You are doing that classic PC gamer thing of not realizing that consoles dictate game ambitions and generational limits. What an RTX 3060 has is largely unimportant.
Clearly the untrue.
During a time in which memory was being riddled with texture assets this was more important. With high speed SSDs and being able to fetch assets nearly at call, you only need to keep in memory that which you need to render. The rest of the space will be render buffers and BVH trees; in which providing more space than buffers and BVH a GPU can compute would be considered overkill.
But how true is this? I think it’s very simplistic to state that, "consoles dictate game ambitions," when the single biggest factor is budget. After that, you got other aspects such as dev time, game design, genre, and a slew of other things that impact ambitions.
Yes, there's a minimum below which you suffer. Now imaging PS4 with 2 TB of RAM. What would that gain it over 200 GB? Or that over 32 GB? You'd be adding cost with no tangible gains. There's a curve of cost/reward and the RAM needs to be optimally positioned for the whole design, not just at a peak in isolation.
Even if they could always use more RAM, which they can't (there'll be costs to fill RAM just as there is SDD storage - we' could be streaming far greater quality assets than we are now except they cost too much to make), we can't just add RAM without consideration of cost. How much would the more RAM cost to include, and what measurable, tangible benefit would it actually bring? I argue that a doubling of RAM price will bring a 3% improvement to games - SSD isn't being taxed at all yet. Need for cached data is limited. Processing power is already saturated with current workloads. etc. If you can present a good argument that a doubling of RAM price brings at least a doubling in game quality, you'll make a case for more RAM, and for that you'll need to point out what in a game is RAM limited and why the SSDs can't pick up that slack. Only thing I can think of at the moment is acceleration structures.
during the PS2-PS3 era console technology was in some aspects a step ahead and dictated a lot of trends, not only from a development perspective but also the adoption of DVD discs, the HD era and HDMI connections instead of VGA, and so on and so forth.
wccftech.com
Sounds like simplifications will continue to be used in HWRT then until hardware evolves if that is the case (staggered update, simpler materials, lesser geo). It is not like the SWRT in Lumen/any other game is going to be attempting to maintain material/geometric parity with primary view once these things go online for AAA games.
I don't think just materials or geometry will be the only challenge. How do we ever hope to integrate ray tracing with volumetric rendering ? (much like UE5's heterogeneous volumes) Or what about rendering more advanced translucency/scattering models ?
I believe it to be true in a general sense. When we're talking about the most ambitious developers, clearly were talking about developers with big budgets. Those games typically need to release on all platforms.. and thus the hardware limitations of the consoles will have bearing on the overall ambition of the dev teams. They'll test around to get an idea of what is possible on the new hardware, and then design around that as a base. From there, they'll look at what PC hardware support they can get away with and depending on their budget and time, they try to scale the game to hit as wide of an array of PC hardware as possible.
Believe it or not, I believe all of those games were limited in ambition and scope even on PC...because they had to get them to work on PS3 and 360.
