of cleverness. For now, cleverness is cheaper than hardware. However, computer hardware keeps getting cheaper. Matter of time.

of course we will move away from polygons. again, a more interesting question is "when" or "what is next in line". it's likely going to be a matter of what is easier to work with given faster hardware.

3d gaming will eventually be common, as will 3d video, but it will have to be significantly different from its current incarnation. multiple monitors probably won't ever be mainstream, we will have larger single monitors.

for the most part, yes. especially in AAA titles.

already shifting to digital. however, as long as people are willing to pay more for physical copies they will remain available.

dx12 is probably a relatively small release if it is included with vista / 7, just like dx 10.1/11. i doubt we will see infinite polygons or textures, because those terms are meaningless given our current graphics paradigm. Probably optimizations or additional functionality for directcompute, and changes to the API that are mostly backwards compatible.

dx11 is in part backwards compatible, for example, even all the way back to dx9 hardware. the only dx11 exclusives are shader model 5.0 and tesselation. oh yeah, we will almost certainly see a revised shader model for dx12. the end.

 

And Intel has ALWAYS had claims of having their own GPU. It'll never happen, they just don't dedicate the resources to it. Larrabee never came to fruition for consumer products. I don't see the IGP's in SB to be that much of a big deal as far as gaming is concerned, more about WiDi.

Ever think we'll see a marriage between Intel and nVidia like AMD and ATI? Call it InVidia...

 

People really need to let go of the whole Intel buying Nvidia fantasy...it was just a make-believe what-if someone came out with back when AMD bought ATI, and people latched on to. Truth is Intel would gain nothing substantial from the purchase of Nvidia that they couldn't produce on their own if they directed the resources into it. Intel would be paying for a lot of extra bloat that they'd end up cutting out anyway.

Way more reasonable fantasy deals have been talked about...like Oracle or IBM buying Nvidia for the server market, or ARM buying them and then licensing out Nvidia's patents to partners.

Apple going after Nvidia's Tegra has been dreamt of as well, though Apple could just as easily afford AMD and get an x86 license as part of the deal.


AMD has more sale rumors of it's own....including one of the theories put out there for the recent release of CEO Dirk Meyer was to make way for the sale of the company. The dream buyer: ATIC, already a major investor in GloFo.

Imagine AMD going against Intel and Nvidia with the the Gov't. of Abu Dhabi bankrolling them.

 

I dunno. I would have never thunk AMD buying ATI. Stranger things have happened. Intel can't produce squat as far as a real performance GPU which is partially the same reason AMD bought ATI. If Intel could they would have already, but they haven't shown anything of near competition what nVidia and ATI have produced either in desktop or notebook market.

 

To jaiaV, I think in one of your last posts you missed what was said about consoles holding back games, it is due to hardware, but the dictation of adoption for certain technologies used within the games are always from the consoles, DX10 never caught partially because it was useless but also multiplat games were still being built and are still being built on dx9, effectively haulting the generation of gaming. PC can move on to dx11 all it wants but developers wont put any serious time or money into it unless the next console generation uses it, or something similar in the case of opengl.

Now with the news of psp2 what does everyone think about the portable gaming again, we all bought laptops for portable gaming, but this comes with a screen , better battery life, and graphics relatively close to ps3. Is a device like this enough to win over more hardcore consumers and the start to a more micro age, as in a console that you can play on the bus, get home and plut it into your hdtv. What are all your takes on the psp2?

As far as polygon replacements go, whats everyones take on voxols? yay or nay.

 

psp2 = tiny screen & resolution, limited to arcade / action type games. Doubt it can push 1080p and Dx11 detail graphics. If it could then there'd be no reason for my new 8 lbs+ laptop.

voxols = no. CPU power will have to vastly overcome GPU performance, and these days GPU's are just as powerful as the CPU they reside in. CPU's aren't geared to do one specific thing where GPU's are.

 

They're called voxels. As in a portmanteau of volume and pixel. Which itself is a portmanteau of picture and element. They don't really have anything to do with CPU power, they're actually much easier than many other ways of simulating physics because the hit-detection is always 100% accurate and very, very simple. So voxels really lend themselves to a lot of things, but the problem is that there's no way to really use them to get photorealistic rendering that everyone expects. That is WELL beyond any existing hardware. But it can still be good for stylized games.

So, voxels have their place, but they will never replace polygons for rendering. The things that may chance are the way we currently do rasterization rendering. It's very fast, but some things are very hard to do with rasterization. The other major technique is ray tracing, which Intel has put some research into, but it's never been as fast as raster rendering and rasterizing has enough tricks that it can be "good enough" for most games. For high-quality movie rendering though they always use raytracing, or a combination of raytracing and rasterization depending on what's being rendered (which is what I honestly think the future is). Use raytracing for what it's good at, and raster for what it's good at, and intelligently combine them.

 

Damn, looks like I owe you $20!

 

While the technology does allow for faster small footprint gaming ala iPhone, PSP, etc., some of us gamers are a bit older with failing eyesight. While I do carry new technology, I hardly ever game on my EVO, my iPad, nor did I on the iPhone before I got the EVO.

I need to be able to see what I am doing to be gaming, and outside of basic games like tetris or some word games, the graphics are just too tiny to play things like COD on an iPhone...at least for this 52 year old. Main reason I am upgrading from 15x to 17x as well.

 

Lol, you know what would suck? Being a 70 year old die hard video game veteran and waking up in your retirement home to find out that Call of Duty 50 and Halo 117 have just been released in "virtual reality". Put the 50$ plastic helmet on and your immersed inside the game.

 

I don't want to hear it, because that seems how old I'll be before we get any of that cool technology. :cry: If only I was born yesterday.

 

Don't forget Final Fantasy XXXVIIIIVIVIIVIVIIIVIIX trailing behind Call of Duty and Halo

 

This is the present, not the future. That's just a description of how things are done

 

The psp2 has a 5 inch oled touch display, and is more a dedicated gaming handset then a cellphone, boasting a 4 core gpu. The graphics that have been demoed like uncharted compete with the ps3, which to pc users is ancient but good enough for a 5 inch oled to shine. a screen that small doesn't need HD resoultions, the pixel density is more important, it also hase dual anologs now which lend to playing first person games and third person games alike much easier to play. Just wanted to state that for the jury of NBK forums.

 

There will be no "big" change. It will all be incremental.