Chasing speed is what is makes sales. The consumer needs to start demanding power efficiency, reliability and other metrics, not just raw benchmark speeds. Unfortunately, with ever increasing game engine demands (and not necessarily better games, just more complex graphics) and high end gpus being bought by twitch gamers, we are unlikely to see a shift in market purchasing behaviour UNLESS MSGM mainstream gaming media, starts putting more emphasis on efficiency and stability into their RATINGS and BUY RECOMMENDATIONS. Perhaps we could get
@W1zzard to be more transparent on the scorecard weighting of performance, price, efficiency, stability at TPU. Maybe a traffic-light system. Any suggestions?
'Increasing game engine demands'... in fact... this is absolute bullshit.
The engines demand
less than they used to. In a relative sense to the hardware on the market. If you add FSR/DLSS, that balance tips over even further compared to the past. I ran Cyberpunk on a 1080 @ WQHD with 50 FPS on medium~high settings + FSR. I'm running Darktide on similar FPS with FSR and the same res plus settings. All I have to accept is some shimmering here and there, nothing that can't be unseen in live play.
There is even a commercial reality alongside that versatility in engines: most recent engines cater to more than one platform and the PC is not 'bigger' than all the others. Its just the most versatile in its performance delta. Content must be streamed, too. It must be played on mobile, a potato PC, or a console.
None of this versatility was available back in the day. Yes, you could wash out all detail in the picture and then you'd get playable frames on something that looked like blobs of color with some idea of geometry to them. Now you get playable frames on something that approaches the intended developer idea closely on a GPU five years old, at a resolution that didn't exist proper when that GPU got released.
'Chasing speed' doesn't make sales - fooling consumers that 'they need the new kind of speed' to play games is what makes sales. That's why we have RT. 'A paradigm shift' so leave your old notions at the door pls and trust us, mighty corporate who know exactly what you need in your life. We'll even repeat it ad infinitum in case you've still got doubts.
Seriously, we are
way past sensible gen-to-gen increases by now. The only things that make them worthwhile is if you choose to make your own life harder by adopting 4K or diving deep into an RT fairy tale.
A reality check is needed, and its coming one way or another - climate change will force our hand, or the limits of wallets will.
I mean... here we are on a 2016 GPU. 60 FPS locked and butter smooth gaming at max settings and no trickery.. And its not the exception, its the
rule:
Suggestions? Sure.
- We should look in the mirror long and hard as humans and consider how much value we really attribute to always buying new stuff and the latest greatest.
- We need governments and global regulatory systems to limit our footprint per person. Its really simple: give every person a lifelong footprint wallet, you can spend all of it however you like, but when its gone, its gone, you'll need to simply accept things are finite. And then we need to price things in money, but also in 'footprint rate'. Stuff can be cheap, but might leave a massive footprint that'll make you think twice - choose and pick between flying everywhere twice in your life, or using other means to be able to travel far more, for example. Choose between running games 4000 hours with RT, or 8000 hours on raster graphics
- We need to price things based on their footprint on the planet, not the price of whatever industry thinks they're selling it at.
I mean... Reviews and Twitch? Lmao... this is bigger. This is the same shit in everything we do; we need to stop wanting more and actually do more with less. Like you say, efficiency - but you need to have a system, an economy to support efficiency, an economy that wants to sell efficiency over waste. Until that penny drops... anything and everything people say they plan or do is futile.
