Why video games nowadays have many resource consumption?

[Gian Y]

I see most new released title have huge system requirement and they only offer a small thing such as graphic. Some games like Skyrim have many active npc and interactive object but this game only needs 4GB of RAM.

[⛧EyMi Mayhem⛧]

bad ports, bad engine/different engines, hardware hungry new features, tons of complex stuff in the eninge etc.
Well and of course a bit marketing.

*And Skyrim, well, short version. the npc's are doppelganger with diff. hairs etc., so the engine has not to load a new npc every sec., only hairstyle and so.

[Baosas]

While some graphical options do little to actually improve image quality and are there to promote the latest GPUs, graphics in general came a long way since six years ago (Skyrim's year of release), and these improvements don't come for free. High-quality ambient occlusion, more prevalent dynamic lighting, refined hair physics, godrays, volumetric fog, new anti-aliasing solutions and much higher-resolution textures, to name a few.

Mayhem also has a point; Skyrim's NPCs differ very little from each other, and use the same mold (plus body mesh) almost universally, only with different stats/AI packages/face geometry/etc. Their lack of detail in the vanilla game is also worth noting.

[Supafly]

Skyrim
SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS
MINIMUM:
OS: Windows 7/Vista/XP PC (32 or 64 bit)
Processor: Dual Core 2.0GHz or equivalent processor
Memory: 2GB System RAM
Hard Disk Space: 6GB free HDD Space
Video Card: Direct X 9.0c compliant video card with 512 MB of RAM
Sound: DirectX compatible sound card
RECOMMENDED:
Processor: Quad-core Intel or AMD CPU
Memory: 4GB System RAM
Video Card: DirectX 9.0c compatible NVIDIA or AMD ATI video card with 1GB of RAM (Nvidia GeForce GTX 260 or higher; ATI Radeon 4890 or higher)

Skyrim Special Edition
SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS
MINIMUM:
OS: Windows 7/8.1/10 (64-bit Version)
Processor: Intel i5-750/AMD Phenom II X4-945
Memory: 8 GB RAM
Graphics: NVIDIA GTX 470 1GB /AMD HD 7870 2GB
Storage: 12 GB available space
RECOMMENDED:
OS: Windows 7/8.1/10 (64-bit Version)
Processor: Intel i5-2400/AMD FX-8320
Memory: 8 GB RAM
Graphics: NVIDIA GTX 780 3GB /AMD R9 290 4GB
Storage: 12 GB available space


As you can see the newer version needs alot more resources. This is because of better features that require higher performing components. Sure you can find some YT videos that will compare the 2 different versions so you can see some of the reasons better hardware is required.

[Gian Y]

I mean not about their apparence, but the games controlling every action such as daily activities conversation and relationship each npc. Most games will unload npc after player goes away from area. Imagine video games is like virtual world for player. Computer handle everything with realtime. It will awesome

I agree, bad software makes resource doesn't effective just like multiplayer mainstream survival zombie apocalypse

[Supafly]

Originally posted by Chigga:

Most games will unload npc after player goes away from area.

That could/would make things worse. Everytime a player needs to see/interact with somethimg it needs to be loaded again and again and again if it is unloaded all the time. Using Ram and VRAM when things are loaded allow things that will be used often is already in memory and can be loaded/reused faster instead of needing to be reloaded from scratch.

Processing power still needs to improve before it will reach the levels you think it will be awesome.

[Blaquicat]

Games evolved so much in the past years..

I remeber when the first quake came out, it was beautiful, everything was modeled, i think only the weapons still sprite based, comparison to other games of the same age, like Duke3d, it was a huge fame at the time, but duke3d isnt actually 3d, like quake, even if both came out in 1996.
Quake is a lot heavier than duke, real 3d modeling was the thing at the time.

Some years after that, Nvidia bought the voodoo, this is the moment when everything changed, because they halted all 3dfx cards, and started something big, OpenGL and ShaderClock..

After that all that matters is how much an VGA (among with a good cpu) can process, games nowadays are still limited by how much "pixels per clock" a vga can make.
Each new generation of cards allow game developers to "do more", they can put more effects, shadders, models in a place where they couldn't before, because the hardware limitation.

Logical processing is cheap, like NPC behavior or AI, you dont even need to calc this, cpu nowadays is pretty powerfull to handle all that with less than 5% of the total game processing.

"Where is gonna end?" Its gonna end when a developer can make everything he wants to, without any hardware limitations.
Logical speaking its limitless.

[Gian Y]

Originally posted by Blaquicat:

Games evolved so much in the past years..

