No way... I was so fed up with the whole tablet gaming that I bought myself a playstation vita, I I dont regret it a second.
The only thing that will ruin PC gaming is when the next generation of consoles come out.
Yeah but tablets are getting full operating systems. We already have fully fledged computers in tablet form, the only difference is they will now get more and more powerful. It'll still be pc gaming, you'll just be hooked up into a tabet. Well, maybe not you, but many people. I for one welcome that kind of power in such a small package!
One thing thats good is you can get Apps that can remote you into your more powerful gaming computer at home and play your games from almost anywhere these days. I can be on the river fishing for salmon and still play any game out thier.
No way... I was so fed up with the whole tablet gaming that I bought myself a playstation vita, I I dont regret it a second.
The only thing that will ruin PC gaming is when the next generation of consoles come out.
Yeah but tablets are getting full operating systems. We already have fully fledged computers in tablet form, the only difference is they will now get more and more powerful. It'll still be pc gaming, you'll just be hooked up into a tabet. Well, maybe not you, but many people. I for one welcome that kind of power in such a small package!
One thing thats good is you can get Apps that can remote you into your more powerful gaming computer at home and play your games from almost anywhere these days. I can be on the river fishing for salmon and still play any game out thier.
I know! Ive tried and own 2. I find splashtop works the best. I was able to load TSW on my tablet at work using it and it ran seamlessly. I thought that was just incredible. I had no keyboard or mouse handy so when I was showing it to my friends all I could really do was look around, but still! Again, I know its just streaming right now, but its pretty sweet.
The current crop of tablets are really just 'toys' rather than serious devices, that would have to change for them to have any significant use, like, they would need to have at least a quad core processor running at least 3.0 ghz, 4+ gb of ram, and a decent, GPU, along with 500 gb of HD, or at a bare minimum 250 gb. anything else is just a toy that can be used to browse the web a bit, and maybe run a few programs you could probably run on a mobile phone.
Originally posted by Phry The current crop of tablets are really just 'toys' rather than serious devices, that would have to change for them to have any significant use, like, they would need to have at least a quad core processor running at least 3.0 ghz, 4+ gb of ram, and a decent, GPU, along with 500 gb of HD, or at a bare minimum 250 gb. anything else is just a toy that can be used to browse the web a bit, and maybe run a few programs you could probably run on a mobile phone.
Asus has a couple of tablets that can rival some lower end and mid range notebooks right now. The SSD isn't that big yet, but they could easily move on to flash (though more expensive at its not a huge market right now) like the macbook pro retinas.
I can't recall the name of the tablet, but it was a full Wacom digitizer screen, an Intel i5, 4gb to 8gb ram, some weaker GPU that was still capable of running photoshop or WoW, and had ports and a stand to hook up a keyboard and mouse. I know it was made by Asus. Now, this tablet I am talking about is over a year old. I've already seen some of the new stuff coming out and man am I excited. I know its not for everyone, but again, I really welcome the day when I am carrying around my tablet that I can hook up to a monitor or TV to get a full gaming experience on.
As other's have said, Tablets will be a supplement to gaming. I could easily see games that have optional apps that you run alongside the game itself. They could replace some UI elements on the main screen, such as inventory, maps, maybe even chat. That would of course require some type of synching between the app and your online account.
Tablets could provide a massive benefit to tabletop gaming though. Playing a D&D style game, your character sheets are there to easily read. If logged in together, your character sheet could automatically update, hell even dice rolls could be handled by the tablet. Not to mention maps and various game pieces. Rules easily accessed via search.
I could see devices like the Nintendo 3DS or PSP's becoming obselete by the rise of tablet gaming, we may even see Nintendo and Sony making tablets specific for gaming that have slots to run games as well.
As other's have said, Tablets will be a supplement to gaming. I could easily see games that have optional apps that you run alongside the game itself. They could replace some UI elements on the main screen, such as inventory, maps, maybe even chat. That would of course require some type of synching between the app and your online account.
Tablets could provide a massive benefit to tabletop gaming though. Playing a D&D style game, your character sheets are there to easily read. If logged in together, your character sheet could automatically update, hell even dice rolls could be handled by the tablet. Not to mention maps and various game pieces. Rules easily accessed via search.
I could see devices like the Nintendo 3DS or PSP's becoming obselete by the rise of tablet gaming, we may even see Nintendo and Sony making tablets specific for gaming that have slots to run games as well.
Trust me, tablets with not just be a simple addition to a game. You will be playing regular full fledged games on them. Right now we are still just taking baby steps in the market, but its gaining fast. Just think of your tablet as being a hub for all your work/entertainment. It makes sense that everything is going to the "cloud" too with the way technology is moving forward.
Looking at the rate of technology, and if following the trends means anything, tablets will be just as powerful as a high end laptop within a couple years. Hell, you can already get a tablet as fast a mid-range laptop using the i5 processors.
How much faster is an Ivy Bridge core than an ARM Cortex A9 core? Eight times as fast? Ten times? Whatever it is, it's a gaping chasm. Yes, ARM Cortex A15 cores will narrow the gap a lot. Maybe an Ivy Bridge core is "merely" four or five times as fast as a Cortex A15 core.
But just because you can get a big jump in performance by adding a lot of power consumption once doesn't mean you can do it again every year. If ARM wants to stay tablet-friendly, then the jump from a Cortex A9 to a Cortex A15 will probably be their last huge jump in performance.
Yes, you can put an Ivy Bridge processor in a tablet. But a ULV variant means it's clocked very low. Even a top of the line Core i7-3667U has a stock clock speed of only 2.0 GHz, as compared to 3.5 GHz for a Core i7-3770K.
Meanwhile, that same Core i7-3667U has a TDP of 17 W, which is way too much to be reasonable for a tablet. Put that in a tablet with a typical battery and you can likely drain the battery inside of an hour. Trying to safely dissipate that much heat in a tablet form factor adds a lot to the cost (not to mention thickness and weight), even before you consider that you're paying $300+ more than you would for a typical tablet processor.
