Personally, I think that That was the most essential and much more important leap de todos y cada uno de los que hemos vivido en el planeta de la computing, esa transición del tubo de vacío al transistor, y dudo que volvamos a conocer algo igualmente deslumbrante en los próximos años, más que nada sabiendo los inconvenientes que la computación cuántica tiene para despegar.

If we jump from that general level to a much more concrete one, it is easy to realize that the advances in technology of enormous significance in the world of PC 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, pero asimismo es acertado pues reducirá la consistencia y la dificultad del product, y eso va a hacer que les resulte mucho más entretenido y cómodo de leer. Como siempre y en todo momento, les invito a comentar y a que compartáis con nosotros otros avances en tecnología que, para nosotros, hayan sido fundamentales.

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.

En 1987 se causó otro de los avances en tecnología mucho más esenciales centrados en la utilización del color en PC, merced al lanzamiento de las resoluciones gráficas fundamentadas en el estándar VGA, que podían emplear hasta 256 colores en screen con una resolución de 640 x 480 pixeles. Esto represento un avance colosal que es bien difícil de comprender por esos que no lo vivieron en su instante, pero no les preocupéis, he amado mostrároslo con tres imágenes de DOOM, el tradicional de 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

Tenemos la posibilidad de distinguir múltiples etapas en este punto, y sucede que la transición del 2D a las tres dimensiones fue bastante extendida, y la democratización de esa technology tampoco se causó de manera inmediata. A lo largo de la etapa mucho más temprana, los juegos tridimensionales They were quite poor, pero a cambio funcionaban parcialmente bien siempre y cuando tuviésemos un processor fuerte.

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

La evolución que vivió la GPU tuvo una relevancia colosal en el gaming en PC, pero esto no debe llevarnos a desmerecer el salto que marcó la llegada de los procesadores de doble núcleo con diseño monolítico. Intel ahora se había dado cuenta de cuál iba a ser el futuro de todo el mundo de los procesadores de consumo general en el momento en que 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 títulos considerablemente más complejos y ricos, tanto a nivel de físicas como de IA (inteligencia artificial). 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 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 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.

Con un SSD no solo tenemos la posibilidad de achicar los tiempos de carga de los juegos, sino asimismo les ofrecemos a estos una base sobre la que 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 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 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. En este saco tenemos la posibilidad de meter al FSR 2.0 y al 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 bastante margen de 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.