It's nice that they're slowly improving, that every Apple Silicon Mac has a half-decent integrated GPU, that ML upscaling is pretty good if you want "4K". But they really don't come close to an NVIDIA card at 200-400W.
Mathematically GPUs can keep getting better at churning out more pixels faster but the biggest limitation is really entirely subjective. Past a certain point the returns are diminishing in terms of what your human eyes and brain can experience as an improvement.
Laptops will never be as fast as workstations but they're fast enough to outsell any desktop. Any reason to believe GPUs are intrinsically immune to this "fast enough"?
Ray tracing for example is becoming much more prevalent, and (done correctly) adds a significant amount of both immersion and overhead to the experience. It is inherently an expensive operation for GPUs, so much that most implementations rely on upscale to make it viable.
Your laptop analogy doesn't really work here; mobile chip implementations are indeed slower but can be measured as a modest percentage drop in performance to their desktop counterparts. Meanwhile, most iGPUs are orders of magnitude slower than many entry level dedicated solutions, especially for sustained performance.
I feel like these days that is not really true. The high end gpu market is so small so most devs don’t even bother. Many games these days are optimized to run on a Steam Deck.
Things are not at all like the late 90s where you had to have a high end PC to even launch a game. Almost everything works fine on a humble igpu. 1080p low to mid graphics settings are possible.
Ray Tracing in most titles does not result in a better game. The hype for it has mostly died out because gamers prefer the higher frame rates.
I'm okay with precast shadows, and so on, but if the game has ray traced reflections I'll always turn those on.
I don't usually play mp games, so I'm fine with a slightly worse framerate to not have screen space reflections.
> The high end gpu market is so small so most devs don’t even bother.
I feel the opposite with big AAA titles pushing realism and ever amazing graphics, selling millions.
I love Steam Deck but good luck playing games like Cyberpunk, Black Myth: Wukong, Latest Metal Gear Solid, Star Wars Outlaws on Steam Deck with any reasonable framerates.
Almost without exception the simple trick of turning the "vivid" dial to 11 makes people swear that's the "better" picture.
> Your laptop analogy doesn't really work here; mobile chip implementations are indeed slower but can be measured as a modest percentage drop in performance to their desktop counterparts.
That "modest" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here [0] even at the mid-range and below. Definitely doesn't fly at the higher end, the 200-400W GPUs mentioned above. The physics of powering and cooling such a system just doesn't agree well with the size constraints of a laptop or its power supply.
Back when we had the same conversation about laptops, they were far less adequate than today. Tech evolves faster than our perception and at some point it's good enough. I'm typing this from an 8 year old laptop. Not too long ago a laptop would have been useless at that age.
[0] At the top end the difference seems to be "a modest" 40-50% between the mobile and desktop versions of a GPU. https://jarrods.tech/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/rtx-4080-mob...
Apple is a bit of an exception to this with the M series (if the marketing lived up to the hype), but globally, they only hold about 8.1% of the market.
People already have their own opinions when graphics peaked, but depending on when they set that threshold, I honestly can't help but respond with look around at the level design.
And streaming has natural latency and quality issues that can't be resolved. Almost every game streaming service is incredibly niche, dead, or BYOG.