The model, called GameNGen, was made by Dani Valevski at Google Research and his colleagues, who declined to speak to New Scientist. According to their paper on the research, the AI can be played for up to 20 seconds while retaining all the features of the original, such as scores, ammunition levels and map layouts. Players can attack enemies, open doors and interact with the environment as usual.
After this period, the model begins to run out of memory and the illusion falls apart.
That’s so far from the truth, it hurts me to read it. Games are one of the most optimised programs you can run on your computer. Just think about it, it’s a application rendering an entire imaginary world every dozen milliseconds. Compare it to anything else you run, like say slack or teams, which makes your CPU sweat just to notify you about a new message.
Many games, especially AAA games or ones relying on common game engines, are actually horribly inefficient. It’s hard to run any Unity/Unreal game in 4k on my 1070. Even if it has shit graphics like Lethal Company. What does run well? Smaller, custom engines, even Metro Exodus runs with 60+ FPS in 4k on my 1070, and still looks very good. Why? Because 4A Game is/was actually interested in creating a good engine and games. That’s the whole reason they split from the S.T.A.L.K.E.R team: Because, in their opinion, the engine was too inefficient.
Most games are just a quick cash grab tho, especially ones by large companies like EA. Other large companies with a significantly lower output of games, eg. Valve, do produce programmatically higher quality games tho.
Both of these engines are capable of making very optimized games, it’s just that most of the developers using them either don’t have the expertise or don’t care to put in the effort.
I know. The inherent problem of games made with those engines is the lack of motivation, knowledge and experience of devs to make (programmatically) good games. Only very few games using those engines are good in that sense, and as exceptions confirm a rule I’d just simplify it to that statement.