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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.
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.
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>> Quake 3 was the best FPS
> LOL
No, that's the best moba.
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.
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. :)
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)