8 ms·

iGPUs have climbed high enough that they are overpowered for "normal" tasks like video watching and playing browser games. They can even do 1080p 60 FPS gaming

iGPUs have climbed high enough that they are overpowered for "normal" tasks like video watching and playing browser games. They can even do 1080p 60 FPS gaming to a decently high standard. And we've already proven via ARM that RISC architectures are more than ready for everything from embedded to high-power compute. What happens when iGPUs get good enough for 1440p 120 FPS high-end gaming? Game visuals have plateaued on the rasterization front. Once iGPUs are good enough, nobody will have much reason to get anything other than a tiny mini PC. The last frontier for GPUs will be raw supercomputing. Basically all PCs from there on out will just be mini machines. The next few years will be very interesting.

stefan_ 2y ago
The same as always, we crank up the resolution? Sorry to say but your 1080p and 1440p is already a few years behind, so "the next few years" aren't terribly exciting.
hyperthesis 2y ago
There's still real-time ray-tracing. Cosmetic physics can eat up more, but as a gameplay mechanic, user interaction with realistic physics are too unpredictable (beyond a gimmick). Of course, we could then get actual computer sports.
jsheard 2y ago
Memory bandwidth is the major bottleneck holding iGPUs back, the conventional approach to CPU RAM is absolutely nowhere near fast enough to keep a big GPU fed. I think the only way to break through that barrier is to do what Apple is doing - move all of the memory on-package and, unfortunately, give up the ability to upgrade it yourself.
- ryukafalz 2y ago
  If so I would like to see more of what the MNT Reform[0] is doing. You can have your CPU, GPU, and memory all on a single board while still making that board a module in a reusable chassis. There's no reason the rest of the device needs to be scrapped when you upgrade. [0] https://mntre.com/modularity.html https://mntre.com/modularity.html
- gabrielhidasy 2y ago
  Move some (but not all) memory on package? NUMA is not easy but it's an option.
- resource_waste 2y ago
  The problem is there is still a limit. There is a reason we have GPUs. I genuinely can't figure out if Apple has a point, or is doing something quirky so they can overcharge outsiders. Given 0 other companies are really investing resources and Nvidia is the giant, I'd guess its the later. I see too many reddit posts about disappointed CPU LLM users who wanted to run large models.
  - jsheard 2y ago
    > I genuinely can't figure out if Apple has a point, or is doing something quirky so they can overcharge outsiders. Well, Apple was already soldering the memory onto the motherboard in most of their Intel machines, so moving the memory on-package didn't really change their ability to gouge for memory upgrades much. They were already doing that.
  - faeriechangling 2y ago
    Apple using a 512-bit memory bus on its Max processors is indeed the future of APUs if you ask me. AMD is coming out with Strix Halo soon with a 256bit memory bus, on the high end we're also seen the niche ampere platform running Arm CPUs with 576-bit buses. PS5 uses a 256-bit bus and Series X a 320-bit bus, but they're using GDDR instead of DDR which increases costs and latency to optimise for bandwidth but there's no reason you couldn't design a laptop or steam deck that did the same thing. AMD has their MI300X which is using 192gb HBM3 over a 8192-bit bus. I don't think it's just apple going this way, and I do think that more and more of the market is going to be using this unified approach instead of the approach of having a processor and coprocessor separated over a tiny PCIe bus with separate DDR/GDDR memory pools. With portable devices especially, more and more every year I struggle to see how the architecture is justified when I see the battery life benefits of ridding yourself of all this extra hardware. LLM inferencing also creates a nice incentive to go APU because the dual processor architecture tends to result in excessive bandwidth and anemic capacity. Nvidia may be the giant yet if you look at what most gamers actually run on, they run on Apple APUs, Snapdragon APUs, and AMD APUs. PCs with a discrete CPU and separate Nvidia GPUs have become a relatively smaller slice of the market despite that market segment having grown and Nvidia having a stranglehold upon it. The average game developed is not developed to run on a separate CPU and GPU monster beast - they're designed to run on a phone APU - and something like a Max processor is much more powerful than required to run the average game coming out.
- 15155 2y ago
  I would rather be in a world where we have skilled hot-air rework shops in major cities (like Shenzhen has) that can cheaply do this upgrade. The speed of light isn't changing, nor is EMI. Upgradability is directly at odds with high-speed, RF-like, timing-sensitive protocols. "Planned obsolescence!!!" - no: electrical reality.
