It’s undeniable that when it comes to aspects which require VRAM space & bandwidth as well as GPU processing power, games have become more demanding in the last few years.
But when it comes to tasks which require RAM, CPU and other components aside from the GPU and hard drive space, how much more demanding do games tend to be compared to 3-5 years ago?
If some tasks have become more demanding, could you detail what they are and in what way(s) they have become more onerous?
3-5 years? Not very much at all. We’ve hit a sort of period of stability in that hardware has, for the most part caught up with software requirements. I can’t recall a 5 year stretch in the past 30 years with less pressure to upgrade my PC for gaming reasons than the past 5 years.
CPUs and RAM have become absurdly capable and cheap in the past decade or so- I have 16 gigabytes of DDR3 1333 RAM that I got in 2013. I haven’t run across ANYTHING that I’ve needed more memory for. I can still tax my processor, but that’s usually for image processing applications with the parallel processing dialed up (use most of the cores simultaneously).
Hard drive space is the one place where I still seem to need to upgrade fairly often- games use multiple gigabytes nowadays as if everybody’s got a terabyte of drive space open.
And new API’s coming out are only going to stretch the existing performance even further. Consoles, sporting very low power CPU’s, will also place design limits on multi-platform games (especially big AAA ones).
The only games that are likely to benefit or utilize a lot of CPU power are PC exclusives where that CPU power has traditional been tapped into a lot. Real time strategy games is probably a big genre which can benefit, and already one game, Ashes of a Singularity, is leveraging powerful CPU’s and DX12 to render thousands of units, light sources, smoke/alpha particles, projectiles, etc.
I’d guess that GPU demands, or at least the upper limits of GPU use, have expanded much faster and further than CPU use.
The parts of games that aren’t graphics/GPU intensive probably don’t come close to maxing out most systems’ capabilities. It’s all just a number matrix at that level, which is then realized by millions of vertexes and planes per second.
What elements have increased in the past half decade that make games more GPU-demanding? There’s monitor resolution, frame rates, texture resolution, texture maps, real-time light, per pixel lighting, polygon count, AA, vision distance, what else?
Is there anything like a list of the typical tasks a CPU does in a game?
I think you’ve got the GPU pretty much covered. Lighting is the big GPU melting task now a days. I don’t think modern GPU’s are heavily tasked by the complexity of 3D meshes for the most part, but I’m not a game dev/3D programmer. Alpha effects and volumetric effects are probably another biggie.
My guess as to tasks likely to take up CPU time: AI, pathfinding, 3D mesh culling, monitoring object states, physics calculations, loading/decompressing assets, and probably managing some aspects of the rendering pipeline.
Do alpha effects include more than transparency and translucency?
Aside from physics calculations (which are amenable to modified GPU-processing) and loading/decompressing assets, it seems today’s games aren’t so much more CPU-demanding than the games 10 years ago.
Look at this bugger doing this in real time with a GTX 980:
