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The G in GPU is for Graphics damnit
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- nomadygnt 1y agoThis is cool! I love this kind of simulation GPU programming stuff. Reminds me of this awesome talk from Peter Whidden: https://youtu.be/Hju0H3NHxVI?si=V_UZugPSL9a8eHEM https://youtu.be/Hju0H3NHxVI?si=V_UZugPSL9a8eHEM Not as technicial but similarly cool.
- Ocerge 1y agoThis is awesome. It also brought back some anxiety from >10 years ago in college that reminds me that computer graphics and my brain do not agree whatsoever.
- fragmede 1y agoEverything's just triangles and numbers, and my brain's no good with numbers. Linear algebra I can do though.
- mouse_ 1y agoIt's not the numbers that freak me out, it's what they do to each other...
- fragmede 1y agoeww...
- Keyframe 1y agoNot always. Disregarding CSGs and parametrics, Nvidia itself was almost buried for not adhering to that philosophy with their first product https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NV1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NV1 funny side note. SEGA invested $5m in Nvidia then, after the fiasco to keep them alive. They sold that equity when Nvidia went IPO for roughly $15m. Have they kept it, it would be worth $3b today. SEGA's market cap is around $4b today.
- spaceballbat 1y agoFunny nvidias first 3d accelerator used quaternions
- throwaway808081 1y agoPeople that love linear algebra reserve a special space, of either fondness or of hate, for Euclidian Space.
- Animats 1y agoGraphics is trivial until you get to shadows and lighting. Then all the simple tricks stop working.
- GuB-42 1y agoGlobal illumination is the hard part. The math isn't that hard, but even the best render farms don't have enough computing power to support a straightforward implementation. So what follow is an endless series of tricks. Path-tracing is one of the purest implementations, and it is actually a simple algorithm to implement, but if you don't want to have a noisy mess on all but the most simple shapes, now we are talking PhDs and rock star developers.
- Lwerewolf 1y agoWould you mind linking some articles or hinting towards techniques used to "coerce" the choosing of ray sample directions so that noise is minimized even in very "specular" scenes? Sorry for the lack of proper terminology on my end, I've been out of the loop for a very long time, but I assume that's where the majority of the tricks are - I suppose the rest is mostly intersection check accelerations (i.e. BVH).
- namibj 1y agoMetropolis light transport is a big one.
- omcnoe 1y agoThe modern state of the art for realtime is ml denoisers, taking noisy pixel data from multiple frames, plus other associated data eg velocity vectors of geometry, depth data etc. and using it to produce a perfectly denoised image.
- Sohcahtoa82 1y ago"perfectly" is doing some heavy lifting here. Right now, I'm heavily into Cyberpunk 2077. I've got an RTX 5090, so I can turn all the details, including the ray tracing, to their maximum settings. It's absolutely gorgeous (Especially on my 4K HDR OLED monitor), but if you look really closely, you can still see the evidence of some shortcuts being taken. Some reflections that are supposed to be a bit rough (like a thin puddle in the road) may appear a bit blurry as I'm walking, but will come into better focus when I stop. My guess is that as I'm moving, the angles of the rays being reflected change with every frame, making the data very noisy. Once I stop, they become consistent, so the reflection becomes clear.
- rob74 1y agoThe thought expressed in the title came to my mind when I saw Nvidia described as an "AI company" in the press recently...
- chii 1y agoto be fair, the percentage of their revenue derived from ai-related sales is much higher now than before. Why is that not accurate?
- shootingoyster 1y agohttps://www.wheresyoured.at/the-case-against-generative-ai/ https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-case-against-generative-ai/
- ffsm8 1y agoGN did a video a few weeks ago in which they were showing a slide from Nvidias shareholder meeting in which it was shown that gaming was a tiny part of Nvidias revenue. Basically, almost half of their revenue is pure profit and all of that comes from AI. While the slide looked a lot nicer, the data is also available on their site https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-announces-financial-results-for-fourth-quarter-and-fiscal-2025 https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-announces-financia...
