As the digital and technological world keeps on evolving so does gaming. What started off as solitaire and minesweeper is now a multi-billion dollar industry; estimated to hit 272 billion dollars by the year 2030. With every generation in gaming, multiple new technologies and advances in Graphics Processing Unit come into play. Every new generation is 10 times more evolved than the previous one.
Current Evolution in Gaming
Cloud Gaming and Streaming: This is a concept in which instead of running the games on the user’s local device, the user can play the games that are live someplace else, like a data centre on their personal devices.
Digital Distribution: Digital distribution of games (in services like Steam) allows the publishers to deliver messages directly to the users, therefore introducing more updates, features, and games.
New Business Models: The business models that are followed by the gaming industry include:
Free to play: Initially the users are allowed to play games for free and in the later stages opportunities for monetization are introduced.
Gaming as a Service (GaaS): It is a subscription-based service that allows users to play games on the servers hosted by a video game publisher.
Increased Diversity: It is not just young boys that play video games but also people of all genders and ages. With the rise of gaming trends, the market continues to become diverse as more people begin to play. Even people who can’t afford high-end gaming PCs or consoles can participate.
Mobile Gaming: With the increase in smartphones, mobile gaming is the largest driver of growth in the video game industry.
Next-Generation Consoles: Since the gaming industry is growing at such a rapid pace, the console manufacturers have introduced next-generation consoles with state-of-the-art graphics, lightning-fast load times, and easy access to new games.
How do graphic cards work in gaming consoles?
A graphic card also called the General Processing Unit is a device with specific hardware capabilities that optimizes the creation and rendering of images, video, and animation. One of the advantages of a Graphics Processing Unit is that it renders more complex visuals much faster than an integrated chip.
The Graphics Processing Unit is an extremely important component of any gaming system. When it comes to certain specific types of games, the GPU is more crucial than the CPU. That is because most of today’s next-generation games require the type of rendering power that the Graphics Processing Unit provides.
PlayStation 5 Graphics Processing Unit
The graphics of PlayStation 5 is a category that it shines in. Their Graphics Processing Unit is custom-made by AMD. The newest in technology AMD that is RDNA 2 is used as the Graphics Processing Unit in Sony’s PlayStation 5. AMD RDNA2 introduces significant architecture developments such as an enhanced compute unit, a new visual pipeline, and the all-new AMD Infinity Cache which enables high-resolution gaming performance with vivid visuals.
It provides up to 10.28 teraflops of power using variable frequencies of up to 2.23 GHz. The Graphics Processing Unit allows much higher resolutions in games and it also has a new feature called ray tracing. Ray tracing is a powerful technique that plays a major role in making very realistic lighting effects in the video game. It mimics how light reflects on water surfaces, the way light breaks through trees, etc. It basically calculates the linear rays of lighting between the player’s eyes and the various light sources present in the game. The console developers that use these excellent features can make their games feel more life-like and more immersive.
Features of PlayStation 5’s Graphics Processing Unit
Generational Performance Per Watt Uplifts: AMD RDNA 2 architecture delivers up to 65% more performance per watt over the previous generations of RDNA 1.
AMD Infinity Cache: AMD Infinity Cache is an all-new cache level that allows high bandwidth performance at lower power and lower latency. It enables scalable performance for the future.
Unifying Visuals: Gaming is enhanced with AMD Fidelity FX6 and DirectX 12 Ultimate that enables naturalistic lighting, shadows, and reflections that come with a new level of details.
AMD FidelityFX: AMD FidelityFX is an open-source collection of advanced visual technologies that bring in new levels of details, reflections, and colour without incurring heavy computational costs..
DirectX 12 Ultimate: With the support for the DirectX 12 Ultimate, the visual pipeline of AMD RDNA 2 brings upscaled immersion through super realistic lighting and shadows.
Game Streaming Acceleration: AMD RDNA 2 allows you to stream to the world and consume the latest and demanding content with a dedicated 4k encode and 8k decode. The support for AV1 enables state-of-the-art transmission from apps like Twitch and Youtube to your display.
Made for modern gamers: AMD RDNA 2 allows a seamless connection to your hardware setup. With features like GDDR6 memory and PCIe 4.0 support, the RDNA 2 architecture is equipped for the new generation of games.
Conclusion
To sum it up, the gaming industry keeps on evolving at a very fast pace to conquer the requirements of the users and to add additional features. With this, new technologies come into the picture. These new technologies play a major role in advancing the quality of images, videos, speed, power consumption, and overall the whole gaming experience. The RDNA 2 provides a significant increase in performance and efficiency as compared to the previous architectures. And it will truly lead the next generation of high-performance gaming.
Alessandra Serpes is an engineering student currently pursuing Information and Technology Engineering. She is passionate about software development. She also enjoys baking and reading novels.
