The Future According To nVidia

NerdMaster writes "Last week nVidia held their Spring 2008 Editor's day, where they presented their forthcoming series of graphics processing units. While the folks at Hardware Secrets couldn't tell the details of the new chips, they posted some ideas of what nVidia is seeing as the future of computing. Basically more GPGPU usage, with the system CPU losing its importance, and the co-existence of ray-tracing and rasterization on future video cards and games. In other words, the 'can of whoop-ass' nVidia has promised to open on Intel."

Who will have the better Linux driver support?

[pembo13]

That's my main influence when I purchase video cards.

Price / Perfomance works for me

[Rog7]

I'm all for it.

The more competition the better.

Anyone that worries too much about the cost a good GPU adds to the price of a PC, doesn't remember much what it was like when Intel was the only serious player in the CPU market.

This kind of future, to me, spells higher bang for the buck.

Re:Really?

[NMerriam]

Yep, I'm sure the Intel Devs have all taken a sabbatical.

The ones that work on GPUs? I'm not sure they ever even showed up for their first day of work.

Re:Well API isn't their department

[ardor]

nVidia doesn't do the APIs for their cards.

Wrong. [nvidia.com]
GPGPU absolutely demands specialized APIs - forget D3D and OGL for it. These two don't even guarantee any floating point precision, which is no big deal for games, but deadly for GPGPU tasks.

Re:Yawn

[Scoth]

Business apps might be the drivers of the most sales, but I tend to think games are the drivers of "progress". There are very few business apps that need more than NT4 on a decent sized screen with a fast enough processor to run Office. I think even Office 2007's minimum requirements say something about a 500mhz processor. Heck, a large number of companies could probably get away with Windows 3.1, Word 1.1A, Eudora Light for e-mail, and maybe some sort of spreadsheet/accounting software. You really don't need a dual core with 2GB of RAM and Vista Ultimate to send e-mail, write letters, track expenses, and surf the web a bit. As for nVidia, I'm still split on whether the graphics card is going to end up being dominant, or we're going to end up with something like 16 or 32 general purpose cores with a dynamically allocated number dedicated to graphics. I tend to think that as things are now, highly specialized dedicated graphics cards aren't going anywhere, but I've been surprised before.

Re:nVidia's split personality

[flabbergast]

And the ray tracing group at Utah, Pete Shirley and Steve Parker, now both work for nVidia as well.

Re:Who will have the better Linux driver support?

[SanityInAnarchy]

Given that nVidia already makes Linux drivers, it seems to me that the only way they could spend less money on them short of not supporting Linux at all would be to open specs and source, thus getting the Linux community to write their drivers for them.

And those drivers would actually be better. Better Linux support for less money.

So what's the holdup?

Re:Who will have the better Linux driver support?

[SanityInAnarchy]

Down, fanboy.

The last time I looked at the graphics scene, they were actually neck and neck. There were reviews for new cards from each, and depending on the publisher, they might go one way or another.

At no point do I remember ATI no longer being relevant.

So, do you have anything to back that statement up, or are you just going to keep parroting the nVidia party line?