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GPUs Keep Getting Faster, But Your Eyes Can't Tell
itwbennett writes "This brings to mind an earlier Slashdot discussion about whether we've hit the limit on screen resolution improvements on handheld devices. But this time, the question revolves around ever-faster graphics processing units (GPUs) and the resolution limits of desktop monitors. ITworld's Andy Patrizio frames the problem like this: 'Desktop monitors (I'm not talking laptops except for the high-end laptops) tend to vary in size from 20 to 24 inches for mainstream/standard monitors, and 27 to 30 inches for the high end. One thing they all have in common is the resolution. They have pretty much standardized on 1920x1080. That's because 1920x1080 is the resolution for HDTV, and it fits 20 to 24-inch monitors well. Here's the thing: at that resolution, these new GPUs are so powerful you get no major, appreciable gain over the older generation.' Or as Chris Angelini, editorial director for Tom's Hardware Guide, put it, 'The current high-end of GPUs gives you as much as you'd need for an enjoyable experience. Beyond that and it's not like you will get nothing, it's just that you will notice less benefit.'"
Aren't there are other areas of science that a faster GPU benefits namely structural biology and the modeling proteins?
-- Jim
Your website could be better. Getting weekly feedback is a good starting point.
they need to handle more stuff happening on the screen.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
What about things like Oculus and rendering with 2 separate cameras?
Make it draw less power!
Mr. America walk on by your schools that do not teach Mr. America walk on by the minds that won't be reached
-Multimonitor gaming
-3D gaming (120 Hz refresh rate or higher)
-4K gaming
keep em coming, and keep em affordable!
One thing they all have in common is the resolution.
So 2560x1440 and 2560x1600 27"s only exist in my imagination?
... can certainly tell. The more onscreen objects there are the more slowdown there is. This is why I like sites like HardOCP that look at MIN and MAX framerates during a gameplay session. No one cares that a basic non-interactive timedemo gets 100's of frames a second, they are concerned with the framerate floor during actually playing the game.
In cutting edge games, FPS still suffers even at low resolutions.
Many users are going to multi-monitor setups to increase their visualization and even cutting edge graphics cards cannot handle gaming at 1920x1080 x 3 display setups on taxing games or applications (e.g. Crysis).
OK that was just joke-trolling. But I don't agree that we should settle for 1080p regardless. I found myself a $200 deal on a Dell Ultrasharp U2410 for my big system, where the important graphics happen. It does 1920x1200 and it's very nice. I would surely rather have a 27" monitor with the 1600p or whatnot resolution, but money has to be spent on practical things sometimes.
This also sounds like a previous Slashdot discussion about GPUs...
For games, GPU's have to process 3D geometry, light, shadows, etc. Number of pixels is not the only factor. This is so lame.
Sig? Heil
8K resolution, 120hz. Nuff said.
If you're spending the kind of $$$ to get high-end GPUs, you're also spending the $$$ for 30" monitors with 2560 x 1600 resolution or more.
Dell has a mind-blowing 31.5" monitor coming out that has a resolution of 3840 x 2160.
Without a good GPU this Green Lantern costume looks like an Ace Frehley costume!
It's not just about drawing a flat image, it's also dealing with all sorts of other stuff (multiple objects, camera angles, etc..).
Throw in there multiple monitors and you can definitely push even a high end card to the point of lag.
That statement makes the rash assumption that GPUs will somehow continue to grow in speed and complexity while everything around them remains static. What about stereoscopic displays which would double the required number of pixels to be rendered for the equivalent of a 2d image? What about HMDs like the forthcoming Oculus Rift, which over time will need to continue pushing the boundaries of higher resolution displays? Who on earth is thinking that the display industry is thinking "whelp, that's it! we've hit 1080p! we can all go home now, there's nothing left to do!" ? 1080p on a 24 inch display is nowhere close to the maximum PPI we can perceive at a normal desktop viewing distance, why is that the boundary? Why are 24" displays the end? Yes, improving technology has diminishing returns. That's nothing groundbreaking, and using that to somehow suggest that we have peaked in terms of usable GPU performance is just downright silly.
