The DeanBeat: Why games still need all of the technology that Moore’s Law can deliver

Back in 1965, Gordon Moore, now chairman emeritus of Intel, predicted that the number of components on a chip would double every two years. His prediction proved remarkably prescient, and Moore’s Law, as his calculation is known, has set the pace for technological progress. Gaming has grown up with Moore’s Law, and after 50 years, it’s easy to be lulled into thinking that computers are good enough. After all computers are now millions of times more powerful than they were back then.

You may think you don’t need all of the power of Nvidia’s Titan X, a graphics chip announced a few weeks ago. It has 8 billion transistors, or 3.47 million times more than the 2,300 transistors on Intel’s first microprocessor, the 4004, back in 1971. A gaming PC with a Titan X graphics card can run 2K’s latest game, Evolve, at 74 frames per second in 4K resolution. Most games look good at 30 frames per second or maybe 60. And high-definition TVs have a quarter of the pixels that a 4K TV has. Who needs that?