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I interned at NVIDIA in 2009 on the kernel mode driver team. Was super fun there in terms of the project work and the people. If the code still exists, I create
by srj 3y ago
I interned at NVIDIA in 2009 on the kernel mode driver team. Was super fun there in terms of the project work and the people. If the code still exists, I created the main class that schedules work out to the GPU on Windows.
That level of programming gave such rewarding moments in between difficult debugging sessions. When I wanted to test a new kernel driver build I needed to walk into some massive room with all of these interconnected machines that emulated the non-yet-fabricated GPU hardware. One of the full time people on my team was going insane trying to track down a memory corruption issue between GPU memory and main memory when things paged out the entire time I was there.
Back then the stock was around $7/share and the CEO announced a 10% paycut across the board (even including my intern salary) and had an all hands with everyone in the cafeteria. It's pretty cool they went from that vulnerable state, with Intel threatening to build in GPU capabilities, to the powerhouse they are today.
- radium3d 3y agoI do wonder though, why has moore's law stopped in its tracks? Using CS:GO benchmark, a 1070 got 218 FPS, while a 4090 is at 477 FPS. Only a ~2.2x increase in FPS in 6 years? :(
- bexsella 3y agoFPS of one specific game isn't a great indicator of GPU grunt.
- transcriptase 3y agoAdmittedly knowing nothing, I’m going to assume that a great deal of the advantages of the latest generation aren’t going to improve performance in a decade old game since the engine won’t touch them. How does a 1070 fare versus a 4090 in Hogwarts Legacy or another modern game at 1440 or 4K?
- Mechanical9 3y agoMy guess is that we've reached a peak in the amount of new investment that can be made annually, based on tech nearing total proliferation throughout society. The tech can sort of only advance as fast as tech companies can grow, and they can't grow exponentially after they account for some percentage of the global workforce. My guess is that we'll see improvements at closer to the current rate rather than at an increasing rate.
- ATMLOTTOBEER 3y agoFps in CSGO isn’t really so dependent on the GPU as more modern games, so comparing with a different game might be more accurate.
- radium3d 3y agoI'm curious, do you know of a study that has proven that single core CPU or other is the bottleneck in CS:GO?
- AaronFriel 3y agoThis is essentially folk wisdom - but I think you can trust the other people in this thread that it's accurate. I doubt anyone has done a scientific study on this, but you could see this for yourself by setting your computer's clock rate lower and re-running the benchmark. I expect that if you have a 4090, you have an Intel or AMD CPU that exposes a core clock multiplier. You could run this benchmark with whatever value it's at, then reduce the modifier by say, half. That should halve your CPU's clock rate, and I'm guessing you'll see the frame rate decline similarly. You can conclude that the game is "CPU bound", then. Even if your GPU was infinitely fast, you have to remember that game developers are not optimizing for the game event loop to run in sub-millisecond times. If the core loop in the game takes under 16ms to run on a common CPU, such as one in a console: that's better than 60hz and the overwhelming majority of video game players will never see a benefit. Some game developers, I see someone in another thread mentioned Doom Eternal, pride themselves on that optimization. With a fast enough CPU and GPU, you could probably reach 1000 FPS on Doom Eternal. A quick search suggests this might have been accomplished with a liquid cooled, this was done with a liquid nitrogen cooled PC with a 6.6GHz CPU: https://www.pcgamer.com/heres-doom-eternal-running-at-1000-fps-on-a-liquid-nitrogen-cooled-pc/ https://www.pcgamer.com/heres-doom-eternal-running-at-1000-f...
- user_7832 3y agoActually kinda yes, look at AMD’s 3d v cache. There’s a very recent review by the verge on an Asia laptop with the AMD chip, and it does hit like 600-700 fps. CPUs can absolutely make such a difference.
- 3y ago
- fragmede 3y agoGS:go aside, the 1070 is said to do 6.5 TFlops to the 4090's 1,321 TFlops, for a 203x improvement in 6 years. Not bad!
- HWR_14 3y agoAt low frame rates, the GPU is (usuallly) the bottleneck most of them time. At very high frame rates, there are other more significant bottlenecks. A much better benchmark would be to take a game designed for 120 or fewer FPS on a 4090 and try it on a 1070.
- dahart 3y agoBetween those 2 GPUs, the fp32 perf went up 12.7x according to TechPowerUp’s specs. The SM count went up 8.5x (which represents Moore’s law and note is almost exactly in line with Moore’s prediction), and the clock rate went up 1.5x. The FPS of CSGO (or any game) is not a good measure of Moore’s law. Games have all kinds of complexities and caveats that will prevent them from scaling linearly. I used to write some of those bottlenecks :P What are the 2080 and 3080 datapoints for CSGO? Did it approach 400-500 fps on the 2080 and never get any faster after that?