If you're talking 2D desktop-type computing (surfing, emails, writing documents etc) the point of this article has already been true for at least a decade.
If you're talking 3D hardware rendering (most usually gaming), there is no such thing as enough GPU power, as its also about consistently achieving the highest framerates your monitor can handle, while having every eye-candy setting maxxed out on the latest AAA games, which are mostly already developed to get the most out of the current and next generation hardware. Its a moving goalpost on purpose.
Get some volunteers, let them play on a machine with an old GPU and a machine with a new one. If they can tell which is which, then apparently our eyes can see the difference. I'd be curious to see the result.
A GPU is no longer a Graphics Processing Unit, it's a general purpose DSP usable for tasks that have simple logic that must done in a massively parallel fashion. No, I'm actually not talking about mining bitcoins or specialty stuff, I'm talking about things like physics engines.
On the other hand, they are still WAY behind the curve measured by the "My screen isn't 4xAA RAYTRACED yet" crowd.
They ARE out to get you simply because They are in it for themselves and they don't care about you.
Even if the framerates or the resolution are ok it still comes down to what quality of imagery is being produced on screen, so saying that the gpus do not need to get faster is like saying we dont want a better visual quality from now on.... Games still do not look like feature film VFX and as long as they dont faster graphics are warranted... Just my 2 cents.
More polygons, for a) better graphics, b) easier graphics creation (from 3-d capture), and c) fewer tricks required to keep frame rates up. We're not horribly far from being able to just 3-D capture the real world to create game worlds. This will also allow really interesting special affects that persist for hours instead of seconds.
Now maybe we can have gameplay and originality again.
"There is considerable debate over what is the limit of the human eye when it comes to frame rate; some say 24, others say 30,"
That's what is studied and discussed as as the lower limit to trick people into thinking it is in motion. I believe there are other studies where they have used pilots as test subjects where they could spot an object between 1/270 a second and 1/300 a second. In addition, there's another study that our brain (and perhaps eyes) can be trained by watching movies/tv to be more relaxed and accept lower frame rates such as 24 as fluid, or higher. Different careers can have an impact as we are exposed to different things visually.
Additionally frame latency can continue to be driven down (with diminishing returns) with higher performing cards even if the frame rate stays constant.
I'm running 3x24" monitors with a resolution of 5760x1080. You damn well bet I need a lot of processing power for that...
I'm not excited about the "next" generation of cards because they'll be able to maintain a solid framerate at higher resolutions (I haven't been for almost ten years), I'm excited because they'll contain more and faster programmable shader units. That's where the magic sauce happens, and the more shader power you have the more awesome stuff you can do. And as other people pointed out, they're incredibly useful for a wide range of applications outside of pure graphics processing.
I like high framerates and can see the difference, and there are other ways to spend the bandwidth and processing time, like color depth. 24bit is still quite limiting compared to 'real life' color gamut.. Of course, in order to be of benefit, we need displays capable of 'real life' color gamut, and normalizing even a 30bit depth on today's monitors is pointless.
Another place GPU is (ab)used is with antialiasing and post process effects, which many like. I dislike antialiasing because it causes me eye strain with the slightly blurrier image. I'd rather live with the jaggies and have higher framerate. Same with the 'blur' and bloom effects now abused by modern titles. Enough already. It's not 'realistic' in the slightest to have all that blown out color in post processing. Example titles include battlefield 4, bioshock infinite, batman arkham origins, and the codemasters' racing games, though there are plenty of others.
Wow, how can something so stupid get chosen as a post? Seriously. Even at 1080p, even the high end GPUs fall below 60fps on the most demanding games out there. People to buy high-end GPUs often do so to pair them up with 3 1080p monitors, or a 1440p monitor, or even a 1600p monitor. In fact, these people need to buy 2 to 4 of these top-end GPUs to drive that many pixels and triangles.
640K ought to be enough for anybody.
(Bill Gates actually never said that, in fact it was an IBM PC limitation.)
Until you can no longer tell the difference between a monitor and looking out a window, I say keep working.
