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Graphics State of the Union
Tom's Hardware has put out a nice recap of where computer graphics have been and where they are headed in the near future. While there are some definite shiny toys being displayed in new product releases and on the test beds, the overall problem of power consumption continues to rear its ugly head demanding attention. From the article: "while all of these things are interesting, exciting and new, the problem remains the same. Getting smaller and faster only makes sense if the design also is less demanding on the wall socket and cooling system. We all want different things when it comes to advancements, but first and foremost we need better power management. The bottom line is simple: graphics makers must take a step back from feature brainstorming until the power issue is resolved."
Ok let me post something relevant. Does the slashdot community think that the power problem is best solves through:
A) A new interface (like PCI Express version 2 now with MORE POWER(tm))
B)Onboard power management and the ability to take power straight from the power supply and bypass the motherboard.
I do agree that power is becoming quite an annoyance these days with the video cards. I would like to say that I believe that to move forward we need to take a step back. I am finding more and more games that are simply pleasing to the eye but lack the originality, functionality, and creativeness of older games. These video card makers focus too much on realism and tend to encourage game makers to focus on the like. Let's make cards that are functional, less power hungry, well-rounded (physics), and cooler.
Music, my drug; dance, my ecstasy.
The bottom line is simple: graphics makers must take a step back from feature brainstorming until the power issue is resolved.
Today this is irrelevant. If consumers continue to purchase ever more power hungry graphics cards, what is to stop the companies from making them? When the market actually changes and people start considering the power requirements of their cards, then I'll believe this statement about the bottom line. Because right now the only thing I hear from people building or buying new computers about the power requirements is "make sure you get a PFC PSU and get lots of watts", not "make sure you get a low-power GPU". For one thing, some people actually enjoy saying they have a 600+ watt PSU. I can imagine that with current power costs today this trend will continue. Do the math, it's not actually costing a person much more per month to go from 600 to a 1000 watt PSU, especially since most people don't use their GPU to full power most of the time.
Power requirements take a back seat to overall performance, and will continue to do so until electricity costs are driven up further. It's simple economics. People are willing to pay for the power-hungry cards. And until they're not, power consumption will continue to be less important to the producers than performance. This is analogous to today's vehicles, still being built and shipped with huge fuel sucking engines. For many people, and I'd wager to say enough to sustain the market for years to come, the cost of energy (either liquid or electrical) is still low enough that they aren't going to give up their cherished powers, be they piston driven or transistor.
TLF
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Thanks to the 30-40 seperate power-chomping ads on each page of Tom's Hardware stories, the lights in my office dim whenever I accidentally hover my cursor over the word "graphics," "Microsoft," or "processor." Thanks, Tom!
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This makes all those "Green PC" claims a joke. I remember my first PC. It wasn't a "Green PC", but it had a 100W power supply, no heatsinks etc. My latest PC is a "Green PC" but has a 400W power supply. I'm not sure how a 400W-based system is greener than a 100W based system, but hey it says Green so it has got to be good right?
Engineering is the art of compromise.
No kidding. I just had to get a new PSU for my higher end system, because the PSU that came with the case (supposedly 300w but apparently a cheap one) couldn't keep up. This isn't cutting edge hardware either...it's an Athlon XP 3200+, Radeon X850XT video card, SB Audigy 2 ZS. Basically all of the hardware is pretty much the cutting edge of the last generation, pre-Athlon64, pre-PCI Express. The system started experiencing problems when I swapped the old Duron 750 for the Athlon XP (I was still using a Radeon 9200 then). I had to swap the video card with a Radeon 8500 to get it to run somewhat stable again. At the time, I incorrectly attributed it to the video card, thinking it may have been bad (it was given to me when my roommate upgraded his system when he started having problems). It turns out that the 9200 was AGP 8x while the 8500 was AGP 4x and that was just enough to make a difference. The whole system died when I put the X850XT in, it wouldn't boot most of the time, spontaneous reboots constantly (Windows or Linux), Windows install would crash at the same point, etc. I swapped out the power supply with a 410W, all problems instantly vanished, and the system has been running fine since. I guess having to have a 410W isn't really that bad compared to some of the new stuff where they're starting to have 1000W PSU's though. I'm probably not going to upgrade any further from Athlon XP 3200+/Radeon X850XT for some time. I mainly just got that stuff to play WOW so I can turn the settings all the way up, I'm not really that much of a PC gamer otherwise.
