We must start from the fact that not all games have the same technical requirements, but from time to time technically state-of-the-art games appear, the development of which will determine what the most powerful graphics cards should be once they will be out. The goal? Whoever makes the title work with the best graphics on the market in the best way will end up being the winner.
How to predict the graphics cards of the future?
To do this, two important points must be taken into account, the first of which is the necessary computing power, which is measured through the operations per pixel. Although the number of polygons per second must also be taken into account, today it is abandoned because it is executed in the same units and because the number of pixels per frame will always be greater than the number of polygons.
The second element is the overdraw, which indicates how many times the framebuffer will be accessed and, therefore, will impact the bandwidth needed. In any case, we must clarify that although there are techniques to reduce the cost of both elements, we will focus on raw power in both aspects.
Pixel overlay
Overdraw refers to the fact that the value of a pixel in the frame buffer is changed several times during the construction of a frame. This is due to the fact that when building a three-dimensional scene, the polygons that compose it are not drawn in a precise order and without the relevant optimizations, it is possible to draw several objects on a single pixel. Other times, on the contrary, it is due to post-processing calculations or an interaction between them. For example, an object reflecting one light source or casting a shadow onto another.
The fact is that from the moment the framebuffer or image buffer is outside the GPU and in the VRAM for each pixel that we modify we must access said memory. The color calculation is done in the GPU cores and the modification is done by the ROPS, units that copy information from the L1 data cache to VRAM in parallel. Normally, the bandwidth is related to the number of these units.
In other words, in each frame, the same pixel will be redrawn today dozens of times. This should not be confused with the computing power required. Obviously, the number of operations per pixel in Doom will be much lower than in Cyberpunk 2077. We must also not forget the increases in screen resolution that have occurred over time and have multiplied the number of pixels a map draws. graphics in your VRAM.
operations per pixel
Operations per pixel refers to the number of operations per pixel on average that are performed between accessing memory and accessing to draw the same pixel, so they multiply with the overdraw and that’s why the One of the most important things in the face of evolving graphics cards is to avoid overdraw as much as possible, as this also completely reduces the total computational cost to the GPU when rendering the scene.
Currently, we don’t know the number of operations per pixel in games, not only because everyone has a different one, but also because the resolution and graphics quality change said parameter in the same game, not to say that they don’t all do it. objects in the scene have the same visual treatment. We cannot therefore say that there is a precise figure. Moreover, we know that as games have become more complex, this figure has increased and that visual quality is directly related to the number of operations the GPU performs on each of the pixels on the screen.
So how do they get the numbers?
Well, for games in development, which is when a company makes a graphically state-of-the-art game, what they’re going to seek is technical advice from the hardware manufacturers, but above all she needs to know if future hardware will still be able to handle this game in development and that everyone will be able to play it.
In any case, the development time for a AAA game is usually five years, but they’ve usually been in production for the last three, so the question is rather whether the games that have currently entered the production phase and have as release date the release date
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