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Actually... Thanks to Moore's Law, computer power has been growing exponentially since forever. Single-core performance has stagnated, sure, but total performa

Actually... Thanks to Moore's Law, computer power has been growing exponentially since forever. Single-core performance has stagnated, sure, but total performance is still following the curve. Graphics is easy to parallelise, so throwing more cores at it is not a problem. In fact, this is precisely what GPUs do. In other words, the available "operations per pixel per second" have gone up over the years, despite the increasing resolution! In fact, we're at the point now that we can even do real time ray tracing, which was unthinkable at any typical resolution just a decade ago. Top-end RTX 4090 GPUs can even do ray tracing at 4K, which is just crazy.

valval 3y ago
Moore’s law is a thing yes, but in the real world, power consumption and heat dissipation issues seem to be the actual constraints rather than transistor counts. Vertical scaling is of course possible, but it’s not really useful for driving a higher resolution monitor in your living room because of bottlenecks being completely elsewhere.
forgotpwd16 3y ago
>total performance is still following the curve Nitpick: Moore's law is about number of transistors on microchips not performance.
- jiggawatts 3y ago
  Yes, but for GPUs performance scales fairly close to 1:1 with increasing transistor counts. Newer GPUs generally have more of the same type of compute units tiled out. The original general-purpose GPU, the NVIDIA 8800 GT had 112 cores. The RTX 4090 has 9,728! Each core has pretty much remained the same: a 32-bit arithmetic/logic unit (ALU).
prmoustache 3y ago
>In fact, we're at the point now that we can even do real time ray tracing, which was unthinkable at any typical resolution just a decade ago So are you saying that we should go back to "just wait for the picture to render..." era just because we can have higher density? Top-End RTX 4090 cater for a niche market.

valval 3y ago

Moore’s law is a thing yes, but in the real world, power consumption and heat dissipation issues seem to be the actual constraints rather than transistor counts. Vertical scaling is of course possible, but it’s not really useful for driving a higher resolution monitor in your living room because of bottlenecks being completely elsewhere.

forgotpwd16 3y ago

>total performance is still following the curve Nitpick: Moore's law is about number of transistors on microchips not performance.

jiggawatts 3y ago
Yes, but for GPUs performance scales fairly close to 1:1 with increasing transistor counts. Newer GPUs generally have more of the same type of compute units tiled out. The original general-purpose GPU, the NVIDIA 8800 GT had 112 cores. The RTX 4090 has 9,728! Each core has pretty much remained the same: a 32-bit arithmetic/logic unit (ALU).

prmoustache 3y ago

>In fact, we're at the point now that we can even do real time ray tracing, which was unthinkable at any typical resolution just a decade ago So are you saying that we should go back to "just wait for the picture to render..." era just because we can have higher density? Top-End RTX 4090 cater for a niche market.