In a laptop, you can have not merely two Ivy Bridge cores, but four, and clocked higher, and without enormous cooling problems. In a desktop, the only reason you can't have an eight-core Ivy Bridge processor clocked higher yet is that Intel didn't consider it a priority and so won't release that chip until next year--and when they do, it will probably be trivial to cool it well enough to give it a considerable overclock.
Yes, tablets will continue to get faster. But so will laptops and desktops. They're all basically limited by power consumption at this point, but so long as performance readily scales with power consumption, you'll always be able to get several times the performance in a 35 W laptop with integrated graphics that you can in a 5 W tablet, and several times the performance in a desktop with a 95 W processor and a 225 W video card that you can in a 35 W laptop.
Looking at the rate of technology, and if following the trends means anything, tablets will be just as powerful as a high end laptop within a couple years.
Yes, tablets will continue to get faster. But so will laptops and desktops. They're all basically limited by power consumption at this point, but so long as performance readily scales with power consumption, you'll always be able to get several times the performance in a 35 W laptop with integrated graphics that you can in a 5 W tablet, and several times the performance in a desktop with a 95 W processor and a 225 W video card that you can in a 35 W laptop.
But you don't address my earlier point that eventually desktop and laptop performance will reach a point where we simply cannot create content that requires more processing power, and then eventually tablets/smart phones will catch up to that standard.
Photorealism is achievable now in pre-rendered CGI - and within a couple of years maybe sooner in real time processing.
Eventually tablet/mobile will be capable of the same level of photorealism in real time.
Processing power/speed will hit that ceiling and tablet/mobile will catch that ceiling too.
Unless you think we can somehow present content in a way that surpasses photorealism and would thus continue to require ever increasing hardware upgrades?
Tablets might well kill off ultrabooks, since ultrabooks are already saddled with most of the drawbacks of tablets. Tablets are also thinner than ultrabooks, and being thin most of the point of an ultrabook. Tablets can also be a lot cheaper than ultrabooks, though people shopping for ultrabooks aren't price-sensitive.
Unless, of course, you want to argue that ultrabooks are already dead, which is reasonable enough. For gaming purposes, ultrabooks are sure a non-starter, so killing off ultrabook gaming should be easy enough.
But killing off normal laptops? No. Some people who get laptops care about performance, reliability, or input options, and tablets will never be able to compete there.
Have you not been following the tablet hardware market? It is astonishing how quickly they are growing. Your earlier comment stating you don't believe that Tablets will catch up to desktop performance for another 17 to 18 years is also a little nuts IMO. Considering where we are now, and recent developments that Intel has made in processors (ie; protons), your estimates are a little skewed. The market will push where the money is, and right now there is a ton of money in tablets. Furthermore, if you look how technology progresses, it gets more and more rapid. So, with the fact we are on the brink of quantum computing in our homes (though not fully fledged), already have cell phones capable of running demanding apps, tablets with high-res screens and fully operational OS's that can run modern games.... I see no reason why it would take so long for them to catch up. Just look at the size of the MacBook Pro Retina, or Macbook Air. The retina 15 has so much frickin power in it that it outclasses MANY desktops at the store, and really, its not far off from being scaled down a little futher to become a tablet.
If anything, I would expect tablets to become quite powerful (which they already are), and become the primary PC of many homes. Hell, there are already tablets that can run WoW and many other games. I would estimate 2-5 years tops till we see tablets having more than enough power and accessibility to become the primary PC of any home (which some people already do).
If you think that simply wanting faster tablets will magically make it happen, then you're the one not following hardware trends.
The problem is power consumption. Increasing performance in a given TDP is driven by Moore's Law. Roughly every two years, you can do a full node die shrink, which lets you fit twice as many transistors in the same die area. That lets you roughly double the performance at a cost of 40% more power consumption, or get 40% more performance in the same power consumption.
Tablets have had some headroom to allow for higher peak power consumption, but the new generation of hardware (iPad 4 and Google Nexus 10 are already out on the processor side, and some AMD Z-series tablets on the graphics side, with many more tablets to come that will offer new generation hardware on both sides) uses up that headroom and offers the last big jump in performance that tablets will ever see unless and until we find something better to replace transistors--akin to how transistors replaced vacuum tubes. It's unlikely that that will happen soon.
Apart from that, we're looking at roughly doubling performance every four years as being the best that is possible. And that will only remain possible so long as power scaling with Moore's Law continues roughly as it has for the last several years, which is far from certain. If we reach a point where further die shrinks are no longer possible or no longer offer power savings, then that will nearly be the end of increasing performance, with typical subsequent annual increases soon dropping into the low single-digit percentages and going down from there.
If you compare a Clover Trail Atom tablet (the only x86 tablet SoC, used for comparison to x86 desktops) to a desktop with, say, an FX-8350 together with a Radeon HD 7870, the desktop offers maybe 15 times the CPU performance and 60 times the graphics performance of the tablet. How long does it take the tablet to catch up to today's desktop if you double performance every four years? You can do the math yourself if so inclined. And that's for future tablets to catch up to today's desktops, not future desktops.
Looking at the rate of technology, and if following the trends means anything, tablets will be just as powerful as a high end laptop within a couple years.
Yes, tablets will continue to get faster. But so will laptops and desktops. They're all basically limited by power consumption at this point, but so long as performance readily scales with power consumption, you'll always be able to get several times the performance in a 35 W laptop with integrated graphics that you can in a 5 W tablet, and several times the performance in a desktop with a 95 W processor and a 225 W video card that you can in a 35 W laptop.
But you don't address my earlier point that eventually desktop and laptop performance will reach a point where we simply cannot create content that requires more processing power, and then eventually tablets/smart phones will catch up to that standard.
Photorealism is achievable now in pre-rendered CGI - and within a couple of years maybe sooner in real time processing.
