Guess Larian just got a load of designers and writers. Such a shame as 5th ed was a real highlight, but now a lot of people seem to be heading back to pathfinder like the 4th ed days. Luckily, the Divinity universe can stand on its own and there’s a wealth of other tabletop rulesets waiting for their amazing adaptions
I don’t think it’s too controversial to suggest that 5e mechanics are not the strength of BG3. It would be arguably praised more if it kept the world design of BG3 and replaced the combat to have the spell scope of DO2 with the basic actions of 5e (aka shove, which arguably BG3 tweaked anyway to make it fun in combat)
I’ll miss the design approach of the game but BG3 was just a big advertisement to how good a D:OS3 will be
“Let me put it to you this way, Tav. You can buy better games than Solasta, but I like Solasta. Yes, it has a linear story, and the voice acting is rather stiff, and you can’t multiclass, but–it’s brilliant!”
I don’t actually know that I would say BG3’s story is undeniably better. It’s more polished, sure, and it’s more open-ended, but that doesn’t necessarily make it better. Granted I’m not done with it yet so I can’t say for sure, but I really like Solasta’s story, especially the second campaign.
I think there’s also something to be said about having four fully voiced player-made protagonists instead of one silent protagonist and a ton of NPC companions. There are scenes made up entirely of your party talking to each other. Which like, yeah, BG3 has that too, but Astarion and Shadowheart aren’t mine. Nora and Crag were. The writing isn’t as tight, the voice acting is relatively amateurish, but I like it.
The story in bg3 better, as it’s closer to tabletop experience. Ofc no video game ever will be as open to player’s choices as an actual living DM, but bg3 here is way better in that regard than solasta. Solving an encounter by convincing multiple people to kill eachother is amazing
I still like solasta more, as there’s just so many things in bg3 that infuriate me, like individual exp instead of party exp, and personal exp rewards for “background related” stuff, allowing for someone get ahead or behind the rest of the party on level ups. I was playing with my gf and let her be the party face, which made me about a quarter of a level behind by act 3. Or flight being a glorified dash.
I know it’s wrong, but I can’t help but be upset by the individual xp. Either I get jealous when my friends level up three hours before I do, or I feel guilty having a level on them for three hours. That shit does not fly at most tables, why would they think to include it in this game? Why isn’t there an option to share xp???
I made the change almost a year ago now after all the OGL nonsense they tried to pull and I honestly believe Pathfinder is a much more fun game. My entire table enjoys it more than 5e and they are a real variety of different player types.
I have a hankering to go back to it regularly and I’m playing on the Switch so it is less smooth, but yes I am a forever fan of Larian Studioes after experiencing just a tithe of DOS:2. Hard to explain why it is so good, but the mechanics are creative, fun, and challenging. The story is epic and actually epic in scope and the characters are all so fleshed out and the voice acting is professionally done and immaculate. It is very open ended and very long but very very good.
I’m so ready to get the kind of polish and mastery that BG3 has applied to a new game in the Divinity universe. I haven’t finished DOS3, not by a Longshot and don’t have time to play it, but it blew me away and I think about playing it again often. I will one day. It is daunting when you haven’t played a game like that in a while, to continue on. Especially on the harder difficulties lol RIP. Larian is the GOAT game studio up there with From Software and the Zelda team imo.
It was incredibly mid. For something Bethesda hyped for over half a decade they sure made a bland game. Throwing aside all of the incredibly dated gameplay, you hit the nail on the head. It was boring
You can tell every faction was decided by a corporate committee inside Bethesda and Microsoft. They couldn’t be too risky, couldn’t come close to possibly offending one person or risk having slightly fewer gamers. That results in a boring as hell game. Everyone was too goddamn nice in the game. No one ever got mad at you. You could punch someone in the face and the response would be “hey, that’s not nice” and then they would continue on. Hold on there don’t want to possibly scare off a potential customer by having a realistic situation there.
Meanwhile a Bethesda game like Fallout 3 had its fair share of flaws, but gave you plenty of opportunity to decide if you wanted to be the good guy or not. Blow up a town? Kill off all residents of Tenpenny Tower, or whack all the ghouls that want to take up residence? Why not all of them? You decide!
