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I worked in a life assurance company in 1996. The networked shared hard drive that the entire 15-ish person IT department worked from was 4GB. We considered tha

I worked in a life assurance company in 1996. The networked shared hard drive that the entire 15-ish person IT department worked from was 4GB. We considered that to be a decent size, and rarely ran into space issues. I keep wondering where this ends up - are we going to have 4TB graphics cards and 1PB hard drives in 2040?

ovi256 7y ago
The 1PB hard drives may come much sooner, the rate of growth in permanent storage is higher than the RAM growth rate.
viraptor 7y ago
There are two economic limits that I see. 1. You're only going to see so much details, so making bigger textures will not make much sense soon. We're already at the level where the art design / mapping / movement / realistic lighting could improve the situation much more than extra resolution. Games can already run at up to 4k and virtually nobody even has hardware for it. 2. There's only so much bandwidth on the storage - graphics memory and graphics memory - GPU lines. If you can't realistically process the textures/geometry you want to display, there's no point making it. 1PB drives will come though for long term storage. We already have petabytes of data being processed in some companies. It's just a question of $/B ratio, whether the R/W speed is reasonable for that size, and how reliable do you want that storage to be.
- Fredej 7y ago
  For gaming it think it's somewhat true that we may reach a visual limit at some point. However for other applications it's not the same thing. I work in medical 3D imaging - we are constantly memory constrained.
- deleted 7y ago
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