>Interesting that the meme that games are ST bound persists when that hasn’t been the case for several years
Except you don't get that it's not a meme, ideally CPU's were expected to scale into the 10-30Ghz range, that never happened because of the end of dennard scaling.
So yes ST performance is paramount, the only reason it's not is because CPU scaling hit a brick wall and because of power and leakage issues, when new materials become available that enable higher frequencies, you will see everything dramatically improve.
So no DX11 and Vulkan will not magically make all games faster, they are optimizations for graphics pipelines.
Most of today's games we're interested in run on 10year old machines just fine. If you think you can't run an i5 2500K /w a modern GPU and run 99% of all games you are clueless.
Most games are targeted at console specs and have held PC gaming back for decades.
>It's actually going to be a great era for consumers.
It's actually NOT, AMD, Intel, MS and big media companies are planning to put hardware DRM inside the computer.
The last 23 years of PC gaming we've seen the PC become a closed platform because of STEAM and mmo's, aka any client-server software you buy mean's you no longer own your PC or have any personal privacy because the program is constantly beaming data back to the mothership.
So no, they are going to turn the PC into locked down platform like mobile where you never see the exe files, they are trying to kill off local applications they want to "end piracy" by literally removing any control you have over your PC.
That's what Windows 10 DRM is about, UWP - encrypted computing, vm's, etc. Mean's it will be increasingly impossible to preserve old software because they are not honest binaries.
Don't think so? That is what Irdeto is all about, they've been encrypting PC game files for a while now and the future of PC gaming looks grim with always online drm, encrypted files because of micro-transactions and in game stores.
So no... the future looks locked down and dystopian to anyone who's been paying attention, what we're gaining in performance we're losing in freedom and increasing levels of DRM, VM's and encrypted software.
>It's actually NOT, AMD, Intel, MS and big media companies are planning to put hardware DRM inside the computer.
That's pretty old news. Things like the AMD PSP or Encrypted Media Extensions (DRM implemented by webbrowsers) exist primarily because media companies strongarm vendors into implementing DRM against their will. Things like HDCP simply do not work if they aren't deeply integrated into the hardware.
Steam is another example of a platform where developers are asking for DRM. The reality is that DRM is optional on Steam [0] but almost no developer is voluntarily disabling DRM. The high profile publishers even add third party DRM to the games because they think what steam does isn't enough!
>The last 23 years of PC gaming we've seen the PC become a closed platform because of STEAM and mmo's, aka any client-server software you buy mean's you no longer own your PC or have any personal privacy because the program is constantly beaming data back to the mothership.
>So no, they are going to turn the PC into locked down platform like mobile where you never see the exe files, they are trying to kill off local applications they want to "end piracy" by literally removing any control you have over your PC.
I'm not sure why you are using Steam as an example because it is a piece of software that wouldn't exist once Microsoft forces every application to be delivered through the Microsoft store. Not only is Steam third party software, it is also a tool that installs even more third party software. This bypasses the entire idea behind only allowing reviewed applications on an app store.
Steam also has another very nice feature that lets you avoid problems associated with Microsoft. It runs on Linux and it even lets you play Windows only games on Linux. Once you switch to Linux all of those problems you are talking about are irrelevant.
You don't get the end game was to client-server the big budget games which has happened. AKA diablo 1 + 2 we owned the game outright, not so with diablo 3 and overwatch.
Steam was forced into half-life/cs in 2004, no one wanted it and steam is malware. That is why we lost dedicated servers and level editors in the AAA gaming space.
Doom vs Doom eternal. Because the internet makes stealing software easy by holding back program files from the user.
Doom was the grandfather of modding on the Pc, in doom 2016, we got a gimped snapmap, and doom eternal is totally locked down. A far cry from the id software of the 90's.
Don't know why you're getting downvoted. I've been trying to keep an old Vaio Z series ticking along with Windows 7 using a community hybrid graphics driver. Lo and behold, you can't even do that anymore without basically hacking the windows kernel from the bootloader because Micro$oft is too busy sucking up to the movie/streaming industry to allow regular users to keep their things running. The kernel will not let you load an unsigned driver and give you the option to overrule their BS setup, even if you have looked at what the driver to determine what it is doing is correct, and are willing to use it.
B2B is the new policy setter. Businesses are the new first class User, and everyone else is just a Luser. To hell with em' all I say. If I could I'd find a way to crack their DRM anti-end-user circuitry and share it with the world out of spite. I liked that damn laptop. I still like it. I'm going to figure out how to pull off that bootloader thing, and I'm putting it out there for other Z series owners. You shouldn't have to fight a computer damnit!
And yes, I could swap to Linux, but that isn't really the point. The DRM crap moving to hardware means everyone has to deal with it. Furthermore, everything else I run is already Linux, and that laptop is my token Windows machine, which has quite a bit of sentimental value, as it was one of the machines that got me through college.
Anyway. Consider my hat firmly in the outraged bucket. This is ridiculous. Worthy of ridicule in every sense of the word. The entire software/hardware industry should look at the industries or actors asking for it, and tell them to work on getting on better terms with their users. The majority won't misbehave if you just provide a reasonable experience.
