The End of the GPU

[trinibwoy]

Mr. Sweeney at his best. Quite a few zingers in here. A passing swipe at Megatexture and I especially like this one

Crysis on a high-end NVIDIA SLI solution only looks at most marginally better than top Xbox 360 games

It's a great read, lots of history and lots of future looking concepts in here.

http://graphics.cs.williams.edu/arch...TimHPG2009.pdf

[Qkjhfhaiguihfma]

screw gaming, gpus are just getting started on the pc platform (see "opencl").

[Think]

I think he has a point actually and why not?

I can only speak for our North American Market but PC gaming is dead. Nevermind online flash games. I have 3 boys and they would rather play the PS3, Wii or Supernintendo then my monster. They'll fly over to the netbooks for simple online games and for there communique interaction.

I'm a die hard PC gamer and can't stand consoles PERIOD but I'm definitely the minority.

[BeepBeep2]

Oh, it looks the same until you jack the resolution to 2500x1600...

[Mechromancer]

We've heard what he's saying before. AMD and Intel are going in that direction full speed ahead.

[trinibwoy]

screw gaming, gpus are just getting started on the pc platform (see "opencl").

Heh, based on that statement I assume you didn't look at the presentation.

[Truckchase!]

Holy cow, he's deadly serious. He makes quite a few good points, but I wonder if the power players in the industry don't have other plans.....

[ToTTenTranz]

Crysis on a high-end NVIDIA SLI solution only looks at most marginally better than top Xbox 360 games

It's exaggerated of course, but I kind of agree with this in the way that both are in the same order of magnitude. You definitely can tell that both games belong to the same generation (which, for me, started with Oblivion).
Even more if you hook both to a 720p "HD-Ready" LCD TV. However, hook a maxed out crysis to a 24" 1200p monitor and it will blow any X360 game you throw at it.



And although they seem to like Fusion approach a lot, they only talk about Intel and nVidia.
I wonder if those TWIMTBP and Intel logos we see at the beginning of the game have something to do with it... hum..

[Russian]

That quote is ridiculously exaggerated because anyone with a set of eyes in their head can tell the difference between a game played on a PC in 1080P compared to a game played on an XBOX. The difference is day and night.

Not to mention that Tim's company hasnt necessarily been PC friendly... there is more profit to be made selling console games. Simply put, they control the content and the margins better on consoles over PC's its jsut that simple. I hate it, but thats the truth. Its all about profit margins and whats easier to do and what makes more money. Not what makes a better game.

[hersounds]

here in xtreme systems this is the REAL end ...

[Chumbucket843]

Crysison high-end NVIDIA SLI solution only looks at most marginally better than top Xbox 360 games

good presentation but this statement is BS.

[Russian]

Honestly, he makes a lot of good points. But the biggest weak point i see is that he expects developers to code for multiple cores, when they're barely struggling to get by with 2-4 cores... and that alone wont be enough to accurately render a game to look good.

[570091D]

i didn't know the geforce 8 is going to rein from 2012-2020.....

sweeney is a man on a mission, i'd like to see where he takes these ideas.

[tdream]

Oh, it looks the same until you jack the resolution to 2500x1600...

and then watch crysis stutter along

[nn_step]

It doesn't appear like they are claiming the end of the GPU, it more appears that they predict that GPU programming will be as easy as CPU programming with extensive focus on making mult-threading easy and efficient.

[JumpingJack]

We've heard what he's saying before. AMD and Intel are going in that direction full speed ahead.

There is a war going on inside our PCs, the GPU vs the generalized CPU, each has strengths and weaknesses, and, ultimately we are seeing a convergence.

AMD with ATI acquisition gives them the right positioning.
Intel with a ground up in house approach with Larrabee.
nVidia with Tegra (niche market at best).

It is easy to see why nVidia has been so aggressive with the GPGPU campaign and CUDA, they need to solidify their relevance to avoid being locked out entirely. IMHO.

[aka1nas]

good presentation but this statement is BS.

No, it's pretty much spot-on. Crysis has horribly diminishing returns when you compare the quality of the final output and the amount of computational resources it needs to produce it.

I somewhat disagree with his final conclusions. He discounts unified GPUGPU APIs such as OpenCL and states that development with such APIs will cost 10x as much as current development. That numbers sounds pretty off-base to me, though I could see it applying to earlier GPGPU frameworks.

