A bit off topic, but are there any free 3D real-time rendered scenes where you can move around that exists just to be pretty/show off the graphics card abilities?
- 2013 - The Valley [1] A nice, explorable forest with weather. Requires a reasonably powerful PC and graphics card.
- 2017 - Superposition.[2] A very detailed lab scene. Requires a good gamer PC.
- 2021 - The Valley of the Ancients [3] The first UE5 demo. Requires a really good gamer PC.
- 2022 - The Matrix Awakens [4] The high-end UE5 demo. If you have to ask what hardware it requires, you can't afford it.
The Valley is from 9 years ago, and it still looks good. Try it first.
From a metaverse engineering perspective, hardware requirements limit what you can do. What's possible today is incredibly good. What you can run on the average user's laptop in the browser is way, way below that level. This is the era of the $1000 phone and the $100 laptop. GPU price/performance hasn't improved much in years.
NVidia doesn't market anything below US$250 any more, although some old cards are sometimes available.
The average Steam user has an NVidia 1060, released in 2016. It cost $250 back then, and it costs about $250 now on Amazon.
Yes, there's cloud gaming, where the GPU is in a data center. Now look at the pricing on cloud gaming. Many cloud gaming companies have gone bust, including Google Stadia, because the economics don't work. To get a mass market, you have to sell at a loss. To run at a profit, the pricing looks like Shadow PC.
If you're looking for a raw "benchmark" style program to measure performance of your CPU and GPU for 3D tasks, I highly recommend the open-source Blender Benchmark https://opendata.blender.org/ . It also has a bunch of existing data points for a large number of CPUs and GPUs already.
There are a bunch of demos for the unreal engine that you can download. I wanted to try them out recently after I built my new computer but unreal engine crashes every time I launch it. Oh well.
Edit: funny, reducing my DDR5 memory speed seems to have fixed unreal engine. New platforms are fun.
