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.

    • cosecantphi [he/him]
      ·
      9 months ago

      For gaming it's a waste.

      Generally speaking, I agree. The draw for those garden variety triple AAA games really should be the game play itself and not necessarily the graphics considering how many them are released every year. More brute force processing power to continuously increase the number of pixels with ray tracing far beyond practical limits is never going to make up for a lack of care, attention to detail, and artistry in the actual game assets.

      On the other hand, I'm a sucker for simulation games, particularly flight sims, and I can't help but think it'd be sick as hell if I could have an RTX 5090 Ti and an R9 8950X3D to make that shit look indistinguishable from real life.

      Also it's my dream for modders to make KSP look identical to MSFS, and honestly it's already halfway there. Unfortunately modding a game in that fashion, especially one that came out in the early 2010s, is always going to result in a horrific unoptimized mess. A nice realism overhaul suite of gameplay and graphics mods can easily push into requiring 64gb of RAM these days, and over 16gb of VRAM. But wow would it be worth it if I could ever afford such a system. For now I'll need to settle on the frankly depressing experience my laptop with an intel iGPU can provide.