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AMD Wants To Standardize the External GPU (arstechnica.com)
Soulskill writes: In a recent Facebook post, AMD's Robert Hallock hinted that the company is working on a standardized solution for external GPUs. When people are looking to buy laptops, they often want light, portable machines — but smaller devices often don't have the horsepower to effectively run games. Hallock says, "External GPUs are the answer. External GPUs with standardized connectors, cables, drivers, plug'n'play, OS support, etc." The article points out that the Thunderbolt 3 connector already (kinda) solves this problem, providing up to 40Gbps of bandwidth over a single connector. Still, I find external GPUs intriguing. I like the idea of having a light laptop when I'm moving around, but a capable one when I sit down at home to play a game. It'd also be nice to grab my desktop's GPU when I want to game on my laptop in the living room. Standardization may turn out to be important for GPU-makers if VR ends up taking off. The hardware requirements for those devices are fairly steep, and it'd facilitate adoption if graphics power was more easily expandable.
As usual, AMD is stuck in the past.
This. My family owned a computer gaming store from 1982 until 2012. After 2011, the bottom just dropped out of the market. Casual games that don't need a big upfront purchase of a game or a fast video card have taken over the market. Even the most hardcore gamers I'm friends with haven't bought a new game in years. Quake 3 was the best FPS so there's no point in buying anything else. Age of Empires II was the best RTS, so again, there's no point in buying anything else. The new SimCity game is terrible compared to the second one. And so on. The gaming market is dead. The new games aren't as good as the games we already own.
Also, you're correct about the XBox not being popular. My parents would go weeks without selling an XBox game.
I call bullshit. Your friends may not have bought console games in years due to your argument on games being comatose because the console controllers ceased evolving their input quantity, thus putting a stop on gameplay advancement,
but there is still plenty of PC gaming innovation happening thanks to the keyboard. Mount&Blade games, space sim, RTT games in the past 3 or 4 years had great releases, the continuation of great RTS storytelling and some innovation with the ex-Relic team coordinating the Homeworld successors,
FPS games that get advancement beyond the quantitative and response time capacity of console controllers (hybrid building/FPS or crazy shit like Planetstorm),
etc. etc. etc.
The only comatose things are consoles, as they are now mostly copy pasta with games we already played as you say, except with a focus on improving graphics and dicking around with "cinematic experience" because gameplay advancement is down the toilet.
PC gaming is just fine and dandy, with indie devs slowly piling up their revenue of initial smaller games on the road towards AAA conglomeration without any Publishers like EA fucking them up with the contractual "innovation is too risky" BS.
The only thing that's missing is Valve creating a marketing push with SteamOS like Microsoft did in the years it was focused on spreading Windows to every household everywhere via gaming, by fully focusing on helping devs with development teaching, bug fixing help, development tools, and stuffing their SteamOS brand on every video game start screen;
and AMD getting their shit back together by hopefully being the first to implement graphene and giving Intel a giant competitive nudge.
TO start using TB, means i guess paying $ to intel. On top of that AMD is already 400 miles behind on a 500mile race with TB as it is so to make their own connection and put it as standard they would have leg up vs intel based laptops. So go figure why AMD wants to make up their own connection at this point.
One of my users was on a big gray Mac Pro, with a fiber card to access the SAN and an AJA card that puts video on the preview/client preview monitors - it's a video card, but a really strange one that acts more as a codec than a traditional video card.
When that machine became a crash-fest I moved him over to a newer Mac Pro trashcan. That fiber card and AJA card can't be put in the trashcan as it lacks PCIe slots. So I got this Magma Thunderbolt PCIe housing. That AJA card working in there beautifully. I doubt the Quadro Pro from his old system would work in that thing (it might - I may have to experiment one day) but I have little doubt a budget GeForce card would work in there.
I could totally plug my ThinkPad W540 into that box and just about any of the newer Macbooks in the building accomplishing what this article is all about.
Still - intentional and standardized would be nice. Especially with all these Mac people in my building - it would be nice to have GPU's in the Thunderbolt monitors we have floating around - it could save us money when buying laptops if we didn't have to worry about which laptop went to who as long as the monitor was able to handle the job.
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I never met or talked with any of the BizX folks, so I can't tell you much more than that. We editors were the bottom of the decision-making totem pole for the site, so I didn't know about the acquisition until it was done.
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