omega 616 said:
I know I am not going to stop companies continually making the graphics better but it is getting silly, everything looks great as it is, whats left to improve? Are things going to look better than real life?
Another thing if we can get 50gb cd's wouldn't that mean we could have games that last us weeks as opposed to 40-50 hours? Just a thought.
Surely, Moore's Law can only go on for finite amount of time, that is assuming what you say is true, there has to be some kind of limit to how much power you can get before you have to get more space to fit it in.
What are we going to do with all that power? The iphone already seems to do everything you would possibly want a phone to do,I have just read a headline right underneath were I am typing "Snipers in Afghanistan Use iPhone to Kill Taliban".
We also have phones with have camera's that have the same mega pixels as a digital camera, so why do we need camera's any more?
I know things are going to get smaller so the ps3 in a few years could be the size book, which makes me wonder why we still use cd's, wouldn't it be better to use external hard drives? Store alot more on it, theres alot less waste, harder to damage the data (it's easy to scratch a disk), if we wanted to buy a game we could wonder down to the shop hand the cash over (or do it all online) and they (we) put the game on the hard drive, we to plug into our ps3/360 and upload the game, I am sure it could be done.
I may not be making much sense 'cos I feel awful and I can't get to sleep so I apologize for any mistakes or lack of sense.
Oh there is ALWAYS room for improvement. And Moore's law has held up for the last 50 years since the first integrated circuits were made and looks like it will hold up for a 100 years in total, especially if quantum computing matures as expected.
It may be hard to believe but the iPhone has SOOO much room for improvement. The 3D graphics are not all that good, the camera is all right but could be better, the flash memory capacity could be increased. The only limitation on the phone is battery technology as that is not subject to Moore's Law, it has been stagnant for years.
I mean one military example is the iPhone cannot at this time stream high definition video with deep encryption in real time, that would be particularly useful as UAV spy planes that view the battlefield with cameras and stream the data to forces on the ground. Can it SIMULTANEOUSLY record high definition video and upload that wireless-ly over a large complex mesh network? Actually, can the iPhone even run multiple applications at the same time? No it can't, so that is an area for improvement.
Point is if you don't care about graphics then you shouldn't mind if they improve, they are going to improve as a hell of a lot of developers and gamers are interested in how visually impressive a game is. It's a visual medium.
Don't think that if some law was passed limiting the graphical quality of games that they would be any longer or better. Coming up with good gameplay and enough of it without unnecessary padding is extremely hard.
For example, although a 50GB Blu-ray for PS3 games (most PS3 games DON'T fill a whole blu-ray disk, but they do use a more than a single DVD disk) has roughly 6 times the capacity of a DVD, that doesn't mean developers suddenly are able to create 6 times as much content for a game.
There is no Moore's law for creativity. They have new assets to work with, but coming up with enough interesting things to put in a game is still as hard as it was back in 1984 when the first 3D game appeared.
But it is not like those older game were lacking in content, they had enough but I want something new with new games. Graphics are one area but another is physics, more advanced processing technology allows for more complex interaction with the environment.
There is the idea that Hard Drives could replace optical drives and BTW stop calling them CDs. CDs SPECIFICALLY mean those with a capacity of 700MB, the word you are looking for is 'Optical Disc' which can be DVD, CD, Blu-ray, etc.
And hard disk drives are very cheap now, the cost per Gigabyte is vanishingly small and decreasing all the time. The problem is how do you actually get the data to the consumer? The idea of impulse purchases are gone if you have to bring your hard drive into a store, they are a liability to carry around and it so many other problems such as if the retailers would rather push for the sales of hard copies.
Download seems to be the way to go but the weak link in the is the internet itself, it struggles to deal with large volume traffic and many users are limited in total downloads per month. The publisher can also struggle to provide adequate server side upload so even through you may have a fast internet connection but the servers may be fare away and overloaded so it only downloads at a trickle.
At the moment this is impractical for things like High Definition movies which often take up a full 50GB of data and given the studio's attitudes to who owns the movie I'd much rather keep my own hard copy.
Not many PS3 games actually use all 50GB of data and those that do tend to use it for unimportant things like pre-rendered cutscenes in higher resolution/ less compression. However, many games use more data than a single DVD such as most PC games installing to take up 10GB on the drive. Single layer blu-rays of 25GB are slightly cheaper and often used.
In fact for Xbox 360's disk each disk can only hold 6.5GB of data rather than the maximum of 8.54GB, a whole 2GB of data is used up for anti-copying measures though most of them have proven to be useless as the piracy on Xbox 360 has shown.
Moving a bit more on topic, although Xbox 360 has managed so far on 6.5GB capacity it is playing it close to the wire, I'm not saying each game needs 50GB capacity, just that the 6.5GB capacity is not enough for the modern games. This becomes a problem as with Forza 3 had to come on two discs with extra tracks downloaded to the HDD while Mass Effect 2 and likely id software's RAGE will have to go on two discs... only this is a problem as those are open world games, you may have to swap between the same two discs over and over going backwards and forth.