It also wasn’t afraid of locking players out of quests if they behaved like an asshole. I liked that, why would somebody try to work with you after you just gave them the proverbial finger?
Far better than ‘oh golly, you just told me that I’m not a nice person. Well, that’s not very neighbourly of you, but I’ll pay you my life-long savings if you hop over to the next hub and return my package that I conveniently know is collecting dust over there, but can’t be bothered to fetch myself’.
In Fallout 3 you can kill the entire BoS faction (minus the essential NPCs, that go unconscious), wait a day, and they’ll be your best pal again.
In Starfield there is the exact same morality system, with lawmen who will attack you if you are evil and some random faction that will attack you because “we hate goody two shoes”, but you are shoehorned into being Jesus at the end of the game with the same issue of the ‘good’ faction having to mandatorily become non hostile to make the final quest work.
The way people feel about Starfield is the way I feel about every Bethesda game since Morrowind.
Yeah, FO3 wasn’t perfect, but at least it had its darker edges. Feel like a slaver? Sure, no problem, you can enslave random wastelanders and sell them for profit. Screw over BoS? Broken Steel let you do that, RIP Citadel. The Pitt gave an antagonist with a motive which turned out to be a bit more nuanced than it initially seemed. You could roleplay a fat-shaming, racist PoS if you wanted to, instead of presenting only safe options.
My biggest issues were that the world building felt so lazy, in that every faction essentially boiled down to Space America in various aspects. You got the Space American Liberal Authoritarian State, you got the Space American Cowboys, the Space American Technocrats, and the Space American Religious Fundamentalists. I found all of these factions kinda repugnant for one reason or another, and uninspired to boot, and so I never felt a pull to experience the world on a deeper level once I had gotten tired of the regular gameplay.
i’m kind of grateful for starfield actually. Feels like I can see bethesda as it actually is, even though it was obvious even before. Its so easy to just not care about anything they do. They can release next elderscrolls all they want, its all dead to me. Even if they manage to make it decent i still dont want to even look at it. Its going to cost 80€ or something like that most likely, so that is so much money saved for something more worthwhile too.
Agree it has be price competitive with consoles. Though I wonder if making a docked Deck be on equal footing with the Machine would have been a better use of R&D. Maybe simply improving having the dock house an eGPU and bumping the Deck specs.
I mean like a v2 Steam Deck and Dock. Give the Deck a bump in CPU/RAM/storage specs and new external ports to facilitate having the GPU in the dock. It could technically even be an externalized PCIe connector instead of Thunderbolt/USB. In handheld mode you get the iCPU limited to 1080, but dock it on the big screen and now you get full 4k @ 60 FPS. Add an HDMI port so you do 1080 on a big screen without a dock.
At this point, you would think that if they wanted to go with an Occulink/Thunderbolt thing… they’d make it in the Steam Machine, the thing that doesn’t move around as much.
They… the Valve video says the Steam Machine is 6 times as powerful as a Steam Deck.
… I have no idea what that actually means, maybe its TFLOPs, who knows, but uh, yeah, if you’re making a 6x thing thats more stationary, I would think that would be the thing you’d make with an option or variant to just jam more compute into it via modularity.
I dunno. It seems like more news about the Deck 2 or whatever is coming, at some point, Valve’s whole actual video is basically making fun of how its not talking about the Deck… stay tuned, goth gamer nation…???
Either way, we always have this:
Oh god are there going to be some very very salty Nintendo fans, very soon.
At this point, you would think that if they wanted to go with an Occulink/Thunderbolt thing… they’d make it in the Steam Machine, the thing that doesn’t move around as much.
I hadn’t heard of OCuLink before, apparently it’s an external PCIe connector! Eh, that would seem like a waste of engineering team to build that into a stationary desktop PC. They can just build the PC case to whatever size is needed to house the GPU and related cooling, which they did. This is the second desktop PC they’ve released, no? They had one like 10 years ago that was a commercial failure? My impression as a console gamer is that the Deck is very successful and popular, but it’s under-powered for playing on a big screen.