A purely software approach will make his life (as a 3d engine vendor) easier, which is why he's pushing it. Doesn't mean his points are wrong, but on the same token I don't think that the rest of the industry wants to particularly deal directly with x86, either and would rather program with some sort of abstraction layer such as DX, Open GL or Open CL.

[Chumbucket843]

No, it's pretty much spot-on. Crysis has horribly diminishing returns when you compare the quality of the final output and the amount of computational resources it needs to produce it.

I somewhat disagree with his final conclusions. He discounts unified GPUGPU APIs such as OpenCL and states that development with such APIs will cost 10x as much as current development. That numbers sounds pretty off-base to me, though I could see it applying to earlier GPGPU frameworks.

A purely software approach will make his life (as a 3d engine vendor) easier, which is why he's pushing it. Doesn't mean his points are wrong, but on the same token I don't think that the rest of the industry wants to particularly deal directly with x86, either and would rather program with some sort of abstraction layer such as DX, Open GL or Open CL.

who cares about diminishing returns. crysis still looks way better.

[Drwho?]

Tim is seeing the wind blowing in the right direction ... I am happy that he understood it ... youpi!

[randomizer]

No, it's pretty much spot-on. Crysis has horribly diminishing returns when you compare the quality of the final output and the amount of computational resources it needs to produce it.

That is the case with any game. A few map-dependent graphical tweaks can make Crysis look far more impressive with a marginal to huge performance hit. Crytek aren't very good at getting the lighting right in their own maps. CryEngine 2 has alot more potential than Crysis shows by default.

[trinibwoy]

who cares about diminishing returns. crysis still looks way better.

I'd like to think a guy who writes game engines for a living has a different perspective on what the hardware is capable of than common folk like us. His point isn't that Crysis doesn't look better, it's that it doesn't look good enough given the compute resources at our disposal. And that's not a criticism of Crytek, he's trying to demonstrate how we're constrained by graphics APIs and inflexible hardware. DirectX and OpenGL don't benefit guys like him, he'd much rather be coding directly in C++ because he doesn't need Microsoft to tell him how to write graphics code and dictate what he can and can't do.

It's simple really. DirectX is necessary now to define hardware capabilities and help people structure their applications to match the hardware. Now when this hardware loses all this fixed structure and becomes freely programmable, then what use is DirectX?

[Chumbucket843]

I'd like to think a guy who writes game engines for a living has a different perspective on what the hardware is capable of than common folk like us. His point isn't that Crysis doesn't look better, it's that it doesn't look good enough given the compute resources at our disposal. And that's not a criticism of Crytek, he's trying to demonstrate how we're constrained by graphics APIs and inflexible hardware. DirectX and OpenGL don't benefit guys like him, he'd much rather be coding directly in C++ because he doesn't need Microsoft to tell him how to write graphics code and dictate what he can and can't do.

It's simple really. DirectX is necessary now to define hardware capabilities and help people structure their applications to match the hardware. Now when this hardware loses all this fixed structure and becomes freely programmable, then what use is DirectX?

i understand Sweeney's point but crysis looks way better than the top xbox game. also with out d3d you could play games on a mac noooooooooooooooo!

[Kylzer]

Crysis on a high-end NVIDIA SLI solution only looks at most marginally better than top Xbox 360 games

............... is this guy high on lsd or something ?

[Drwho?]

screw gaming, gpus are just getting started on the pc platform (see "opencl").

For OpenCL ... you need large caches to feed the beast
Bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

[Reznik Akime]

i understand Sweeney's point but crysis looks way better than the top xbox game. also with out d3d you could play games on a mac noooooooooooooooo!

Really? Do you really want to go there? This don't have anything to do with D3D (Maybe just a bit on D3D...) or Macs or any of that crap, so please don't. Look at the grand scheme of things, beyond the software and closer to the metal. We just aren't interacting with the metal, be it both general purpose x86 or even any other sort of general purpose processor as efficiently as we could be.

And yes, you can dial up the resolution but is that even what it's about? What do high resolutions count on and favor over lower ones? Sure, I can polish a turd to look like a shiny and smooth stone, but what is it still? A turd. We're talking about the meat of the visuals. Not just resolutions.