Future of personal computing

[Narei Mooncatt]

I remember not too far back there were always major jumps in computing performance relative to the software out there to make use of them. Take gaming....Sometimes to the point of not being worth it to buy PC over console (in my opinion) because you'd need to fork over $$$$ for top end stuff to play them at comparable qualities. Then it seemed that the hardware was catching up because "gaming" computers were becoming more in demand. This point was driven home last week when I bought my mate a gaming laptop with comparable specs to my gaming beast for nearly 1/3 the price after not much over a year difference. Of course things get cheaper over time, but I didn't know it was this drastic.  I realized that now it seems the hardware is growing faster than software, so that software developers have been making better use of graphics to the point that games are looking nearly photo realistic. From what I've been seeing lately, it doesn't seem like there's much of a noticable difference in game quality to the nekkid eye when comparing mid level computers to top end. There's only a few games out now that will really tax a system's resources it seems. In the past, a mid level computer would have a hard time playing many games on even medium settings. I'm focusing on the gaming aspect because thats what takes the most computing power. And with graphics the way they are now, I don't see how they can get much better. You can only go so high of a resolution, only so far of a draw distance, only so many auto gen objects, that any more wouldn't be seen by the player. Plus physics engines are pretty much on par, being extremely realistic themselves. It's almost like hitting end game in the world of playable improvements.

So what do you think would be next? More focus on extreme computations of huge calculations like with the various distributive computing networks? Where the processing power of the CPU/GPU is put to full use, but not really seen or experienced by you. Or working on better AI, and all the conspiracy theorists that claim a world takeover that come with it? Perhaps new interactive ideas (Think VR type periferals)? Or will hardware just kinda hit a dead end, because there's no benefit to going more? Or because it's physically impossible to pack more power into it?

Or do you think I'm pointing out the obvious? I never was huge into computers and their hardware, only speaking from my own experiences with needing vastly expensive hardware in the past, when now even the cheap stuff is really good and seems to have longer staying power before going obsolete.

[McMajik]

In 1997, we had a windows 95 PC, 133 Mhz pentium processor, 48Mb of RAM, a 2 gig HDD, no soundcard or onboard sound (We added a decent soundcard later), not sure about the rest.

It cost us £1300, which i think was about $2600 back then, maybe more. Now, though, you'd have to pay someone to take it off you.

last december (2007) we got a £1000 PC. 2.4Ghz quad core processor (2.4 x 4 instructions at once = about 9.6Ghz of power), Nvidia geforce 8800GT (obsolete by 2 generations now), 2 x 640Gb raid 1 HDDs, 4 gig of ram, and even that's obsolete now.

I think when they've got graphics to a level where they can't get any better, they'll target 2 other areas - sound and AI. Realistic speech synthesis that would render voice actors obsolete, and realistic NPC behaviour, with more focus on the NPCs decision making and less on things being scripted.

[Weisseman]

The future of hardware is around. MRAM and Graphene could certainly be featuring in future computers to expand on the power they can do while SSD's, GPGPU's, multiple threaded CPU's and 32GB Ram sticks will all be alot cheaper in the next coming years. Hardware in itself does have limitations but there's plenty of experiments out there to get round them. In the end it comes down to how much the software itself will use.

Software for science and corperations has come on miles in the last for years. CUDA has expanded Server and Workstation power alot (256bit encrytion was broken a few months after it was released). The next big thing in software is the Cloud computing model. Personally I'm not in favour of this in on a personal computing level. Having all my programs running outside of my pc isn't something I want =X On a business level of things it makes sence. Right now I see Cloud level stuff going where it already is. You can store files on it to access anyway (Skydrive and G Drive are the 2 big examples of this) while programs will remain on the personal users pc.

Graphics can still be improved upon. A few years ago I used to rate how go it was on fire, that changed to water once fire had become good and now it's trees. Since leaves are so thin alot of games just render them in 2D and it's painfully obvious >.<
Engines wise there's a game called The Conduit coming out that has a very clever engine. I'm told it only loads process's it needs rather than everything. This way low powered pc's (or consoles since the games is a Wii game) can do good graphics. Now The Conduit doesn't look like Farcry 2 but it's certainly impressive for a Wii game.
I could see this style of engine becoming the future of gaming engines as it removes some of the retrictions hardware places on a game.

[Narei Mooncatt]

last december (2007) we got a £1000 PC. 2.4Ghz quad core processor (2.4 x 4 instructions at once = about 9.6Ghz of power), Nvidia geforce 8800GT (obsolete by 2 generations now), 2 x 640Gb raid 1 HDDs, 4 gig of ram, and even that's obsolete now.

This is the kind of staying power I'm talking about. I've also got an 8800M card and 4GB ram (On 32-bit XP, but did so because I may go 64-bit in the future and planned ahead), but a 3.0GHz duo core and a single 200GB HDD. You say our systems are obsolete, but I say far from it. Yes, they  have better stuff out there, but our systems are still more than capable to do things and do them fast enough to not cause problems. You wanna talk about obsolete, my old laptop is getting there. 2.0 GHz single core Athlon 64, 1.25 GB ram, 100GB HDD @5400, and integrated graphics. It's 4 years old and about the only thing I can do on it is my GPS program and web browsing. I used to be able to play some decent games like Need For Speed Most Wanted and STALKER at decent frame rates on low quality settings. Now even with a recent Windows re-install, all the driver, anti-virus, and other updates, those games would barely work and it's definately showing a slow down on some menial tasks.