I was thinking about this yesterday... I had downloaded a rom of Crono Trigger for the SNES, and I'm having a blast. When all the new games like Battlefield 2, Titan Quest, UT2004, and FEAR get old, I like to go back to the old games. So someone might say... why go back to the old games? They're old and pixellated. But they're FUN! The old classics like Crono Trigger, Secret of Mana, original Mario Bros., Zelda Link to the Past, Super Metroid... they don't make em like that anymore. And there's a generation of "gamers" coming up that have missed out on a lot because of that.
Nowadays it's all about the graphics, and the gameplay tends to (but not always) suffer. Even the best of the best new games have these problems. FEAR? A pathetic 8-9 hours of gameplay, though it was pretty fun while it lasted. Oblivion? Tons of hours of gameplay, but completely SHALLOW in terms of the overall experience. Even Morrowind had this game beat IMO. Battlefield 2? Awesome graphics, and fun gameplay... oh, but don't try running more than a few bots on your machine unless you want to run at 2fps, and forget about coop play, and don't expect single player with more than 16 player maps (mods notwithstanding).
It seems to me that the more games focus on graphics, the more they lose in other areas. They either have cut features, performance issues, lack of content, or something... this isn't always the case (think Half Life 2), but unfortunately we're paying for the 'shiny factor' more often and losing out on the content that made the old games fun. Maybe I'm getting too old, or maybe I'm just jaded, but I still miss the old style games.
When the new equipment requires more and more power, I am forced to add more and more fans to my system.
I wouldn't care a bit about power consumption if it wasn't so closely connected to noise levels.
Or C) Developing graphic cards that use less power
I stopped reading the article after it started to suggest 1100 watt power supplies are necessary for this nonsense.
I'm sorry. No video game is worth that much power.
I don't read or respond to AC posts
Just out of curiousity, lets look at the current CPU offerings.
:)
Intel came out with a truly Power-Hungry CPU.
AMD came out with a cooler and better CPU.
Intel came out with an even cooler CPU that out performed the AMD one. (Core Duo/Core 2 Duo)
The ball is now in AMDs court.
In other words, the presure on Intel was that they had to compete in that area in order to be competitive.
Perhaps AMD, coming from their battle with Intel can help focus the ATI division on less power consumption/heat generation, and perhaps that is that AMD can help bring to the table.
If they even BEGIN to make inroads in this, while maintaining a competitive stance against Nvidia, it will force Nvidia to compete on this point also, which should move GPUs in a cooler direction
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For people who don't pay for their electricity directly (like most college students) this won't be as big a factor, but for the rest of us...
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"Tom's Hardware has put out a nice recap of where computer graphics have been and where they are headed in the near future."
No. It's an article more-or-less solely devoted to discussing the issue of power consumption in new and upcoming graphics cards. It doesn't describe the state of the union or even have much to say about any shiny new toys beyond their likely impact on power consumption.
It's an interesting article, but not the article that goes with its title nor the Slashdot summary.
Not disputing anything in TFA, but there's another power-related annoyance that (IMHO) should be easier to address.
When rendering in double-buffered mode with vsync on, the graphics card driver needs to wait for the display's vertical retrace before it swaps (or blits) the back buffer to the front. Today, all Windows drivers that I know of accomplish this with a spinlock. This means that an animated app grabs ALL available CPU cycles, even if the CPU actually needed to redraw each frame is trivial, and thus runs much hotter than it ought to for the amount of work being done.
For a high-end game that stresses the system anyway, this isn't a big deal. For more modest games or non-game applets, it's embarrassing to have a single rotating triangle forcing the machine to run all-out, particularly on battery power.
Application-level 'fixes' for this problem are very unsatisfactory - mostly trying to guess how long you've got until the next flip, Sleep()ing a bit and hoping you get woken up in time. It's clumsy, imprecise and the wrong place to be solving this. Why can't the driver wait on the flip - the flip it controls, for crying out loud - in some more efficient manner? (Can the new MWAIT instruction in EMT64 help with situations like this?)
