Mobile. This is just screaming for mobile. Please let me dock my 2013 mobile phone with 4 GB RAM and 4 Kepler-PhysX cores with my HDTV and let me play Crysis on it.
You dont even need to port Crysis to be a "mobile" game (touchscreen, etc.). You just need to make it run on the hardware using Android/ios.
>let me dock my 2013 mobile phone with 4 GB RAM and 4 Kepler-PhysX cores with my HDTV and let me play Crysis on it.
Hahahaha, no. (I love the non-gamers on HN. So optimistic. Go look at the current state of emulation and hardware power, it's a bleak situation.) Current desktop graphics technology is still only sorta able to run the Cryengine at full speed, and they're pumping out on the order of 1000(mid-grade)-2500(high-end) GFLOPS.
An iPhone is somewhere between 5 and 15 GFLOPS. So unless we're going to have a 100x leap in graphics bandwidth, I wouldn't expect to be able to play desktop quality PC games off of a mobile phone anytime soon.
Even my CPU (2500k) has higher throughput than the iPhone GPU, at 50-100 depending on the benchmark.
Should be able to run a poker game or Farmville though.
I think your definition of "gamer" is different from mine. We don't all play the AAA titles.
I write 3D code for mobile devices, and I'm continually astonished by what these things are capable of, i.e. your comment about poker and Farmville is a bit too much snark. Besides, it seems you're equating game quality with poly count. There are a lot of visually stunning, intelligent games that run great on phones that would be perfect on a larger screen.
Otherwise, what you say is perfectly reasonable and quite true. But comparing a phone with a computer running Crysis doesn't seem quite right.
What I want to know is what's stopping people from doing this now? Wouldn't most tablets, and probably phones, have something in place to connect video to a TV? HDMI would be nice but I'd imagine a proprietary cable of some sort?
Not really. A Python port, PyGG2, is currently in development, and that might have a chance of mobile support, but I don't expect so. The current GG2 is written in Game Maker. While GM has cross-platform Mac/HTML5/iOS/Android support, we use a custom-built windows-only networking library, so this isn't really an option. Also, we've been meaning to migrate away from GM for quite some time, due to its performance and limitations.
> Besides, it seems you're equating game quality with poly count.
As someone who, in terms of raw gaming time, spends more time beating Ninja Gaiden on the NES than playing the favorite FPS of your average 11 year old, that seems dubious at best.
The original Ninja Gaiden series is the Liszt of gaming.
I don't necessarily agree with your Crysis evaluation but I agree with your point.
It's interesting to see people who think their phone somehow equals the abilities of a console or PC. I can see comparing gameplay experiences but not hardware capabilities.
If he had only stated "let me play games on it" then it wouldn't matter. At the same time I don't see what's stopping him from doing that today, assuming his phone has some sort of video out support.
Maybe one day we'll have that super computer in our pockets we all dream of but then our birth rates will likely decline.
> It's interesting to see people who think their phone somehow equals the abilities of a console or PC.
I don't know of anyone who thinks that, and I don't read the above post that way. It's almost a pointless discussion, though, because the three year old phone in my pocket is more powerful than most of the desktop computers I've owned in my life. It doesn't seem unreasonable to expect mobile devices a couple of cycles hence to be able to match 90% of what's on people's desks right now.
Well, I took it that when someone says they want to play Crysis on their phone they mean they want to play Crysis on their phone. If he was speaking about a phone in the future then I see your point.
I don't think it's unreasonable either. I would agree that to compare today's tech with yesterday's or today's with tomorrow's is sometimes pointless. I didn't realize that's what we were doing.
There aren't any mobile GPUs that support cuda-style parallel programming yet. Even if a phone did launch with 4 stream processors/cuda cores it would still need another 1300 cores before it could compete with my desktop graphics card in terms of power.
I think one big reason we're seeing comparable graphics on mobile devices now is that they are just now getting close to the capabilities of the 5 year old console hardware. Most dev studios need to target this old hardware and make their games scale to it.
When the new consoles come out the gulf between mobile and console gaming will again be huge and the consoles will immediately begin to lag behind PC hardware as usual.
Maybe game companies will continue to make an effort to scale their engines to mobile hardware as well but I doubt it as the architecture is fundamentally shifting to make use of massive parallelism.
Desktop quality gaming is already here on your mobile. Yes, I do understand that it is not Crysis quality, but it is a superb indicator of where its heading.
It was not my intention to devolve this discussion in this direction. My excitement stems from Valve's innovative new keyboard that reduces dependence on a keyboard paradigm as well as its recent leanings towards Linux ( ~ Android).
That's nifty looking alright until you compare it to the current high end graphics hardware which has around 1500 of those cores (my gtx670 has 1300). Once more games really start using all those cores for things like physics and interactivity you will see that phones have nowhere close the ability of modern PC HW.
With that many cores you can do some things orders of magnitude faster. Take this Nbody sim my friend and I wrote for example.
And massive heat dissipation. Imho that's the real killer. Its going to be a while before we start seeing passively cooled SoCs with Crysis level graphics. Some day, yes. Next year? No way.
I can't even imagine how ridiculous a phone with active cooling would be. I've seen a few wintel tablets with active cooling and they look/feel like garbage compared to their thinner lighter ARM based android/iPad counterparts. The extra size would be way even pronounced on a phone.
You dont even need to port Crysis to be a "mobile" game (touchscreen, etc.). You just need to make it run on the hardware using Android/ios.
I'll bring the Dualshock.