If graphics indeed move in this direction, the basic design of GPUs will be very different.  Rays are complex and quite serial in nature and better suit CPU architecture.  So I believe GPUs will be a bit more like CPUs but with 1000s of cores so to speak.  Right now GPUs only have several 10s of "cores"  what GPU makes call cores are only actually FPUs which each core like unit I think SMs? have many of them cluster together.

With Turing and it's change to even the raster architecture is shifted towards more CPU like design.

Traditionally ray tracing was done on the CPU as the CPU was better suited and faster.

I think with AMD's designs the move in this direction makes sense, many of their architectures are already better suited for complex computing rather than raster work loads. If I am not mistaken I am sure AMD were pushing ray tracing long before nvidia were.

I think the foreseeable future will just do what has always been done, greater and greater hybrid rendering until older techniques are completely invalidated.

For the last decade its been talked about merging CPUs and GPUs into a unified architecture but it hasn't happened yet and I doubt it ever really will.

Well AMD pushed that with graphics and CPU but rather it's just an all in one chip with distinct sections, that is the APU AMD has been pushing all those years and I think that is a growing market now that they got a decent product out of it and very popular one at that.



On another subject I don't know if you have seen the benchmarks of the new forza 4. It is a really good one to see as something that was suspected for ages but never realized until now is the raw power of Vega over nvidia competing cards.  They got the optimization down pat and boy does vega perform,  taking over the 1080Ti and not a lot behind the 2080Ti.  Really impressive stuff.  Another note is how bad maxwell performs, absolute garbage in that tittle, pascal and turning is about what expected for the raw FPU count and vega is where it should be going by the FPUs as well.

It is a really good implementation of dx12 which gets the best out of AMD and does decent on the proper dx12 nvidia cards (pascal and above)

I would love to see volta tested on this title just because it has async and a LOT of FPUs.

Rays are complex and quite serial in nature and better suit CPU architecture.

Will this sort of technology be implemented in VR tech? I'm unfamiliar with the sort of processing cores (or equivalent) they have. It would certainly make the VR experience quite, well, vivid.

The VR demos I have seen seemed to have a sort of campy video quality. Very few suspended disbelief for me. They were fun, true (which I guess is the point), but were not very impressive immersion-wise. Just go on YouTube and you'll see what I mean. Attention-grabbing titles read AMAZING AWESOME TOTALLY REALISTIC EPIC VR GAMES... most look pretty woeful and cartoony.

I think it's because with VR the computer needs to render twice the graphics, a completely different perspective for each eye, so the graphics is probably cut down to get decent performance as I have heard low FPS in VR makes people sick. I can at least vouch feeling sick from watching low fps game play or video calls. I even used to feel funny on 60-85Hz CRT monitors back in the day as I can see the vertical sweep at that low refresh on a CRT.  I had a Trinitron at 120-160Hz back in 2000 to feel comfortable.

VR is not related to ray tracing or alike. It's merely 2 x graphics outputs at different perspectives.  Though ray traced VR at high FPS would be the holy grail of graphics but the computing power for high FPS photo realistic VR would need hardware years if not a decade away.


As for what CPUs do is they are serial in nature with ability to do many different simple and complex operations with lots of different data sets which are normally pipelined consecutively. Although modern CPU have extra means of parallelizing work loads. multiple pipelines, SMT, combining operations into single large instructions, multi cores etc..   CPU can be thought as a multi purpose processor.

GPUs primarily only so simple single instructions with huge data sets of same or similar data.  So for example GPU will mainly do floating point math on the same instruction but with lots of data broken down into smaller bits.  These are feed to the 1000s of floating units they have.  Modern GPUs have some ability to do more varied instructions and workloads now so are starting to get CPU like things added to them and vise versa for the CPU.

Hope that sort of makes sense, best I could explain it to my understanding.

Hope that sort of makes sense, best I could explain it to my understanding.

It does, thanks! And you're not alone when it comes to FPS-sickness, I suffer from that too. Not so much from RTS type games (those are generally quite smooth anyway), but definitely with choppy first-person perspective play-throughs.

But I guess I'll wait awhile for the VR experience...

