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A modern graphics card already is a parallel compute card. A modern graphics pipeline is mostly compute with only very specific stuff using fixed function funct

A modern graphics card already is a parallel compute card. A modern graphics pipeline is mostly compute with only very specific stuff using fixed function functionality.

amelius 3y ago
Yes, but that was not the point. The point is that they are sold as graphics cards, not compute cards. Therefore, expect these cards to be good at (and have the memory for) typical graphics operations.
- dotnet00 3y ago
  I don't entirely agree, especially with the popularity of LLMs nowadays. While graphics are still a big portion of the pitch, compute oriented features are increasingly expected as part of the offering, especially at the higher end of the lineup. If you've bought a 3090/4090, you likely had in mind more computationally oriented tasks compared to if you've bought a 1660 or AMD card.
justinclift 3y ago
Are the ray tracing cores in Nvidia cards used for compute?
- dotnet00 3y ago
  All that the ray tracing cores do is accelerate calculation of BVH intersections. The rest of the tracing (ie the part that gives meaning to the BVH intersection result) is done via compute, with the RT cores being able to be 'invoked' essentially arbitrarily. This is in contrast to the way graphics cards used to be, where you had certain stages for certain things, designed specifically around producing graphics, making the 'graphics' part of the name hold more weight than nowadays. I'm not sure if you're asking if they're used for a compute application or if you're asking if they can be used from the same execution path as 'compute' code.
  - zozbot234 3y ago
    Seen from first principles, BVH is quite close to some kinds of hierarchical clustering. The ray intersection part can be understood in turn as a kind of normalization, or projection to the unit sphere. So depending on how much hardware is actually reserved to this task on-chip, there might be ways of making it somewhat useful in the ML context.
  - justinclift 3y ago
    Just asking if those cores tend to sit unused when "standard" compute jobs are run on the cards. :)

A modern graphics card already is a parallel compute card. A modern graphics pipeline is mostly compute with only very specific stuff using fixed function functionality.

amelius 3y ago

Yes, but that was not the point. The point is that they are sold as graphics cards, not compute cards. Therefore, expect these cards to be good at (and have the memory for) typical graphics operations.

dotnet00 3y ago
I don't entirely agree, especially with the popularity of LLMs nowadays. While graphics are still a big portion of the pitch, compute oriented features are increasingly expected as part of the offering, especially at the higher end of the lineup. If you've bought a 3090/4090, you likely had in mind more computationally oriented tasks compared to if you've bought a 1660 or AMD card.

justinclift 3y ago

Are the ray tracing cores in Nvidia cards used for compute?

dotnet00 3y ago
All that the ray tracing cores do is accelerate calculation of BVH intersections. The rest of the tracing (ie the part that gives meaning to the BVH intersection result) is done via compute, with the RT cores being able to be 'invoked' essentially arbitrarily. This is in contrast to the way graphics cards used to be, where you had certain stages for certain things, designed specifically around producing graphics, making the 'graphics' part of the name hold more weight than nowadays. I'm not sure if you're asking if they're used for a compute application or if you're asking if they can be used from the same execution path as 'compute' code.
- zozbot234 3y ago
  Seen from first principles, BVH is quite close to some kinds of hierarchical clustering. The ray intersection part can be understood in turn as a kind of normalization, or projection to the unit sphere. So depending on how much hardware is actually reserved to this task on-chip, there might be ways of making it somewhat useful in the ML context.
- justinclift 3y ago
  Just asking if those cores tend to sit unused when "standard" compute jobs are run on the cards. :)