It's not just about resolution and frames per second... it's about color depth, shading complexity, depth of field, reflection, iridescence and phong. There are TONS of other dimensions that could be included in games that can benefit from a faster GPU. Parent post is somewhat naive... Games should play like hollywood movies at 60fps before we even talk about slowing down.
Which has more power: the hammer, or the anvil?
There is absolutely no reason to have 1080p as a "standard" max resolution. 5 years ago I got a nice Princeton 24", 1920 x 1200 monitor at a good price. And I expected resolution to keep going up from there, as it always had before. Imaging my surprise when 1920 x 1200 monitors became harder to find, as manufacturers settled on the lower "standard" of 1920 x 1080 and seemed to be refusing to budge.
It's great and all that a 1080p monitor will handle 1080p video. BUT... when it does, there is no room for video controls, or anything else, because it's in "full screen" mode, which has limitations. I can play the same video on my monitor, using VLC, and still have room for the controls and other information, always on-screen.
Now certain forces seem to want us to "upgrade" to 4k, which uses an outrageous amount of memory and hard drive space, super high bandwidth cables, and is more resolution than the eye can discern anyway unless the screen is absolutely huge AND around 10 feet away.
Whatever happened to the gradual, step-wise progress we used to see? I would not in the least mind having a 26" or 27", 2560 x 1440 monitor on my desk. That should have been the next reasonable step up in monitor resolution... but try to find one from a major manufacturer! There are some on Ebay, mostly from no-names, and most of them are far more expensive than they should be. They should be cheaper than my 24" monitor from 5 years ago. But they aren't. Everything else in the computer field is still getting better and cheaper at the same time. But not monitors. Why?
Most games are written for the Lowest Common Denominator, that is, Game Consoles.
Hopefully PC games will be 'allowed' to improve when the next generation of console becomes standard.
Until, when I look at a video game on my screen and look at a live action TV show and can't tell the difference, there is room for improvement. Perhaps the improvement needs to come from the game developers, but there is still room and I do not believe we have hit the pinacle of GPU performance.
By the way, 4K will replace 1080p very soon, so the article is doubly moot.
When I tell people I game on Haswell, they say "nice CPU but I asked what GPU you use." I just stare at them. They finally get what I'm saying, and don't believe me. But it's true, and AFAICT it's just fine, and way faster than the discrete GPU machine I used to have. It all comes down just how many years old that machine was. And if it was 12, then YES, Haswell beats it, and seems plenty fast for my 10 year old games.
Really? GPU's are being used more and more for more than just graphics processing. Many interesting parallel processing problems are being off loaded to GPU's where they are number crunching on hundreds of cores much faster than can be done on your main CPU. See http://www.nvidia.com/object/cuda_home_new.html for one such set of libraries for Nvidia cards.
So WHO CARES if you cannot see the difference in what gets displayed. There is a LOT more going on.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
1080p on a 27" screen? Those are some pretty big pixels! Actually my 27" iMac has far higher res than that, though still looks a little fuzzy after using my "retina" laptop screen. I hope to see these 300-ish ppi values reaching 27" screens sometime soon, and that's what these GPUs will need to be fast for. Unlike a TV set, which is viewed from a distance, a monitor is used much closer, so higher res is a very obvious benefit.
If there is a widely accepted standard, there is a guaranteed customer base. 4K is the next logical plateau since it is gaining traction as the next broadcast standard (although NHK is pushing for 8K!).
There are only two suppliers of flat panels, Samsung and Sharp (and Sharp isn't looking good financially). If you ask them to make a common, but not wildly common resolution, it will cost much more.
In two years, you will be able to buy a 4K monitor for the same price as a 1080p screen, and all new video cards will support it.
Most current generation PC games are less than stellar ports from the Xbox360 and PS3. As such, even a modern low-end GPU will likely have enough power to run the game well at less extreme resolutions.
The console versions have heavily constrained textures and model face-counts, and use shaders in a modest way. New assets are rarely created for the PC version, so the PC version is merely showing console assets at a higher resolution, with higher (or more consistent) frame-rates, and better (often MUCH better) anti-aliasing methods.
