I suspect game development will be similar - game companies will optimize their games given customer cards are not going to be released for a while or will be too expensive.
Resource usage has been on a hedonic treadmill at least since I came online in the 90s. Good things have come from that, of course, but there's also plenty of abstraction/waste that's permitted because "new computers can handle it."
With so many gaming devices based on the AMD Z1 Extreme platform (and its custom Valve corollaries) over the past few years, it'll be great to see that be the target/baseline for a while. Brings access to more players and staves of e-waste for longer.
I'm not sure how we got on to games as resource hogs when Teams uses 2GiB of RAM and Windows itself uses 4GiB of RAM.
I work in gamedev, so perhaps I'm a bit sensitive, and I understand that general purpose engines aren't as light on resources as the handcrafted ones that nobody can afford to make anymore... but we're not anywhere close to the layers of waste and abstraction that presents itself when using webtech for desktop apps by default.
Still, isn't part of the hedonic treadmill merely marketers dream of number goes up? If your software needs more specs, then surely it's doing more work and the hardware boys will gladly give you a monitor with more hz.
So, the causal link is more: why would software makers need to optimize when it benefits them to pretend the user _needs_ more hardware. Especially in the games realm. Surely going from 60hz to 240hx refresh rate was a practical loss in benefits per hz halfway through. But it ate up hardware resources along the way.
Games are actually pretty well optimized nowadays. I mostly "game" on a 10 years old computer with a mid-range GPU I bought maybe 3 or 4 years ago and on a Steam Deck.
I sometimes have to disable graphical options but it's more the exception than the rule. On a lot of games, I can even play in 4K.
Of course as you can imagine, I don't game at 245 fps :D
Not really new, Nvidia's GTX 1070 launched in 2016 with 8 GB of VRAM and they've been slow walking VRAM increases for the last decade.
Today's RTX 5060 has 8 GB for basically the same price that the 1070 did.
For $650 you can go up to 12 GB in the 5070, if you want 16 GB it's $1000 for the 5070 Ti, or hundreds more than that for the 5080.
I know there's inflation and $380 in 2016 was more money than it is today, but if you'd asked me 10 years ago I would've bet on VRAM capacity doing better than "the same money is worth less but still gets you exactly same amount of memory 10 years from now."
With prices going up, I half expect Nvidia to launch the RTX 6070 and tell everyone "It has 4 GB of memory and we think you're going to love it. $900." Or they'll just stop bothering with consumer GPUs entirely.
1060 6GB here. Figured the headroom would get me a couple extra years out of it. At this rate I’m wondering if the card is going to outlast the concept of owning graphics cards. Partly because, as you mention, maybe NVIDIA will stop selling them. Partly because, maybe APUs will get good enough…
About 3 years ago I got an RX 6750 XT with 12 GB of VRAM for $330 and I expect to be using that until either it dies or my computer's RAM dies and I don't have $10,000 to replace it. If only I'd maxed out all my DDR4 slots when DDR5 was the hot new thing and you could get it for cheap.
Strix Halo looks quite good. Hoping the stars will align, and my GPU will hold on long enough for the RAM famine to end and some Strix Halo successor to come out.
Even if they do, “crime scene” camera footage is less useful than the victims expect. Cameras discourage thieves of opportunity but not someone who has their mind set on taking your stuff. A simple cap or mask, some sunglasses, a few strips of reflective tape, a WiFi deauther, cheap and accessible stuff like this make the practical usefulness of most home camera systems limited at best to the owner understanding what and how it happened.
That’s why police looks to piece together from a larger surveillance network. Maybe you can’t see the face on the home camera but in another camera down the road, or a license plate on the getaway car down the street, or an accomplice without disguise. They want everyone to have cameras and then they can abuse the system.
Friends showed me high quality close up footage of someone stealing their bike. Absolutely useless, all you saw was an average guy that you wouldn’t recognize if you walked past on the street.
Careful what you wish for, local cops have already abused cameras and license plate readers to arrest people just for driving by the location and looking similar to doorbell video, over package theft...
In Poland some moron in surveillance center visually profiled a random guy as one wanted person (by jacket color), then police took the guy to the police station and beat him to death.
Wow. What an infuriating case, again and again. Only 2 years in prison for the perps because the court decided that "excited delirium" killed the guy and not being beaten and tased 4 times.
The guys who beat Rodney King faced zero justice, American prison guards pretty regularly do horrific things and face little repercussion, and the guys who executed Pretti were working the next day, until that led to backlash and now they are being systemically protected.
In some states in the US, it is not illegal for a cop to have sex with someone they have arrested. Ain't that just dandy.
Sure, monopolies are great for the C-suite, but they turn out to be really bad for the end users and customers, the real losers when there is no competition.
Get in loser, we're going for a monopoly! It's all fun and games until you're locked in and enshitification sets in. I would sooner go without than get fooled again.
Please say something intelligent about a link when you drop it. No one can tell if you're being sarcastic or not.
I did watch the video of him and I can confirm (so no one else wastes their time) he does not address why monopolies are great for everyone other than the CEO. But he does go into depth about why women should not wear Hillary Clinton style pantsuits when pitching ideas to him. Noted.
I am not sure if the video is the same as the article, but there is no way I am going to pay a penny to hear what Theil has to say. Honestly, after I heard him rambling about the anti-christ crap he spews I would pay for him to stop talking.
The article is not about how monopolies are good for society.
It’s about how businesses over emphasize small differences which make them indistinguishable from their competition.
It’s better to be in your own category rather than a slightly different permutation.
Capturing the value you produce from a business is actually very difficult. Think about how many Facebook users are a net less for the business. Good business plans also plan for capturing value.
We don't need an article to tell us that monopolies are not good for society. The fact that the article ignores this elephant in the room is exactly why I have issue with it.
I agree that the best way to capture value is to destroy all competition or otherwise ensure that the customer has no other options. It is also deeply unethical, even if within the current law. I'll note that anti-trust laws have been eroded in the past two decades as the gov has caved to corporate pressure and lobbyists.
I also can't pretend I don't see a relationship here to Theil's financial backing of Curtis Yarvin, who calls for replacing democracy with a corporate-led monarchy -- the political form of monopoly. Creepy!
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