Technology from '50s could change gaming

The future of computer and video games is more than 60 years old.

Back in the 1950s, researchers started playing around with a technology that would allow them to store data in a form of memory that had no moving parts. While the new tech was destined to be faster and more reliable than the giant discs used in today's popular hard drives, it also was more expensive.

Now, the price and performance of solid-state drives are beginning to show signs of hitting mainstream popularity. Speaking at the recent Game Developers Conference, Intel, the world's largest chip maker, says it expects solid-state-drive technology to be in every laptop in the world soon.

While some of what Intel talked about could be viewed as self-serving, the company makes solid-state drives and said pairing the technology with its new Sandy Bridge processors will maximize the experience. The demonstrations of the technology were hard to ignore.

The company hired developers Iron Galaxy Studios to research the impact that solid-state drives could have on future games. David Lang, president of the Chicago-based company, said they discovered that one of the biggest bottlenecks in modern computer gaming is the hard drive.

A high-end computer using the spinning disc of a hard drive to store a game's content is slowed down by its inability to get that information quickly. This means that games take longer to load, levels in games need to be smaller to reduce lag and transitions through areas can start to chug visually.

Lang and his team created a virtual world packed with mountains, temples, deserts and arctic landscapes. He then traveled through the landscape in the game, showing how effortlessly the solid-state drive was able to load the different areas, doing so without any lag.

Lang said the demo, designed by his team to "break" solid-state drives' ability to stream information, barely stressed it.

"We need to rethink how we are going to make games moving forward," he said. "You can make really compelling experiences for folks on [solid-state drives] without a whole lot of new engineering."

Imagine, Lang said, a wide-open game such as Rockstar's "Grand Theft Auto" on a solid-state drive. The worlds could be bigger, the way they look more detailed.

And Lang, whose company typically works on console games, believes that solid-state drives will also be coming to the next generation of consoles, removing the size limitation created by disc-based games.

"We don't do PC development, because I don't want to deal with the hassle," he said. "If you're telling me there is a future and it's everyone with this new bar, and it's the low bar, and it's really freaking high, it gets me very excited.