This season's batch of next-gen games for the (dreadful) Xbone, and the AMD-2014 HSA, hUMA architecture based PS4, are quite grotty ports of the current PC versions, and thus unremarkable compared with even a PC running with a lesser mid-end card. What matters is what happens from 2014 onwards.
If the putrid Xbone has any success, cross-platform AAA developers will likely usually constrain the games to what the very weak hardware of the Xbone can handle, and this essentially means games that never look better than PC games from 2012 running on lesser graphics cards. This could create problems for future PC owners looking at better gaming experiences on the common resolution (1080P) mentioned in the article, given that by the end of next year, almost any PC GPU card would be overkill at that rez for 2012 style titles.
However, if the Xbone fails (as seems very likely), and the vastly superior PS4 becomes the console of choice, AAA games developers will have enough power to start to make big use of a whole batch of new methods that make the visuals much better. As this happens, current PC hardware will once again be seriously tested, especially if PC owners desire to activate the better forms of anti-aliasing that the PS4 will not be able to use.
Or, possibly, now that the PX, Xbone and PS4 are all forms of PC, games developers will treat the three platforms as variations of ONE PC version, crafting the best graphic experience possible, and then LOWERING the settings for the console versions until they play at adequate speed. This would unleash the ability of developers to utilise any amount of potential GPU power, but on the understanding that many heavy-weight rendering options would have to be switched down or off for the console versions. The problem here is that currently, console sales are considered as vastly more important than PC sales, and so spending large amounts of money developing features that can ONLY be appreciated on quite powerful PCs would run counter to good financial planning- UNLESS the PC version was seen as creating a clear 'HALO' effect (like has happened with The Witcher IP, and the Battlefield IP).
Today, the impact of the state-of-the-art in games rendering means that SANE PC gamers (those that don't blow up low-rez games on monitors with massive resolutions) can still happily get by with high-mid-end cards from years ago, or low-mid-end cards from today. If you don't care about being future proof (with AMD's Mantle support on their GCN architecture found on both consoles and their current PC GPU parts), you can buy a card like Nvidia's 2GB 650TI Boost (yes, that 'boost' bit matters as a designation). for around 150 dollars, and it will give a great experience at 1080P.
For $300 you can get AMD's 7970 with three free good games, or for a bit more, Nvidia's 770 with three far better games, and have so much surplus power at 1080P, you can probably be happily using this card in two years time (and even when it needs retiring, it will make a great card in a secondary system).
However, if you are upgrading your PC in the light of the current situation, think seriously about getting a card with MORE than 2GB (which really means AMD) and a card with GCN (which means ONLY AMD). Current 1080P games are almost using 2GB of GPU memory per frame rendered, and given the PS4 has 8GB of memory that can theoretically be used by its GPU, it is likely the best 1080P rendering methods will start to use approaching 3GB of space. To-the-metal games on the Xbone and Ps4 will be GCN, of course, and many will have 'Mantle' GCN versions on the PC.
i run 3 monitors, with my main being 2560x1600. a oc'd geforce gtx 680 can ~barely~ keep up at that resolution. now there next thing on the scene is 4k gaming. whats 4k? 3840x2160. that's a lot of fucking pixels, lemme tell you.
oh and the difference between 2560x1600 and 1920x1080? fucking amazing. like double the pixels.
The game we've chosen for this test is Dwarf Fortress
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
you need to buy a bigger monitor .
You don't need a GPU at all. A screen is 2Mpixels. Refreshing that about 60 times per second is enough to create the illusion of fluid motion for most humans. So that's only 120Mpixels per second. Any modern CPU can do that!
Why do you have a GPU? Because it's not enough to just refresh the pixels. You need (for some applications, e.g. gaming) complex 3D calculations to determine which pixels go where. And in complex scenes, it is not known in advance what objects will be visible and which ones (or part) will be obscured by other objecs. So instead of doing the complex calculations to determine what part of what object is visible, it has been shown to be faster to just draw all objects, but to check on drawing each pixel which object is closer, the already drawn object or the currently being drawn object.