About the only two industries that have a reasonable claim to needing these types of features are National Security, medical devices, and grudgingly finance. That's it. Even then, I have difficulty swallowing the application, because it just leads to people trying to pry the lid open ever more. If they aren't going to give people the capability to opt out of this draconian nightmare, I want nothing to do with them.
It's because the internet has given control of software to companies. Pre 2005 the only control game companies had over software was a few PC RPG's that had been rebranded mmo. In an internet enabled world, every game can be made client-server and have in game stores.
The internet is what ruined gaming because it gave corporations and developers too much power and control of the software and the ability to deny ownership, dedicated servers to their customers.
I noticed this while searching for quality mobile games to help pass the time in quarantine. "Always on" completely changes the gaming medium since that constant relationship between developer and player means the product should never "end".
I don't like to think of new technology as "ruining" something, but maybe art is the one exception. After all filmmakers stubbornly stuck with 24 fps even when frame rates improved.
A CD based Sega system was a great idea but not as an add on, the reality is the cost of hardware back then and the nature of the console market being technology illiterate was the issue.
I was one of the few who got the original Sega CD, the early version one that mounted underneath the genesis. It had cool games like Darkwizard. The real issue was the cost of add on peripherals were too high to get any kind of market penetration. Back then parents bought videogames for kids for their christmas or their birthdays. They'd rent their favorite games from blockbuster/convenience store and then get their parents to buy their favorites.
The reality was consoles and games were expensive and most kids rented games back when sega and nintendo were the kings of gaming before PC gaming had taken off in 1990's.
So the financial barrier to console ownership and the high price tag for parents was the real issue. Sega had a lot of good idea's but not conceived in the right way or at the right time. They acted as if the gaming populations parents were rich.
That was the real issue with many console companies that allowed Sony to get a foothold into console gaming.
Playstation was as popular as it was because of piracy and backups thereby increasing its market, it was "microsoft" method of console dominance - we don't care if you pirate as long as you use our console.
Even if sony didn't intend that, Sony PS1 and PS2 became huge because of ability to pirate games on the platform.
Piracy paradoxically drove sony to success. Everyone forgets places like china, india and third world countries at the time that couldn't really afford games because the the ridiculous prices.
>I honestly fail to see any good reason not to use the cloud anymore, at least for business. Cost-wise, security-wise, whatever-wise.
Problem is point of failure, many businesses need to be independent and having data stored in the cloud is a bad idea overall. Because it produces point of failure issues. Consider if we ever got a real nasty solar wind and the electric grid goes down, the more we rely on the internet and centralize infrastructure into electric devices, the more it becomes a costly point of failure.
While many see redundancy as "waste" in terms of dollars, notice that our bodies have many billions of redundant cells and that's what makes us resilient as a species, we can take a licking and keep on ticking.
Trusting your data to out-side sources generally is a bad idea any day of the week. You always want to have backups and data available in case of diaster, mishap, etc.
Like no one has learned from this epidemic yet. Notice that our economic philosophy didn't plan for viral infections and has forced our capitalist society to make serious adjustments. Helping people is an anathema to liberals and conservatives / republicans / democrats, so for void to come along and actually force co-operation was a bit tragically humorous.
As a general rule you need redundancy if you want to survive, behaving as if the cloud is almighty is a bad idea, I'm not sold on "software as a service" or any of that nonsense. It's just there to lull you into a false sense of security.
You always need to plan for the worst case scenario for surviveability reasons.
>This might be a super dumb question, but are super computers worth it?
Yes, because that's where you get innovation in architecture. You have to understand the reason commodity hardware caught up supercomputers was because of getting lucky with materials. AKA the mateirals cpu's were made out of was easily shrinkable and frequency kept going up because of dennard scaling until roughly 2006. With the end of dennard scaling, research into new processor materials and computer architectures is the main issue. Single threaded performance is a huge priority because most problems we are interested in cannot be made parallel and hence do not benefit much from multicore.
There are also things you are not hearing about and aren't privy too.
Basically computers can run much faster if you use incredibly expensive or experimental materials. The major roadblock is really mass production. I'm certain there are black projects doing all sorts of custom hardware behind the scenes, most likely for military applications.
But the expense to run those custom machines makes it non viable for anything like mass adoption.
> Basically computers can run much faster if you use incredibly expensive or experimental materials. The major roadblock is really mass production. I'm certain there are black projects doing all sorts of custom hardware behind the scenes, most likely for military applications.
No. The CPUs on supercomputers are basically the same as what you can purchase commercially. What distinguishes supercomputers from "the cloud" is better networking.
> Single threaded performance is a huge priority because most problems we are interested in cannot be made parallel and hence do not benefit much from multicore.
The few big problems very interesting to militaries are all embarassingly parallel. There are no super-secret CPUs that have better single-threaded performance than what is available commercially.
That's not entirely true. Well, it is true that you can't get better chips with much higher clocks commercially, but there are specialist vendors making digital circuitry with crazy high clock speeds, and the primary market is the military.
