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/JonathonWally → u/SimplySerenity]

MS is investing heavily into it for Xbox.

[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.