  - bluGill 2y ago
    The upgrade would be replace the iGPU including the memory on board. Upgrades are not really environmentally good. They might be the best compromise, but the parts you take off still are discarded.
    - 15155 2y ago
      Why are they discarded?
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - throwaway11460 2y ago
      But it's still better than discarding the whole thing, isn't it?
      - paulmd 2y ago
        Why discard anything at all? If the laptop is sufficiently durable it should be able to endure multiple owners over its functional lifespan.
        throwuxiytayq 2y ago
        It often takes a very slight upgrade to give the hardware a whole new life. Plenty of macbooks with 8GB of RAM out there.
        talldayo 2y ago
        Well one day the SSD will fail, and then your options are as follows: 1) reflow the board with a steady hand 2) bin it The overwhelming majority of customers will not choose option 1.
- doctorpangloss 2y ago
  I am pretty sure cooling is holding back performance on iPhones and other cellphones though. It throttles after about 5m of typical high end 3D gameplay. That’s how it can be much faster than a Switch including using faster RAM than it but not really useful as a game console.
- papruapap 2y ago
  I dont think. AMD is releasing a 256b width soon, we will how it performs.
kanwisher 2y ago
We keep making more intensive games and applications that tax the gpu more. LLMs have already kicked off another 5 year cycle of upgrades before they run full speed on consumer hardware
- citizenpaul 2y ago
  Isn't one of the issues with local LLM the huge amount of GPU memory needed? I'd say that we'll go a lot longer than 5 years before phones have 24+GB of VRAM.
- jerlam 2y ago
  It's very questionable whether consumers want to spend the money to run LLMs on local hardware; nor do companies want them to, instead of charging a subscription fee. High-end PC gaming is still a small niche. Every new and more powerful gaming console does worse than the previous generation. VR hasn't taken off to a significant degree.
testfrequency 2y ago
You know, I agreed with this years ago and spent $4,000 on a SSFPC based on Intel NUC…only to have Intel drop NUC entirely. While NUC has integrated graphics, the major benefit was pairing it with a full sized GPU. Now I’m stuck with an old CPU, and have little reason to upgrade the GPU. I guess my main hope is it’s modular and seamless to upgrade small frame machines in the future, so I can keep a case standard for generations.
- netbioserror 2y ago
  It's my hope as well that maybe a new upgradeable standard for mini-PCs comes about. But keep in mind, Linux doesn't care much if the hardware configuration changes. One could conceivably just move their SSD and other drives to a new mini PC and have a brand new system running their old OS setup. If only Microsoft were so accommodating. The added benefit being how useful a mini PC can be over an old tower. Just buy a cheap SSD and: Give it to grandma; turn it into a NAS; use it as a home automation hub; use it as a TV media center; any number of other possibilities that a small form factor would allow. All things that were possible with an old tower PC, but far less convenient. And now that we're on a pretty stable software performance plateau (when we don't throw in browsers), newer chips can conceivably last much longer, decades, even.
  - Dalewyn 2y ago
    >If only Microsoft were so accommodating. You can use sysprep[1], though nowadays you don't even need to do that most of the time. [1]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/manufacture/desktop/sysprep--system-preparation--overview?view=windows-11 https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/manufactu...
Dalewyn 2y ago
>What happens when iGPUs get good enough for 1440p 120 FPS high-end gaming? The video card goes the down the same road as the sound card. Given how expensive video cards have gotten thanks first to cryptocurrency mining and now "AI", it's only a matter of time.
saidinesh5 2y ago
What makes it even more interesting is more and more people are starting to enjoy AA games more than AAA games for various reasons .. (cost, more experimental/novel game play mechanics/story) It feels like the next few years would be really glorious for handheld gaming...
- nothercastle 2y ago
  Basically every AAA game has been bad recently. Only interesting games are in the AA and indie categories
wiseowise 2y ago
> What happens when iGPUs get good enough for 1440p 120 FPS high-end gaming? Hell yeah, we celebrate.
MrBuddyCasino 2y ago
