Current lack of RAM (and subsequent price explosion) has a wider range of grim consequences than even the Great GPU Famine of 2020. First came death one of the most reliable manufacturers of gaming memory and solid state drives, and now… uh… New game Divinity from Larian will it be more optimized for PC than it might otherwise be?
Here's what Larian CEO Sven Vincke said (apparently on a media tour – Here he is discussing Divinity with our Edwin) said TheGamerAnyway. Vincke notes that the lack of available RAM options makes it harder to predict the power of future PCs, “we already have to do a lot of optimization work in early access that we didn't necessarily want to do at that point.” This doesn't seem particularly terrible to me – better performance on weaker rigs ultimately means more players can join in – although nowhere in full interview does Vincke acknowledge that the shortage is directly caused and supported by demand from the data centers that power generative artificial intelligence, the technology Larian uses in the production of Divinity, and that Vincke himself defends the use.
This doesn't necessarily mean you'll be drinking potions from six-fingered hands or leading your party to the cozy village of Ekwheh. Larian's boss is adamant: “We're not releasing the game with any AI components, and we're not going to cut teams to replace them with AI,” as the company presumably limits its genAI app to things like placeholder text and links for concept artists.
Without wanting to make another argument about this – at least not too late – I still don't think this approach solves the problems associated with environmental damage, unauthorized cleanup, or even true labor replacement, which the AI ​​genius continues to work on. The fact is also that any the use of tools such as ChatGPT, Midjourney or Adobe Firefly, although limited, increases demand for those data centers that use all of our RAM.
The effect of artificially running out of memory, again, goes well beyond how well Divinity will perform on 16GB of DDR4 memory. Rising prices are it is expected to last until 2026.with manufacturing costs for laptops, pre-built PCs and possibly gaming consoles being passed on to consumers while Valve is rumored to be revising its pricing and launch date plans new steam engine. Even hardware heavyweights Nvidia as reported the reduction in GPU production plans due to the lack of available GDDR7 memory, as well as their own supply of graphics chips to the genetic artificial intelligence industry, has made them the richest company on Earth.