For example, the Rapid Single Flux Quantum (RSFQ) logic uses superconducting circuitry and experimental chips have hit 1 THz for simple ADC/DAC circuits, and I've heard of 100 GHz DSP chips in practical use. They're typically used for radio telescope amplifiers and digitisers, large static military radar installations, etc...
People sometimes forget that the commodity market seeks a kind of Pareto Frontier optimisation where "cost effectiveness" and "low risk manufacturing" are key metrics. If you don't care about any of that and just want the maximum performance at any cost, there's some amazing technologies out there!
> I see year after year, decade after decade that they keep being discussed, with the same points being made over and over again. Is there a name for these?
Because human beings don't see reality accurately, see the science:
The reason is they've been stealing games since 1997 with UO, that was the plan. For those of us who remember kali and kahn IPX emulation over the early internet that allowed us to play warcraft 2, doom, descent, duke 3d, etc.
The internet changed the incentives because it made it trivial to steal software en masse from the public by client-servering it, and therefore there is no incentive to make high risk high definition games with lots of content when you can make low risk multiplayer games with tonnes of microtransactions.
That's what killed dedicated servers, once stupid kids started paying for skins in game or mounts in wow, that killed any incentive for game devs and publishers to make software we owned and controlled.
You have to see the internet is one giant world sized PC, two or more networked computers behave as a single machine.
So they see us as dumb terminals they can put in game/in app stores on every persons device in the world.
That was the whole plan from the beginning, to get rid of software ownership by holding back game and app files since most people are ignorant to how computers work.
They even have industry meetings about how stupid the public is:
They always wanted to take control of customers PC's and reprogram them to obey them and they have done that with Steam, mmo's (aka rebranded RPG's with a subscription and non ownership).
That's why we have uplay, origin, steam, etc.
The last 20 years has been the public committing suicide on software ownership and I've watched in horror as everyone, even my fellow nerds falling for this scam which was all part of conspiracy to take control of your computing device.
The tech industry's long term goal was to move us to an authoritarian model of computing device ownership where you no longer control the files or OS or device. That's what mobile was about.
Microsoft and the industry want to do that to the PC and windows 10 is their first version of the OS to turn the PC into a locked down platform like mobile.
> made it trivial to steal software en masse from the public by client-servering it
To be fair, the public were also "stealing" software from the publishers.
I'm very familiar with the "information feudalism" argument you're making, and it has a valid core, but you're way overstating it especially as a conspiracy or authoritarianism. Especially if you're going against the groundbreaking UO.
And no, gamers can't "Steal" files, since the nature of comptuer files means as soon as you have a copy of a file you can't control it because files are just numbers, so to equivocate software piracy "(henceforth referred to as file copying)" as stealing is bs. We could make a good faith argument, lobbyists who wrote IP law governing software removed the publics property rights to own the software they buy (aka stealing their human rights to own the stuff they buy).
Since silicon valley has always hated other companies controlling their own software and their PC's. The history of IBM, microsoft, etc, is a history of criminality.
So no, the conspiracy is quite real. They've had these plans in the cards for a long time, they've had conferences like the below before internet of things was even a thing...
UO was not some "revolutionary new genre", it was you being illiterate, a literate consumer would have got the Renamed RPG "mmo" for a fixed price. and demanded the server exe's to run his own shards.
The fact that private UO servers exist for world of warcraft and ultima online, is proof that mmo is a fake genre invented to con the gullible out of game ownership. You just fell for the propaganda.
I can't be bothered to even unpack some of this loony RMS-level cutesyness, like that WoW is "stolen from the public" because it's a server-client game.
But how does your ideal kumbaya world, whatever that is, prevent cheating in networked games?
It's almost like humanity is too stupid to understand when you buy criminally coded stolen software as a service, you will get screwed.
The fact that parts of the OS functionality are living on some remote server is a sign of idiocracy.
Steam, origin, uplay, epic games store, Windows 10, are all signs humanity is stupid.
Watching the entire tech community steal software from the public beginning in 1997 with ultima online was enlightening.
No one should complain about windows 10 ads, you literally bought an OS that is fraudulently coded, there is no reason for any OS to be client-server. It's exactly the same as buying windows 95 or XP with missing files and a missing CD/DVD that they didn't give you which is sitting in some remote servers drive.
>This is my biggest pet peeve with news in general. Why does a high school paper have more rigor in terms of citations than the average post from a major news organization?
Because news is not meant to inform, it's meant to indoctrinate and keep you passively under the thumb of the rich.
>It makes digesting political news all but impossible.
The question is do you know the upper classes know your brain doesn't see the world as it is, you can be told the facts and not reason to the right conclusion?
Except you don't get that it's not a meme, ideally CPU's were expected to scale into the 10-30Ghz range, that never happened because of the end of dennard scaling.
So yes ST performance is paramount, the only reason it's not is because CPU scaling hit a brick wall and because of power and leakage issues, when new materials become available that enable higher frequencies, you will see everything dramatically improve.
So no DX11 and Vulkan will not magically make all games faster, they are optimizations for graphics pipelines.
Most of today's games we're interested in run on 10year old machines just fine. If you think you can't run an i5 2500K /w a modern GPU and run 99% of all games you are clueless.
Most games are targeted at console specs and have held PC gaming back for decades.