> What happens when iGPUs get good enough for 1440p 120 FPS high-end gaming? They won't with the mainstream number of memory channels, where iGPUs are severely bandwidth starved. AMD Strix Halo wants to change that, but then the cost difference to a discrete GPU gets smaller. They might cannibalise even more of the low-end market, but I'm not sure they will make mid-range (or high-end) dGPUs obsolete.
fidotron 2y ago
For the near future actually using this power does cause a notable battery hit. We reached the point a while back with mobile 3D where you actively have to hold yourself back to stop draining the battery as so many devices will keep up frame rate wise to a surprising degree. Mobile phones have taught us another annoying lesson though: edge compute will forever be under-utilized. I would go so far as to say now a huge proportion of the mainstream audience are simply not impressed by any advances in this area, the noise is almost entirely just developers.
- callalex 2y ago
  Increased edge compute has brought a lot of consumer features if you take a step back and think about it. On-device, responsive speech recognition that doesn’t suck is now possible on watches and phones without a server round trip, and a ton of image processing such as subject classification and background detection is used heavily. Neither of those applications were even possible 5-7 years ago and now even the cheap stuff can do it.
ethanholt1 2y ago
I was able to get Counter-Strike 2 running on an iGPU of a fourth gen Radeon chip. Don’t remember the name, but I got barely 10FPS and it was unplayable, but it ran. And it was amazing.
- msh 2y ago
  CS2 runs fine on a steam deck with its iGPU
beAbU 2y ago
Cloud gaming + a monthly subscription is probably going to be the end result. Inwon't be suprised if the next xbox generation is a streaming stick + wireless controller. The writing is on the wall for me. A cheap streaming device + a modest games subscription will open the platform up to many who are currently held back by the cost of the console.
- byteknight 2y ago
  At the detriment of experience.
- hollerith 2y ago
  Hasn't that been tried by well-funded companies like Google starting over 10 years ago and failed?
  - 0x457 2y ago
    Stadia was doomed to fail: - You have to buy all the games all over again - people, that are familiar with google ways, didn't want to invest anything into stadia - stadia controller, while nice, didn't want with anything, but stadia until recently (still doesn't work with ATV for some reason) - Google own devices didn't support Stadia for absolutely no reason (you could have side-loaded the app, and it worked just fine) xCloud always felt much better than Stadia when playing.
  - gabrielhidasy 2y ago
    Didn't really fail, GeForce Now is still available and working well. Stadia was abandoned by Google but worked really well for the ones that had good internet and lived close enough to the data-centers. The bad part is needing to live close to a big, expensive, GPU-heavy data-center, but if mobile GPU's are getting that good, maybe in the near future we could have single servers or small racks serving a few dozen to a few hundred players, that would be much easier to co-locate, grow as needed, and improve latency.
  - masterj 2y ago
    Yes, but sometimes ideas come ahead of the infrastructure that would enable them, in this case fiber rollouts and geographically distributed data centers with GPUs. I've been really impressed by GeForce Now lately and XBox Cloud Gaming is a thing.
maxglute 2y ago
More mobile desktop mode plz.
Salgat 2y ago
8k-16k is the breakpoint where pixel density is high enough to no longer need anti-aliasing, so we have a ways to go, but once we hit that, we still have a long ways to go in rendering quality. Screenshots can look really nice, but dynamic visuals are still way behind realistic graphics you'd expect to see in movies.
hbn 2y ago
Don't worry, no matter how good hardware gets, you can rest assured bad software will push it to the limits and further push the minimum system requirements to run anything as basic as a note taking app or music player. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_and_Bill%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_and_Bill%27s_law
- banish-m4 2y ago
  Sigh. The problem with fast hardware is it enables ever worse software development techniques. Perhaps we need 80286-level hardware performance levels again and then unlimited performance for 6 months once every decade.
taskforcegemini 2y ago
but this is still far from good enough for VR
refriedbeans 2y ago
Even today, the 4090 with path tracing cannot achieve 1440p at 120 fps in Cyberpunk, and the 1% lows are not great. Also, high-resolution VR will require much more performance.(Unless we manage to get foveated rendering working effectively)
- netbioserror 2y ago
  Maybe high-end is the wrong word. I mean the games people play commonly and regularly. Most of those can be played at 1440p ~90fps as far back as Turing or the Radeon 5000, I think. Most people have at least that at this point.

