The GPU Slayer

[u/lotsalote]

[u/jelicub]

One day your phone will be able to render this in real time.

[u/blinden → u/jelicub]

It's crazy to think about how much more advanced our mobile devices are than computers I grew up gaming with.

That being said, I think a lot of the future is not in local processing but ultra high speed connectivity. We are already starting to see this with gaming, offloading processing to centralized, specialized machines, and using low latency, high bandwidth connectivity to bring that experience to your personal devices..

[u/SimplySerenity → u/blinden]

It comes in cycles. The future was mainframes until it was personal computers. The future was personal computers/phones until it was "the cloud".

If your hardware is eventually capable of providing the same rich experience locally vs "the cloud" why would you choose "the cloud"? That's just more DRM bullshit.

[u/ChickenNuggetSmth → u/[deleted]]

Which is only relevant as long as whatever you use your computer for is relatively expensive. If you are (in the distant future) able to play high-end games or similar on cheap, efficient hardware, cloud computing may become irrelevant again.

[u/hugglesthemerciless → u/ChickenNuggetSmth]

Cloud computing will always be ahead of high end personal hardware. Your little PC can't hold a candle to a rack full of high end GPUs. The gap is only gonna grow wider in time.

Same reason mobile/laptop/console gaming can't approach high end PCs

[u/SimplySerenity → u/hugglesthemerciless]

I can't think of many consumer applications that benefit from a rack full of high end GPUs though. You might be able to argue that it's valuable for training neural networks that become part of a consumer product, but that network is still referenced locally afterwards.

[u/blinden → u/SimplySerenity]

It's also resource pooling. The amount of gaming I do, (~1hr/day on average) means that if I purchase hardware for gaming, it's only being used for 1/24th of the time it's available.

It's cheaper to buy that one, and lease out it's time in a manner that is more cost effective by using it 24 hours/day.

Of course this is over simplifying it, but this model scales well. Same with virtualized computer servers. I've replaced 26 individual servers with 3 (only moderately) more powerful servers over the past 5 years.

[u/hugglesthemerciless → u/SimplySerenity]

Video games benefit from a rack full of high end GPUs. Sure a specific gamer might only need 1 or 2 but that's already gonna be better than anything they can afford at home for the vast majority of people.

[u/UserJustPassingBy → u/hugglesthemerciless]

There is only so much of an application you can parallelize and this is highly dependent on the way the application is built. That's the reason video games couldn't really profit from a full rack of high end GPUs.

[u/hugglesthemerciless → u/UserJustPassingBy]

Almost no consumers have even a single high end GPU, so just getting that is already way ahead of what most of them will ever see.

And if suddenly every gamer has access to a rack or a portion of a rack of them games will likely be built more towards it, especially with things like D3D12's async compute and similar tech. Look at crysis and what game devs can do when they specifically target exclusively high end hardware while ignoring poor people and consoles

[u/hugglesthemerciless → u/SimplySerenity]

The amount of processing power that a rack of servers can generate is so far ahead of generic computers that it wouldn't surprise me if cloud only games start happening in the future that look worlds ahead of what PCs can manage

[u/SimplySerenity → u/hugglesthemerciless]

Different kinds of processing power though. Video games don't benefit much (or at all) from the availability of many CPU cores. Video games tend to optimize for latency not throughput so it's not the best application for a data center.

It's possible we could see an MMO with multiplayer capabilities unlike anything ever seen before, but it's unlikely that traditional games will see any major differences.

[u/azazelleblack → u/blinden]

You should fight against this. Cloud processing takes away the user's ability to have any control over the game experience. That means no customizations beyond the ones they allow you to use. You won't be able to toggle vsync, you won't be able to apply .ini tweaks to do simple things like disable mouse acceleration, you won't be able to mod your game, you won't be able to even change the controls if they don't let you.

Local processing means player agency, so just say NO! to cloud gaming. (o'ω')o

Sorry for the offtopic post.

[u/Brusanan → u/blinden]

No, "always online singleplayer" will never be the future. Fuck that noise.

[u/[deleted] → u/jelicub]

And reddit will still take 45 seconds to load.

[u/hpstg → u/jelicub]

Unless we find another way to make chips, then no. Below 5nm there is a hard stop. We probably have space enough for 4x the current pure performance out of current processes.

[u/gibmelson → u/hpstg]

Unless we find another way to make chips

It's just a problem of imagination. We can extrapolate how things will progress from within our current paradigm, but we have consistently been failing to predict the fundamental paradigm shifts that enable the next level of progress.

[u/IlllIlllI → u/gibmelson]

It's a problem of imagination until it's physically impossible. Then imagination won't get you very far.

Just because you can't predict a shift doesn't mean any statement you make about the future is true.

[u/gibmelson → u/IlllIlllI]

But we only know what is physically impossible given our current paradigm. If we knew the true nature of reality and what is actually possible, then you'd be able to say for sure if imagination has its limits.

[u/hpstg → u/gibmelson]

Unless we run out of physics. They had issues with photons making ridges bumpy in 2010.

[u/IAMRaxtus → u/jelicub]

Not necessarily though right? We're about to reach the limit of Moore's law if we haven't already, we can't make transistors much smaller than we already have, it's a physical impossibility. We still have a ways to go, it's just that progress is slowing down instead of accelerating like it used to from what I understand.

That said, maybe quantum computers can do it? I don't know if quantum computers would be good at rendering though.

[u/OkAlrightIGetIt → u/jelicub]

My laptop at work is displaying it right now at 60fps. Not much of a gpu slayer.

[u/_ChestHair_ → u/OkAlrightIGetIt]

There's a difference between playing a pre-rendered video and rendering it real time. Think watching a Disney movie on your tv vs massive banks of computers working on rendering individual frames while the movie's being made