Opinion: AMD, Intel, And Nvidia In The Next Ten Years

[Guest]

Say what you will about AMD, Intel, and Nvidia's product lineups as they stand today. But all three employ undeniably-different philosophies in how they approach development and execution. Alan Dang explores how the next decade might look for this trio.

Opinion: AMD, Intel, And Nvidia In The Next Ten Years : Read more

 

[anamaniac]

[citation][nom]Alan Dang[/nom]And games will look pretty sweet, too. At least, that’s the way I see it.[/citation]
After several pages of technology mumbo jumbo jargon, that was a perfect closing statement. =)

Wicked article Alan. Sounds like you've had an interesting last decade indeed.
I'm hoping we all get to see another decade of constant change and improvement to technology as we know it.

Also interesting is that you almost seemed to be attacking every company, you still managed to remain neutral.
Everyone has benefits and flaws, nice to see you mentioned them both for everybody.

Here's to another 10 years of success everyone!

 

[False_Dmitry_II]

I want to read this again in 10 years just to see the results...

 

[Guest]

" Simply put, software development has not been moving as fast as hardware growth. While hardware manufacturers have to make faster and faster products to stay in business, software developers have to sell more and more games"

Hardware is moving so fast and game developers just cant keep pace with it.

 

[Ikke_Niels]

What I miss in the article is the following (well it's partly told):

I am allready suspecting a long time that the videocards are gonna surpass the CPU's.
You allready see it atm, videocards get cheaper, CPU's on the other hand keep going pricer for the relative performance.

In the past I had the problem with upgrading my videocard, but with that pushing my CPU to the limit and thus not using the full potential of the videocard.

In my view we're on that point again: you buy a system and if you upgrade your videocard after a year/year-and-a-half your mostlikely pushing your CPU to the limits, at least in the high-end part of the market.

Ofcourse in the lower regions these problems are smaller but still, it "might" happen sooner then we think especially if the NVidia design is as astonishing as they say and on the same time the major development of cpu's slowly break up.

 

[sarsoft]

Nice article. Good read....

 

[lashton]

one of the most interesting and informativfe articles from toms hardware, what about another story about the smaller players, like Intel Atom and VILW chips and so on

 

[JeanLuc]

Out of all 3 companies Nvidia is the one that's facing the more threats. It may have a lead in the GPGPU arena but that's rather a niche market compared to consumer entertainment wouldn't you say? Nvidia are also facing problems at the low end of market with Intel now supplying integrated video on their CPU's which makes the need for low end video cards practically redundant and no doubt AMD will be supplying a smiler product with Fusion at some point in the near future.

 

[jontseng]

This means that we haven’t reached the plateau in "subjective experience" either. Newer and more powerful GPUs will continue to be produced as software titles with more complex graphics are created. Only when this plateau is reached will sales of dedicated graphics chips begin to decline.

I'm surprised that you've completely missed the console factor.

The reason why devs are not coding newer and more powerful games is nothing to do with budgetary constraints or lack thereof. It is because they are coding for an XBox360 / PS3 baseline hardware spec that is stuck somewhere in the GeForce 7800 era. Remember only 13% of COD:MW2 units were PC (and probably less as a % sales given PC ASPs are lower).

So your logic is flawed, or rather you have the wrong end of the stick. Because software titles with more complex graphics are not being created (because of the console baseline), newer and more powerful GPUs will not continue to produced.

Or to put it in more practical terms, because the most graphically demanding title you can possibly get is now three years old (Crysis), then NVidia has been happy to churn out G92 respins based on a 2006 spec.

Until we next generation of consoles comes through there is zero commercial incentive for a developer to build a AAA title which exploits the 13% of the market that has PCs (or the even smaller bit of that has a modern graphics card). Which means you don't get phat new GPUs, QED.

And the problem is the console cycle seems to be elongating...

J

 

[Swindez95]

I agree with jontseng above ^. I've already made a point of this a couple of times. We will not see an increase in graphics intensity until the next generation of consoles come out simply because consoles is where the majority of games sales are. And as stated above developers are simply coding games and graphics for use on much older and less powerful hardware than the PC has available to it currently due to these last generation consoles still being the most popular venue for consumers.

