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General discussionNew NVIDIA cards on the horizon(77 posts)(77 posts)
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This is my favourite topic
Posted July 19, 2016
I hope there's a new low profile card I can upgrade to from my 210.
Posted July 20, 2016
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ET3D: ...
Indies vs. studios, I think that for indies it makes sense to get as quickly as possible to game development, and that means using an existing game engine. AAA devs who create their own engine (and there are few of them) want as much control and flexibility as possible, which means something that's as low level as possible.

Direct3D has been going more general and less conceptual over time. DX10 dropped all notions of specific vertex transformations from the API (world, view matrices, etc.). Some version of DX11 dropped the D3DX library completely, so any notion of organising shaders and any other handholding got removed. DX12 treats resources as memory, and the notion of textures whose memory is handled by the API is gone. In short, Direct3D becomes more and more complex to use, but provides more control. It's aimed at the engine writers, not hobbyists and indies. The barrier of entry becomes higher.

GPU's are already geared towards compute performance. Any game that doesn't have heavy calculations is using just a fraction of the chip's potential power.

The way I see it, things will likely continue this way: the base API's will be geared at general computing, with some graphics functionality thrown in (depth buffer, texture samplers, ...), but growing ever more low level and general. Over this will be built engines, which is what the vast majority of developers will use.
That's a pretty accurate summary of things over time. I'm a former video driver engineer and the tendency over time has been for APIs to loosen up and put more control over the hardware into the hands of the developer at the same time transferring the complexity to the developer. Vulkan and DX12 take this up several notches and change the entire ballgame.

As you say though, the average game shop isn't going to be coding directly to these APIs and taking on that level of complexity, they'll be using pre-existing game engines that support these underlying technologies in the majority of cases. Game engines have gotten large and complex and the barrier to entry to create an exciting competitive new one is increasingly out of reach of small developers and even many larger ones.

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mistermumbles: NVIDIA is back to piss some more into AMD's cereal. The GTX 1060 will be out later this month, and according to NVIDIA it will be faster than the GTX 980 (probably not too much so though)... for only $250 (for the non-fancy versions). Seeing as their claims about the other cards were fairly accurate, I'd expect this to hold true as well.
That's getting more into my stubborn thrifty price range but not quite there yet. I tend to buy the lower end of the high end cards though too and usually from AMD although their last few generations haven't impressed me greatly. I'm still using a HD7850 here which is holding up but choking on some newer titles below spec. Not in a rush to upgrade but it'll be needed some time in the next couple of years. The prices of even the low end of the high end cards seems stratospheric in the last 3 years from both AMD and nVidia though. Hopefully there will be some price shifting downward in the next few years though. I miss the days when I used to get high end cards sent to me for free <sigh>. Never had to buy any video hardware between 1998 and 2013, but now it's a game of watching prices and grumbling. :)
Post edited July 20, 2016 by skeletonbow
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This is my favourite topic
Community
General discussionNew NVIDIA cards on the horizon(77 posts)(77 posts)
(77 posts)