How comes games demand more & more, which means you need a more powerful gpu. Every year...

 

Guess who is one of the biggest money supporters of AAA titles development? Yes, son. It's AMD and nVidia. That's why you will ALWAYS need a better GPU to run the newest titles.

 

Games are a huge market and this market has huge profit potential. Provided you make a product that many people want to buy.
How does a manufacturer sell his product? It has to be better and more innovative than the competition.
Many new games are becoming more realistic and equipped with new possibilities, and that usually costs more computing power.

 

Because the game industry always wants more powerful options and the hardware manufacturers want to keep up with the demands of this market.

 

Sighs. I was honestly hoping that games are different

 

Can't be true because ps5 (msrp) is better value than a gpu the same price. It must be an optimisation thing, that gpu/game companies are pretending is impossible

 

What the companies invented or improved is their trade secret.

Mass production of the AMD Ryzen 7 6800U based on TSMC's 6nm base has started, according to tech insiders, which should accordingly soon be found in consoles. It is conceivable that this will be the case with the new PS5 model CFI-1200, which was spotted by Japanese authorities just a few days ago.

The new design is therefore based on the semi-customised 6nm chip for the CPU from AMD, as this can be produced more cheaply than the current chip on a 7nm basis and the demand on the market is not quite as great here.

Source: https://playfront.de/ps5-modell-cfi-1200-6nm-chip-produktion-gestartet-bald-entspannung-in-sicht/

 

Partly because good plugins are like precision tools that you return to again and again over a long period of time. The Waves plugins were at version 9 in 2012. Waves L1 came out in 1994. And people still use them despite the Winamp style GUI. I'm sure many people here weren't even alive then.

Games though.. People pick them up, dawdle a bit, get bored and throw them in a digital corner. Games are a one time thing for most people. In fact, the majority of buyers never completes the games they buy. That's crazy.

No profit in investing in code optimization if people won't be coming back to your game anyway - just scrape some content together and move on, business as usual.

Conversely, that's why so many F2P games run so well on crappy machines despite having alright graphics and fairly complex logic going on behind the scenes. Because F2P is digital crack billions of kids (mostly boys) lose years of their lives to.

'Just buy a better computer' - doesn't work for consoles. Developers are stuck with the same hardware specs for a long time, there's pressure to write less shitty code.

 

Game manufacturers / Gamers constantly push hardware specifications. Not because it gives AMD or NVIDIA or Intel more money. But anyone that's a gamer typically wants games to be more and more advanced... more realistic. There are other industries that push hardware advances pretty hard, but gaming is a very large factor in this.

@BEAT16 and @RachProko are right.

"Better value" is a bit subjective here. They are cheaper though, yes.

There are multiple reasons for this, but the big reasons.. Consoles are mass produced. Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo, etc. pick manufacturers for components and pay them a large amount of up front money. Guaranteed money for these manufacturers. So, like with anything bought in bulk, it comes at a cheaper price.

Secondly, console makers often take a loss on consoles and make it up on game licensing. This isn't something you can do on PC, as there's many PC hardware manufacturers out there so they can't just take a cut of software licensing.

Lastly, PC's are far more versatile than consoles.. Theres a lot more that they need to be capable of doing. A little harder than building something that really has one function. But the bigger reasons are the other two points.

 

Both of these right here. Worked at Best Buy ages ago, right around the time the Xbox One and PS4 dropped. Was looking at getting an XBO for my girlfriend at the time's kid for a birthday gift and the employee discount for it was like $0.25 off. The consoles retail price are literally breaking even, there are pennies of profit a retail store makes off those. ALL the money comes from the licensing required. This is why Nintendo games rarely go on sale. Something like Doom Eternal is regularly on sale for cheap as shit nowadays on the Xbox/PS yet still $59.99 over at the Switch ALL the time. Nintendo's licensing is so ridiculous, developers can't make money off their games unless they're charging the full price for them.

