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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.
What does it take to get canned as a /. editor?
Did he RTFA or go a week without posting a dup?
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
>> It'd also be nice to grab my desktop's GPU when I want to game on my laptop in the living room.
Congratulations: you just invented the home graphics mainframe!
Intel has already done the heavy lifting by giving us the Thunderbolt standard that can expose a 40Gbit (or more if you gang connectors) external interface that can transport PCIe to a GPU in a seamless manner.
If AMD wants to work on making the enclosures, cooling, and power supplies more standardized to make plugging in a wide range of GPUs easy then that's great. If they get all NIH and think they can gin up some proprietary connector instead of just using Thunderbolt then you can forget about this entire announcement right now.
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
I haven't bought one in over a decade, and even my most hardcore gaming friends I have don't own one. Also, other than Microsoft employees, I have never met someone that has one of those XBox things. They just aren't selling. How about improving your mobile CPUs before working on something that no one wants now. As usual, AMD is stuck in the past.
As I type this there are 11 million users logged in to Steam, the primary source for PC games. There are nearly 2 million players actually in-game right now between the top 10 titles alone.
A market of millions is nothing to sneeze at. I personally would love external graphics to become a proper supportable thing rather than the occasional one-off proprietary setup I can't expect to use with the next model. I have a desktop for gaming and a laptop for portability, but with a proper external GPU option I could just have the laptop and pair it with a GPU-equipped dock for when I'm at home.
I used to get high on life, but I developed a tolerance. Now I need something stronger.
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.
They've sold 20 million XBox One. Your getting the wrong conclusions from your evidence. From 1982-2012, sales went first away from mom&pop stores, and then towards online purchases.
Also, I think you've just gotten older. You get sentimental over games from when you were a kid...Kids don't play Quake anymore, of course they could. The game is dated, the model has been improved upon.
Slashdot: providing anti-social weirdos a soapbox, since 1997.
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.
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
>> Quake 3 was the best FPS
> LOL
No, that's the best moba.
Whups... caffeine hadn't kicked in, and I had completely forgotten that the IP for Thunderbolt has been transferred to Intel entirely. Never mind me, I'm not awake yet.
"Inveniemus Viam Aut Faciemus" 'We will find a way... Or we will make one!' --Hannibal of Carthage
Your experience does not match the overall trend.
PC Gaming Market is Estimated to Grow To $35 Billion by 2018 [REPORT] There's a nice graph at showing how the PC games industry has doubled since 2009.
watch that cpu throttle to uselessness in the process of gaming.
Actually, I think an external GPU and power source is a fairly elegant setup. Rather than limiting the GPU capabilities by trying to cram the cards into the laptop format, they can use full desktop GPUs with the associated power supplies and just plug in where you need that power. Then you could have something that performs both tasks of being a very nicely portable laptop and a gaming rig without unnecessary duplication of CPU and RAM or having to manage two separate machines.
Knowledge Brings Fear
That is the dumbest thing I ever heard. Minecraft made Notch millions long before it was ever ported to a console. Kerbal Space Program. Your "group" must be cloistered dopes or you don't listen very well.
Ah, an unreal fanboy I presume. Why are you people allowed to live?
Agree. The fellow is out of touch.
"and I don't know anyone that can get the games that they paid for to work." That one's easy: You know 0 people who use Steam. Chances are also good that you know 0 people altogether.
You want to game on a MacBook?
You'll need a real GPU.
You're going to want a real keyboard and mouse.
And a bigger and better display. Or multiple displays.
You'll want real speakers (or headphones for the retards).
Multiplayer? You need a good mic to talk to people without them hearing everything in your game looping back to them.
At this point you've got so much shit on your desk hooked up to the laptop (docking station or not) that it's easier to just get a real desktop.
You'll get much better CPU performance out if it, you'll be able to store more games on it, you won't have to deal with wireless internet or a usb to ethernet adapter, etc. It'll be upgradable, too.
>>>> I'm in my 40's and my 'device that does it all' is my cell phone
>> How do you...?
Easy: this guy is a manager. If all you do is schedule things, have meetings and delegate things with initials (e.g,. "JR can you handle this?"), you can live on a mobile device with a fairly large screen. You only need a computer if you actually have to do work.
You get sentimental over games from when you were a kid.
As I've gotten older, I'm less inclined to pay $60 for a PC game. I can wait a few years to buy the same title for 20 bucks or less on Steam. I may have even replaced the video card to play the game in its AAA glory.
The CPU in macbooks is pretty weak. I'm not sure how much benefit they would even see with an external GPU.
When BizX bought Slashdot, they brought only a portion of the existing Slashdot staff with them. That included one of the three editors and one of the four engineers. I'm not sure about the other departments. I'd guess they intended to fill those roles with people from their own organization, but I don't know anything about how they're going about it.
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.
Even if I'm no longer affiliated, I still love the site and the community. I'll keep contributing until I see good reason not to.
Yes, I've found another job -- I start on Monday, actually. Really looking forward to it. :)
Negative; I started at Slashdot in December, 2007. Dice didn't buy it until Fall 2012.
Good luck and best wishes
Wow, someone being nice on Slashdot. :).
My hat is off to you, sir
Well, don't worry about that. We can get you back before you leave. (Dr. Who)