The end of gaming-focused GPUs? (GT300 article)

There is an interesting article about the next Nvidia architecture on AnandTech. It describes the design of the GT300 which is due out some time next year. The cards based on this will play games of course (Nvidia claims they'll be better than the RV870 which is behind AMD/ATI's latest Radeon 5870 and 5850 cards), but the interesting part is just how much of the chip is devoted to things other than gaming. It will support C++, ECC and various other things more often associated with CPUs than GPUs.

The article says this in its Final Words section:

What do people think? It's pretty clear that today's high end (desktop) GPUs are only necessary if your really must have all of the bells and whistles in the most demanding games and even then you probably need to be running at 2560x1600 to see the difference. It would be pretty neat if GPUs moved towards general computing and merged with CPUs at some point down the line.

 

Well, AMD's purchase of ATI was a part of a big push to do CPU/GPU integration (I remember reading things about having GPUs that plug directly in to special ports on the CPU), so the idea of heavy integration isn't exactly new. Also, while they are focusing on mobile etc as thier growth area, there will always be the CAD and high end gaming markets on PCs. Stopping making GPUs would be throwing money out the window for NVIDIA.

 

It is very interesting, but as long as there are people (such as myself) who demand the giddy experience of going into a game's graphics options and saying something like this to themselves: "on, on on on, high, high, high, high, very high, max, max, max, max, APPLY!!" etc, then graphics cards will continue to thrive on delivering graphics.

 

could be. since the 360s and ps3s have been dragging pcs down for some time now. high performance gfx cards have no place to stretch muscles.

 

lol the end of gaming focused gpu? really? they don't necessarily have to make gaming specific performance cards if it can be optimized to do 'general computing' stuff as well. let's just say if they stop making latest and greatest gaming cards that technology has to offer, somebody else will. how do you think Nvidia and ATI lasted as long as they have if there weren't a great deal of demand for their high end cards with huge markup. it's like saying the success atom processors will stop intel and AMD from making high end processors. gotta love these ridiculous paranoia articles that try to ^^ the readership.

 

Interesting article to read but I doubt it will be the end of game focused gpu. At least not during 2010.

 

I think you are missing the point. The cards will still play games, it's just that there will be a lot of stuff on there that has nothing to do with gaming. For example, ECC is completely irrelevant to the rendering of graphics -- no human will ever notice that one pixel in one frame is not what it should be. Native C++ support likewise doesn't do much for gaming (not unless somebody intends to use these cards in a very different way). The important part is that these features are not free: they make the die bigger and thus make the cards more expensive to produce (never mind development time).

Who? Making GPUs that are on par with even the current generation requires an investment on the order of multiple billions of dollars. I can't really think of any company other than AMD, Intel and Nvidia who would do something like this and of those three, one has never made GPUs solely for gaming, another has just been confirmed to be moving away from doing so and the third is rumored to be interested in the same thing.

It's definitely going to take a long time (at least a few years), but it's still an interesting development.

 

It is more of a cyclic thing in all likelihood.

The demand for super high performance gaming graphics cards is going down because PC games aren't taking advantage of all that performance for normal resolution screens (which are all super high resolution anyway).

A lot of that is related to the fact that the consoles are seriously underpowered compared to those graphics cards.

So wait for the next generation of consoles to come out, and everything will shift back.

 

if nvidia moves away from dedicated graphics and the demand is still there then ATI will fill the gap. they can move in 2 directions at once. produce dedicated graphics cards and still produce gpu/cpu combo's or whatever it is they are trying to do. in the same way that a car company makes gas/diesel and hybrids and electrics.