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Comment by buran77 | Hacker News Reader

Far, far more people are gaming on Nintendos, Playstations and Xboxes with iGPUs and relatively weak total processing power than on 400W GPUs. You're making the mistake of thinking only the fastest can win but in real life the good enough almost always wins. Streaming will do even more for the death of the dGPU than performance alone can compensate. You already rely on someone else to rent your game software from, doing the same for the hardware is one small step.

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"?

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Because the iGPUs aren't keeping pace, and many of the biggest/most popular titles continue to push the envelope of fidelity.

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.

> Because the iGPUs aren't keeping pace, and many of the biggest/most popular titles continue to push the envelope of fidelity.

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.

> Ray Tracing in most titles does not result in a better game.

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.

Sorry but do you got a source on this?

> 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.

A large quantity of my games are outright terrible to play on my steam deck. I have my games divided into categories based on if they're worth playing on it or not. For more intense games where the framerate is abysmal and audio stutters, I avoid using it. That or for games that I want the extra smoothness and visual fidelity. There are many, many games that are like this. It includes older ones too.

> push the envelope of fidelity

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...

I'm focusing on the mainstream iGPUs that dominate the market, which often run in the tens of watts. Indeed, mobile versions of dedicated GPUs with desktop counterparts pull their own.

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.

Saying anything but the Switch has an iGPU is a very literal interpretation of what an iGPU constitutes. I'd wager that fairly modest power consumption (10-30W) and (non G) DDR memory constitutes the soul of an iGPU. PS5 and XSX do not fit those definitions, as do the Xbox One (eSRAM) and PS4.

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.

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