And yeah gamers, or rather "real" gamers so they call themselves, don't want consoles. As solid as they are, the computer geeks consider them very 'inferior'. I work for one of the big display manufacturers now here in California, I talk to the gamer kids buying our $1000-2500 'gaming monitors' every day and going over their ridiculous setups all because they HAVE to have a 165hz refresh rate and 240fps in whatever Call of Duty scam Activision just released this week. Its pretty nuts, in the 80s you threw us in front of an Atari 2600 and we were stoked to move around little 2x2 pixel blocks that were supposed to be our character haha.

The gaming industry alone is literally what drives the evolution in graphics technology. If it weren't for the demands for more 'realistic' gaming, we'd still be using 2MB ATI Rage cards or something heh.

 

It's widely known that modern gen consoles, specifically the ps5, are sold at a loss or a very low profit margin for the console itself. The hardware is too expensive, but the companies want to get it in the consumers' hands anyways because all the profit comes from the sales afterwards. This argument holds no water.

 

Don't ask me, I still play asteroids!

 

Without the users' money there would be no progress. I remember that 1 hour of AOL Internet cost 6$ back in 1998 and the first CD ROM cost 10$. What do ordinary citizens get out of gamers? Faster equipment and sharper images. The world outside is reproduced on the monitors almost like the original.

 

and how is that any different than plugins?

RX10 is much slower than RX9
newer UAD plugins require more DSP power
new Waves plugins require Metal capable gpu else they show grey squares instead
ProTools needs more and more ram and cpu to crash only as much as before

 

The other thing I forgot to mention with console development vs pc development.. With console development you know all the hardware you're developing for (with some slight variations such as Xbox series s vs x). Every developer will tell you it's generally much easier to program for a system that you know all the hardware involved. So it is typically easier to optimize for console, but I can guarantee you the vast majority of developers spend a lot of time and money optimizing their games for any platform.

There's a couple/few different latest Gen Xbox / playstations but a plethora of different pc hardware specs. Nvidia, miscrosoft, amd, engine developers, etc do spend time trying to remove the burden of spec differences from developers, but they'll always be a concern.

 

Last edited: Sep 25, 2022

*me looking at Ultima I and Spiderman Remastered PC* "Yeah damn greedy game makers not optimizing their games!"

*me looking at Ableton limiter and Newfangled Elevate* "They should take a page from VST devs where power requirements are the same across the board!"

Sarcasm aside, I've been using my Gtx 1070 for gaming since i got it 6 months after it released, and it's just been pretty recently with games like cyberpunk or the newest AAA shooter demos (cause both bf2042 and new cod were not worth) where Ive been feeling the oldness. that could just be cyberpunk sucking ass though, bastards. such potential.

IMO it's less about the greed the of devs or even Nvidia/AMD and way more about the chip shortage/mining shit. if I can get years of solid use out of a 400 dollar gpu that's the equivalent pretty much of a new console, especially when balanced out with 60 dollar console games and PC sales. It's just the last few years when the shortage happened and the MSRP tripled or whatever where that 400 dollar multi year investment into entertainment became way more unreasonable.

Alright, back to playing Zork with RTX enabled.

 

eh I don't think this is 100% true at all. certainly with some games you will need the newest fanciest stuff, but even disregarding the vast amount of indie games and non GPU intensive games out there that are new and looking at AAA fps games (usually the most demanding) - Overwatch 2 beta recommended, not minimum, requirements are for 60fps medium is a gtx 1060. which is years old. As I said above it's just the stupid MSRP of new GPUs skyrocketing that has made it seem more obscene than normal, and that's really a world wide issue beyond gaming.

which isn't to say greed and shitty practices don't exist within the industry, and that Nvidia and amd aren't doing what they can to leverage more out of the market. that I agree with, I just don't with the sweeping generalization when clearly there are a ton of new games that don't fall into the category of needing a 3090 to run them decently.