I remeber when the first quake came out, it was beautiful, everything was modeled, i think only the weapons still sprite based, comparison to other games of the same age, like Duke3d, it was a huge fame at the time, but duke3d isnt actually 3d, like quake, even if both came out in 1996.
Quake is a lot heavier than duke, real 3d modeling was the thing at the time.

Some years after that, Nvidia bought the voodoo, this is the moment when everything changed, because they halted all 3dfx cards, and started something big, OpenGL and ShaderClock..

After that all that matters is how much an VGA (among with a good cpu) can process, games nowadays are still limited by how much "pixels per clock" a vga can make.
Each new generation of cards allow game developers to "do more", they can put more effects, shadders, models in a place where they couldn't before, because the hardware limitation.

Logical processing is cheap, like NPC behavior or AI, you dont even need to calc this, cpu nowadays is pretty powerfull to handle all that with less than 5% of the total game processing.

"Where is gonna end?" Its gonna end when a developer can make everything he wants to, without any hardware limitations.
Logical speaking its limitless.

You must have been through many things. I've played duke nukem 3d and quake too. Video games emphasize visual development rather than others.

Originally posted by Supafly:

Originally posted by Chigga:

Most games will unload npc after player goes away from area.

That could/would make things worse. Everytime a player needs to see/interact with somethimg it needs to be loaded again and again and again if it is unloaded all the time. Using Ram and VRAM when things are loaded allow things that will be used often is already in memory and can be loaded/reused faster instead of needing to be reloaded from scratch.

Processing power still needs to improve before it will reach the levels you think it will be awesome.

I mean the way I mentioned it is like gta games.

[🦜Cloud Boy🦜]

God of War 3 is a 7 year old ps3 game. For those who don't know-, ps3's GPU is 6 Times Less powerfull than a GTX 1050ti, only 350 Gflops. and ps3 has only 512 MB of Ram in totall, for System and GPU both are sharing from the same RAM pool. in my opinion God of War 3's graphics is better than many modern games, those who needs a GTX 1050 ti class GPU and 8 GB of Ram to run.

Watch in 1080p.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=voADmVC-47A

[Gian Y]

Originally posted by Cloud Boy:

God of War 3 is a 7 year old ps3 game. For those who don't know-, ps3's GPU is 6 Times Less powerfull than a GTX 1050ti, only 350 Gflops. and ps3 has only 512 MB of Ram in totall, for System and GPU both are sharing from the same RAM pool. in my opinion God of War 3's graphics is better than many modern games, those who needs a GTX 1050 ti class GPU and 8 GB of Ram to run.

Watch in 1080p.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=voADmVC-47A

That's another example, Video game console has smaller memory and slower clockspeed processing but they could be more powerful than pc. Just want you to know, read & write speed in ps3 is a real pain in the ass.

[🦜Cloud Boy🦜]

Originally posted by Chigga:

Originally posted by Cloud Boy:

God of War 3 is a 7 year old ps3 game. For those who don't know-, ps3's GPU is 6 Times Less powerfull than a GTX 1050ti, only 350 Gflops. and ps3 has only 512 MB of Ram in totall, for System and GPU both are sharing from the same RAM pool. in my opinion God of War 3's graphics is better than many modern games, those who needs a GTX 1050 ti class GPU and 8 GB of Ram to run.

Watch in 1080p.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=voADmVC-47A

That's another example, Video game console has smaller memory and slower clockspeed processing but they could be more powerful than pc. Just want you to know, read & write speed in ps3 is a real pain in the ass.

That video above shows that the developers can actually make quality graphics in a low end systems, if they wanted to.
But they program their games such a way that games will only run in a high end PC. It's a marketing technique to sell the latest hardware.

[Blaquicat]

It's easy when all hardware in the world is exactly the same.
Unlike consoles, Dev for PC have to do their game to be compatible with a vast range of different hardware configuration.
On consoles devs know exactly how far they can go, besides consoles don't have OS, don't have drivers, and they assembly (memory and processing) everything which is much faster and cheaper.
A nice example of this is those very old classic 64k demos, it contains a video and music and with only 64kb size..
Compatibility is very expensive.

[Dr.Shadowds 🐉]

1. Not enough, and/or terrible devs working on game port to PC.

2. Consoles got their custom API exclusive, so people on PC will have to find away how to help the software communicate with the variety of hardware's better, such as Vulcan, which is a great API, and made things possible to port games to Linux more easily.

3. Game could be using different type of engine, which will cause this issue if the game never gets fully optimize.

4. Adding different features, using uncompress format files, adding larger files such as support 4k textures, more other crap, and/or etc... Which is another reason why games want to use more resources than they should.

5. This one marketing tactics, which some of the large companies, want to make sure consoles will always run & look better compare to their competitors, and that includes the PC.

[Gian Y]

I have no more word to say, thanks for answers guys