- dylan604 1y agoJust because customers use their hardware for AI does not mean the hardware maker is an AI company.
- naasking 1y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45487334 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45487334 When more of their revenue comes from AI than graphics, and they're literally removing graphics output from their hardware...
- dotnet00 1y agoThere's a lot of software involved in GPUs, and NVIDIA's winning strategy has been that the software is great. They maintained a stable ecosystem across most of their consumer and workstation/server stack for many years before crypto, AI and GPU-focused HPC really blew up. AMD has generally better hardware but poor enough software that "fine wine" is a thing (ie the software takes many years post-hardware-launch to actually properly utilize the hardware). For example, they only recently got around to making AI libraries usable on the pre-covid 5700XT. NVIDIA basically owns the market because of the stability of the CUDA ecosystem. So, I think it might be fair to call them an AI company, though I definitely wouldn't call them just a hardware maker.
- moomoo11 1y agoGenerator
- Animats 1y agoDo most GPUs made for AI even have a graphical output buffer and a video output any more?
- Kokonico 1y agoI know that the NVIDIA H100 chips don't, other than those however I'm not too sure, I'd assume that that'd be the case though, no point adding extra tech you aren't gonna be using in a big datacenter.
- wtallis 1y agoThey've been aggressively removing or reducing hardware that's vestigial from the perspective of AI. NVIDIA's Hopper has no display outputs, no raytracing hardware, no video encoders, and only one of the eight GPCs has raster graphics functionality; the rest are compute-only. With their newer Blackwell parts, going from B200 to B300 they cut out almost all FP64 and INT8 capabilities so they could squeeze in more FP4 throughput.
- augment_me 1y agoYes still but perhaps not needed in next iteration when we just approximate the graphics pipeline with matrix multiplications
- GuB-42 1y agoYou can game on H100 GPUs, it is terrible though. Someone has tested it and it is on the level of a Radeon 680M, that is the performance of a typical business laptop. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-nb_DZAH-TM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-nb_DZAH-TM
- riknos314 1y agoNaming may provide useful hints about some utility of a tool but naming does not bound the utility of a tool.
- cmxch 1y agoThen who actually delivers on that front aside from AMD? Intel does deliver but only on the low to mid range.
- diegoperini 1y ago> And here are my clearly unimpressed “friends” >:( These friends don't get it!
- bblb 1y agoRoom for new competitors then? Surely Nvidia/AMD/Intel are not the only graphics vendors? Or is the tech too hard to even enter the market?
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- swiftcoder 1y agoThere are a whole raft of other GPU companies out there (Broadcom, MediaTek, PowerVR, Samsung, Qualcomm, ...), but none of them interested in the classic PC gaming space. And I'm not sure that space has been economical for a long time. Integrated GPUs have more-or-less reached a point where they can handle PC games (albeit not at the latest-and-greatest resolutions/frame-rates/ray-tracing/etc), and the market for multi-thousand-dollar dedicated GPUs just isn't very big
- jacquesm 1y ago> the market for multi-thousand-dollar dedicated GPUs just isn't very big What market research underpins this?
- swiftcoder 1y agoSteam hardware survey suggests <15% of gaming PCs are running a high-end GPU. I'm defining "high-end" as "outperforms a top tier integrated GPU", which makes it 3070/4070/5070 or above on the NVidia side of things. That's a rough upper bound of 20 million on the whole market, and NVidia + AMD already have it buttoned up - a newcomer can expect to attract a tiny fraction thereof But I think more importantly, you can see this in NVidia's focus. Most of their profits are not in the gaming space anymore.
- Sohcahtoa82 1y agoThe Steam Hardware/Software Survey [0] answers this. Look up the MSRPs of the most common GPUs. Very very few are over $1,000. If you want to interpret "multithousand" to be >= $2,000, then the answer becomes VERY small (less than 0.5%), as the highest MSRP gaming GPUs are the RTX 5090 and RTX 3090 Ti, both which technically have an MSRP of $1,999, that typically only applies to the "Founders Edition" releases done by NVIDIA. 3rd party AIBs (MSI, Gigabyte, Zotac, etc) typically charge a bit more. [0] https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Software-Survey-Welcome-to-Steam https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...
