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Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

GTA isn't where you go to for innovations -- its DNA is pretty set in stone, and judging from its economic success, it's DNA is great.

Presumably it's just going to be another (revisited) location, better graphics/animation/AI, stories are getting more complex, even bigger maps with even more side missions and discoveries, and probably another leap in terms in realism of NPC's -- much like RDR2 lets you have (elementary) conversations with virtually everyone, and NPC's follow much more realistic entire "paths" and activities during the day.

GTA has always been about unparalleled breadth, not depth. Deep and narrow is the DNA of other different types of games. And nobody has the resources to to deep and broad. GTA's breadth and shallowness is its defining feature, not its problem.

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Perhaps people have been seeking a more generational leap but from the footage you are correct, they just iterated on top of what worked, and likely have thousands of hours of insight into what sells.

I was hoping that they would at least upgrade the graphic side of the things, it does seem like from this video, that it could easily be just another DLC.

Think after I saw that Matrix demo from Unreal Engine, that trend would carry on into city roaming sandbox games.

Still can't wait to pick up this game in 2 to 3 years when all the bugs are fixed and they have a discount.

With Moore's law over, I wouldn't expect huge leaps and bounds in graphics again any time soon. Expect incremental improvement, and honing in on the details that matter to immersion. I for one find graphics "good enough" for the most part, and I'd would rather the budget go into NPC AI, character movement, and storytelling.

Why would you think Moore's law is over?

Because people in the know have been saying it’s dead for a while. E.g.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2016/05/13/245938/moores-la...

https://www.cnet.com/tech/computing/moores-law-is-dead-nvidi...

Moore's law has been 'over' for ages, it hasn't stopped video games graphics improving substantially between console generations.

Ages? I think it was about 2016 when people started credibly saying it’s over. So, that’s 8 years ago, which is about how long i think it took for the high end to trickle down to affordable. The graphics difference between a ps4 and a ps5 are… noticeable, but not shocking, and they were released in 2013 and 2020 respectively.

kenny living in 2024

lol, good point. 6 years.

Graphics between an end-of-life and a new next-gen console are a bad comparison. Late PS3 and early PS4 games also saw only small improvements. But compare early PS3 to late PS4 titles and the differences are staggering. The PS5 has about an order of magnitude more processing power than the base PS4 and Moore's law states that computing power doubles every two years, which means it gains an order of magnitude every 6 or 7 years - which is precisely the time frame between the PS4 and PS5 release. Moore's law definitely isn't dead and the new console generation proves it.

> The PS5 has about an order of magnitude more processing power than the base PS4 and Moore's law states that computing power doubles every two years, which means it gains an order of magnitude every 6 or 7 years

That's not what moore's law is. Moore's law says that TRANSISTOR COUNT will double every 2 years.

> Moore's law is the observation that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit (IC) doubles about every two years

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law

Back to the ps4 and ps5:

> Each of the PS5’s CUs has roughly 60 percent more transistors

- https://www.digitaltrends.com/gaming/ps4-vs-ps5/

From the same page, the original PS4 had 18 CUs, the PS5 has 36 CUs.

So if the PS4's transistor count is (n x 18), the PS5's transistor count is (n x 38 x 1/0.6) = (n x 63.3333) - which is only 3.5x

If moore's law had held you'd expect a multiple of 8 or 16, not 3.5.

Moore's law is dead, and the new console generation proves it.

First off, your calculation is wrong because these chips are not the same size. Secondly, if you actually go with the definition of Moore's law, my argument still holds - and it's trivial to prove. From your linked article:

>Moore's law [states] the number of transistors that could be housed in a dense integrated circuit [doubles every X]

(emphasis mine)

The PS4 GPU was a 28nm chip and PS5's is a 7nm one. A factor four reduction in length between transistor terminals equates to a factor of 16 increase in transistors that could be housed in one unit of area. That's precisely what you'd have expected from your definition of Moore's law. In reality there's a bit more to it, like efficiency and power consumption (Moore included that in his original estimate), which slightly lessen whole deal of increasing compute power. But as stated in my first comment, it still holds as an OOM increase when you look at raw FLOPs in the end, which is what we expected.

It's not only about calculation speed; the cost of building an AAA class game has exploded over the last 10 years. Maybe you can render 10x as much stuff on screen, but somebody has to actually draw and integrate that in the game. Also, the cost of the needed artwork seems to put game design on the back burner since taking risk is no longer an option. (just like modern Hollywood movies seem to be bland)

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