AI has been running at a big loss to get the users hooked. It was inevitable that prices would start climbing. That process is nowhere near done, running AI is expensive as hell.

Once the market starts reflecting the actual costs, you can bet the cost/benefit will not be nearly as rosy as it looks now. But some customers will already have gotten themselves between a rock and a hard place and will be sucked dry, then discarded. Those "expensive" people that are getting dumped will start looking like a bargain, but they will have already been snapped up by smarter companies by the time management that can't see past their own toes figures that out.

All of this makes me remember a short story reading assignment in the 5th grade. It was about kids growing up in a society where machines did all of the intellectual work. To them, writing was 'squiggles'. They managed to disable a filter on their "bard" (a story teller for children) and had it tell them a tale of machines ruling over Man.

Nobody expects prophesy from a 5th grade reading assignment.

To what are you alluding?

I don't want ANY Outlook!

Yeah well, we can't all be a person who doesn't understand how things work. Kudos to you for being simple minded!

" The Kathmandu Post"

Ah we don't to pay for journalism, says a planet of suckers

Basically everyone who lives in the area or studies the climate or hydrology would tell you that you're insane.

More like a once-in-a-millennium event. Though I suspect it's going to be considerably more common going forward.

Deserts have some amount of normal precipitation, too. And when you get a lot less than normal, that's called a drought. Yes, even in a desert.

We do have pretty good data from tree rings. Unless you think the trees came from somewhere else?

Oh, that's pretty neat. Microsoft is definitely the right level to address this at - they already have permission to enumerate the HW, own the hardware and software infra to tackle this, enjoy economy of scale other players are not privvy too, and can deliver a solution in a vendor agnostic way. Thanks for the heads up. It's the right thing to happen.

Of course there are. Tragedy of the commons. My point is that no single entity is likely to absorb the costs unless they're already enjoying economy of scale advantages and there are business experience/optic benefits to doing so. The poster above you pointed out that Microsoft seems to be addressing this, which makes a lot more sense to me than doing it at the 3d HW vendor level.

Sure, but many people would opt in, especially if you explained that they would benefit.

Maybe. Maybe not. Before committing to developing such a thing, you'd have to at least do some research and analysis to find out if that's true and how the likely opt in/out ratios would impact the business case. Remember, this is hosting content in a daemon on your machine .. I think that'd a non-starter for a lot of people, despite the upside of shorter shader updates. (I'm not super up on what the US ISP market/landscape is like these days, but are not data caps still a thing on many plans there? I get the sense that hosting off a home line is not only a performance concern but a concern with actual possible financial ramifications.)

It can't be only when the game is open - this is when gamers are most sensitive to their computers doing other work, and the available of such a network would be far more limited.

Also a torrent like network would be absolute loaded with cache misses. You need to fetch a shader from somebody who has the exact same hardware/drive/game version combination as you do, and they need to have opted in. I highly suspect the majority case for many would be to cache miss and end up compiling locally.

Asking people to host and serve a non-trivial amount of content to other players is a non-starter. (The size of compiling all the shaders for CoD can range from a couple gigs to 10 gigs.) Opting in to a torrent-like network would have to be opt in - many people would just opt out (justifiably or not) minimizing the point of such a network.

You can probably assume that if you've thought of something, they've thought of it too. They simply have constraints and considerations - both technical and business oriented - you don't need or want to account for.

It's worth noting that many game studios/engines do support shared shader caches in their local studio pipelines, but the hardware config spread is much more limited, and the costs for lost productivity waiting for shaders is far greater than hosting a shader cache on premises.

Yes, this. There are many *many* combinations. Distributed compilation and a remotely hosted shader cache would cost a lot of money to host. I don't think it's the technical considerations that are as preventative as simply the cost of hosting the service.