F E A T U R E // T U R I N G - C E L E B R A T I N G T E C H N O L O G I C A L A D V A N C E M E N T
game titles can claim to be
completely optimized for the
available hardware. That
is to say, most software is unable
to extract the maximum amount
of compute power from the
underlying silicon. It’s for this
reason that with every console
generation, the titles released at the
beginning of the life cycle are
visually inferior to the titles that are
released towards the console’s
twilight years. By that time, the tools
have improved, the system software
and of course, if not most important
- the developers have a better
understanding or grasp of the
hardware and therefor can do more
or extract more performance from it.
It’s the software developers that
change with time, not the hardware
within the console.
This isn’t exclusive to consoles or
any other closed box environment,
as it’s true across many
if not all computing spaces in
general. It is easier to observe this in
consoles for a number of reasons not
related to the technology at
all. Just the mere fact that more
consoles will make it to the market
than any other computationally
equivalent device (barring smart
phones) plays to this. There are
plenty of personal computers of
course, but you’re not likely to find 40
million odd computers from a myriad
of PC vendors containing exactly the
same hardware and the exact same
performance metrics. So when we
observe this better understanding of
any one console’s abilities over the
years (materialized in better
graphics), it’s easy to divorce it from
the reasons pertaining to how that
comes to be as a property of all
technological progress, not just
consoles. As such, titles making use
of DXR for whatever purposes will
only improve,making better use of
the underlying hardware, while the
hardware itself gets faster. That the
performance at present may not be
up to expectation is of little
importance.
Consider an example outside
of computing for a moment. We
celebrate or encourage infants as
they start to walk or crawl. Our
appreciation of this milestone
doesn’t at all factor in how fast they
are crawling or walking. We are well
aware of that their speed will
increase with time as they grow. If
that’s too abstract to understand,
look at it this way. Usain Bolt wasn’t
born with a 9.58s 100m sprint. At
some point he was running at a
toddlers pace. That he learned to run
was more important than how fast
he ran at the time. In the same way
before we could even think Michelin
Pilot Sport Cup 2 tires, someone
needed to come up with the 'tire'.
The ability to do something has to
“MORE OFTEN THAN NOT, TECHNOLOGICAL MERIT,
IS CONFLATED OR DISCUSSED ALONG WITH
PERFORMANCE AND OF COURSE PRICING.”
Silicon Progress, used in every modern-day computer.
18 The OverClocker Issue 45 | 2018