I thing the endgame is lossless PNG with 16bit color components with basic compression like gzip or at best bzip2. Or a format without the weirdness of PNG 'line based loading' which is obsolete nowdays. The "expensive part", apart from the compression algorithm, being the meta data storage without kludge.
>without the weirdness of PNG 'line based loading' which is obsolete nowdays
How? Line-based loading is a very simple way to exploit 2D spatial coherence. A 1D format like gzip loses this advantage for minimal gain in simplicity.
These days I favour lossless WEBP instead of PNG. I often save around 30%~40% of file size compared to PNG, especially when the PNG is encoded with lots of bits per pixel (i.e 48 bits or 24 bits).
GTA 6 will probably be software as a service to some extend, namely the code will change all the time at somewhat high frequency for any port. If I am not too mistaken a big chunk of the GTA community does play online.
"AI porting" able to follow? (If that AI thing is actually true)
Unless GTA 6 is not hardwired to AMDGPU hardware at release, if they have a cross-platform engine, for PC, it is to click the right export button... and do the QA and debug to please the various 3D drivers out there.
Conscious AI would be an ultra-fast and massive neural net with real time generic massive input/output with the real world AND some _STABLE_ model which has merged ML+inference (will probably need some 'maintenance' regimes to maintain weight stability).
I understand the good will of the intent but... you have to understand that those driver code paths went thru massive QA over the years. On such complexe hardware, any modifications, even believed benign, can be disastrous for some/many software actually still 'in production'.
This is very risky: one guy QA over a massive amount of software with hardly a few remaining users able to report issues of with those GPUs...
Better have a slow working well tested driver, rather than a broken driver which is supposed to be faster...
That is a valid concern in theory, but in practice, improvements to drivers for old GPUs rarely break things. There are regression tests... and part of it might be Timor being very diligent in his work.
This is my point: you won't see them because the people able to report the breakage are rare to non-existent anymore, because most those who were able to do so did move to recent GPUs. The real "normal" users with old GPUs will be forced to move to newer hardware.
The "tests" are nowhere near the QA which has been done by the real stuff out there. Come on, this is border line hypocrit.
I am sorry, but I have to severely disagree: this has more a taste of planned obsolesence than actually improving old GPU performance.
At least if we could get some amount of c++ to plain and simple C (namely a language with a simple syntax) port, would be great though.
And a noscritp/basic HTML interface would have done that almost mechanically... but they shut it down a few years ago to favor the web engines from their whatwg cartel.
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