 

[Swindez95]

Oh, and very good article btw, definitely enjoyed reading it!

 

[1898]

Without much doubt, Nvidia is working on a x86 CPU simply because their life depends on it.
and +1 jontseng

 

[mfarrukh]

I hope all of this is for the betterment of mankind

 

[neiroatopelcc]

Page 4 sais 5-6 hours to render a frame? can't be true really ....
a typical animation feature : 90 minutes
the maths : 90 minutes = 5400 seconds ; @ 25fps that is a total of 135000 frames to render ; rendition time is 5 times that, totalling 675000 hours = 28125 days - that's 77 years - even in parallel that means it'll take a year with 77 supercomputers to do just one animation of each frame ; and I know a disney guy (dvd extra content) said it took about 8 months to make an animated feature after the story was done (ie. animation) - doubt pixar is so much slower.
ps. assuming 29.7fps it's over 90 years

 

[Tohos]

@ neiroatopelcc
That is where render farms come in. Hundreds of computer clusters churning out frames day and night.

 

[mfarrukh]

Excellent read. Thorough and great Experience speaking

 

[climber]

If you want to get a feel for how long it takes to render a frame in a modern movie. Check out the extended features content on the first Transformers movie. It's mentioned that it takes ~24 hrs to render a frame of movie footage with five transformers in it at full screen size. I might have some of the numbers slightly off, but it's serious computational time folks.

 

[neiroatopelcc]

[citation][nom]Tohos[/nom]@ neiroatopelcc That is where render farms come in. Hundreds of computer clusters churning out frames day and night.[/citation]
What follows is a citation from the actual article page four.
"With Pixar-level budgets come the potential for Pixar-level graphics (and Pixar-level characters and stories). Given that Pixar films still require 5 to 6 hours to render a single frame on large supercomputer clusters, the answer is no, graphics have not reached the point of diminishing returns yet."
In my book a cluster of supercomputers is the same as a render farm.
[citation][nom]climber[/nom]If you want to get a feel for how long it takes to render a frame in a modern movie. Check out the extended features content on the first Transformers movie. It's mentioned that it takes ~24 hrs to render a frame of movie footage with five transformers in it at full screen size. I might have some of the numbers slightly off, but it's serious computational time folks.[/citation]
I don't own that movie, and I'm not even sure I've seen it. Is it the one with amodern yellow muscle car and a wimpy teen? if so I may have.
Anyway - a day per frame simply can't be an average - not even 5 hours can! It would simply take too many years to make a movie, and I'm sure pixar doesn't rent all blue gene servers in the world or half of crays hardware just to make one movie?

 

[Guest]

That's what the writer was getting at. These 'supercomputers' are nothing but render farms. And while they don't take hours to render a frame, they do take a significant amount of time. Then again one must consider that these frames are 4096×2160 each and you are not only doing raster operations, including high levels of AA, but also carrying out physics calculations on almost all of contents of the scene. This is waaaay more than any gpu can hope to do right now. That is why you are seeing these scenes rendered on farms consisting of general purpose cpus. They can compute anything required for the rendering of the scene. They are easy to assign tasks to over the network with existing software. I doubt scheduling rendering chores to cpus AND gpus on each of the nodes on the farm work as well with current hardware and software.

 

[killerclick]

I'm happy I get to keep my 8800GT for another year.

 

[memeroot]

one of the great things with render farms is that they can render more than one image at a time, one of the sad things about render farms is if you allocated the whole farm over to 1 image it wouldn't be any faster.

 

[Reynod]

Great article there Alan.

Well done.

 

[Ciuy]

geeez, i sure hope things happen the way u think

 

[huron]

Nicely written Alan. I truly appreciate a well-written, well-supported article. Even if you don't agree with his opinions, it is still a nice read.

Thanks

 

[Spanky Deluxe]

Superb article! A great read!