4 ms·

Meh, that's like saying 640kb of RAM is more than anyone would ever need. Demand follows hardware development, which in turn accelerates demand. I'm sure game d

Meh, that's like saying 640kb of RAM is more than anyone would ever need. Demand follows hardware development, which in turn accelerates demand. I'm sure game developers would easily find a way to use 128GB of VRAM if it was commonly available in their target market.

late2part 3y ago
To be fair, 640kb is more than anyone really needs. It's just far, far less than we want.
Takennickname 3y ago
Can you imagine the download sizes?
amelius 3y ago
Turns out that demand for graphics memory got stuck at a point where compute is still hungry for more. That may certainly change but it doesn't help compute much, today.
- LoganDark 3y ago
  It's supply that's down - Nvidia is strictly enforcing their artificial segmentation where the jump from 24GB to 40GB of VRAM multiplies the price by around 5 (!). They know that if you need a 40GB card, you probably can't use a 24GB card at all because it'd run out of VRAM. They charge such insane prices for those higher capacity cards, because they know that they can make you pay thousands upon thousands for every tiny scrap of extra VRAM, and you will have literally no choice but to pay that price because you need the VRAM. Demand isn't low, demand is actually so high that they don't care if lowly consumers want VRAM, they already have enterprise customers that need it so badly that they'll pay prices higher than most consumers would ever imagine. And that's why they're so stingy with VRAM on the consumer cards. They need to be careful not to accidentally make them useful in the datacenter, so they can ensure that their enterprise customers continue to be forced to pay those extortionary prices. You see, it's all about the money, and it always will be. Capitalism, baby!
  - amelius 3y ago
    You need a special license to run nVidia cards in the datacenter, so this rules out consumer gaming cards already.
    - LoganDark 3y ago
      There are already ways to get around this. For example, renting compute from people who aren't in datacenters. Which is already a thing: https://vast.ai https://vast.ai
godelski 3y ago
This isn't an argument against giving users this much VRAM, but I'm pretty sure they'd just drop the whole game into VRAM and call it a day instead of actually optimizing.
- fbdab103 3y ago
  Isn't that exactly how things improve? When you can reduce the cognitive load on bookkeeping, you can accomplish more productive work. I can produce a featureful webapp in Python-Django solo because I do not have to worry about optimally filling registers and CPU cache. As you cut deeper to the hardware limitations, you have to be significantly more cognizant of writing to the hardware constraints than solving the business problem. Taken to the extreme, we have Electron applications consuming multi-GB of RAM, but it does expand the universe of possibilities.
  - LoganDark 3y ago
    > Isn't that exactly how things improve? When you can reduce the cognitive load on bookkeeping, you can accomplish more productive work. What are you talking about? Sure you can appear to be more productive if you are reckless and wasteful of resources, and adding more resources means there is more that you can afford to waste. But for the past decade or so we have been seeing what happens if you teach every software developer that it's okay to waste resources: resources get wasted. Back when you couldn't afford to waste resources, you'd see extremely skilled optimizations and extremely clever hacks to get advanced software to run on extremely slow and primitive CPUs. But ever since computing power increased by a couple orders of magnitude, what happens? The exact same software implemented by today's developers would more than compensate for the increased computing power by being a couple orders of magnitude less efficient. Sure it expands the universe of possibilities. I do want more resources, I really do. But "reducing the cognitive load on bookkeeping" is making software get slower faster than hardware gets more powerful. Which is absolute insanity to me.
    - fbdab103 3y ago
      Think of all the software which does not exist if we are still writing in assembly because we are constrained by the hardware. Python, RPGMaker, Roblox, PICO-8, etc are no longer possible because they are too wasteful. Having bounty enables art to be made which is impossible if creators are bit twiddling. Do I bemoan that my 2000s era super computer squanders resources to load 20 kb of text? Sure, but it is also amazing the things that are possible because tools are not restricted to the priesthood of assembly programmers.

late2part 3y ago

To be fair, 640kb is more than anyone really needs. It's just far, far less than we want.

Takennickname 3y ago

Can you imagine the download sizes?

amelius 3y ago

Turns out that demand for graphics memory got stuck at a point where compute is still hungry for more. That may certainly change but it doesn't help compute much, today.

LoganDark 3y ago
It's supply that's down - Nvidia is strictly enforcing their artificial segmentation where the jump from 24GB to 40GB of VRAM multiplies the price by around 5 (!). They know that if you need a 40GB card, you probably can't use a 24GB card at all because it'd run out of VRAM. They charge such insane prices for those higher capacity cards, because they know that they can make you pay thousands upon thousands for every tiny scrap of extra VRAM, and you will have literally no choice but to pay that price because you need the VRAM. Demand isn't low, demand is actually so high that they don't care if lowly consumers want VRAM, they already have enterprise customers that need it so badly that they'll pay prices higher than most consumers would ever imagine. And that's why they're so stingy with VRAM on the consumer cards. They need to be careful not to accidentally make them useful in the datacenter, so they can ensure that their enterprise customers continue to be forced to pay those extortionary prices. You see, it's all about the money, and it always will be. Capitalism, baby!
- amelius 3y ago
  You need a special license to run nVidia cards in the datacenter, so this rules out consumer gaming cards already.
  - LoganDark 3y ago
    There are already ways to get around this. For example, renting compute from people who aren't in datacenters. Which is already a thing: https://vast.ai https://vast.ai

godelski 3y ago

This isn't an argument against giving users this much VRAM, but I'm pretty sure they'd just drop the whole game into VRAM and call it a day instead of actually optimizing.

fbdab103 3y ago
Isn't that exactly how things improve? When you can reduce the cognitive load on bookkeeping, you can accomplish more productive work. I can produce a featureful webapp in Python-Django solo because I do not have to worry about optimally filling registers and CPU cache. As you cut deeper to the hardware limitations, you have to be significantly more cognizant of writing to the hardware constraints than solving the business problem. Taken to the extreme, we have Electron applications consuming multi-GB of RAM, but it does expand the universe of possibilities.
- LoganDark 3y ago
  > Isn't that exactly how things improve? When you can reduce the cognitive load on bookkeeping, you can accomplish more productive work. What are you talking about? Sure you can appear to be more productive if you are reckless and wasteful of resources, and adding more resources means there is more that you can afford to waste. But for the past decade or so we have been seeing what happens if you teach every software developer that it's okay to waste resources: resources get wasted. Back when you couldn't afford to waste resources, you'd see extremely skilled optimizations and extremely clever hacks to get advanced software to run on extremely slow and primitive CPUs. But ever since computing power increased by a couple orders of magnitude, what happens? The exact same software implemented by today's developers would more than compensate for the increased computing power by being a couple orders of magnitude less efficient. Sure it expands the universe of possibilities. I do want more resources, I really do. But "reducing the cognitive load on bookkeeping" is making software get slower faster than hardware gets more powerful. Which is absolute insanity to me.
  - fbdab103 3y ago
    Think of all the software which does not exist if we are still writing in assembly because we are constrained by the hardware. Python, RPGMaker, Roblox, PICO-8, etc are no longer possible because they are too wasteful. Having bounty enables art to be made which is impossible if creators are bit twiddling. Do I bemoan that my 2000s era super computer squanders resources to load 20 kb of text? Sure, but it is also amazing the things that are possible because tools are not restricted to the priesthood of assembly programmers.