stefan_ 2y ago

The same as always, we crank up the resolution? Sorry to say but your 1080p and 1440p is already a few years behind, so "the next few years" aren't terribly exciting.

hyperthesis 2y ago

There's still real-time ray-tracing. Cosmetic physics can eat up more, but as a gameplay mechanic, user interaction with realistic physics are too unpredictable (beyond a gimmick). Of course, we could then get actual computer sports.

jsheard 2y ago

Memory bandwidth is the major bottleneck holding iGPUs back, the conventional approach to CPU RAM is absolutely nowhere near fast enough to keep a big GPU fed. I think the only way to break through that barrier is to do what Apple is doing - move all of the memory on-package and, unfortunately, give up the ability to upgrade it yourself.

ryukafalz 2y ago
If so I would like to see more of what the MNT Reform[0] is doing. You can have your CPU, GPU, and memory all on a single board while still making that board a module in a reusable chassis. There's no reason the rest of the device needs to be scrapped when you upgrade. [0] https://mntre.com/modularity.html https://mntre.com/modularity.html
gabrielhidasy 2y ago
Move some (but not all) memory on package? NUMA is not easy but it's an option.
resource_waste 2y ago
The problem is there is still a limit. There is a reason we have GPUs. I genuinely can't figure out if Apple has a point, or is doing something quirky so they can overcharge outsiders. Given 0 other companies are really investing resources and Nvidia is the giant, I'd guess its the later. I see too many reddit posts about disappointed CPU LLM users who wanted to run large models.
- jsheard 2y ago
  > I genuinely can't figure out if Apple has a point, or is doing something quirky so they can overcharge outsiders. Well, Apple was already soldering the memory onto the motherboard in most of their Intel machines, so moving the memory on-package didn't really change their ability to gouge for memory upgrades much. They were already doing that.
- faeriechangling 2y ago
  Apple using a 512-bit memory bus on its Max processors is indeed the future of APUs if you ask me. AMD is coming out with Strix Halo soon with a 256bit memory bus, on the high end we're also seen the niche ampere platform running Arm CPUs with 576-bit buses. PS5 uses a 256-bit bus and Series X a 320-bit bus, but they're using GDDR instead of DDR which increases costs and latency to optimise for bandwidth but there's no reason you couldn't design a laptop or steam deck that did the same thing. AMD has their MI300X which is using 192gb HBM3 over a 8192-bit bus. I don't think it's just apple going this way, and I do think that more and more of the market is going to be using this unified approach instead of the approach of having a processor and coprocessor separated over a tiny PCIe bus with separate DDR/GDDR memory pools. With portable devices especially, more and more every year I struggle to see how the architecture is justified when I see the battery life benefits of ridding yourself of all this extra hardware. LLM inferencing also creates a nice incentive to go APU because the dual processor architecture tends to result in excessive bandwidth and anemic capacity. Nvidia may be the giant yet if you look at what most gamers actually run on, they run on Apple APUs, Snapdragon APUs, and AMD APUs. PCs with a discrete CPU and separate Nvidia GPUs have become a relatively smaller slice of the market despite that market segment having grown and Nvidia having a stranglehold upon it. The average game developed is not developed to run on a separate CPU and GPU monster beast - they're designed to run on a phone APU - and something like a Max processor is much more powerful than required to run the average game coming out.
15155 2y ago
I would rather be in a world where we have skilled hot-air rework shops in major cities (like Shenzhen has) that can cheaply do this upgrade. The speed of light isn't changing, nor is EMI. Upgradability is directly at odds with high-speed, RF-like, timing-sensitive protocols. "Planned obsolescence!!!" - no: electrical reality.
- bluGill 2y ago
  The upgrade would be replace the iGPU including the memory on board. Upgrades are not really environmentally good. They might be the best compromise, but the parts you take off still are discarded.
  - 15155 2y ago
    Why are they discarded?
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - throwaway11460 2y ago
    But it's still better than discarding the whole thing, isn't it?
    - paulmd 2y ago
      Why discard anything at all? If the laptop is sufficiently durable it should be able to endure multiple owners over its functional lifespan.
      - throwuxiytayq 2y ago
        It often takes a very slight upgrade to give the hardware a whole new life. Plenty of macbooks with 8GB of RAM out there.
      - talldayo 2y ago
        Well one day the SSD will fail, and then your options are as follows: 1) reflow the board with a steady hand 2) bin it The overwhelming majority of customers will not choose option 1.
doctorpangloss 2y ago
I am pretty sure cooling is holding back performance on iPhones and other cellphones though. It throttles after about 5m of typical high end 3D gameplay. That’s how it can be much faster than a Switch including using faster RAM than it but not really useful as a game console.
papruapap 2y ago
I dont think. AMD is releasing a 256b width soon, we will how it performs.

