Video Games General

[OverReactionGuy]

Game theory inspired by a walkthrough I watched.

The cat from stray isn't smart or as smart as a human.

The cat from stray was just doing cat things, didn't really know what the hell was going on, and things just worked out. Because cat.

 

[Avernus]

Part of me feels like making a sort of map of the life-cycle of 80s-to-early 2000s games.

First has bare minimum graphics but often has a surprising amount of mechanical detail.

Second is considered the series' peak with amazing/timeless sprite-work and sets the foundation for the entire genre all other games inspired by it will put painstaking work into trying to replicate yet rarely ever succeed, even when the original creators are involved.

Third is okay with controversial changes to the base gameplay and rarely anything revolutionary. The graphics often look dated as a result of trend chasing, be it pre-rendered early 3D, home PC rendered 3D, or a specific style of live-action.

Exceptions apply and a more simplified version is more universal. It's just that graphics are the most period-specific ever since they peaked in arguably the 2010s.

Click to shrink...

I think it's half technology changing, half trend-chasing. That was a period when graphics hardware was advancing really quickly, only slowing down in the 2010s. Early 3D was an awkward attempt to do something the hardware of the time wasn't quite up to doing acceptably; it was effectively pushed out the door before it was truly ready since they wanted to do things in 3d so bad. And the infamous "make everything brown and grey" period definitely didn't age well; ugly is ugly, no matter how well you render the ugliness.

Game UI too has largely settled down to a standard setup that works better than some of the old, awkward and overcomplicated ones where you had different buttons for every action, and often awkwardly placed. Old games game be fun, but learning the controls is often a pain.

I don't know about "peaked", but the difference between a 2010 game and a 2025 one isn't anywhere near as large as between 1995 and 2010, or 1980-1995.

Let us assume you have two buckets. One of these buckets holds pretty rocks and the other one holds apples.

Does adding more pretty rocks to one of the buckets mean the other can hold fewer apples?

Click to shrink...

Not a good analogy. The GPU also is what normally renders multitudes of small objects not the CPU; so there's only one "bucket". And more to the point, it's a matter of obsessively polishing the "apples" to an extent beyond most people will ever notice, while barely having any "pretty rocks".

There's just not much point in pushing for ever-finer detail in games that eat up large amounts of resources when we are already at the point people are unlikely to be able to tell the difference. But more things happening at once is the sort of thing people can see.

 

[vyor]

Not a good analogy. The GPU also is what normally renders multitudes of small objects not the CPU; so there's only one "bucket". And more to the point, it's a matter of obsessively polishing the "apples" to an extent beyond most people will ever notice, while barely having any "pretty rocks".

There's just not much point in pushing for ever-finer detail in games that eat up large amounts of resources when we are already at the point people are unlikely to be able to tell the difference. But more things happening at once is the sort of thing people can see.

Click to shrink...

The rocks were the graphics in the analogy, but more to the point...

A GPU can render, as an example, a single soldier in an RTS game. It renders them once.

There are 30 thousand of them.

Want to know how many times it renders the exact same model? Once per animation frame. Which could be a lot, but far less than the full 30k you'd assume.

Placing them in the right spots takes a bit more time, but the part that takes the longest is usually going to be the initial color and triangle rendering, then they get placed into the world (assuming they're visible) and then the lighting and shader rendering happens; and that step takes the same amount of time regardless of how many units there are (more or less).

The CPU, on the other hand, will be struggling with it because it needs to tell the GPU where each and every single one of those soldiers is standing and what's happening to them.