[citation][nom]vittau[/nom]Well, transistors are reaching a physical limit, so we need any kind of optimization we can get. Let's hope this technology gets implemented soon...[/citation]
they are close, but we are probably a good 10 or so years off of hitting the real limit, at least size wise.
if we ever figure out 3d, it could make a cpu well over twice as fast, and fit in a smaller footprint.
[citation][nom]drwho1[/nom]Could this mean no more dedicated video cards in the future?I hope not.[/citation]
in the far future, yea, graphics cards are going to go the same way as sound cards. they will be fast enough to do damn newer everything for everyone, and the only people who want more will need a specialty item (probably wont be overly price inflated, due to size of the chips at the time)
[citation][nom]Zanny[/nom]This is actually not true. Just FYI, credentials wise, I am a software engineer that doesn't work in gaming but plays plenty of games. I have used openGL / openCL / etc.PC game developers now have a technology that allows them to compute almost all game logic GPU side - openCL / CUDA - where before that had to be done CPU side. It is why a game like World of Addictioncraft used a lot of CPU resources when it came out, because it did collision detection CPU side because they wrote the game for an openGL standard that didn't support general computation outside vector processing on GPUs. Today, with openCL (you can't make a game that uses CUDA if its an Nvidia chip and something else if it is AMD when you can just write openCL and be cross GPU) you can do a lot of parallelizable things GPU side that were previously outside the vectorization paradigm openGL fixes processing on the GPU to. And the general pipeline of a game engine, at its basic roots, is process input (user, network, in engine message passing) -> update state (each agent reacts on a tick stamp to game world events) -> collision detection (to prevent overlapping models) -> GPU rendering of the game world. Today, everything but processing input can be offloaded to the GPU and done massively parallel through openCL / openGL. The next generation of games "should", if properly implemented, use so few processor resources besides file and texture streaming and processing key events and handling network packets that you might get 10% of one CPU utilized in an extremely high fidelity game that pushes the GPU to the limit but barely uses any CPU resources.It also makes no sense to do any of those parallel tasks CPU side either - GPUs are orders of magnitude faster at that stuff. It is why an i5 2500k for $225 will last you a decade but you can spend $1500 on 3 7970s in triple Crossfire and have them be outdated by 2015. Games are moving into a completely GPU driven architecture for everything, and it is a good thing. It hugely increases the performance you can get from a game.[/citation]
i dont like the idea of a game running soley on the gpu, look at physx on a lower end card, you have to scale it back to the point it may as well not be there to get the game running at higher framerates.