Digital Foundry Article Technical Discussion [2025]

[Lurkmass]

No, integrated graphics are not going away at any point in the hypothetical future.

No one said they were but from now on (outside of the very 'best') they'll become auxillery to any high-end technical games and there's a "world of difference" between the latest Xbox/PS hardware and something else like the Switch/Steam Deck since support for the latter by AAA game developers wasn't really taken in any serious capacity for extended periods ...

The "hardware convergence movement" that nearly everyone else so desired here between console and PC platforms ultimately means that any unlike systems will be eventually driven off to the cliff of extinction since it's industry consensus to move to ever more powerful/capable hardware and much of the future of ultraportable devices won't be looking so good ...

 

[homerdog]

No one said they were but from now on (outside of the very 'best') they'll become auxillery to any high-end technical games and there's a "world of difference" between the latest Xbox/PS hardware and something else like the Switch/Steam Deck since support for the latter by AAA game developers wasn't really taken in any serious capacity for extended periods ...

The "hardware convergence movement" that nearly everyone else so desired here between console and PC platforms ultimately means that any unlike systems will be eventually driven off to the cliff of extinction since it's industry consensus to move to ever more powerful/capable hardware and much of the future of ultraportable devices won't be looking so good ...

An NVIDIA handheld could offer a decent experience IMO. With DLSS4 (SR and FG) it could render way fewer pixels than current consoles and still get acceptable results for a tiny screen. Not a premium solution but consider that the most popular console on the market is way slower than a PS4..

I'm not necessarily referring to the Switch 2 since it's Nintendo Cheap™. But a handheld with a Lovelace or Blackwell GPU might be surpisingly capable.

 

[Lurkmass]

An NVIDIA handheld could offer a decent experience IMO. With DLSS4 (SR and FG) it could render way fewer pixels than current consoles and still get acceptable results for a tiny screen. Not a premium solution but consider that the most popular console on the market is way slower than a PS4..

I'm not necessarily referring to the Switch 2 since it's Nintendo Cheap™. But a handheld with a Lovelace or Blackwell GPU might be surpisingly capable.

Sure but then developers will use similar tricks/hacks for current consoles as well even if they're more suboptimal and then soon things will spiral out of control to the point where even Microsoft will have to seriously consider dropping Series S compatibility altogether. Can a theoretical system such as the one even you propose built with current technology be able to cross that very high threshold ?

Nintendo can shore up whatever left overs that remain in the portable space because they WANT to be in a different world (NOT generic high-powered stationary box) from the rest of the industry!

 

[arandomguy]

I'm bit a confused what the context of this discussion this? For the latest "high end technical games" and users looking to play them at those settings were for the most part opting for discrete graphics cards since basically the late 90s. So status quo will remain status quo?

 

[homerdog]

Sure but then developers will use similar tricks/hacks for current consoles as well even if they're more suboptimal and then soon things will spiral out of control to the point where even Microsoft will have to seriously consider dropping Series S compatibility altogether. Can a theoretical system such as the one even you propose built with current technology be able to cross that very high threshold ?

Nintendo can shore up whatever left overs that remain in the portable space because they WANT to be in a different world (NOT generic high-powered stationary box) from the rest of the industry!

Currently there is no comparable substitute for DLSS. If/when that changes it will be a different story. But it's been years now and NVIDIA's lead has only gotten bigger. Looking forward to FSR4 but we don't know how good it will be and it won't be running on current consoles.

 

[Lurkmass]

Currently there is no comparable substitute for DLSS. If/when that changes it will be a different story. But it's been years now and NVIDIA's lead has only gotten bigger. Looking forward to FSR4 but we don't know how good it will be and it won't be running on current consoles.

Who implied anything about current consoles being forced to always run higher resolutions from the get go ? Why not just have them run the game's graphics at already low resolutions ? Afterall there's no contract where developers must promise to ship above a specific minimum xyz resolution ...

Then what will Nvidia do with their own handheld since dropping to even lower resolutions will have diminishing returns thereafter ? Where would the other room to scrape by come from ?

 

[DavidGraham]

I'm bit a confused what the context of this discussion this? For the latest "high end technical games" and users looking to play them at those settings were for the most part opting for discrete graphics cards since basically the late 90s. So status quo will remain status quo?

The context is that Lurkmass repeatedly proposed that the current NVIDIA graphics trajectory is unsustainable, and that Sony will go the custom hardware route, and AMD will go the "WorkGraph" route and try to stifle the progress of machine learning and path tracing.

However Sony doubled down on ray tracing and machine learning with the PS5 Pro, and AMD fully embraced path tracing and machine learning upscaling and denoising, they even embraced the Cooperative Vectors API for Neural Rendering, meaning Sony will follow suit eventually. So any hardware that doesn't fully embrace this convergence is going to be biting the dust.

The "hardware convergence movement" that nearly everyone else so desired here between console and PC platforms ultimately means that any unlike systems will be eventually driven off to the cliff of extinction since it's industry consensus to move to ever more powerful/capable hardware and much of the future of ultraportable devices won't be looking so good ...