
GPUs are a dying breed  - iamelgringo
http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquirer/news/2007/12/18/gpus-dying
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far33d
Oh please. It's not about pixel resolution. It's about the amount of realism
in each pixel. Pixar and FX houses render frames at the same 1080p resolutions
- but they do them at over 2-10 hours PER FRAME. The GPU is getting better,
but the artistic and realistic quality of images will probably always be in
front of the technology.

You could make this same, lame argument about CPUs, but we've always used
those limits too.

~~~
eugenejen
But GPU has nothing to do with those rendering techniques that you mentioned
in Pixar case. You don't use OpenGL pipeline on a GPU card to render a Pixar
movie, you did all tricks in non realtime offline rendering to make them
beautiful.

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iamwil
To some extent, he's right that GPU processing power will get to a point where
pumping more pixels will not be discernible to the human eye. But that doesn't
mean that there aren't more transformative steps you can insert in rendering
computer graphics to make it look more realistic. Convincing fluid and smoke
dynamics come to mind.

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henning
The work on general-purpose computing with GPUs (e.g., protein folding) has
only begun. This article is either trolling or shortsighted.

It's like looking at the web in 1995 and saying it's dying because there are
only so many pages you can fit on a "what's new" page (at one point there were
so few webpages that you could list all of them on one page).

GPUs are very exciting and a major reason why desktop computing will continue
to matter outside of business applications.

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marcus
The thing he doesn't get is that you can always have more smaller polygons,
rendering a single 3D cube is trivial in any resolution/framerate you may
want, the problem is that polygons interact/intersect and that takes some real
computing power.

Which reminds me of a UF cartoon from my youth:
[http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20000615&mode=c...](http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20000615&mode=classic)

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emfle
GPU's are getting more and more programmable, while CPU's are getting more and
more cores and streaming instructions.

It's getting harder and harder to tell them apart and this means a typical PC
more and more looks like two general purpose computers that are talking to
each other over the PCI bus. Which is kinda dumb.

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mynameishere
My eyes started glazing over when he started doing math. Did he calculate the
amount of processing power for, say, a room sized, 6-sided monitor, or for a
monitor with 1000s of layers in the Z-dimension? Because, it seems like those
would take quite a bit of power...

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tocomment
Umm, they don't make GPU's for 30 inch monitors yet. Resolution is always
increasing. How long until a GPU can run a full wall display at 300DPI?

I think they've got a lot of work ahead of them.

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mmp
640K ought to be enough for anyone!