When I can have 32fps full screen animation of real-time zoom into a fractal I might be satisfied. Till then I will politely suggest that the premise is flawed...
My GPU can compate with 8-core server, but my HDD is a bottleneck.
I definitely need BCache (HDD/SSD Caching) "BCache comes down to being a Linux kernel block layer cache where one or more SSDs (or other fast storage devices) can act as a cache for slower rotating disk drives, in somewhat a similar manner to some of the "SSHD" hybrid drives now on the market. BCache is similar to the L2Arc feature exposed on Oracle's ZFS file-system, but with being at the block device level, it's file-system agnostic. BCache is targeting the caching of random reads and writes to the faster storage medium than sequential I/O."
playing @ 1080p w/ frames to spare?
downsample. throws SSAA all over the entire screen.
Just because you guys are dumb and not doing 3D gaming with active shutter glasses. The faster is giving me finally immersive 3d with a lot less puke inducing lag.
1080p on my 32" monitor with 3d running really does need SLI and those ungodly fast video cards.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I remember when the manufacturers of speakers believed that humans couldn't sense audio information below 30Hz. There are still arguments about whether human beings can discern 100,000 colors or 10million. (http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2006/JenniferLeong.shtml)
Oh, and don't forget that people really can't tell the difference between a 128-bit MP3 and one at 320-bit. And those who tell you that vinyl sounds better? Or that there's a difference between audio recorded digitally and audio recorded using analog processes. Pfft.
Please. The new GPUs are about more than just framerate.
I'm kind of surprised that a supposedly technologically sophisticated site like Slashdot feels the need to repeat these "We've reached the limits!" stories that always, without exception, turn out to be wrong."
And by the way, I think 128k is plenty of RAM for any computer user. Of course, you could stuff more than that into a computer, but do we really need to?
You are welcome on my lawn.
I've seen side-by-side comparisons at SONY stores. This applies to monitors 4 feet or larger. 4K is 2x in each direction and 4x overall. There is not a lot of true 4K programming out there however. More movies are being filmed in 4K. No real plans to braodcast at the resolution in the US.
I know there are many other posts that are saying the same but regardless: bullshit. Polygon counts CAN get better, texture resolution CAN get better, detail quality CAN get better, particle counts CAN get better. And that's while keeping the same "classic" rasterizing concept. If you move into the raytracing world, there's plenty of space for improvement.
Cuda, OpenCL and PhysX would tend to disagree about that statement.
I'm pretty sure there's still room for improvement in framerate on a 6 4K monitor setup.
Besides, technology has a tendency to trickle down, like F1 Racing technology from years ago is used in today's Fords and GMs, My cellphone blows the doors off a 2003 computer, heck, my Dollar-store calculator is probably faster than a 1995 supercomputer.
Besides, ATI and nVidia fighting off brings us cheaper and more silent GPUs...
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
Your eyes might not gain much benefit, but your dog's flicker fusion threshold is somewhere up to 80Hz. How's Fido supposed to enjoy TF2 at your paltry 60Hz refresh?
Who cares about res? It's never been about that. It's about FPS (frames / second).
was a buddy's office; he and another PhD CS professor were talking about a side scroller second dude had written for iphone, and what a bitch it was to implement sprites in a 3D engine .... mother of god. Can't get C64 level graphics on modenn processor because it's *ALL* 3-D.
shh... don't tell anyone i play some old MMORPGs with an Nvidia Geforce 210 and a 17 inch monitor - 1024 x 768 pixels. I can't tell the difference between 25 or 60 frames per second. World of Warcraft plays fine.
all the new games play slowly. Star Wars: the old republic takes 5 minutes to load. lol. Yeah, I need a new computer and a $100 video card. no point in putting a fast video card into a 6 year old computer. At least my PC has a PCI express 16 version 1 slot so that I can plug in a Geforce 210.
Why are the practical alternatives to deferred shading? I'm genuinely curious, because I drank the deferred shading kool-aid, and I switched my engine to it this past year. I really like the fact that it essentially gave me unlimited non-shadowing accent lights for free, and that I only have to light the pixels that are actually displayed.