kanwisher 2y ago

We keep making more intensive games and applications that tax the gpu more. LLMs have already kicked off another 5 year cycle of upgrades before they run full speed on consumer hardware

citizenpaul 2y ago
Isn't one of the issues with local LLM the huge amount of GPU memory needed? I'd say that we'll go a lot longer than 5 years before phones have 24+GB of VRAM.
jerlam 2y ago
It's very questionable whether consumers want to spend the money to run LLMs on local hardware; nor do companies want them to, instead of charging a subscription fee. High-end PC gaming is still a small niche. Every new and more powerful gaming console does worse than the previous generation. VR hasn't taken off to a significant degree.

testfrequency 2y ago

You know, I agreed with this years ago and spent $4,000 on a SSFPC based on Intel NUC…only to have Intel drop NUC entirely. While NUC has integrated graphics, the major benefit was pairing it with a full sized GPU. Now I’m stuck with an old CPU, and have little reason to upgrade the GPU. I guess my main hope is it’s modular and seamless to upgrade small frame machines in the future, so I can keep a case standard for generations.

netbioserror 2y ago
It's my hope as well that maybe a new upgradeable standard for mini-PCs comes about. But keep in mind, Linux doesn't care much if the hardware configuration changes. One could conceivably just move their SSD and other drives to a new mini PC and have a brand new system running their old OS setup. If only Microsoft were so accommodating. The added benefit being how useful a mini PC can be over an old tower. Just buy a cheap SSD and: Give it to grandma; turn it into a NAS; use it as a home automation hub; use it as a TV media center; any number of other possibilities that a small form factor would allow. All things that were possible with an old tower PC, but far less convenient. And now that we're on a pretty stable software performance plateau (when we don't throw in browsers), newer chips can conceivably last much longer, decades, even.
- Dalewyn 2y ago
  >If only Microsoft were so accommodating. You can use sysprep[1], though nowadays you don't even need to do that most of the time. [1]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/manufacture/desktop/sysprep--system-preparation--overview?view=windows-11 https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/manufactu...

Dalewyn 2y ago

>What happens when iGPUs get good enough for 1440p 120 FPS high-end gaming? The video card goes the down the same road as the sound card. Given how expensive video cards have gotten thanks first to cryptocurrency mining and now "AI", it's only a matter of time.

saidinesh5 2y ago

What makes it even more interesting is more and more people are starting to enjoy AA games more than AAA games for various reasons .. (cost, more experimental/novel game play mechanics/story) It feels like the next few years would be really glorious for handheld gaming...

nothercastle 2y ago
Basically every AAA game has been bad recently. Only interesting games are in the AA and indie categories

wiseowise 2y ago

> What happens when iGPUs get good enough for 1440p 120 FPS high-end gaming? Hell yeah, we celebrate.