Eventually tablet/mobile will be capable of the same level of photorealism in real time.
Processing power/speed will hit that ceiling and tablet/mobile will catch that ceiling too.
Unless you think we can somehow present content in a way that surpasses photorealism and would thus continue to require ever increasing hardware upgrades?
Nonsense. No matter how fast hardware gets, sufficiently slow software can still manage to run poorly. You want to eat up that extra performance in a game? That's pretty trivial to do: place several times as many objects in the game world. Have you ever seen a 3D game with realistic trees anywhere near as dense as commonly happens in real-life?
I've never seen any pre-rendered CGI that is anywhere near being indistinguishable from real-life. It's getting better, yes, but true photorealism? No, and not close.
And even if it were, for pre-rendered CGI, you can take an hour per frame if so inclined. That means that the processing power available per frame is somewhere around five orders of magnitude greater than for games. Assuming that games double performance every four years, even scaling Moore's Law until we're placing individual atoms exactly where we need them will still mean it dies decades too soon.
Now, pre-rendered CGI probably isn't able to fully exploit the hardware available just yet, as you need to create the art assets that you want to render and video memory capacity could easily be a big problem. Even if Moore's Law did scale forever, we'd likely have games with graphics comparable to today's CGI videos within a couple of decades by being a lot more efficient than today's CGI videos, rather than taking on the order of 60-70 years or so. But a couple of years? No. Not a chance.
Now, pre-rendered CGI probably isn't able to fully exploit the hardware available just yet, as you need to create the art assets that you want to render and video memory capacity could easily be a big problem. Even if Moore's Law did scale forever, we'd likely have games with graphics comparable to today's CGI videos within a couple of decades by being a lot more efficient than today's CGI videos, rather than taking on the order of 60-70 years or so. But a couple of years? No. Not a chance.
Supposeduly Square Enix is already doing real time rendering of CGI level graphical fidelity with their new Lumious engine - and Unreal 4 is pretty damn close too.
So I believe you are way, way, way off in your estimates of when we'll have CGI level graphics in our games.
I'd wager the next generation of consoles (720/PS4) will have this within a year and will REALLY have it optimized in a couple of years (just like modern 360/PS3 games are so much more graphically impressive than early games for each console.)
And yes, people have hit photorealism indistinguishable from real life -
Tablets might well kill off ultrabooks, since ultrabooks are already saddled with most of the drawbacks of tablets. Tablets are also thinner than ultrabooks, and being thin most of the point of an ultrabook. Tablets can also be a lot cheaper than ultrabooks, though people shopping for ultrabooks aren't price-sensitive.
Unless, of course, you want to argue that ultrabooks are already dead, which is reasonable enough. For gaming purposes, ultrabooks are sure a non-starter, so killing off ultrabook gaming should be easy enough.
But killing off normal laptops? No. Some people who get laptops care about performance, reliability, or input options, and tablets will never be able to compete there.
Have you not been following the tablet hardware market? It is astonishing how quickly they are growing. Your earlier comment stating you don't believe that Tablets will catch up to desktop performance for another 17 to 18 years is also a little nuts IMO. Considering where we are now, and recent developments that Intel has made in processors (ie; protons), your estimates are a little skewed. The market will push where the money is, and right now there is a ton of money in tablets. Furthermore, if you look how technology progresses, it gets more and more rapid. So, with the fact we are on the brink of quantum computing in our homes (though not fully fledged), already have cell phones capable of running demanding apps, tablets with high-res screens and fully operational OS's that can run modern games.... I see no reason why it would take so long for them to catch up. Just look at the size of the MacBook Pro Retina, or Macbook Air. The retina 15 has so much frickin power in it that it outclasses MANY desktops at the store, and really, its not far off from being scaled down a little futher to become a tablet.
If anything, I would expect tablets to become quite powerful (which they already are), and become the primary PC of many homes. Hell, there are already tablets that can run WoW and many other games. I would estimate 2-5 years tops till we see tablets having more than enough power and accessibility to become the primary PC of any home (which some people already do).
If you think that simply wanting faster tablets will magically make it happen, then you're the one not following hardware trends.
The problem is power consumption. Increasing performance in a given TDP is driven by Moore's Law. Roughly every two years, you can do a full node die shrink, which lets you fit twice as many transistors in the same die area. That lets you roughly double the performance at a cost of 40% more power consumption, or get 40% more performance in the same power consumption.
Tablets have had some headroom to allow for higher peak power consumption, but the new generation of hardware (iPad 4 and Google Nexus 10 are already out on the processor side, and some AMD Z-series tablets on the graphics side, with many more tablets to come that will offer new generation hardware on both sides) uses up that headroom and offers the last big jump in performance that tablets will ever see unless and until we find something better to replace transistors--akin to how transistors replaced vacuum tubes. It's unlikely that that will happen soon.
Apart from that, we're looking at roughly doubling performance every four years as being the best that is possible. And that will only remain possible so long as power scaling with Moore's Law continues roughly as it has for the last several years, which is far from certain. If we reach a point where further die shrinks are no longer possible or no longer offer power savings, then that will nearly be the end of increasing performance, with typical subsequent annual increases soon dropping into the low single-digit percentages and going down from there.
If you compare a Clover Trail Atom tablet (the only x86 tablet SoC, used for comparison to x86 desktops) to a desktop with, say, an FX-8350 together with a Radeon HD 7870, the desktop offers maybe 15 times the CPU performance and 60 times the graphics performance of the tablet. How long does it take the tablet to catch up to today's desktop if you double performance every four years? You can do the math yourself if so inclined. And that's for future tablets to catch up to today's desktops, not future desktops.
Everything you have stated is only your opinion presented as fact. Heat and power consumption are being dealt with and things are moving at a great pace. I do not agree with your opinion at all, and I am so confident that I am correct that I am willing to place a wager. If in 5 years I am not able to run a modern MMO on my tablet (a PC MMO, not some version of Order & Chaos), I will purchase you an MMO of your choice at that time. Unless of course it is some ridiculous price hahah. If I am right you just have to write "MadAzz rules" at the end of every post on every forum you use for 1 year.
