Sony Interactive Entertainment to layoff 8% of their workforce, close Sony London Studio

[Chrkeller]

Soundwave said:

Chrkeller said:

The answer to all that is GPU AI, like ray tracing.  The biggest advantage of Ray Tracing is the gpu producing light and reflections verus those aspects being developed.  

More AI support to developers will be coming.  Graphics are not going to stop anytime soon.  

Yeah "support" as in more people getting fired as jobs get automated. That said I don't think AI is ready for prime time professional level usage at this point and possibly won't be for a long time, talking like 10+ years. 

As for GPUs, if AI takes over more of the rendering entirely it won't stop at lighting, GPUs themselves will likely go the way of the dinosaur as AI cores like tensor cores may just generate a photograph like image that doesn't even really use polygons or lighting at all but just approximates what it should look like based on a data set that its fed. 

But if that happens then it will likely mean you can just get photorealistic visuals on any kind of device and any one can make that from their own home, which is going to present a whole host of other problems for the traditional game industry. 

Though I don't see that happening for a while, for the time being for people banging the drum saying they want 2-3x better graphics than PS4 which will require budgets to skyrocket even higher ... who is paying for that exactly? Are you going to pay $120 for a game? And then what? Another dramatic jump for PS6? $500 million dollar budgets as the new normal? How many studios will be able to keep pace then? Right now sadly a lot of real people are paying for it with their jobs and livelihoods. 

This whole thing is not sustainable, if it was Sony wouldn't be firing all these people, if it was they wouldn't be going running to the PC, the simple fact of the matter is you can't increase budgets several times over every 6-7 years, keep the price of the games more or less the same (minus/plus $10 whopping bucks), and have no hardware growth either, PS5/XSX are on pace to sell less than the PS3/XBox 360 did. That's not a healthy business model and even Sony knows it.

It isn't a healthy business model.  PC day 1 will be a huge boost by over doubling potential customers.  And developer AI already exists in Ray Tracing.  And hardware gaps will exist for at least another decade.  RT is AI based and still requires a ton of processing power.  AI doesn't negate the need for strong hardware.  

The funny thing is PC decimates the ps5 in visuals....  PC seems to be just fine with most games at $50....  perhaps the problem is simple sony's business model and not gaming itself?

The obvious next step is digital only for consoles.  If anything is going the way of the dinosaur it is physical games.