(* Before you ask, the game/engine isn't named yet and I don't have a demo available. I've been working on it for three years, and I'm getting close to finishing the engine; I'll probably release a demo sometime next year. And yes, it will require a very beefy GPU for long draw distances.)
What if you want the GPU to run 3 monitors at the same time?
...should be enough for everyone.
First, 1080p is nice from 12 feet away watching a movie, but sucks when 2 feet away on a 24" monitor.
I game using a trio of Dell 30" panels connected to an AMD 7970HD card, and frankly with 12 million pixels being pushed, it still needs MSAA to not look like crap to me. I can see the pixels, they stick out perfectly fine to my eyes.
4K panels can't get here fast enough, and frankly it will take 8K panels to really close the gap with our eyes. The amount of GPU power required to drive 3x panels at that resolution (24 million pixels) is impressive and we aren't there yet.
Second, even if resolution wasn't going up, there are "pixels" and then there are "pixels". Do you want to play DOOM at 1080P? Great, any 5 year old card can do that. Do you want to play CoD Ghosts at 1080P? A 5 year old card might well have a struggle with that.
The PS3 could do 1080P out of the box, if that was "good enough", then why does the PS4 have FAR better graphics at the same resolution?
Seriously, try working at that DPI all day and actually using that resolution. Your letters would be so small your eyes would get tired way before you reach the 8hrs. You can focus on a screen that close for a limited time only. To work comfortably on screens all day long, they need to be at least 60cm (2ft) from your eyes, making densities over 120 DPI useless for anyone that's not into graphics design.
Maybe you young whippersnapper can pull this off, but once you hit 30 or something, you won't. I'm over 40 and I don't need reading glasses or anything. My eyes still test so good, they need a manual device to test the limits, the computer ones are too slow to register because my eyes adapt faster than they can read them. Still, if I have to work all day on (small) high DPI screens driving home after work I notice I have trouble to focus quickly enough on things happening in traffic. It's not that it's dangerous or anything, but I have to get a lot closer to a sign before I can properly read it than I have to in the morning, or I will have to look at it so long that it will get dangerous if I do that while driving. I get more headaches and later in the day, I tend to not want to work on the computer anymore because I have trouble concentrating on what I read. At home, on my comfortable dual 30" 2560*1600 screens, I have no problem doing 10 hours of work on the same sort of things.
Having to work often at equipment provided by customers, I see a trend of making techies work on a high resolution laptop screen that's 15" or less, while it used to be that we got large dual screens made available to us. Not only do we seriously lack screen real estate in pixel count, we also don't get the font size required for comfortable and fast reading all day long. Stop the craze of insane DPIs and smaller screens and start focusing on ergonomics again. There's a reason we had these large screens in the past and that reason hasn't changed. It's called ergonomics and if you want people to perform, it's cheaper to give them a bit more tech than to throw infinite monkeys at a problem.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
Come on editors what the fuck are you thinking? Even if resolutions aren't getting bigger, there was no option for 3d or multi-screen, the CONTENT of the rendered scene can always be increased. Bigger textures, more polygons, more objects, further view distances. You can give me the most powerful gaming PC and I can bring it to its knees with Skyrim and a few mods. Why NOT 10.000 visible individually rendered trees? Why not a million individual snowflakes? Why not a view distance of a 20 miles or more fully populated.
Eye candy? Depends, one set of mods and settings allow you to fire your bow without the arrow just disappearing in thin air after a certain distance. So you can truly shoot that deer at the other side of the river who you could see from a mile away, just as in real alive.
Not every gamer is into simply arcade games.
There are still countless graphical advances to make.
