Why Are Game-Key Cards So Controversial?

[Pemalite]

Chrkeller said:

Soundwave said:

They shouldn't have even offered GCKs and just gone digital only which every mobile platform is today. There's no other company that would make a mobile platform today with a cartridge or disk format.

Cartridges are an outdated, expensive, and poorly performing format that had their time.

And people aren't happy with the half way solution anyway, shouldn't have even bothered. Switch 3 will be digital only.

I rarely agree with Soundwave, but he is right on this one.  Games are getting bigger and bigger.  Physical is dying and won't be the future.  Things aren't going to get better for physical; they will get worse.  I will be stunned if the ps6 has a disk drive, at best it will be optional.  The ps6 portable will be digital only.    

I don't disagree that Physical is on it's last legs.

But... I am holding out for backwards compatibility and game preservation.

sc94597 said:

https://research.nvidia.com/labs/rtr/neural_texture_compression/

Nvidia has been working on this for a while. 

"The continuous advancement of photorealism in rendering is accompanied by a growth in texture data and, consequently, increasing storage and memory demands. To address this issue, we propose a novel neural compression technique specifically designed for material textures. We unlock two more levels of detail, i.e., 16X more texels, using low bitrate compression, with image quality that is better than advanced image compression techniques, such as AVIF and JPEG XL. At the same time, our method allows on-demand, real-time decompression with random access similar to block texture compression on GPUs, enabling compression on disk and memory. The key idea behind our approach is compressing multiple material textures and their mipmap chains together, and using a small neural network, that is optimized for each material, to decompress them. Finally, we use a custom training implementation to achieve practical compression speeds, whose performance surpasses that of general frameworks, like PyTorch, by an order of magnitude."

We already have texture compression ratios of 36:1 which beats the Neural texture compression.

The thing with compression is that... The more advanced the technique, the more processing power needed to decompress and "piece back" the dataset.

What will truly be game changing is Neural Texture Generation... You simply won't have texture files anymore, you will simply have a description of what that texture pattern is... And the Neural processing takes care of the rest, procedural generating it on-demand.
We already have procedural texture generation, but it's still fairly rudimentary and limited.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Procedural_texture