Also, technology doesn't increase at a static rate. Dont believe me? Read a history book Speeds do not just simply double every 4 years. And as mentioned earlier, now that we are moving into proton instead of electron based processors, the sky is the limit. Intel themselves stated that where they struggled to provide 4ghz, they would now be able to provide 10 or more, and this new build would also provide substantial speed increases for at least 10 years. Considering there are already tablets capable of doing the majority of PC tasks, I think we are much closer than you think.
Now, pre-rendered CGI probably isn't able to fully exploit the hardware available just yet, as you need to create the art assets that you want to render and video memory capacity could easily be a big problem. Even if Moore's Law did scale forever, we'd likely have games with graphics comparable to today's CGI videos within a couple of decades by being a lot more efficient than today's CGI videos, rather than taking on the order of 60-70 years or so. But a couple of years? No. Not a chance.
Supposeduly Square Enix is already doing real time rendering of CGI level graphical fidelity with their new Lumious engine - and Unreal 4 is pretty damn close too.
So I believe you are way, way, way off in your estimates of when we'll have CGI level graphics in our games.
I'd wager the next generation of consoles (720/PS4) will have this within a year and will REALLY have it optimized in a couple of years (just like modern 360/PS3 games are so much more graphically impressive than early games for each console.)
And yes, people have hit photorealism indistinguishable from real life -
Interesting points! I read up the engines you linked to, but had never come across your link to the CGI video! I've seen other ones though. There is one where they render the ground so well using this new type of processing, that as you zoom in further and further they can literally increase the detail on the fly so much that you could see an Ant moving a grain of salt.
Also, if he was right about the time frames, someone forgot to tell the cell phone industry! It was more than quadrupled in power in the last 4 years. I am running PS2 emulators, Vice City, GTA3, Max Payne and tons of other full fledged games on a tiny little device.
Tablet games are generally pretty basic and anything more advanced as far as gameplay goes tends to suffer in the controls depertment.
I was originally going to design some games for tablets but then quickly decided that I could do more in a web browser.
I think that is probably a wise idea. Tablet games for iOS and Android are doing well in the immediate time, but will eventually evolve into full fledged games as the power increases in said tablets. Most tablet games right now are basically just casual games, in which case they aren't affecting the PC game market, and don't think they ever will.
Tablets might well kill off ultrabooks, since ultrabooks are already saddled with most of the drawbacks of tablets. Tablets are also thinner than ultrabooks, and being thin most of the point of an ultrabook. Tablets can also be a lot cheaper than ultrabooks, though people shopping for ultrabooks aren't price-sensitive.
Unless, of course, you want to argue that ultrabooks are already dead, which is reasonable enough. For gaming purposes, ultrabooks are sure a non-starter, so killing off ultrabook gaming should be easy enough.
But killing off normal laptops? No. Some people who get laptops care about performance, reliability, or input options, and tablets will never be able to compete there.
It's already happening. Most brick and mortar stores are cutting back on laptops and ordering more tablets.
As far as performance, reliability, and input options...
Input - Input options are being taken care of with docks and attachable keyboards. We won't even go into my tablets lol, lets look at the lowest end piece of tech I own. My Phone, the Motorola Photon 4G. I have a mouse and keyboard hooked up to my phone. I have my phone hooked up to a TV screen to use as a monitor with an HDMI cable. I still have 2 open USB slots. This is done with a dock. I can take my phone with me anywhere and turn it into a PC. While it's not a PC I simply use it as a touch screen mini tablet. If I need to do some serious typing I hook up my bluetooth keyboard.
So... no input isn't a limiting factor, I even have a controller I can use on my phone to play games on my TV.
Performance - What kind of performance are we talking about here? Are we talking about your average business that has already replaced laptops with tablets? Your average household that has mostly replaced laptops with tablets?
Yes, laptops will still have a place with 3D modelers and those that need a great deal more "power" than your average person, but that isn't what we are talking about. Your average laptop user is going to go tablet.
They are cheaper and perform the same function for these users. Not only is it going to replace laptops for these people, it mostly already has.
Gaming - Lets be serious here. Laptop gaming isn't about performance or power lol. It's about portability. Most simply look for good enough. This is going to be easily replaced by tablets.
Tablets are great. I own one and love it but it's no where near what a PC can do in capabilities. The games on a tablet are certainly fun but your not going to be running Crysis 3 on any tablet anytime soon. Tablets have their place and so do PCs. They complement each other. Your good old PC will be around for the forseeable future.
Tablets might well kill off ultrabooks, since ultrabooks are already saddled with most of the drawbacks of tablets. Tablets are also thinner than ultrabooks, and being thin most of the point of an ultrabook. Tablets can also be a lot cheaper than ultrabooks, though people shopping for ultrabooks aren't price-sensitive.
Unless, of course, you want to argue that ultrabooks are already dead, which is reasonable enough. For gaming purposes, ultrabooks are sure a non-starter, so killing off ultrabook gaming should be easy enough.
But killing off normal laptops? No. Some people who get laptops care about performance, reliability, or input options, and tablets will never be able to compete there.
Have you not been following the tablet hardware market? It is astonishing how quickly they are growing. Your earlier comment stating you don't believe that Tablets will catch up to desktop performance for another 17 to 18 years is also a little nuts IMO. Considering where we are now, and recent developments that Intel has made in processors (ie; protons), your estimates are a little skewed. The market will push where the money is, and right now there is a ton of money in tablets. Furthermore, if you look how technology progresses, it gets more and more rapid. So, with the fact we are on the brink of quantum computing in our homes (though not fully fledged), already have cell phones capable of running demanding apps, tablets with high-res screens and fully operational OS's that can run modern games.... I see no reason why it would take so long for them to catch up. Just look at the size of the MacBook Pro Retina, or Macbook Air. The retina 15 has so much frickin power in it that it outclasses MANY desktops at the store, and really, its not far off from being scaled down a little futher to become a tablet.