Captcha: Huntsman
Even at 1920x1080 they still haven't achieved photorealism for gaming, and yes it get's better, but if you look at the latest BF4 trailers, those video's are done with triple highend GPU's, and even those seem to be rather smooth and lifelike, they still need a lot of extra detail to make it even more realistic, and it will still take a few years before we have GPU's in the what we call 'mainstream' (100-200 euro for a videocard). Upping the resolution for gaming isn't really usefull (except maybe on larger monitors (27" and up) as with higher resolutions more powerfull GPU's are needed to 'fill' the extra resolution.. We've still got a long road ahead to get lifelike facial animations (yes even though the nvidia demo's looked awesome, but those were only one face and everything dedicated to that face, will be a different matter if you have a crowd)..
Aha aha, i have a 30" 2560x1600 display.
Why do people assume that what they have is what everyone has and enough for everyone?
Go buy a flimsy gpu for your tiny display.
peace out
The current high-end of GPUs gives you as much as you'd need for an enjoyable experience. Beyond that and it's not like you will get nothing, it's just that you will notice less benefit.
Pushing pixels is not the be-all and end-all of GPUs. A faster GPU can compute more shadows, more reflections, caustics, subsurface scattering and all those other beautiful things that are slowly pushing us out of the uncanny valley.
Or as Chris Angelini, editorial director for Tom's Hardware Guide, put it, 'The current high-end of GPUs gives you as much as you'd need for an enjoyable experience. Beyond that and it's not like you will get nothing, it's just that you will notice less benefit.'
Or as Bill Gates may or may not have said, "640k ought to be enough for everyone."
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
... which is why I use a 19" 4:3 and a 17" 4:3 side by side. I can't stand wide screens. When are we going to have CHOICE in the monitor market? Why aren't monitor manufacturers required by law to put the screen AREA, as well as the diagonal measurement?
Is he really not taking into account the ever-increasing requirements of games? Doesn't matter how fast your GPU *was*, when the next wave of AAA games comes out, you *will* be able to tell the difference, and you'll be hurting for a new one if you want to keep running with maxed out settings. Happens every time.
What about the need to play them on crazy things like 2560x1440 IPS displays? Or other uses like scientific calculations, video compositing, or bitcoin mining? You'll want all the GPU muscle you can get.
Friend: "The NIC is misconfigured..." Me: "No prob, I'll just telnet in and fix it." *Silence*
Why are the practical alternatives to deferred shading?
Regardless of which methods you use, you've gotta sacrifice something. Forward rendering doesnt do so well with lots of dynamic lights, deferred shading doesn't do so well with lots of materials, and deferred lighting doesn't do so well with lots of geometry.
"His name was James Damore."
In other words, deferred shading is still exactly what I need, since I have tons of lights and tons of geometry, and I don't have very many unique materials. ;)
p.s. The data I'm writing to the g-buffer is non-trivial to compute, and I have a fair bit of overdraw even though the geometry is mostly sorted, so I'm planning to test to see if a depth-only pre-pass will improve performance. (But first I'm planning to do a bit more LoD to cut down on the geometry. Ugg I have way too much geometry.)
Does anybody else hate the 1920x1080 "standard" resolution? It seems to be the only thing available now. At least give me 1200 vertical pixels...
I tire of statements of 'WQXGA' and '24" 1920x1440'. I realize that the pixel grid dimensions are a fact of life for the hardware, but at the consumer level, I know that all I care about is the DPI resolution of the screen. For a phone or desktop monitor, give me 300 DPI. For the TV in my living room, give me 100DPI. If the TV is 42" diagonal, then that's some number of pixels. If the TV is 50" diagonal, then that's more pixels.
Would there be problems with that? Sure. I just want the industry to focus on DPI resolution. Ideally, standardized DPI resolutions.
More on topic, until we have a functioning holodeck for the typical consumer, GPUs will need to be faster.
No, I'm not spending that much on video cards actually. I've never spent more than $160 on one if I recall correctly. This is precisely the effect of the point of the OP - you don't need all that for gaming. The so-called "mid range" cards quite sufficient for gaming on any size monitor nowadays.
