I don’t really understand how it’s realistic that every single year new GPUs, CPUs, consoles, TVs, etc. are being released with new technological advances. How is there not a year where it’s like “welp, actually our tech right now is advanced as we can figure it out”. Do they hold onto some features to save them for future releases?
In: 1
That’s called “Moore’s Law”. Every few years we are able to double the number of transistors on the same size of chip. More transistors mean more calculations running at the same time, and also smaller transistors work faster.
How do we do that? Well, it’s a lot of effort, but we research new technology that allows building even smaller circuits. For the past decades this has been true, but some people think we are about to reach the limit.
The limit people fear is wavelength related. We now make structures so small that regular light can’t resolve them anymore. That’s bad because we use light to create those tiny structures. There are some possible workarounds, Moore’s Law might slow down though.
That’s calculation power increasing exponentially, wich allows more complex software to run in adequate time. New features are developed independant of that, and those are basically a race between companies. If you have something new first that brings in a ton of money, so they constantly try to top each other.
AFAIK, these advancements start years before consumers see them. Creating blueprints, new standards, smaller sizes, etc, then creating the machinery, prototyping, etc, them actual production.
For a while, Intel couldn’t actual make things smaller, and was basically the releasing the same tech with minor improvements.
I’m sure people other than me can explain much better.
Gamers Nexus is a great YouTube channel if you want to hear about the process and get very in depth reviews of end results
Basically, capitalism.
Think that literally hundreds of thousands of people across the world try to up each other so you will buy the product they work on, so they work very hard to find small improvements. These small improvements over time create large shifts in technology.
Just look at the difference between this year’s versions of the IPhone vs last years. It has very small improvements. But if you see that every year there are small improvements, then you look at the iPhone today vs 15 years ago, it’s night and day.
Most of the technology you’re getting has been created a few years ago, it’s just being brought down from luxury or business tiers to consumer grade as production becomes easier to scale up and the price per unit comes down.
So while they toss out a new “xxx amazeballs why can’t you tell the difference in the clarity feature” it’s been out for like 3 years, it just started closer to $10k and now it’s $2500 lol.
The video games market has been growing some 7% a year in revenue these last few years. More money in the industry means more and better games. Plus the hardware keeps getting better which allows them to do more. And the field is advancing over time. Basically, we are learning how to make better and better games. And there are basically infinite possibilities, just like drawing a picture, so we are exploring more of them.
As for the hardware, it’s mainly that the transistors are getting smaller. The transistor is the brain of the computer, and as they shrink we can add more. So computers become more powerful.
As others have mentioned it takes years to develop all this stuff. What you are using today was in the works years ago.
Latest Answers