If anything, I would expect tablets to become quite powerful (which they already are), and become the primary PC of many homes. Hell, there are already tablets that can run WoW and many other games. I would estimate 2-5 years tops till we see tablets having more than enough power and accessibility to become the primary PC of any home (which some people already do).
If you think that simply wanting faster tablets will magically make it happen, then you're the one not following hardware trends.
The problem is power consumption. Increasing performance in a given TDP is driven by Moore's Law. Roughly every two years, you can do a full node die shrink, which lets you fit twice as many transistors in the same die area. That lets you roughly double the performance at a cost of 40% more power consumption, or get 40% more performance in the same power consumption.
Tablets have had some headroom to allow for higher peak power consumption, but the new generation of hardware (iPad 4 and Google Nexus 10 are already out on the processor side, and some AMD Z-series tablets on the graphics side, with many more tablets to come that will offer new generation hardware on both sides) uses up that headroom and offers the last big jump in performance that tablets will ever see unless and until we find something better to replace transistors--akin to how transistors replaced vacuum tubes. It's unlikely that that will happen soon.
Apart from that, we're looking at roughly doubling performance every four years as being the best that is possible. And that will only remain possible so long as power scaling with Moore's Law continues roughly as it has for the last several years, which is far from certain. If we reach a point where further die shrinks are no longer possible or no longer offer power savings, then that will nearly be the end of increasing performance, with typical subsequent annual increases soon dropping into the low single-digit percentages and going down from there.
If you compare a Clover Trail Atom tablet (the only x86 tablet SoC, used for comparison to x86 desktops) to a desktop with, say, an FX-8350 together with a Radeon HD 7870, the desktop offers maybe 15 times the CPU performance and 60 times the graphics performance of the tablet. How long does it take the tablet to catch up to today's desktop if you double performance every four years? You can do the math yourself if so inclined. And that's for future tablets to catch up to today's desktops, not future desktops.
Everything you have stated is only your opinion presented as fact. Heat and power consumption are being dealt with and things are moving at a great pace. I do not agree with your opinion at all, and I am so confident that I am correct that I am willing to place a wager. If in 5 years I am not able to run a modern MMO on my tablet (a PC MMO, not some version of Order & Chaos), I will purchase you an MMO of your choice at that time. Unless of course it is some ridiculous price hahah. If I am right you just have to write "MadAzz rules" at the end of every post on every forum you use for 1 year.
Also, technology doesn't increase at a static rate. Dont believe me? Read a history book Speeds do not just simply double every 4 years. And as mentioned earlier, now that we are moving into proton instead of electron based processors, the sky is the limit. Intel themselves stated that where they struggled to provide 4ghz, they would now be able to provide 10 or more, and this new build would also provide substantial speed increases for at least 10 years. Considering there are already tablets capable of doing the majority of PC tasks, I think we are much closer than you think.
An AMD Z-60 based tablet is a little faster than the C-50 that they used there. AMD Temash will be unambiguously a lot faster yet.
But there's a huge difference between making a game playable at minimum settings and making it run smoothly at high settings.
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Moore's Law states that the number of transistors doubles roughly every two years. That has been remarkably accurate for well over 40 years now--far longer than anyone expected when Gordon Moore first made that observation. But if anything, the rate of hardware advances is likely to slow in the future rather than speeding up, as quantum mechanics starts interfering.
Some things have already slowed way down or stopped scaling entirely. Being able to run desktop chips as fast as they can go without worrying about power consumption ended several years ago. That's largely because being able to double performance with each die shrink without increasing power consumption died about a decade before that. Processor clock speed scaling has nearly stopped, too; a 3.8 GHz Pentium 4 that launched in 2004 was the highest stock-clocked x86 processor ever until the AMD FX-4170 launched earlier this year.
Will processor advances be saved by some enormous revolution comparable to the shift from vacuum tubes to transistors? It's possible, but it doesn't appear to be forthcoming.
Tablets might well kill off ultrabooks, since ultrabooks are already saddled with most of the drawbacks of tablets. Tablets are also thinner than ultrabooks, and being thin most of the point of an ultrabook. Tablets can also be a lot cheaper than ultrabooks, though people shopping for ultrabooks aren't price-sensitive.
Unless, of course, you want to argue that ultrabooks are already dead, which is reasonable enough. For gaming purposes, ultrabooks are sure a non-starter, so killing off ultrabook gaming should be easy enough.
But killing off normal laptops? No. Some people who get laptops care about performance, reliability, or input options, and tablets will never be able to compete there.
It's already happening. Most brick and mortar stores are cutting back on laptops and ordering more tablets.
As far as performance, reliability, and input options...
Input - Input options are being taken care of with docks and attachable keyboards. We won't even go into my tablets lol, lets look at the lowest end piece of tech I own. My Phone, the Motorola Photon 4G. I have a mouse and keyboard hooked up to my phone. I have my phone hooked up to a TV screen to use as a monitor with an HDMI cable. I still have 2 open USB slots. This is done with a dock. I can take my phone with me anywhere and turn it into a PC. While it's not a PC I simply use it as a touch screen mini tablet. If I need to do some serious typing I hook up my bluetooth keyboard.
So... no input isn't a limiting factor, I even have a controller I can use on my phone to play games on my TV.
Performance - What kind of performance are we talking about here? Are we talking about your average business that has already replaced laptops with tablets? Your average household that has mostly replaced laptops with tablets?
Yes, laptops will still have a place with 3D modelers and those that need a great deal more "power" than your average person, but that isn't what we are talking about. Your average laptop user is going to go tablet.
They are cheaper and perform the same function for these users. Not only is it going to replace laptops for these people, it mostly already has.