Regardless of whether we can see fine grained detail, reality looks pretty good through our vision because of all of the neat stuff that happens with photons that bounce off of stuff or are absorbed by other stuff (stuff being a technical term). With fast GPUs, just because we're near the limits of our eyes to make out detail in resolution, does not mean we are at the limits of rendering an image, whether simulating real visual phenomenon (HDR, subsurface scattering etc) or some newly created means of processing a visual output of some form. Faster GPUs mean more time to process such imagery for different effects, and even possibly realtime raytracing or radiosity in the near future. Even televisions from the 1980s look good in terms of reality detail when watching a television signal and they weren't particularly high res. So a gain in GPU power means a better looking image despite what detail our eyes can make out, and our eyes can make out quite a bit of detail. Combine that with high res screens, and you still get more cycles per second to handle transformation and lighting (for 3D) and post process your output. A good thing in all. Besides, when we start using a 64 bit colour space at the consumer level, we're going to need all that processing power to handle a finer detail of colours with 16 (or 32 bits) per channel colour when the screens can handle that. What about when GPUs are used as part of the processing pipeline in creating artificial eyes for the blind? We'll need GPU processing power then, seeing as our wonderful organic mechanisms for processing visual information do so with information messaging that runs at roughly 50 m/s, and we've got to be able to match that with information messaging that operates at nearly the speed of light through a semiconductor. GPU power and DSPs will likely be what gives us the ability to give (artificial) sight to the blind. I say that's a worthy goal. So there's plenty of reasons for faster GPUs that go beyond what we can see. They may help someone else who can't.
We need at least 60 fps constantly to experience a normal sense of motion. GPUs need to keep getting better because very few of them are able to *maintain* 60fps in modern games when scenes become more complex in certain areas. We also need to look ahead to 4K gaming which no graphics card currently can handle at acceptable framerates. http://boallen.com/fps-compare.html
There is a lot of need for faster cards, and for developers to start making use of the processing abilities of these cards in their games. I'm looking at you MMOs! ( One genre which still makes heavy use of the CPU). Now if the author had said that in gaming the CPU's speed is becoming irrelevant to frame rate, I would tend to agree. http://www.techspot.com/review/734-battlefield-4-benchmarks/page6.html
-Gel214th
players have to know that when the press "x" they will get the same result.
That's sort of hard to do when every console puts "x" in a different place.
Some games use "frames" only as a discrete time unit for game simulation. Tetris the Grand Master series is tightly coupled to a 60 Hz update rate. Players expect that rotation, sideways motion, and downward motion happen in that order each frame to make "synchro" moves (slide moves that combine rotation with sideways autorepeat) work correctly. Super Smash Bros. Brawl is tied to frames as well. Game simulation frames happen at a steady 60 fps; if rendering lags, some game simulation frames just don't get rendered.
If, however, it simply isn't possible to cater to people who I need as customers if my environment has 500 NPC armies clashing
If a 1.8 MHz, 1-core, 8-bit NES can have 22 guys on the field in Tecmo Bowl, then why can't a 1.8 GHz, 2+-core, 64-bit PC have 22,000 guys on the field?
this is compounded by the fact that a lot of web developers are still making content that assumes we're back in the age of non-widescreen monitors
It appears a lot of web designers design their layouts for an 8:9 display with close to 960x1080 pixels. Snap one browser window to half of your screen and something else to the other half.
I wonder if you could do triple buffering but only render 2 frames and then have the gpu create a 2d composite frame of the 2 in the frame buffer to sandwich inbetween the frames. You would probably be able to double your perceived framerate while not increasing load too much. Would essentially get the benefits of motion blur.
uhhhh.... that's what 2.5k and 4k monitors are for :P The main differences in increased resolution are the reduction in the staircase effect, and increased smoothing, which requires more powerful GPU's.
So what's the best practice for a web site to use all 116em* of a 1920x1200 monitor's active width without making the main text column wider than the 30-36em** that's best for readability?
* Assuming the default font size of 16px per em, minus 2em for scrollbars and 2em for outer margins.
** Assuming the 80-character line length and just over 2 characters per em.
Or at least, he shouldn't be writing tech articles. To say that extra rendering power is only for higher resolution and framerate totally misses the point.
Despite continuing gains in performance, current graphics cards remain woefully underpowered for truly photo-realistic rendering.