[saltcured]

However, 1000x is really not very much. With a 1000x uplift, we could certainly get better weather predictions, but not necessarily paradigm-altering improvement. In a real sense, we already have 1000x speedup and its what you get in a contemporary "supercomputer", whatever that is in a given market at a given point in history.

Let's say we had perfect 1000x improvement in compute, storage, and IO such that everything remains balanced. A fluid-dynamics or atmospheric simulation can only increase resolution by about 10x if a 3D volumetric grid is refined uniformly, or only about 5x if we spread it uniformly over 4D to also improve temporal resolution. Or maybe you decide to increase the 2D geographic reach of a model by 30x and leave the height and temporal resolution alone. These growth factors are not life-changing unless you happen to be close to a non-linear boundary where you cross a threshold from impractical to practical.

I'm not sure we can say how much a video game would improve. There are so many "dimensions" that are currently limited and it's hard to say where that extra resource budget should go. Maybe you currently can simulate a dozen interesting NPCs and now you could have a crowd of 10,000 of them. But you still couldn't handle a full stadium full of these interesting behaviors without another 10x of resources...

[ninjanomnom]

I work on an open source multiplayer game that's limited by single thread CPU speed so I can give a perspective of what would improve for us at least.

The fastest thing to change is we'd increase player limits per server, per player CPU costs are significant and we could bring the player limits to maybe 500 before network speeds start being a consideration. Certain ai improvements that are currently not viable like goal oriented ai design and pathfinding improvements could be added that would make new kinds of gameplay possible. Hell with even just 10x I would be very tempted to try unifying our atmospheric and chemistry simulations so they use the same data structures, thus allowing chemical reactions between gases that aren't basically masses of nonstandard performance hacks on the back end.

In short though, even minor performance improvements would vastly change what we could accomplish. 1000x is extreme and you would see very different games that could make use of techniques that today are mostly relegated to games built around them as a gimmick that they make sacrifices for.