It may surprise a lot of people that CPU speed is still a huge determining factor for 3D gaming performance.
Some people might look at a game like World of Warcraft and jump to the conclusion that since it doesn't appear to have all the latest 3D eye candy, it must not be CPU-bound. But the reality is that the WoW client is heavily CPU-bound, like most of the 3D MMOG clients out there. When you have to manage several dozens of players on-screen, plus the hundreds of static meshes that comprise the scene, it's extremely difficult to keep even a mid-range GPU well-fed with data. You can also take a look at Doom 3 or FarCry for good examples where even a top-end CPU simply cannot keep up.
Game performance isn't a black-and-white deal where it's either the CPU or the GPU that's the bottleneck. It's almost always a combination of both at various stages of rendering. I do this stuff for a living, and I'll take anything extra CPU performance I can get. Faster CPUs mean I can get more characters on the screen, more complex scenes, better NPC behavior, etc.
That would have been true if the APIs were still using a fixed-function pipeline. But now with shaders, as a developer I can easily swap in one shader for another. Adding a new effect using any one of the shader models takes on the order of a day or two and involves swapping just the shaders.
This is entirely different from the old FFP approach, where if you wanted to add an effect, the work involved in writing all of the fallbacks just wasn't worth it sometimes. That's why the Crytek guys could whip up some SM 3.0 stuff very quickly for Farcry.
So I think you'll start to see games adapt to new features very quickly, and it will no longer be the case that you buy a card and have to wait years for it to be fully utilized.
Slashdot Mirror
It may surprise a lot of people that CPU speed is still a huge determining factor for 3D gaming performance.
Some people might look at a game like World of Warcraft and jump to the conclusion that since it doesn't appear to have all the latest 3D eye candy, it must not be CPU-bound. But the reality is that the WoW client is heavily CPU-bound, like most of the 3D MMOG clients out there. When you have to manage several dozens of players on-screen, plus the hundreds of static meshes that comprise the scene, it's extremely difficult to keep even a mid-range GPU well-fed with data. You can also take a look at Doom 3 or FarCry for good examples where even a top-end CPU simply cannot keep up.
Game performance isn't a black-and-white deal where it's either the CPU or the GPU that's the bottleneck. It's almost always a combination of both at various stages of rendering. I do this stuff for a living, and I'll take anything extra CPU performance I can get. Faster CPUs mean I can get more characters on the screen, more complex scenes, better NPC behavior, etc.
That would have been true if the APIs were still using a fixed-function pipeline. But now with shaders, as a developer I can easily swap in one shader for another. Adding a new effect using any one of the shader models takes on the order of a day or two and involves swapping just the shaders.
This is entirely different from the old FFP approach, where if you wanted to add an effect, the work involved in writing all of the fallbacks just wasn't worth it sometimes. That's why the Crytek guys could whip up some SM 3.0 stuff very quickly for Farcry.
So I think you'll start to see games adapt to new features very quickly, and it will no longer be the case that you buy a card and have to wait years for it to be fully utilized.