with consoles now also offering different specs (XSS to XSX and probably more later), i think its a non-issue.....
It's a must to solve scaling now, but this does not make it a non issue. It adds costs to all ends, from programming up to content generation.
The really big problem is dev costs being so high, cross platform is essential. Otherwise we could just make different games for different specs. One would think gaming has grown so large this would just work, but due to costs so high, sadly that's not the case in a AAA context.
Also we can't do magic with scaling. There's always a limit. If we want to support Steam Deck or even Switch, we either do a complete downgraded port later, or we do compromises on high end. Gfx scales fairly easily maybe, but other thing's don't and will never do.
Conclusion: High end becomes properly utilized only years later, after min specs go up. It's thus more economical to invest in mid range and entry level, no matter if you are average gamer or dev.
Largest RDNA3 for 2500 bucks as speculated? Pointless. And no, we never had HW this expensive before. It's a crazy. Meaningful for content creation and enterprise, but pointless for gamers and developers.
Everything contradicts your claims that the pc aint attractive to devs. Its doing better then ever and piracy has become a much of a lesser issue these days as say 10 or 15 years ago.
It is attractive, agreed. But mostly because cross platform development is cheap. The question is: Can we still count on further growth with WH supply simply being unable to match demand? No. Solution: Lower specs / slower increase of specs. It's simple economy, no matter what's our personal enthusiasm.
With smaller boxes we also make gaming more accessible, to keep it growing. Grandma already has internet, so let's sell her some Quake too
That's not my personal desire, but what the industry wants to justify their upwards spiral of ever increasing costs.
PC's on the other hand have shrunken quite much as compared to the large grey towers from 20+ years ago.
Yep. Monster GPUs with chips becoming larger instead smaller just don't fit into this picture. (Agree PS5 is too big too, and ugly)
3060 would already suffice to match and exceed console performance, that its expensive is due to the craze going on (wheter thats due to mining, covid or other factors no idea), but that problems arise on PS5 aswell, its a rarity to be able to get one (here atleast).
3060 + the rest you need to have a PC costs at least twice as match as a console with similar specs. So i want this form factor on PC too. Then the PC is a nice platform again, and beats console due to being open.
And i fully agree consoles have similar issues. Too big, specs higher than needed. I don't believe in a PS7, and PS6 maybe neither. But we want some box, no? We agree streaming sucks? So we need to work on such box before it's too late. Lower power, but still better gfx than current stuff. Totally possible.
Barely no upgrade? I think we have had one of the largest leaps in hardware so far going from pascal to turing to ampere.
The visual upgrade requires exponential growth in power. Point of diminishing returns. The new RT feature obfuscates this a bit, but the visual win becomes smaller and smaller, even if power doubles and doubles.
We need to find a sweet spot about HW power, and we need more time to achieve improvements than we did in the 90's. Rushing forward and depending on increased HW power and costs is like shooting our own legs.
It's like climate change. To solve it, we need to tone down and work on efficiency in the long run. Not great, not popular, but sadly the reality.
Well, both Sony and MS have gone with X86 so you will have to live with that for the next 7 years, at the least.
No problem. Aside from some SIMD optimizations we don't deal with instruction sets at all anymore. If NV gives us this small box with nice ARM SoC and powerful GPU, and AMD does the same with x86, extra work to support both is almost nothing.