Personally, I think that That was the most essential and much more important leap of each and every one of us who have lived in the world of computing, that transition from vacuum tube to transistor, and I doubt that we will see anything as dazzling in the next few years, especially knowing the problems that quantum computing has to take off.

If we jump from that general level to a more specific one, it is easy to realize that the technological advances of great importance in the world of PCs had a very different impact depending on each field. Thus, for example, the jump from 8 to 16 bits, and the subsequent arrival of 32 bits, are clear turning points in the professional world, but it is clear that many of the most important ones also had a place on the gaming planet, and we are going to dedicate this product to them.

Choosing five technological advances from among all those that took us from those traditional games, made of dots and lines, to the giant three-dimensional worlds with a finish that is increasingly closer to realism photography is, of course, an ambitious approach, But it is also a good idea because it will reduce the consistency and difficulty of the product, and that will make it much more entertaining and comfortable to read. As always, I invite you to comment and share with us other advances in technology that, for us, have been fundamental.

1.- The use of color was among the greatest advances in technology

It's a thing of no relevance today, but in the 1980s, color reproduction in the PC world, and in games, was nothing like what it is today. EGA graphics cards could display up to 16 colors at a resolution of 640 x 350 pixels. It was a huge leap, since We went from playing in monochrome (without color) to doing so with a whopping 16 simultaneous colors, but the much bigger things came in the following years.

In 1987, another of the most important technological advances focused on the use of color on PCs took place, thanks to the launch of graphics resolutions based on the VGA standard, which could use up to 256 colors on screen with a resolution of 640 x 480 pixels. This represented a huge advance that is difficult to understand for those who did not live it at the time, but do not worry, I wanted to show you with three images of DOOM, the classic from 1993.

As you can see, the jump to 256 colors completely changed the world of PC gaming, And while other major developments in this regard were generated later, none were as dazzling or had the same influence as that one. The reasons are obvious, think about playing your favorite game today with only 4 colors, or with 16 poorly delegated colors to try to cover a huge void, as the second image shows. Playing with 256 colors was a real delight.

2.- The democratization and standardization of three-dimensional graphics

We can distinguish several stages at this point, and it happens that the transition from 2D to three dimensions was quite extensive, and the democratization of that technology did not happen 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 strong processor.

In the second stage, at the time when 3D graphics accelerators began to arrive, was when this type of graphics card 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 accelerator graphics card could make.

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 the capacity by a huge amount, it was also necessary to complete a sequence of advances in technology that I always like to group around three main 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 one of the key specifications of the GeForce 256, and it greatly improved the realism of games through the transformation process, 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 play of light and shadow that we saw 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 of the GPU 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 HT technology into its 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, which were the first dual-core processors aimed at the general consumer market that had a monolithic core design. Intel responded with the Pentium D, which were essentially two Pentium 4s "stuck together" and were far behind AMD's expectations, but later made up for it with the Core 2 Duo, one of the largest generational leaps in the field of high-performance 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 technological level 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'm sure 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 on the motherboard. These 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 components 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 an SSD we not only have the possibility of reducing the loading times of the games, but we also offer them a base on which to build. 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 technological advancement that marked a huge leap forward in the gaming world. I know that it is still in its early stages, and that due to its high hardware demands it has only been applied in a limited way, but Even so, the graphic quality of a game can improve so much that it becomes overwhelming.Of course, it also has a long way to go, it will gradually progress and thanks to the arrival of increasingly more powerful hardware its application will become more and more complex, and more interesting.

In that sense, think, for example, about the impact that ray tracing had on Battlefield V, and What happened years later with Cyberpunk 2077In the first one it was only applied to reflections, while in the second one 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 putting the FSR 2.0 and the TSR, while DLSS is on a different level because it also uses AI (artificial intelligence) to reconstruct the image. These upscalings made it possible to play in 4K resolution with greater fluidity without losing excellent image quality, and were also key to allowing ray tracing to be used in 4K without performance dropping.

Of course, they also have in front of them plenty of 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 indistinguishable from native resolution, and ever-increasing performance improvements.

Read also : How to build a gaming PC.