They… the Valve video says the Steam Machine is 6 times as powerful as a Steam Deck.
Right, my point was just bumping the chipset/CPU/memory would give a nice marketing tagline like that without designing a whole new desktop PC. Obviously, you can’t put a giant modern CPU and heat sinks and fans in a handheld. So spend that engineering R&D money on giving the dock a GPU so now the Deck performs as well as the Machine would have, and you have it using a successful branding rather than reviving a brand that already failed once.
It seems like more news about the Deck 2 or whatever is coming,
This is the second desktop PC they’ve released, no?
No. They have never designed a desktop before. The original Steam Machine was mainly a branding program for system integrators coupled with the release of the original Steam OS.
rather than reviving a brand that already failed once
Or do what they’re already doing and just call it something else.
But there’s one major thing you’re missing/ignoring: a big reason why the Steam Deck was a hit is because it has good price/performance. EGPU’s are the antithesis of that. They don’t scale well, and they add extra hardware and complexity, driving up price and limiting performance.
Right, that’s what I’m saying. Make a v2 Deck with upgraded CPU/memory, and put the GPU in the dock so it can do 4k on a big screen. I’m sure “Deck v2 is 4x more powerful than v1 and you can dock it for 4k @ 60fps on the big screen” would be just as good a marketing line as “Machine is 6x more powerful than a Deck”.
Though I wonder if making a docked Deck be on equal footing with the Machine would have been a better use of R&D.
No, it would not. Buulding a Steam Deck that’s 6x more powerful (the claimed comparison for the Steam Machine) is NOT possible with today’s technology. For anyone.
The Steam Deck has to be hand portable and get somewhat decent battery life. That leaves little little space for a cooling solution. You cannot beat thermodynamics.
My guess would be that around $800 sounds roughly right… if you try to approximate a small form factor pc with… roughly those specs?
You’d kinda end up around there, but… the architecture is so nonstandard, its hard to say.
You gotta think of it as an SFF PC not a console.
Because its closer to an SFF PC than it is to a console.
Right like, this thing is also a PC, its a laptop or w/e if you plug a mouse and keyboard into it.
I run desktop mode on my Deck all the time, use it as a laptop/tablet of sorts.
As far as tiers go, GN has said there are plans for a 512 GB and 2TB variant, so, there’s at least two tiers… I would not expect like, more or less GDDR5/6 RAM variants though, the whole thing is built too much around the exact power draw and thermal load.
But on the other hand, Valve have economies of scale, so they can build this thing cheaper than a normal person can build a PC. Plus, they don’t need to make a huge profit on this stuff. The purpose of the hardware is to sell games. At least that’s what I’ll keep telling myself until we find out more.
But on the other other hand, tariffs, and RAM just doubled in cost in like the last month, because… well this time its not bitcoin miners buying all the GPUs, its… the entire AI industry is a multi trillion dollar scam.
Hilariously, one way to read this announcement is that Valve expects the AI bubble to blow up by ‘early next year’, thus lowering RAM costs, ahahaha!
Holy shit, Valve is clowning on MSFT so fucking hard right now.
There’s no display, no battery, no controller included, no OS fees.. I think it could be cheaper than $800.
Because it’s all custom hardware we don’t really have a great basis for comparison. I’m going to guess that the cheapest variant will be something like $650. Doubt more than $700 though.
GLaDoS may or may not flood your home with neurotoxin if you try this, but uh, you could run a local LLM on it, and thus just have your own AI catgirlfriend or maybe lightweight coding assistant w/e.
I’ve futzed about with OpenLlama on a Bazzite Deck, there aren’t too many models lightweight enough to run, but some of them work!
I have a PSVR2 and I don’t consider the capability of VR to be its failure. I have to assume it’s just that much harder and more expensive to develop for VR. Like the FPS genre is hugely successful, and that’s such a natural fit for VR.
