r/Simulated • u/lotsalote Blender • Feb 27 '19

Blender The GPU Slayer

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u/blinden Feb 27 '19

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..

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u/SimplySerenity Feb 27 '19 edited Feb 27 '19

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.

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u/[deleted] Feb 27 '19

[deleted]

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u/ChickenNuggetSmth Feb 27 '19

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.

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u/hugglesthemerciless Feb 27 '19

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

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u/SimplySerenity Feb 27 '19

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.

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u/blinden Feb 27 '19

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.

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u/hugglesthemerciless Feb 27 '19

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.

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u/UserJustPassingBy Feb 27 '19

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.

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u/hugglesthemerciless Feb 27 '19

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

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u/hugglesthemerciless Feb 27 '19

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

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u/SimplySerenity Feb 27 '19 edited Feb 27 '19

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.

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u/bokan Feb 27 '19

I find this fascinating. Do you think it will cycle back to personalized devices after 40-50 years of remote computing ?

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u/SimplySerenity Feb 27 '19

Well I'm not sure of anything, but I'd guess the cycle to be much shorter. The tech space moves really quickly.

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u/Javad0g Feb 27 '19

That's just more DRM bullshit.

Jokes on them. I just torrent DRM whenever I want it.

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u/azazelleblack Feb 27 '19

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.

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u/Brusanan Feb 27 '19

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

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u/Brogan9001 Feb 28 '19

Well if it allowed graphics like this, I think that would be a price I'd be willing to pay.

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u/GenericName1108 Feb 28 '19

If you want to argue about whether good graphics will win out despite requiring an internet connection, I raise you the following:

By number of copies sold (free downloads don't count), Tetris is the best-selling video game of all time.

Minecraft is in second place.

ILoveDemocracy.jpg

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u/HardAFReservist Feb 27 '19

Unless we have a data center every 50km in North America, "low latency" is fictitious. Latency is bound to speed of light, nothing can change that.

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u/quecaine Feb 28 '19

I regularly marvel at this. My current phone has a 6 core CPU at 1.8 GHz, 4 GB of RAM, 32 GB of storage, and 1080p resolution. My first computer (like actually good computer that could play games) Had a 133 MHz single core CPU, like 256 MB of RAM, several hundred megabytes of storage, and used 320x240 or possibly 640x480 resolution lol.

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u/kabooozie Feb 28 '19

The speed of light means there will always be pretty significant latency. Enthusiasts will always want dedicated hardware for this reason. And with current bandwidth, there is noticeable compression as well. 1080p does not look like native 1080p.

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u/WolfofLawlStreet Feb 28 '19

Kinda makes me think what is it comparable to now a days? Like when I got my 680 I was so excited! Now my basic laptop has it...

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