Are graphics cards going to keep getting bigger forever?
Are graphics cards going to keep getting bigger forever?
Damn, the things used to be these thin little, well, cards. Nowadays they are reaching the size of entire consoles and can more accurately be called graphics bricks. Is the tech so stagnant that they won't be getting smaller again in the future?
The high end ones are so huge, power hungry, and fucking expensive that I'm starting to think they might as well just come with an integrated CPU and system RAM (in addition to the VRAM) on the same board.
What is the general industry expectation of what GPUs are going to be like in the mid term future, maybe 20 to 30 years from now? I expect if AI continues to grow in scope and ubiquity, then a previously unprecedented amount of effort and funding is going to be thrown at R&D for these PC components that were once primarily relegated to being toys for gamers.
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The card in the picture is of a kind that no longer exists: the basic, office computer GPU.
It got entirely displaced by integrated graphics.
So in a way they did get smaller, so small that they share a piece of silicon with the CPU. The only cards that remain are those that are so power hungry they can't share power and cooling with the CPU.
GeForce 9500 GT was for basic, office computers in 2008?
To play Halo Online in between office meetings, and competitive bombsweeper
I found a dusty old office desktop in my parents garage a few months ago from circa 2008, and I noticed it had both an AMD and Nvidia sticker on it, so I decided to open it up to take a look at what card it had. When I got the thing open I was perplexed to find there was no card in it at all, and that single core Sempron wasn't an APU, so what gives?
Found out that not only did integrated graphics exist back then on AMD platforms, but that they were built right into the motherboard and Nvidia manufactured them. It had no fan at all or really any obvious indication of its existence lol. Just an innocuous little piece of aluminum for a heat sink that was stuck on good to the chip with some kind of strong adhesive. Took a while to figure out that's what that was. Didn't know this was a thing, but that must've been a lot lower end than a 9500 GT.
Yes, it was the cheapest graphics card that could decode 1080p H.264 video in real time (and the acceleration worked in the Flash player). The 8500 GT could also do it but it was never popular. It made a huge difference when youtube became a thing.
According to cosecantphi below who opened a cheap low end office computer from 2008, it had integrated graphics and not a dedicated graphics card
I find it extremely hard to believe that schools and libraries and whatnot were building PC towers with dedicated graphic cards like 9500 GT, that was an exclusively gamer/performance nerd thing to do
Of course you had to have something to drive the VGA outputs. Usually this meant a VIA, SiS, or Unichrome chip in the motherboard. Those chips often had no 3D acceleration at all, and a max resolution of 1280x1024. You were lucky to have shaders instead of fixed-function pipelines in 2008-era integrated graphics, and hardware accelerated video decoding was unheard of. The best integrated GPUs were collaborations with nVidia that basically bundled a GPU with the mainboard, but those mainboards were expensive.
Windows Vista did not run well at all on these integrated chips, but nobody liked Windows Vista so it didn't matter. After Windows 7 was released, Intel started bundling their "HD Graphics" on CPUs and the on-die integrated GPU trend got started. The card in the picture belongs to the interim time where the software demanded pixel shaders and high-resolution video but hardware couldn't deliver.
They left a lot of work for the CPU to do: if you try to browse hexbear on them you can see the repainting going from top bottom as you scroll. You can't play 720p video and do anything else with the computer at the same time, because the CPU is pegged. But if you put the 9500 GT on them then suddenly you can use the computer as a HTPC. It was not an expensive card, it was 60-80 USD, and it was a logical upgrade to a tower PC you already have to make it more responsive and enable it to play HD video.
this type of "expanding to fit the new constraints" is the central reason for human suffering, ecological damage, and everything else
The tech was mastered, so humans naturally started making bigger beefier resource hungry tech that consumed 3000% more resources to make their games look 30% better
If someone's not okay with playing their games on 2007-era TF2 graphics I don't consider them a real socialist. I'm not even saying such sacrifices would be necessary under socialism, but being unwilling to make that sacrifice is probably indicative that you won't be compatible with it
If someone's not okay with playing their games on 2007-era TF2 graphics I don't consider them a real socialist.
I’m going to go a step forward and say we need to ban personal electronics eventually, phones, personal computers, tvs, game consoles. This entertainment is contributing to the alienation of the working class. If we force people to go into more communal spaces to access this media, like arcades, movie theaters, computer cafes. It would be more environmentally friendly and as an added bonus we can censor all reactionary content.
Of course, party officials shouldn’t be forced to obey these fucking laws. Fuck the peasants, it’s going to take a long time for the transition to communism to happen so it’s in the interests of the terminally online left such as ourselves to collaborate and share the spoils of corruption with eachother, we gotta live by a do as I say not as I do motto.
I’m going to go a step forward and say we need to ban personal electronics eventually, phones, personal computers, tvs, game consoles. This entertainment is contributing to the alienation of the working class. If we force people to go into more communal spaces to access this media, like arcades, movie theaters, computer cafes. It would be more environmentally friendly and as an added bonus we can censor all reactionary content.
I'm going to go a step further and dictate you wear a dirty ushanka at all times, do not shave, and only take cold sponge baths because hot running water is bourgeoisie decadence.