I think it’s just an accessibility thing. VR is expensive, and it takes people pushing through some disorientation/nausea to really enjoy it. Many will simply feel sick the first few times they try it, decide it’s not for them and leave it.
Just place a fan on the floor in front of you. Bam! No nausea. Because now your body instinctively knows your position and orientation in the space you’re in.
As someone who experienced nausea. I’ve tried all kinds of tricks. They all help, just like Dramamine or those bands with the beads that 1/10 pain.
It took quite a while to get over the nausea. A lot of starting and stopping with slightly longer sessions each time.
I fully expect that most people would not be willing to do that but I received the system as a gift and I really liked it. I wish they had more longer games. I’m so tired of the games that are 30s of concept and then do it over-and-over.
His replacement’s not much better. Lots of mixed sentiment from past employees, and even though he did acknowledge it with a joke, the “overdelivery” thing is such a red flag to carry.
I quit the game this past fall after literally 12k hours on steam. Huge number of growing reasons, but the top reason has always been the way bungie c-suite treats their devs and their players. One of the most toxic in the industry by a mile.
Nowadays games are very repetitive and grindy. That’s very unfortunate as it kills the game. Very few of them have engaging side quests that don’t feel like generic AI generated crap. So longer gameplay doesn’t automatically equate to better quality games.
It’s working out good for me personally. Between that trend and having gamepass. I don’t have much time to game any more, so can barely get past a tutorial before real life steps in. By that point I feel like I get it though so it’s OK.
I absolutely love kingdom come deliverance 2. Usually in games like that i just mainline the game and even then i usually don’t finish them. I did everything in this game before i even touched the main quest. The game is just very fun to play.
I have the first part, but I am not exactly sold on it. I really like the idea, the historical precision, etc., but the gameplay, especially the fight mechanics are a bit putting me off to a point that I have never completed it. Is the second part better in that regard?
I’m struggling with this too, about 1/3 of the way through the main quest. They tutorialize you on feints and defensive mechanics, but you can’t really punish aggression like you can in a fighting game, and the NPC never falls for my feints, basically ever. Getting through a melee fight feels like luck. The last one I got through was because I managed to impale him with three arrows before the sword fight actually started.
I think I realised what my big problem with $90 games is for Nintendo and it’s this, when I was a kid I used to save up money and buy game boy games. It was an important thing my parents made me do because it meant that I learnt you don’t just get given things for free (gifts are of course fine but at some point you need to learn about working to get money for things you want).
There’s no way he’s going to be able to get $90 in a reasonable time frame. What’s he going to do, cut lawns for 2 years in a row?
Dear internet person, this whole discussion is being triggered because Nintendo, of all people, decided $100 was an acceptable price for a video game. They are the asshats who opened the flood gates for the corporate zombies to waltz in.
Unfortunately this will continue to happen with or without Nintendo being first to do it. They happened to be this time, and it’s BS. But now more than ever people need to vote with their wallets.
There’s definitely a CEO whose bonus depends on hitting a certain number of PSN accounts. I can only assume account info is being sold because why else would they care? It’s either that or they eventually plan on charging PC players a monthly fee to play all their Sony games.
could also just be as simple as getting people’s feet in the door to their marketplace. if you already have an account maybe you’ll be fractionally more likely to buy other stuff in the store. multiply that by a few million or whatever… it’s not nothing.
Yea. Someone higher up at PlayStation (I forgot who, might have been the CEO) recently said that they believe PC gamers would buy PlayStations to play exclusive sequels to their PC games (like Horizon Forbidden west, which is not yet on PC). Forcing PSN accounts for their games on PC opens the door to getting a PlayStation just a little bit further.
Marketing. They want to increase PSN account numbers to increase their valuation, to have more data, and to make it easier for customers to move to their products/services since the account creation is already done.
That’s a cool aspect of it, no doubt, I just wish it took a backseat to the core game play. We have so many FPS games, but not many great new-gen space sims.
And if this space sim can create perfect FPS experience, now you’ve got all the FPS money funding the development of a space sim.
See how that works? Markets create synergies and non-zero-sum games. In this case, putting the limited resources for the space sim into FPS elements makes new resources available.