Gaming - Lets be serious here. Laptop gaming isn't about performance or power lol. It's about portability. Most simply look for good enough. This is going to be easily replaced by tablets.
If you have to carry around a mouse, keyboard, and television, then your "phone" is now far less portable than a laptop.
Given a choice between more performance and less performance, is there really anyone who would choose less performance without some compensating advantages? Given a choice between "will run any game that you want to play pretty well" and "will run some games smoothly, some choppily, and some not at all", you don't think there will be people interested in the former?
It's going to be many years before tablets offer performance that can keep pace with this:
And yet many people are willing to pay more than $85 for the processor and graphics added together in order to get higher performance yet. And that's just today. Do you think that future software will tend to require more performance than today's or less?
And I notice that while you quoted my comment about reliability, you never addressed it. In a tablet, if a single chip anywhere inside the entire machine has problems, the entire tablet is shot and you have to replace the whole thing outright. In a laptop, that may be the case, but some parts are replaceable. In a desktop, everything is replaceable. If a memory chip goes bad, do you want the fix to be a new $20 memory module or a new $500 tablet?
To put it in a different context, how many people would buy a car that was completely impossible to repair, so that the first time it needed maintenance it meant that the car was totaled? Even if the car was otherwise very nice, that's a huge strike against it--and it's something that tablets are stuck with due to the form factor.
Originally posted by ShakyMo Might actually save it.
Android is a flavour of Linux that is a flavour of Unix Ios is also a flavour of Unix
So developers are more likely to make Linux / Ios compatible games for easier porting
Which gets around a lot of the things Microsoft would like to get up to with integrated stores and such in the future.
If you're designing a game, you really, really don't want to have to do custom things for every piece of hardware and OS out there. The entire point of APIs such as DirectX and OpenGL is to cover that up so that you write your code once and then it runs on everything. You put your shader source code in a string (literally a string, as in, kind of like an array of chars) and the video drivers written by AMD or Nvidia or Imagination or whoever compile that string into a binary program optimized for the particular piece of hardware that is going to run the code. Optimizing the code for the particular piece of hardware is handled by the video drivers, so that a programmer can just focus on getting the desired behavior with fewer and cheaper (e.g., addition is cheaper than trig functions) operations.
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One thing thats good is you can get Apps that can remote you into your more powerful gaming computer at home and play your games from almost anywhere these days. I can be on the river fishing for salmon and still play any game out thier.
I know! Ive tried and own 2. I find splashtop works the best. I was able to load TSW on my tablet at work using it and it ran seamlessly. I thought that was just incredible. I had no keyboard or mouse handy so when I was showing it to my friends all I could really do was look around, but still! Again, I know its just streaming right now, but its pretty sweet.
Asus has a couple of tablets that can rival some lower end and mid range notebooks right now. The SSD isn't that big yet, but they could easily move on to flash (though more expensive at its not a huge market right now) like the macbook pro retinas.
I can't recall the name of the tablet, but it was a full Wacom digitizer screen, an Intel i5, 4gb to 8gb ram, some weaker GPU that was still capable of running photoshop or WoW, and had ports and a stand to hook up a keyboard and mouse. I know it was made by Asus. Now, this tablet I am talking about is over a year old. I've already seen some of the new stuff coming out and man am I excited. I know its not for everyone, but again, I really welcome the day when I am carrying around my tablet that I can hook up to a monitor or TV to get a full gaming experience on.
As other's have said, Tablets will be a supplement to gaming. I could easily see games that have optional apps that you run alongside the game itself. They could replace some UI elements on the main screen, such as inventory, maps, maybe even chat. That would of course require some type of synching between the app and your online account.
Tablets could provide a massive benefit to tabletop gaming though. Playing a D&D style game, your character sheets are there to easily read. If logged in together, your character sheet could automatically update, hell even dice rolls could be handled by the tablet. Not to mention maps and various game pieces. Rules easily accessed via search.
I could see devices like the Nintendo 3DS or PSP's becoming obselete by the rise of tablet gaming, we may even see Nintendo and Sony making tablets specific for gaming that have slots to run games as well.
I do love my tablet, it's quite handy for a lot of stuff. The truth is, though, they're unwieldy for gaming. Even compared to mobile gaming consoles.
So no, I don't think it'll replace PCs or high-end consoles. Or keep the dedicated gamers.
If anything, I think tablets will bring in new gamers and provide a new entry level to gaming as a whole. Many will not get in deeper, and some will.
Trust me, tablets with not just be a simple addition to a game. You will be playing regular full fledged games on them. Right now we are still just taking baby steps in the market, but its gaining fast. Just think of your tablet as being a hub for all your work/entertainment. It makes sense that everything is going to the "cloud" too with the way technology is moving forward.
How much faster is an Ivy Bridge core than an ARM Cortex A9 core? Eight times as fast? Ten times? Whatever it is, it's a gaping chasm. Yes, ARM Cortex A15 cores will narrow the gap a lot. Maybe an Ivy Bridge core is "merely" four or five times as fast as a Cortex A15 core.
But just because you can get a big jump in performance by adding a lot of power consumption once doesn't mean you can do it again every year. If ARM wants to stay tablet-friendly, then the jump from a Cortex A9 to a Cortex A15 will probably be their last huge jump in performance.
Yes, you can put an Ivy Bridge processor in a tablet. But a ULV variant means it's clocked very low. Even a top of the line Core i7-3667U has a stock clock speed of only 2.0 GHz, as compared to 3.5 GHz for a Core i7-3770K.
Meanwhile, that same Core i7-3667U has a TDP of 17 W, which is way too much to be reasonable for a tablet. Put that in a tablet with a typical battery and you can likely drain the battery inside of an hour. Trying to safely dissipate that much heat in a tablet form factor adds a lot to the cost (not to mention thickness and weight), even before you consider that you're paying $300+ more than you would for a typical tablet processor.