- radium3d 3y agoWow, didn't expect to get so many comments. It's just interesting to me that we have 500hz monitors, yet games are still coming out that only run at ~70 fps on a 3080, etc. I used CS:GO as a comparison just because it was an example capable of coming near 500 FPS. Avg FPS are not going up fast enough in my opinion. I understand some games purposefully limit FPS for physics calculations, but there are many that do not.
- Cloudef 3y agoAlso note that FPS is non-linear value, you want to compare frame times instead.
- KronisLV 3y ago> Avg FPS are not going up fast enough in my opinion. I've never had hardware to run above 1080p at 60fps (monitors, GPUs), so my desires are a bit orthogonal - I wish more games let you customize the graphics settings so that you could maintain a consistent framerate (be it 30 on a low spec laptop, 60 on a regular PC or more fps) at a resolution of your choice. Things like switching between baked or dynamic shadows, their type/filtering, things like ambient occlusion and tessellation, various post processing effects and filters, model LOD limits and texture resoltion, resolution scaling and so on. More so, it would actually be nice if games let you download a version with lower fidelity assets (like War Thunder sort of does, for example), so you don't need 100 GB of models and textures if you're realistically only ever going to see 20 GB of those on your hardware. Thankfully, most modern game engines scale both up and down decently, for example, Unity's URP (though historically a bit half baked and fragmented the community/assets). It's just up to the developers to get over the hubris of wanting "low" settings to still be pretty, that choice should be up to the user.
- AnotherGoodName 3y agoThat's because single thread perf of CPUs hasn't progressed and ~500fps is where CPUs cap out on that game still to this day. GPUs are doing fine.
- teaearlgraycold 3y agoFor anyone that doesn't understand why this matters, the CPU still needs to prepare the full scene before sending it over to the GPU for polygons to get rasterized and shaders to get calculated. Most of the time the CPU does all of the physics as well. So even if GPU render time goes to 0ms, 2ms spent by the CPU per frame means 500fps is the best you'll get without a better CPU or better code. And I suspect game devs aren't looking to shrink their budgeted CPU time just so someone benchmarking can see 1000fps.
- izacus 3y agoCS:GO also doesn't use any of the new approaches that reduce CPU time in those operations and more effectively saturate the GPU. Compare CS:GO against Doom:Eternal, which runs at high fps while providing massive improvements to visuals.
- teaearlgraycold 3y agoDoes Doom: Eternal have multiplayer? How do people feel about it as a competitive shooter?
- izacus 3y agoIt has multiplayer, but I admit I never really spent any time with it.
- spoonjim 3y agoPhysics stopped Moore’s law
- newZWhoDis 3y agoI’m more worried about how human development has seemingly stopped in its tracks, backtracking more like it
- devnullbrain 3y agoMoore's law is about transistors, not CS:GO. CS:GO benchmarks stopped advancing as quickly because Moore's law is - objectively, despite the protestations of semiconductor companies - dead.
- Mawr 3y agoYou can't just use an arbitrary game to test your hypothesis like that. You need to test with something that caps out the 4090 at 100% usage and then see how a 1070 performs in comparison. It's not quite that simple of course, so just look up some benchmarks ;)
- 1-6 3y agoDo you still own stock?
- the_svd_doctor 3y agoHe probably didn’t get any as an intern.
- srj 3y agoI vaguely remember that I could participate in the employee purchase program. This was during the financial crisis though and I was an undergrad intern with a paltry ability to invest. Even if I had hit received some great stock award in all likelihood I would have sold it for index funds at my first opportunity. I imagine some of my old coworkers made out quite well though.
- enos_feedler 3y agoI joined as a new college grad (full time) the same year. I remember the 10% pay cut announcement. I didn't get any stock granted to me in the 4 years I was there as a SWE working on CUDA. They had an ESPP you could put 10% of your paycheck into or something like that though.
- granshaw 3y agoInterned there Summer of 08. Remember mentions of “this CUDA thing” then, that was during its infancy. Midway through, our intern friend group found out one of the smaller buildings had a buffet lunch and started taking the shuttle there often. Saw this tweet just now and that lanyard holder really brought back memories, hasn’t changed at all: https://x.com/jimcramer/status/1694465908234699243?s=46&t=NA4OwNM8Z_Eu-eHB4CKIjg https://x.com/jimcramer/status/1694465908234699243?s=46&t=NA...
- alanfranz 3y ago> the CEO announced a 10% paycut across the board Which is still better than a 10% layoff, anyway!
- M3L0NM4N 3y agoOnly for 10% of the workers.
- bottled_poe 3y agoI guess that depends if you want to do 11% more work, and probably the tedious stuff.
- henry2023 3y agoMorale after layoffs goes down for all workers. So no, not only for 10% of the workers.
- M3L0NM4N 3y agoMore than having their salary cut by 10%?