Technology on Video Games
Technology and video games have come so far over the past 30 years, and there’s no denying that they both go hand in hand. Games have definitely pushed the limits of technology and technology has improved the quality of games over the years. There are two main factors where technology has affected video games, hardware and software.
Hardware
Hardware’s the physical parts of a system, they affect how fast the game can be loaded, how quick the graphics load, and how swift the can the games be calculated. In this article, I’ll be talking about two key pieces of hardware, the CPU, and the Memory.
What is a CPU?
A Central Processing Unit (or CPU for short) performs most of the in the system. Games change in real-time, and a faster CPU enables the game to process information much faster and render the graphics much more quickly.
Some examples of CPU’s are Intel’s Pentium series and AMD’s Ryzen processors.
What is Memory?
Memory stores the code and data for the system for the game to run on. The larger the memory, the more things a game can add like higher resolution art, more game levels, and allows games more space to render things more quickly.
Games have definitely pushed the limits of technology; technology has improved the quality of games over the years.
Software
A software is “a program tells the system how to do a task in a specific and way”. It utilizes the hardware efficiently in order for the game to run optimally and in the best condition. Games used to take a lot of time rendering objects, because you were limited in what textures, lights, models, effects, and variables to use. However, the widespread usage of shaders has allowed the developers more freedom to program different parts quickly and with more freedom.
What is a Shader?
Shaders are programs that can be used in video games to showcase a wide range of effects. Aside from simple lighting models, it can be used for more complex tasks like altering the hue, saturation, brightness or contrast of an image, producing blur, light bloom, volumetric lighting, normal mapping for depth effects, cel shading, posterization, bump mapping, distortion, chroma keying (greenscreen effects), edge detection and motion detection, psychedelic effects, and a wide range of others.
Shaders are programs that can be used in video games to showcase a wide range of effects.
Aside from shaders, game engines play a huge role in making games run smoothly. Back in the day, engines such as Unity and Unreal didn’t exist back then and companies used their own in-house game engines in order to make their own games, and it would take a lot of time and effort to develop a game.
With processors getting much faster, new technologies are being developed, and the video game industry capitalizes on each and every new tech being made. Videos and Technology definitely go hand in hand, in the future, we’re going to see more of these as technology improves.
