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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.
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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"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?)
I forsee a coming together of household technology. The CPU will also become the oven and the GPU will also become the water heater.
Wait until you have to switch your PC from a regular 110V outlet to a round 220V outlet like the ones they use for electric ovens.
Maybe if you had a little meter next to you that rang up how much you were paying for electricity since you turned on your pc people would be more conservative. Right now it is a bit of a hidden cost since it all gets lumped together into a monthly bill, along with your AC, fridge, etc.
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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?