Big news in the world of hardware and graphics.
Nvidia just announced a streaming system to play on your TV with heavy graphic computation being done in your office room or basement on loud computers.
AMD announced a couple of weeks ago Mantle, a low level API for its graphic cards.
Both technology are working on current gen. For the very first time since GPUs exist, the new graphic generation is not based on completely new hardware but on software features and enhancements. It was already the case for the past few years but now manufacturers just don’t hide it anymore.
It makes sense now that each of these marvel of technology are in the billion transistors count (7.08 billion-transistor chip for the very last AMD card, it is mind-blowing). Moore’s law is so slowing down (14nm is a bitch, ask Intel about yield).
AMD and Nvidia have to sell more cards that are today absolutely under-used or way too expensive. Even PC enthusiasts don’t upgrade anymore. No one wants to change to Intel’s Haswell as well.
It’s a massive industry shift and I think everyone is going to benefit: users with better app performances and still a wide range of choice, AMD and Nvidia don’t have to rush products out anymore and developers get more market stability than ever.
I sure hope it will push game developers to spend more time on things like AUDIO and INPUT. ‘bout time.
Also manufacturers, slow down on 4K BS. I have yet to see a game programmer happy about 4K textures and the shit storm that will come with managing that asset size just to please a couple of rich dudes out there is not something they’re looking forward to.