I mean here it is running at 22fps. In another 5 years it’s reasonable to conservatively believe hardware and software to be 3x as powerful which gets you to a smooth 60fps.
Well my critique of your comment is just that it’s unbounded. Yes, eventually all compute will get better and we can use once slow technologies. But that’s not a very valuable discussion because nobody is saying it’ll never be useful, just that it isn’t for games today.
It also ignores that everything else will be faster too then as well, and ignores needing to target different baselines of hardware.
Either way 5 years for a 3x improvement seems unrealistic. 4 years saw a little over a doubling of performance at the highest end with a significant increase in power requirements as well, where we’re now hitting realistic power limits.
Taking the 2080 vs 4080 as their respective tiers
153% performance increase
50% more power consumption
50% price increase.
So yes performance at the high end will increase, but it’s scaling pretty poorly with cost and power. And the lower end isn’t scaling as linearly.
On the lower/mid end (1060 Ti vs 2060 Super) we saw only a 53% increase in that same time period.
I guess it's to me that's still just an pessimistic perception. Ray tracing was also extremely slow for a long time until Nvidia built dedicated HW to accelerate it. Is there reason to believe that splats are already well served by generic GPU compute that dedicated HW won't accelerate it in a meaningful way?
Here's splats from 2020 working at 50-60fps [1]. I think my overall point is I don't think it's performance that's holding it back in games but tooling & whether it saves meaningful costs elsewhere in the game development pipeline.
Again, I’m not saying it won’t be possible someday. Any number of things could happen, even though the trajectory doesn’t imply it will be in the next 5 years. All I’m saying is that the question is pointless without bounds.
Otherwise flying cars will also be possible.
Also your splat is running in isolation. Any single system can run by itself at a good clip. That’s not indicative of anything when running as part of a larger system. Again, the discussion of performance is pointless without bounds.
What am I missing on the performance front?