- astrea 1y agoHoly tangents, Batman! This whole post was a million interrelated topics woven into one semi-coherent textbook.
- hollowonepl 1y agoNice texture generator came out of this, with seems to be perfectly looped images! Well done!
- geldedus 1y agoSince when a name dictates function?
- andunie 1y agoI read somewhere that CPUs are better at generating graphics than GPUs (although I imagine much slower). Is that true? Does that explain why GUI libraries like Egui are so much uglier than, for example, Iced?
- indoordin0saur 1y agoWhat exactly does "better" mean if not faster?
- Sohcahtoa82 1y agoI imagine the answer is "Higher quality" or "Better customization". You can get extremely precise control over the render pipeline on a CPU since you can calculate pixels however you want. But...with today's world of pixel shaders (Really, a world that's existed for 10+ years now), I'd be surprised if there's actually any benefit to be had these days. With a proper pixel shader, I doubt there's anything you could do on a CPU that you couldn't do on a GPU, and the GPU would be massively parallel and do it much faster.
- indoordin0saur 1y agoYou give my understanding in your last sentence there. I don't think there's any "higher quality" graphics which could be rendered on a CPU that couldn't be rendered on a GPU. Since they are equivalent in their possible actions, the only differential would be speed, which is what GPUs are designed for. But to play devil's advocate against myself, I have heard that programming for GPUs can be harder for many things. So maybe usability and developer-friendliness is what is meant by CPUs being better?
- Sohcahtoa82 1y agoGPUs are TERRIBLE at executing code with tons of branches. Basically, GPUs execute instructions in lockstep groups of threads. Each group executes the same instruction at the same time. If there's a conditional, and only some of the threads in a group have a state that satisfies the condition, then the group is split and the paths are executed in serial rather than parallel. The threads following the "true" path execute while the threads that need to take the "false" path sit idle. Once the "true" threads complete, they sit idle while the "false" threads execute. Only once both threads complete do they reconverge and continue. They're designed this way because it greatly simplifies the hardware. You don't need huge branch predictors or out-of-order execution engines, and it allows you to create a processor with thousands of cores (The RTX 5090 has over 24,000 CUDA cores!) without needing thousands of instruction decoders, which would be necessary to allow each core to do its own thing. There ARE ways to work around this. For example, it can sometimes be faster to compute BOTH sides of a branch, but then merely apply the "if" on which result to select. Then, each thread would merely need to apply an assignment, so the stalls only last for an instruction or two. Of course, it's worth noting that this non-optimal behavior is only an issue with divergent branches. If every thread decides the "if" is true, there's no performance penalty.
- gbolcer 1y agoThey used to refer to it as GPGPU (general purpose) but they just shortened it maybe 10 years ago?
- larrydag 1y agoShould change the name to Matrix Processing Units
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- _ache_ 1y agoWhat does Bechara means? DuckDuckGo doesn't help me much. "Poor thing" maybe? Anyway, I think you should change friends. Or study subjects. Either way. Btw, these look like parasites or worms under microscope.
- eternityforest 1y agoI wonder if they'll ever start doing the graphics with AI. Could you render the scene in the simplest most efficient way possible, then train a special model that takes that picture, along with the coordinates of lights, depth maps, text descriptions of materials, etc, and adds detail?
- dpoloncsak 1y agoIsnt this DLSS and Frame Gen in a nutshell? DLSS - Render at low resolution, use an ML model to upscale Frame Gen - Render a frame, use an ML model to generate the next frame. Render the next, gen the next....so on (I think in practice, Frame Gen is more complicated due to fluctuation between FPS but that's another can of worms)
- eternityforest 1y agoThey're pretty much just upscaling and interpolating right? They can't fill in anything that's not actually there, like you could with a model that understands "Hey this tree is a actually just a PS2 era low poly model, but here's a picture of what it should look like, make it fit somehow"
- rdsubhas 1y agoThe G now stands for GenAI.