1. GPUs have higher transistor counts than modern CPUs.
2. The development cycle for GPUs is much shorter than CPUs
3. The shelf life of GPU designs is much shorter than CPU designs (the C2D is a direct descendant of the P5, (pentium 4 arch is a dead end evolutionarily).
Given the preceding, it is unlikely that a reduction of power consumption will be the focus of GPU companies in the future, it would be suicide in a market which demands performance above all else. nVidia has shown that there are significant gains to be made from G70>G71, but nothing to the order necessary, R580 (ATI) has proven to be a bloated SUV with respect to power consumption but performs quite well. Considering the difference in die size between R580 and G71 I think the mandate in this regard is profits, ATi's die is nearly twice the size of nVidia's and they are priced similarily (G71 actually pulls bigger money). Still, their power consumptions are not seperated by such a divide (a 60 watt differential would be generous). Honestly, to a great extent, this call for chip engineers to focus on poower consumption is equivalent to asking top fuel dragster engineers to focus on fuel consumption. It is not a priority, and modern graphic cards draw very little power when they aren't doing anything, which is most of the time. A situation will manifest itself if top end systems start to surpass 10 to 15A draws on the 120v line (1200-1800 watt peak), but that is a way off yet. Heat dissipation will become a problem long before we hit those kind of limits I would suspect.
For all the complaining that Tom's does about the escalation of video card power usage, you don't see them benchmarking peak power consumption on their video card comparisons. It's all framerates and synthetics.
Why would a PC builder take power usage into consideration if the major review sites don't?
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Also, consider this an official request for a way to edit posts in the first minute after they're posted.
I'm a little wary everytime someone talks about how great video games were in the past, and how new games have it wrong because of "X", where "X" represents something like lack of creativity, too much complexity, or in this case, too much dependence on graphics.
Don't get me wrong, I loved most of those games as well. But we should realize that those of us who played them are under the aura of the "video game nostalgia", where those games can almost do no wrong. There have been times where I've tried to re-play older titles, and just realized that while they were great for their time, there ARE advances in current games which I do miss (whether it be better game mechanics, or graphics, or gameplay balance, etc.). For example, the original Mario Bros was great for its time, but there's no way I'd spend hours playing it anymore (although that's just me).
Yes, there are some classic games that I'll love to play now, no matter what. But it's not because they didn't do "X". It's because they were just good games. There are plenty of games today that I enjoy that do "X", that I'm sure we'll be talking about 10 years from now. And I'm sure there were plenty of folks 10 years ago, lamenting how those generation of games were not "getting it" by doing too much of "X", and bringing up nostalgia over even older games (Zork, etc.).
And finally, it goes without saying but sometimes it seems like it's not obvious enough to people: Game quality is subjective!. I happen to like Oblivion far more than Morrowind (which I never got close to finishing). It wasn't the graphics that I liked so much (if anything it was much too uncanny valley for me). I know a ton of people that happened to love the exact games you cited as being bad, so to each his own.
-- jchenx
If you want to play the latest games at 1800 x 1400 or whatever than yes you will need a giant heat producing card with a fan that sounds like a jet taking off.
FUD, pure and simple.
For $30 (and less) you can buy a nearly noiseless heatsink that will cool your card better than most stock heatsinks (e.g. Zalman VF(7/9)00, Arctic Cooling Silencer line), and if you don't want to go the DIY route there are more and more cards coming out that have quality quiet heatsinks preinstalled (e.g. ICEQ3 by HIS).
"The past is but the beginning of a beginning, and all that is and has been is but the twilight of the dawn."
Modern PCs consume a *horrible* amounts of power. I bet if power consumption were taxable that consumption could miraculously drop by a third without any loss in performance. Suddenly you would find that hardware & software makers flip on the power saving functionality by default rather than expecting people to find it. And the Nvidia & ATIs of this world producing desktop GPUs which have performance characteristics closer to their laptop versions. If Intel can produce CPUs that consume less power than the last generation then the GPU makers sure as hell can too. Who knows, it might even lead to cheaper graphics cards since they won't need so much circuitry including power connectors and massive fans to keep them cool.