Technologies that will change the PC Gamer

Quake 2 via program

Quake 2 with 3D acceleration via Open GL

We can distinguish multiple stages at this point, and it happens that the transition from 2D to three dimensions was quite extensive, and the democratization of that technology It was not caused immediately either. During the earliest stage, three-dimensional games They were quite poor, but in exchange they worked partially well as long as we had a processor strong.

In the second stage, at the time when 3D graphics accelerators began to arrive, was when this type of graphics really took off. Games like Quake GL, Quake II, the first two Tomb Raider games, Resident Evil 1 and 2, and Half-Life showed the world the potential of 3D graphics, and also made clear the difference that a 3D graphics could make. graphic card three-dimensional accelerator.

From there, three-dimensional graphics evolved in every single way. We increasingly had games with much more free levels, much more complicated geometry and a much more realistic finish, although there are some titles that marked a before and after on their own merits. Games like Quake III and GTA III are two great examples, and much later titles like DOOM III and Half-Life 2 raised the bar again.

3.- Taming three dimensions: T&L, programmable shaders and unified shaders

The evolution that was gradually caused in the planet of three-dimensional graphics was so colossal that we went from flat and unsettled worlds, with completely square individuals whose faces were just blocks with a flat texture attached, organic and rich worlds which, at times, could easily pass for a scene from any real world.

To get to where we are today, it was not enough to increase our capacity by a barbaric amount, it was also necessary to complete a sequence of advances in technology which I always like to group around three major keys: T&L, programmable shaders and unified shaders. The first is what is known as transformation and also illumination, and represented a colossal advance in that it freed the central processing unit from an essential workload, which ended up falling on the GPU.

It was between the GeForce Key Specifications 256, and allowed the realism of the games to flourish enormously through the development of transformation, through which the image adapts to each new frame, and lighting, which reached some higher levels of realismMax Payne 2 is one of the best examples. Programmable shaders made it viable that fabulous game of lights and shadows that we have seen in DOOM III, and unified shaders ended the division of deliberate elements into pixels and vertices, marked a colossal advance in terms of raw capacity and defined the foundations of today's graphics technology.

4.- Dual-core Intel processor: A key step towards creating considerably more complex games

The evolution that the GPU Intel had a colossal relevance in PC gaming, but this should not lead us to underestimate the leap that marked the arrival of dual-core processors with a monolithic design. Intel had now realized what the future of the entire world of general consumer processors was going to be at the time when integrated the technology HT on their Pentium 4This allowed its core to work with 2 threads, and it is a feature that has remained as such until today.

It was a first step, but the genuine revolution came through the AMD Athlon 64 X2, who were the first processors Intel's Pentium Ds were dual-core processors aimed at the general consumer market that had a monolithic core design. Intel responded with the Pentium Ds, which were essentially 2 Pentium 4s "stuck together" and were very much under the radar of consumers. AMD, but much later it made up for it with the Core 2 Duo, one of the most important generational leaps in the field of high-performance general consumer CPUs.

The jump to 2 physical cores became one of the most important technological advances because it directly opened the doors to another way of developing video games, where it was possible to parallelize the workload on 2 complete cores and give form to considerably more complex and rich titles, both in terms of physics and AI (artificial intelligence). It is not by chance that Crysis It was one of the first games that required a dual-core processor to run properly, and yes, it would load both cores at 100% capacity.

We currently have processors with up to 16 cores and 32 threads, but recent games do not use much more than 6 cores and 12 threads well, and the evolution that has occurred at the level technological It was much less incredible of what was at the time the jump to the 2 cores with the legendary Crysis.

5.- Dedicated sound cards: No more "peep, poop, boom"

This is another one of those advances in technology that Few of our readers will have lived, but I am sure that those who have done so will agree that it deserves to be in this article without any doubt.

Throughout the second half of the first decade of the year 2000, the recognition of sound cards began to decline with the rise of built-in sound resolutions in the motherboardThese resolutions largely cannibalized the sound card market because, in the end, they offered acceptable quality and allowed the user to save a significant amount of money, which could be invested in improving other elements of the PC.

That situation has continued to this day, although I can confirm that the difference between using an internal sound solution and a dedicated card is very large. I already told you about this when we were able to investigate the Sound BlasterX AE-5 Plus, but the truth is that the real revolution came with the abandonment of the old PC "speaker" and the arrival of dedicated sound cards.

Games from the eighties and nineties could make use of the speaker that came with the PC, but the result was a bunch of sounds and noises that, in the best of cases, could approach the much more basic quality of an 8-bit system. With the arrival of sound cards, the leap was so colossal that it is difficult to describe, but in essence it would be something like going from the "stone age" to the "modern age."

I loved illustrating this topic with one of my favorite videos, as it perfectly captures the leap that marked the arrival of dedicated sound cards as opposed to the PC speaker. DOOM from 1993, for example, It is a group of noise sounds and does not have music, but with a simple Sound Blaster the experience changes completely and we can enjoy the carefully crafted soundtrack created by id Program, some fabulous sound effects for the season, and that unique atmosphere created by the noises, grunts and moans of the opponents.

With a SSD Not only can we reduce the loading times of games, but we also offer them a base on which to They have the ability to work at a higher speed at the same time. This is essential to avoid performance issues, stuttering, popping, and other problems in the demanding graphics engines used to create open worlds. However, this ingredient still has a lot of potential to develop, something that will soon change thanks to Direct Storage.

Ray tracing is another of the advances in technology which marked a huge leap forward in the gaming world. I know that it is still in a relatively early stage, and that thanks to its high hardware demands it only came applying in a limited way, but Even so, the graphic quality of a game can improve so much that it becomes overwhelming.Of course, there is also a considerable walk ahead, little by little it will progress and thanks to the arrival of hardware little by little your app will become more and more complicated, and much more interesting.

In this sense, think, for example, of the impact that the ray tracing applied to Battlefield V, and What happened years later with Cyberpunk 2077In the first one only applied to reflections, while in the second it was used in reflections, shadows, ambient occlusion and also global illumination, achieving a simply incredible result, so much so that it is one of the games that has best used ray tracing.

Finally, there are advanced rescalings that use time-based items and exclusives. In this bag we have the possibility of put to FSR 2.0 and TSR, while DLSS is on a different level because it also uses AI (artificial intelligence) to reconstruct the image. These rescalings made it possible to play in 4K resolution with greater fluidity without sacrificing excellent image quality, and at the same time were key to ensuring that ray tracing can be used in 4K without performance sacrificing.

Of course, they also have in front of them enough room for optimization. This has now been demonstrated by AMD with FSR 2.0, which is a significant improvement over FSR 1.0, and by NVIDIA with DLSS 2.3, which has significantly reduced ghosting issues. As the years go by, we can expect ever-increasing image quality, to the point where it will be almost impossible to distinguish it from native resolution, and an increasing increase in the optimization performance.

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