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That's right, but then you're building a GPU with 20 year old tech
by WithinReason 5y ago
That'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.