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Bit of a related shower thought here.. but solutions that require NVidias high end hardware are always going to be the solutions NVidia promotes right? If hyp

Bit of a related shower thought here.. but solutions that require NVidias high end hardware are always going to be the solutions NVidia promotes right? If hypothetically someone figured out some magical algorithm to do ray tracing at RTX levels of performance on a CPU, it would severely hurt them right? (Hurt them in terms of GPU market, probably a non issue now AI most of their market.)

thfuran 2y ago
Maybe then the GPUs could finally reach the ray counts needed to avoid all the temporal smearing and AI interpolation hacks.
LegionMammal978 2y ago
Easy, games will just push for higher resolutions/framerates/SFX layers until it can no longer be done on a CPU. What Andy giveth, Bill taketh away.
kevingadd 2y ago
There are plenty of graphics researchers not in NVIDIA's pocket cooking up stuff that doesn't require vendor-specific features, so I'm not worried that graphics research is being suppressed, if that's your theory. Intel and AMD are both big players with a vested interest in promoting the capability of CPUs and promoting the capability of non-NVIDIA GPUs, since they sell both. They're big and well-capitalized, so if they wanted to they could be operating big graphics research teams (whether they are is unclear to me, and it's obviously not a 'snap your fingers and you have a big graphics research team' situation, but they have the resources) In some cases if you see CUDA being used for a demo or a research project it's just because the alternative stacks kinda suck, not because only NVIDIA hardware is capable of doing the thing. Researchers aren't necessarily concerned with shipping on 99% of consumer machines, so they can reach for the most convenient approach even if it's vendor-locked. I won't be surprised if we see some researchers start targeting Apple's platform-locked Metal API in the future since they have compelling unified memory offerings with capacities exceeding everybody else's.

thfuran 2y ago

Maybe then the GPUs could finally reach the ray counts needed to avoid all the temporal smearing and AI interpolation hacks.

LegionMammal978 2y ago

Easy, games will just push for higher resolutions/framerates/SFX layers until it can no longer be done on a CPU. What Andy giveth, Bill taketh away.

kevingadd 2y ago

There are plenty of graphics researchers not in NVIDIA's pocket cooking up stuff that doesn't require vendor-specific features, so I'm not worried that graphics research is being suppressed, if that's your theory. Intel and AMD are both big players with a vested interest in promoting the capability of CPUs and promoting the capability of non-NVIDIA GPUs, since they sell both. They're big and well-capitalized, so if they wanted to they could be operating big graphics research teams (whether they are is unclear to me, and it's obviously not a 'snap your fingers and you have a big graphics research team' situation, but they have the resources) In some cases if you see CUDA being used for a demo or a research project it's just because the alternative stacks kinda suck, not because only NVIDIA hardware is capable of doing the thing. Researchers aren't necessarily concerned with shipping on 99% of consumer machines, so they can reach for the most convenient approach even if it's vendor-locked. I won't be surprised if we see some researchers start targeting Apple's platform-locked Metal API in the future since they have compelling unified memory offerings with capacities exceeding everybody else's.