In a laptop, you can have not merely two Ivy Bridge cores, but four, and clocked higher, and without enormous cooling problems. In a desktop, the only reason you can't have an eight-core Ivy Bridge processor clocked higher yet is that Intel didn't consider it a priority and so won't release that chip until next year--and when they do, it will probably be trivial to cool it well enough to give it a considerable overclock.
Yes, tablets will continue to get faster. But so will laptops and desktops. They're all basically limited by power consumption at this point, but so long as performance readily scales with power consumption, you'll always be able to get several times the performance in a 35 W laptop with integrated graphics that you can in a 5 W tablet, and several times the performance in a desktop with a 95 W processor and a 225 W video card that you can in a 35 W laptop.
But you don't address my earlier point that eventually desktop and laptop performance will reach a point where we simply cannot create content that requires more processing power, and then eventually tablets/smart phones will catch up to that standard.
Photorealism is achievable now in pre-rendered CGI - and within a couple of years maybe sooner in real time processing.
Eventually tablet/mobile will be capable of the same level of photorealism in real time.
Processing power/speed will hit that ceiling and tablet/mobile will catch that ceiling too.
Unless you think we can somehow present content in a way that surpasses photorealism and would thus continue to require ever increasing hardware upgrades?
If you think that simply wanting faster tablets will magically make it happen, then you're the one not following hardware trends.
The problem is power consumption. Increasing performance in a given TDP is driven by Moore's Law. Roughly every two years, you can do a full node die shrink, which lets you fit twice as many transistors in the same die area. That lets you roughly double the performance at a cost of 40% more power consumption, or get 40% more performance in the same power consumption.
Tablets have had some headroom to allow for higher peak power consumption, but the new generation of hardware (iPad 4 and Google Nexus 10 are already out on the processor side, and some AMD Z-series tablets on the graphics side, with many more tablets to come that will offer new generation hardware on both sides) uses up that headroom and offers the last big jump in performance that tablets will ever see unless and until we find something better to replace transistors--akin to how transistors replaced vacuum tubes. It's unlikely that that will happen soon.
Apart from that, we're looking at roughly doubling performance every four years as being the best that is possible. And that will only remain possible so long as power scaling with Moore's Law continues roughly as it has for the last several years, which is far from certain. If we reach a point where further die shrinks are no longer possible or no longer offer power savings, then that will nearly be the end of increasing performance, with typical subsequent annual increases soon dropping into the low single-digit percentages and going down from there.
If you compare a Clover Trail Atom tablet (the only x86 tablet SoC, used for comparison to x86 desktops) to a desktop with, say, an FX-8350 together with a Radeon HD 7870, the desktop offers maybe 15 times the CPU performance and 60 times the graphics performance of the tablet. How long does it take the tablet to catch up to today's desktop if you double performance every four years? You can do the math yourself if so inclined. And that's for future tablets to catch up to today's desktops, not future desktops.
Every time I hear someone say Post PC Era or Tablet Era IRL I seriously have to restrain myself from hitting them.
Nonsense. No matter how fast hardware gets, sufficiently slow software can still manage to run poorly. You want to eat up that extra performance in a game? That's pretty trivial to do: place several times as many objects in the game world. Have you ever seen a 3D game with realistic trees anywhere near as dense as commonly happens in real-life?
I've never seen any pre-rendered CGI that is anywhere near being indistinguishable from real-life. It's getting better, yes, but true photorealism? No, and not close.
And even if it were, for pre-rendered CGI, you can take an hour per frame if so inclined. That means that the processing power available per frame is somewhere around five orders of magnitude greater than for games. Assuming that games double performance every four years, even scaling Moore's Law until we're placing individual atoms exactly where we need them will still mean it dies decades too soon.
Now, pre-rendered CGI probably isn't able to fully exploit the hardware available just yet, as you need to create the art assets that you want to render and video memory capacity could easily be a big problem. Even if Moore's Law did scale forever, we'd likely have games with graphics comparable to today's CGI videos within a couple of decades by being a lot more efficient than today's CGI videos, rather than taking on the order of 60-70 years or so. But a couple of years? No. Not a chance.
Supposeduly Square Enix is already doing real time rendering of CGI level graphical fidelity with their new Lumious engine - and Unreal 4 is pretty damn close too.
http://www.vg247.com/2012/11/27/luminous-engine-demo-shows-off-on-the-fly-tweaking/
So I believe you are way, way, way off in your estimates of when we'll have CGI level graphics in our games.
I'd wager the next generation of consoles (720/PS4) will have this within a year and will REALLY have it optimized in a couple of years (just like modern 360/PS3 games are so much more graphically impressive than early games for each console.)
And yes, people have hit photorealism indistinguishable from real life -
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn19765-is-this-the-most-realistic-cgi-youve-ever-seen.html
Everything you have stated is only your opinion presented as fact. Heat and power consumption are being dealt with and things are moving at a great pace. I do not agree with your opinion at all, and I am so confident that I am correct that I am willing to place a wager. If in 5 years I am not able to run a modern MMO on my tablet (a PC MMO, not some version of Order & Chaos), I will purchase you an MMO of your choice at that time. Unless of course it is some ridiculous price hahah. If I am right you just have to write "MadAzz rules" at the end of every post on every forum you use for 1 year.
Also, technology doesn't increase at a static rate. Dont believe me? Read a history book
Speeds do not just simply double every 4 years. And as mentioned earlier, now that we are moving into proton instead of electron based processors, the sky is the limit. Intel themselves stated that where they struggled to provide 4ghz, they would now be able to provide 10 or more, and this new build would also provide substantial speed increases for at least 10 years. Considering there are already tablets capable of doing the majority of PC tasks, I think we are much closer than you think.
Tablet games are generally pretty basic and anything more advanced as far as gameplay goes tends to suffer in the controls depertment.
I was originally going to design some games for tablets but then quickly decided that I could do more in a web browser.
Wa min God! Se æx on min heafod is!
