Creative Technology…
One thing that the game industry deals with on a fairly regular basis is new technology. In graphics, it’s especially true that there are new techniques coming out all of the time. These techniques are pretty varied and focus on everything from animation to texturing. Not only that, but the pace of innovation has exploded over the last few years due to the introduction of extremely powerful and extremely *flexible* graphics cards. In the end, it’s always a rat race to keep up in an attempt to be the first to market with a particular feature.
On the console side of the industry, the platforms are a lot more static than on the PC side. Matter of fact, modern graphics hardware in PCs is roughly 10-20x more powerful than the graphics hardware in the current batch of consoles. However, there are a few kinds of graphics cards that are commonly ignored by current PC games: cheap and low performance integrated graphics. I used to believe that supporting this kind of hardware wasn’t really that important, but with the ever-increasing popularity of laptops, that kind of ideology no longer holds up.
Lucky for us graphics guys, even the low end hardware is seeing some very important advances. These advances mostly manifest themselves in the form of increased flexibility. We can now do things on even low end hardware that would have been impossible only a few short years ago. That leads me to the point of this post: I believe that the industry has simply taken a “more features equals better” approach towards graphics. Not only does this approach typically fail to effectively support low-end hardware, it’s simply not a sustainable approach for the future.
Given the number of new graphics technologies coming out every year, it will be impossible to maintain the current approach without completely astronomical budgets. Even then, would all of those new features contribute in a truly meaningful way? Let’s pretend for a second that we’re not talking about graphics any more… we’re now talking about cars. Lets presume that you want to build the fastest race car ever. If you go out and grab the fastest engine, the best tires, the best car frame, the best everything currently in existance… would you get the best car? In theory, it seems like you would. But in reality, you’d probably have lots of things that don’t really fit well together. Well guess what: graphics technologies are no different!
That said, I think that the game industry needs to stop this “more equals better” approach and start taking a smarter, more creative, and holistic approach. We should be thinking “smarter equals better”. We should be focusing on developing creative uses for all of that new flexibility that graphics cards are now giving us! We should be focusing on technologies that don’t just increase the visual quality, but also enhance practicality! It’s only a matter of time before it’s no longer about how your game looks on high-end hardware… it will be about how it looks and performs on low-end hardware.
*EDIT*:
Sorry for not posting on my usual Monday schedule… I’m just getting over being sick, and it turns out that it’s really tough to write with any real capacity whilst not feeling well! =X
