Next-gen gaming: tech’s take on gaming’s future

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While software and engine innovations drive the latest video games, hardware and its advancing technology also define next-gen.

The most significant leaps in game development arrive on the back of new tech — like physics chips, improvements in audio hardware, and, most recently, the widespread use of solid-state drives.

The solid-state drive, in particular, is a great example of the sort of immediate impact adoption of a pivotal shift in technology can have on video game development.

This is most obviously seen in the launch of the PlayStation 5, which features an SSD customized for high-speed data streaming. That means it can access data from the SSD and place it directly into a specific place in memory at record speeds. This leap in the console’s input-output system removes the huge latency that historically existed between a hard drive and processor, which was becoming a looming limiting factor.

You need only look to Unreal Engine’s Nanite micropolygon geometry tool to see just how much that I/O speed increase can improve the development landscape.

Nanite takes an image and breaks it down into millions or billions of scalable triangles. Then, the software streams only the data the camera can see (it removes anything that isn’t front facing or blocked by something else via a very accurate algorithm) from the high-speed SSD directly to memory on the console.

“This removes the need for multiple level of detail versions of a 3D model,” said Epic Games’ Sjoerd De Jong. “But for it to work, the data needs to be accessible very quickly and also to remove it just as quickly when it is no longer needed. The super fast speeds of the SSD is allowing for content to be near instantly loaded. Over the years, the main focus for graphics has been on 3D capabilities, but that was beginning to be held back by old mechanical hard drive speeds. With SSDs now becoming the norm, that is causing a shift in graphic capabilities driven — for the first time, perhaps in the history of 3D gaming, by hard drives.”

The solid-state drive is just one of myriad ways hardware advancements are empowering game makers and players. Something that Alienware, AMD, Intel, Logitech, and NVIDIA — which have each experienced multiple generational shifts over the years — shared their thoughts on.

To read the rest of this feature, which first ran on April 8, 2021, visit UnrealEngine.