Interesting points! I read up the engines you linked to, but had never come across your link to the CGI video! I've seen other ones though. There is one where they render the ground so well using this new type of processing, that as you zoom in further and further they can literally increase the detail on the fly so much that you could see an Ant moving a grain of salt.
Also, if he was right about the time frames, someone forgot to tell the cell phone industry! It was more than quadrupled in power in the last 4 years. I am running PS2 emulators, Vice City, GTA3, Max Payne and tons of other full fledged games on a tiny little device.
I think that is probably a wise idea. Tablet games for iOS and Android are doing well in the immediate time, but will eventually evolve into full fledged games as the power increases in said tablets. Most tablet games right now are basically just casual games, in which case they aren't affecting the PC game market, and don't think they ever will.
It's already happening. Most brick and mortar stores are cutting back on laptops and ordering more tablets.
As far as performance, reliability, and input options...
Input - Input options are being taken care of with docks and attachable keyboards. We won't even go into my tablets lol, lets look at the lowest end piece of tech I own. My Phone, the Motorola Photon 4G. I have a mouse and keyboard hooked up to my phone. I have my phone hooked up to a TV screen to use as a monitor with an HDMI cable. I still have 2 open USB slots. This is done with a dock. I can take my phone with me anywhere and turn it into a PC. While it's not a PC I simply use it as a touch screen mini tablet. If I need to do some serious typing I hook up my bluetooth keyboard.
So... no input isn't a limiting factor, I even have a controller I can use on my phone to play games on my TV.
Performance - What kind of performance are we talking about here? Are we talking about your average business that has already replaced laptops with tablets? Your average household that has mostly replaced laptops with tablets?
Yes, laptops will still have a place with 3D modelers and those that need a great deal more "power" than your average person, but that isn't what we are talking about. Your average laptop user is going to go tablet.
They are cheaper and perform the same function for these users. Not only is it going to replace laptops for these people, it mostly already has.
Gaming - Lets be serious here. Laptop gaming isn't about performance or power lol. It's about portability. Most simply look for good enough. This is going to be easily replaced by tablets.
Tablets are great. I own one and love it but it's no where near what a PC can do in capabilities. The games on a tablet are certainly fun but your not going to be running Crysis 3 on any tablet anytime soon. Tablets have their place and so do PCs. They complement each other. Your good old PC will be around for the forseeable future.
Bren
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give me a 30 inch tablet with eightcore CPU, 16gig ram and a gtx670.
Until then I'll keep my setup in a more appropriate box.. with vents and cooling
Secrets of Dragon?s Spine Trailer.. !
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwT9cFVQCMw
Best MMOs ever played: Ultima, EvE, SW Galaxies, Age of Conan, The Secret World
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2X_SbZCHpc&t=21s
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The Return of ELITE !
Android is a flavour of Linux that is a flavour of Unix
Ios is also a flavour of Unix
So developers are more likely to make Linux / Ios compatible games for easier porting
Which gets around a lot of the things Microsoft would like to get up to with integrated stores and such in the future.
You already can run a lot of games on a tablet.
http://www.tomshardware.com/picturestory/594-netbook-gaming-performance.html
An AMD Z-60 based tablet is a little faster than the C-50 that they used there. AMD Temash will be unambiguously a lot faster yet.
But there's a huge difference between making a game playable at minimum settings and making it run smoothly at high settings.
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Moore's Law states that the number of transistors doubles roughly every two years. That has been remarkably accurate for well over 40 years now--far longer than anyone expected when Gordon Moore first made that observation. But if anything, the rate of hardware advances is likely to slow in the future rather than speeding up, as quantum mechanics starts interfering.
Some things have already slowed way down or stopped scaling entirely. Being able to run desktop chips as fast as they can go without worrying about power consumption ended several years ago. That's largely because being able to double performance with each die shrink without increasing power consumption died about a decade before that. Processor clock speed scaling has nearly stopped, too; a 3.8 GHz Pentium 4 that launched in 2004 was the highest stock-clocked x86 processor ever until the AMD FX-4170 launched earlier this year.
Will processor advances be saved by some enormous revolution comparable to the shift from vacuum tubes to transistors? It's possible, but it doesn't appear to be forthcoming.
If you have to carry around a mouse, keyboard, and television, then your "phone" is now far less portable than a laptop.
Given a choice between more performance and less performance, is there really anyone who would choose less performance without some compensating advantages? Given a choice between "will run any game that you want to play pretty well" and "will run some games smoothly, some choppily, and some not at all", you don't think there will be people interested in the former?
It's going to be many years before tablets offer performance that can keep pace with this:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819103942
And yet many people are willing to pay more than $85 for the processor and graphics added together in order to get higher performance yet. And that's just today. Do you think that future software will tend to require more performance than today's or less?
And I notice that while you quoted my comment about reliability, you never addressed it. In a tablet, if a single chip anywhere inside the entire machine has problems, the entire tablet is shot and you have to replace the whole thing outright. In a laptop, that may be the case, but some parts are replaceable. In a desktop, everything is replaceable. If a memory chip goes bad, do you want the fix to be a new $20 memory module or a new $500 tablet?
To put it in a different context, how many people would buy a car that was completely impossible to repair, so that the first time it needed maintenance it meant that the car was totaled? Even if the car was otherwise very nice, that's a huge strike against it--and it's something that tablets are stuck with due to the form factor.
If you're designing a game, you really, really don't want to have to do custom things for every piece of hardware and OS out there. The entire point of APIs such as DirectX and OpenGL is to cover that up so that you write your code once and then it runs on everything. You put your shader source code in a string (literally a string, as in, kind of like an array of chars) and the video drivers written by AMD or Nvidia or Imagination or whoever compile that string into a binary program optimized for the particular piece of hardware that is going to run the code. Optimizing the code for the particular piece of hardware is handled by the video drivers, so that a programmer can just focus on getting the desired behavior with fewer and cheaper (e.g., addition is cheaper than trig functions) operations.