Damn, the things used to be these thin little, well, cards. Nowadays they are reaching the size of entire consoles and can more accurately be called graphics bricks. Is the tech so stagnant that they won't be getting smaller again in the future?
The high end ones are so huge, power hungry, and fucking expensive that I'm starting to think they might as well just come with an integrated CPU and system RAM (in addition to the VRAM) on the same board.
What is the general industry expectation of what GPUs are going to be like in the mid term future, maybe 20 to 30 years from now? I expect if AI continues to grow in scope and ubiquity, then a previously unprecedented amount of effort and funding is going to be thrown at R&D for these PC components that were once primarily relegated to being toys for gamers.
Probably a good chance. Take the Steam Deck and these console "slim" versions. They take the lessons they learned, refined some aspects but basically shunk the die down 1-2 nm. allowing more space for the same power or better along with better cooling.
We're at an interesting tech time where die processes are shrinking rapidly, 6nm, 5nm...soon 3nm. We're also seeing GaN making it's debut. Faster, more power efficent, smaller space, better thermals.
I saved up to get an OC 7900 XTX and AMD is on a roll with refreshing the cards with new tech. I can run a game at 1080 or 2k and upscale it to 4k with littlee performance hit. This is negating the necessities of massive cards making do more with less. Smarter not harder. They just dropped AI frame generation which works so well I have to tune it back due to not needing 350fps ultra settings and turning my card into 100% radiant space heater. That an theres some screen tearing at that point without vertical refresh. So if it works that well with their flagship card, I'd imagine it works fairly well on their lower end cards.
So it's getting a 1-2 punch from better smarter ways of doing things and smaller more efficent chips.