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The bigger question is, does it violate any patents? Not necessarily intentionally, but because there's only so many ways you can build a GPU and (almost) all o
by WithinReason 5y ago
The bigger question is, does it violate any patents? Not necessarily intentionally, but because there's only so many ways you can build a GPU and (almost) all of them are patented already. Apple themselves failed to build a GPU from the ground up, so it's actually difficult.
- Retric 5y agoMany of those core GPU patients must be expiring right now. The GeForce 4 is 20 years old at this point, and many newer technologies are going to have significantly older patents.
- WithinReason 5y agoThat's right, but then you're building a GPU with 20 year old tech
- Retric 5y agoIt’s a question of wiggle room. Foundational patents are generally a lot harder to work around.
- speed_spread 5y agoEven with 20 year old design, you'd be using modern process which in itself should make room for significant improvements in scaling, frequency and power usage.
- ac29 5y agoYeah, but it would still be stuck at supporting something like DirectX 8 and OpenGL 1.3 (like the GeForce4). It would certainly be faster and more efficient but modern games and other software wouldn't run on it.
- MichaelBurge 5y agoThe hardware seems separate from the software interface. Projects like WINE can convert DirectX calls to OpenGL or Vulkan calls, so it seems like a driver update could support a newer interface if needed. For something that isn't supported at all like raytracing, those API calls would have to be dropped so you'd get a blank screen or only a UI. But something polygon-based, maybe you could drop the resolution and polygon count and that could be translated to the newer API.
- _kbh_ 5y agoThis isn’t entirely true. The software that a GPU supports (DX version, etc) is directly tied to certain specifics about the hardware. Have a look at the “Shader model comparisons” to see an example of this. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Level_Shader_Language https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Level_Shader_Language
- imtringued 5y agoAre there any patents blocking GPUs from implementing all features of SPIR-V?
- _kbh_ 5y agoProbably not as long as you don't trample any implementation specific patents. But the point was more about how it is much harder than just porting an old design to a newer process node to get good performance in modern games, modern hardware is fundamentally different than hardware of even the Geforce 7000 series.
- inetknght 5y ago> does it use any stolen ip? > The bigger question is, does it violate any patents? The former implies the latter. On the other hand if the IP isn't stolen but would still fall afoul of the patent then I would argue that the patent is wrongly provided. Patents don't exist to protect obvious implementations. I'm not a lawyer but we all know patent law is all kinds of fucked up.
- jhgb 5y ago> The former implies the latter. Isn't it the reverse? Patents are one of the several forms of IP that one can violate, so the latter should imply the former.