MrBuddyCasino 2y ago

> What happens when iGPUs get good enough for 1440p 120 FPS high-end gaming? They won't with the mainstream number of memory channels, where iGPUs are severely bandwidth starved. AMD Strix Halo wants to change that, but then the cost difference to a discrete GPU gets smaller. They might cannibalise even more of the low-end market, but I'm not sure they will make mid-range (or high-end) dGPUs obsolete.

fidotron 2y ago

For the near future actually using this power does cause a notable battery hit. We reached the point a while back with mobile 3D where you actively have to hold yourself back to stop draining the battery as so many devices will keep up frame rate wise to a surprising degree. Mobile phones have taught us another annoying lesson though: edge compute will forever be under-utilized. I would go so far as to say now a huge proportion of the mainstream audience are simply not impressed by any advances in this area, the noise is almost entirely just developers.

callalex 2y ago
Increased edge compute has brought a lot of consumer features if you take a step back and think about it. On-device, responsive speech recognition that doesn’t suck is now possible on watches and phones without a server round trip, and a ton of image processing such as subject classification and background detection is used heavily. Neither of those applications were even possible 5-7 years ago and now even the cheap stuff can do it.

ethanholt1 2y ago

I was able to get Counter-Strike 2 running on an iGPU of a fourth gen Radeon chip. Don’t remember the name, but I got barely 10FPS and it was unplayable, but it ran. And it was amazing.

msh 2y ago
CS2 runs fine on a steam deck with its iGPU

beAbU 2y ago

Cloud gaming + a monthly subscription is probably going to be the end result. Inwon't be suprised if the next xbox generation is a streaming stick + wireless controller. The writing is on the wall for me. A cheap streaming device + a modest games subscription will open the platform up to many who are currently held back by the cost of the console.

byteknight 2y ago
At the detriment of experience.
hollerith 2y ago
Hasn't that been tried by well-funded companies like Google starting over 10 years ago and failed?
- 0x457 2y ago
  Stadia was doomed to fail: - You have to buy all the games all over again - people, that are familiar with google ways, didn't want to invest anything into stadia - stadia controller, while nice, didn't want with anything, but stadia until recently (still doesn't work with ATV for some reason) - Google own devices didn't support Stadia for absolutely no reason (you could have side-loaded the app, and it worked just fine) xCloud always felt much better than Stadia when playing.
- gabrielhidasy 2y ago
  Didn't really fail, GeForce Now is still available and working well. Stadia was abandoned by Google but worked really well for the ones that had good internet and lived close enough to the data-centers. The bad part is needing to live close to a big, expensive, GPU-heavy data-center, but if mobile GPU's are getting that good, maybe in the near future we could have single servers or small racks serving a few dozen to a few hundred players, that would be much easier to co-locate, grow as needed, and improve latency.
- masterj 2y ago
  Yes, but sometimes ideas come ahead of the infrastructure that would enable them, in this case fiber rollouts and geographically distributed data centers with GPUs. I've been really impressed by GeForce Now lately and XBox Cloud Gaming is a thing.

maxglute 2y ago

More mobile desktop mode plz.

Salgat 2y ago

8k-16k is the breakpoint where pixel density is high enough to no longer need anti-aliasing, so we have a ways to go, but once we hit that, we still have a long ways to go in rendering quality. Screenshots can look really nice, but dynamic visuals are still way behind realistic graphics you'd expect to see in movies.

hbn 2y ago

Don't worry, no matter how good hardware gets, you can rest assured bad software will push it to the limits and further push the minimum system requirements to run anything as basic as a note taking app or music player. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_and_Bill%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_and_Bill%27s_law

banish-m4 2y ago
Sigh. The problem with fast hardware is it enables ever worse software development techniques. Perhaps we need 80286-level hardware performance levels again and then unlimited performance for 6 months once every decade.

taskforcegemini 2y ago

but this is still far from good enough for VR

refriedbeans 2y ago

Even today, the 4090 with path tracing cannot achieve 1440p at 120 fps in Cyberpunk, and the 1% lows are not great. Also, high-resolution VR will require much more performance.(Unless we manage to get foveated rendering working effectively)

netbioserror 2y ago
Maybe high-end is the wrong word. I mean the games people play commonly and regularly. Most of those can be played at 1440p ~90fps as far back as Turing or the Radeon 5000, I think. Most people have at least that at this point.