But that’s never how these things go. They put so many resources into FPS aspects that they almost entirely abandon the space sim. Just look at E:D for an example. They dedicated a whole DLC to walking around your ships and then threw ground assault missions into it.
The immersion from being a part of the world, walking around and experiencing stuff is neat and immersive. If the focus was on that stuff first and FPS second, cool, but that feels rarely the case.
Chris won’t stop until ShowerTech™ is in the game with realistic health debuffs so there’s a consequence when you don’t do the maintenance gameplay loop on your ship’s bathroom.
I wish that was entirely a joke.
But Star citizen has always had FPS missions as a core gameplay aspect, and it’s really one of their main selling points. In no other game can you walk out of a mission, into a ship, hop in the pilot seat and go from the ground to orbit with no cutscene and all of it under player control. The amount of crazy shit you can do just because your character can leave the pilot seat is ridiculous. A month ago I teamed up with some dude who did bounty hunting. He EMPd the other player, had me EVA over to their ship, shoot open the airlock, and gun down the target, all so his buddy could come over and harvest the ship for resources to sell. The emergent gameplay, even though the game can still be very rough, is a really cool aspect of what they’ve made.
I admit, I was a backer of the original campaign for Star Citizen. However, with the dev cycle what it is, I think I’ll be a grandparent before the game releases from early access. Last time I played it, it was a buggy mess, with only combat, and was not fun to me. I also admit, a lot of my angst comes from the way Elite: Dangerous tried to make FPS combat, etc., a thing. As someone who plays that game to explore, that entire DLC, as well as the alien shit they added, was part of system I had no interest in and, in my opinion, has further led to the downfall of E:D, a game that has been waiting for atmospheric landing, etc., but still, years later, barely has non-atmospheric landing.
I get the desire to walk about your ship, have carrier ships you can walk around with other players, and space stations you can visit actual NPCs in. However, if I wanted to shoot stuff, I’d play an FPS. I play E:D to explore and get that fear/anxiety/dread I only ever feel watching American politics. Just not my game play when I wanna just chill and narrowly avoid crashing my ship while exploring!
You’re right, getting out and moving around and hoping into the pilots seat of your ship is cool and I love to see that stuff. However, I don’t know why it always has to tip toward violent encounters instead of just having the ability to feel immersed in a space ship or station.
Because an FPS avatar is the body many people are most used to inhabiting in game worlds.
If you want people to feel immersed in an environment, you have to give them the virtual body they’re used to.
Like imagine you’re playing Battlefield 5, and then UFOs land and you go on a big space adventure. If you’re not still able to pull out that tommy gun and fire rounds the same way, your body feels different. It doesn’t feel like you’re there.
FPS is the biggest genre with the most resources in it. That makes it a standard for virtual environments everywhere.
I have to agree. Games tend to resort to violence immediately now, no need for justification. I didn’t imagine Starfield would be a shooter at all in fact. Ultimately it was almost exclusively shooting
I get the desire to compare the two games but Starfield tried too hard to color inside the lines by giving a story and lore while simultaneously trying to make an open ended sandbox which gave us neither. There’s a LARPing town of cowboys with dirt roads existing a few minutes from a hyper advanced planet with platinum roads and somehow they haven’t made contact? The cowboys haven’t progressed their dirt and wood town despite being in spitting distance of a planet of machines that could fabricate advanced tools in seconds?
Star Citizen seems to take the Dark Souls approach of light narrative, heavy world building, “go learn the world by experiencing it.”
But I would honestly say that the only things I liked about Starfield are the things you’re kind of dismissing. The story and ambiance pieces worked really well, and I ONLY wanted that part.
Every time I had to do anything space travel, combat, space combat, or inventory management, I died inside.
I also felt like the cities and locations were tiny and didn’t feel lived in or real. Basically the immersiveness of the game which thrives on immersion was not handled well so I was left with a terrible shooter.
Well the story held the game back because the game wanted to be more open than than the story allowed and vice versa where the game held the story back because a lot of areas were underdeveloped or don’t make sense with where they are for the sake of the story they wanted to tell. It felt like two conflicting ideas at the core which ended up with what we have.
Why are cowboys within trading distance of a future tech planet? How have they not interacted to a point where they don’t need dirt roads? The only answer seems to be for the sake of being neat and is baffling. Empty planets being explained as being on purpose to ‘get more joy out of discovering ones with things on it’ and just… it was astoundingly average and competes for the worst Bethesda game against 76.
Bethesda excels at world building and it was disastrous to watch them fail at that.
That’s the ultimate goal though. Just last night I flew from a mining outpost on a moon to find resources, scanned a whole bunch, pulled out of my ship with a mining buggy, mined a bunch, and then logged out from my bed within the ship. 0 combat. That’s a life they want to have possible and I’m all for it! lol
I think it’s just that fps stuff sells and all the COD kiddies wouldn’t look at SC at all if they didn’t focus on pewpew everything. Hell they have a cargo ship that has an advertisement of it shooting its guns …lol ffs why? It’s just marketing bs.
That’s the entire thing they’re doing. The violent encounters are being planned for, obviously, but they’re not a requirement.
Star Citizen’s approach seems to be to add the ability to do as many things as possible while giving you the option to define how you want to interact with them. Of course, you’re probably going to have to defend yourself from the stray pirate or bandit with whatever you end up doing but that’s par for the course.
Except people are complaining because they were having fun before and now they’re having less fun. It hasn’t affected me as I’ve replaced the railgun with EAT, but I do think the nerf was mostly unnecessary. All it did was give players less options for higher difficulties.
Steam ended pricing in those currencies and reverted the prices to USD without local adjustment.
Any developers who want to sell in Turkey or Argentina will set a local price in USD.
This really only affects older/abandoned games where the developer never updates pricing. Those games will be left charging US prices in poorer countries.
Yeah it's a nonsense. Argentina and Turkey have atrocious economies, with inflation at crazy levels. Turkey's is at 60% and Argentinas is at 143% currently, on a background of years of terrible economic decisions. Their local currencies are effectively trash so it makes absolute sense for Steam to move to dollars if they're going to continue bothering trading in those countries.
I’m from Argentina, the prices we have now are absolutely ridiculous even with the LATAM USD, an Argentinian might have a monthly income of something around 250-350USD, and some games are something along the lines of 40USD even with the regional pricing, you need to add to that the fact that there is a tax on the dollar of 155%. I assume a normal person from the US earns something along the lines of 1500-3000USD a month, so it’s completely incomparable. To give you an idea, physical retro collectible games are cheaper than virtual ones.
Programs bounce around between a ton of different code segments, and it doesn’t really matter how they’re arranged within the binary. Some code even winds up repeated, when repetition is more efficient than jumping back and forth or checking a short loop. It doesn’t matter where the instructions are, so long as they do the right thing.
This machine code still tends to be clean, tight, and friendly toward reverse-engineering… relatively speaking. Anything more complex than addition is an inscrutable mess to people who aren’t warped by years of computer science, but it’s just a puzzle with a known answer, and there’s decades of tools for picking things apart and putting them back together. Scene groups don’t even need to unravel the whole program. They’re only looking for tricky details that will detect pirates and frustrate hackers. Eventually, they will find and defeat those checks.
So Denuvo does everything a hundred times over. Or a dozen. Or a thousand. Random chunks of code are decompiled, recompiled, transpiled, left incomplete, faked entirely, whatever. The whole thing is turned into a hot mess by a program that knows what each piece is supposed to be doing, and generally makes sure that’s what happens. The CPU takes a squiggly scribbled path hither and yon but does all the right things in the right order. And sprinked throughout this eight-ton haystack are so many more needles, any of which might do slightly different things. The “attack surface” against pirates becomes enormous. They’ll still get through, eventually, but a crack delayed is a crack denied.
Unfortunately for us this also fucks up why computers are fast now.
Back in the single-digit-megahertz era, this would’ve made no difference to anything, besides requiring more RAM for this bloated executables. 8- and 16-bit processors just go where they’re told and encounter each instruction by complete surprise. Intel won the 32-bit era by cranking up clock speeds, which quickly outpaced RAM response times, leading to hideously clever cache-memory use, inside the CPU itself. Cache layers nowadays are a major part of CPU cost and an even larger part of CPU performance. Data that’s read early and kept nearby can make an instruction take one cycle instead of one thousand.
Sending the program-counter on a wild goose chase across hundreds of megabytes guarantees you’re gonna hit those thousand-cycle instructions. The next instruction being X=N+1 might take literally no time, if it happens near a non-math instruction, and the pipeline has room for it. But if you have to jump to that instruction and back, it’ll take ages. Maybe an entire microsecond! And if it never comes back - if jumps to another copy of the whole function, and from there to parts unknown - those microseconds can become milliseconds. A few dozen of those in the wrong place and your water-cooled demigod of a PC will stutter like Porky Pig. That’s why Denuvo in practice just plain suuucks. It is a cache defeat algorithm. At its pleasure, and without remedy, it will give paying customers a glimpse of the timeline where Motorola 68000s conquered the world. Hit a branch and watch those eight cores starve.
Unfortunately, increasing cache seems to be the direction things are going, what with AMD’s 3D cache initiative and Apple moving RAM closer to the CPU.
So Denuvo could actually get away with it by just pushing the problem onto platforms. Ideally, this would discourage this type of DRM, but it’ll probably just encourage more PC upgrades.
I wouldn’t be surprised if we end up with ram-less systems soon. A lot of programs don’t need much more memory than the cache sizes already available. Things like electron bloat memory use through the roof, but even then it’s likely just a gigabyte or two. Cpus will have that much cache eventually. The few applications that really need tons of memory could be offloaded to a really fast SSD, which are already becoming the standard. I imagine we’ll see it in phones or tablets first, where multitasking isn’t as much of a thing and physical space is at a premium.
That’s just not true, here are a few off the top of my head:
video games
docker containers
web browsers
productivity software
RAM is actually the one resource I run out of in my day to day work as a software developer, and I get close on my gaming PC. I have a really fast SSD in my work computer (MacBook Pro) and my Linux gaming PC (some fast NVME drive), and both grind to a halt when I start swapping (Linux seems to handle it better imo). So no, I don’t think SSDs are enough by any stretch of the imagination.
If anything, our need for high performance RAM is higher today than ever! My SIL just started a graphics program (graphic design or UI/UX or something), so I advised her to prioritize a high amount of RAM over a high number of CPU/GPU cores because that’s how important RAM is to the user experience when deadlines approach.
Large CPU caches are great, but I don’t think you can really compensate for low system memory by having large caches and a fast SSD. What is obvious, though, is that memory latency and bandwidth is an issue, so I could see more Apple-style soldered NAND next to the CPU in the coming board revisions, which isn’t great for DIY systems. NAND modules are just so much cheaper to manufacturer than CPU cache, and they’re also sensitive to heat, so I don’t think embedding them on the CPU die is a great long term solution. I would prefer to see GPU-style memory modules either around or behind the CPU, soldered into the board, before we see on-die caches with multiple GB capacity.
Well you’re right that it’s not practical now. By “soon” I was thinking of like 10+ years from now. And as I said, it would likely start in systems that aren’t used for those applications anyway (aside from web browsers, which use way more ram than necessary anyway). By the time it takes over the applications you listed, we’ll have caches as big as our current ram anyway. And I’m using a loose definition of cache, I really just mean on-package memory of some kind. And we probably will see that GPU style memory before it’s fully integrated.
It’s already sort of a thing in embedded processors, such as ARM SOCs where RAM is glued to the top of the CPU package (I think the OG Raspberry Pi did that). But current iterations run the CPU way too hot for that to work, so the RAM is separate.
I could maybe see it be a thing in kiosks and other limited purpose devices (smart devices, smart watches, etc), but not for PCs, servers, or even smart phones, where we expect a lot higher memory load/multitasking.
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