I havn't talking or meet anyone who gets that.  Question, can you see the sweeping/scanning on CRTs?  Because everyone I ever mentioned it to don't see anything and think I am making it up.   In fact I could call out a refresh rate just by looking at the screen up to about 120Hz where I could no longer tell easy.   The wide spread adoption of LCDs were a godsend for me just for this reason as they work on a image update rather than scan lines and their tenancy to linger on so they mostly appear solid even at low refresh rates.

Question, can you see the sweeping/scanning on CRTs?

Yes, I do. I've only seen a few cathode ray monitors in my time, mostly because I wasn't interested in that sort of stuff when they were more ubiquitous, but whenever I did, I thought that they were broken because of the scanning. Quite annoying.

I will agree with you that it is not that common a trait, though my mum has it as well, so maybe it's genetic.  

Yeah it could be, I always preferred much higher frame rate compared to most people.  Seem the golden standard is 60fps but I always felt anything under 90-120 getting on the slow slide.   I feel most comfortable with 150+. It isn't just how it looks, but there is a distinct feel from input to display.

I think everybody would prefer a higher FPS in any game by default, and it's really a matter of personal preference for how much someone is willing to sacrifice those frames for the sake of better graphics or newer games.

I myself have to rather delicately balance the settings of my games since I have a rather sorry-looking Nvidia GeForce 220 graphics card with about 1024Mb of VRAM (Hey, it was good for 2011). This card, together with my 8 Gb of RAM and 2 Duo E8500 3.16 GHz CPU, can play most games from anywhere before 2011-12, unless I install some wild mods or graphics overhauls.

As such, it can play those now-oldies-but-goodies like the original Crysis or Skyrim at the High to Ultra settings with the complete physics turned on and an anti-aliasing filters, at about 80-90 FPS - unless things get really hairy with super explosions or something.  I have not bought any super-new games from beyond 2014 for the reason that all enjoyment I get from them might be tarnished by the fact I need to play them on the lowest settings for fear of random ctds or freezes.

But to drag myself out of my gaming self-pity, Space Engine v0980 worked pretty well for me with a decent 100 FPS and 40% RAM, as my PC sits pretty squarely in the minimum recommended settings.  However, it is also one of the first games to max out my CPU and causes some pretty consistent crashes when I go near neutron stars, or load landscapes at LOD 2. The latter is the worst, since my FPS drops by 10 as I get closer to a planet until I get maybe 2 FPS when I'm on the surface. It takes an hour to load 1 cell. I hope the new rendering techniques in v0990 will be more kind to my machine.

Anyway, I was seriously considering to buy a more top-class video card, taking into consideration that the newer cards might not be compatible for my older rig, but then again, I might as well just buy a whole new computer for the same selling price.

haha I couln't deal with that.

I think my over clocked water cooled 980 and FX8320 are bad on SE. But I do like to run it at highest settings and I found LOD 1.8 to be the highest that doesn't crash.

I have done a few tweaks in the user config to force faster title loading at the cost of min FPS (about 15-20)

My goal is to get real time tile loading at LOD2 or beyond.  I found moving and loading to be the biggest CPU bottle neck and standing still in the upper atmosphere near auroa to GPU bottle neck so much the CPU goes to idle and results in a massive input lag.

I want to get a 2700X or perhaps ryzen 3000 which comes early-mid next year.  GPU I still am up in the air for that as the performance to price is really bad atm and I really would like 1080Ti as a min but they still are over $1000 here in Australia. 

I have started researching monitors recently too, so hard to find one that ticks all the boxes.

Yeah if you are considering a new card, I would definitely look at a new CPU too. SE can take advantage of both high single thread performance and also multi thread under certain conditions.

Mine is great at the multi thread in SE but pretty average in the single thread and is why I am looking at 2700x. It's a really good all rounder. It should be about 2-2.5x my current CPU in single and multi.  These have a much greater performance per dollar and watt than the intel offerings, but the best intel CPUs are faster in the single thread by a decent but not massive amount. something like 10%.  The other advantage the intel have is great overclocking so they make the best gaming only CPUs but the AMD zen based ones are much better all rounder.

Great comparison here.  Just so hard to beat for the value alone and also the support and upgradability of the AM4 platform, something the intel platform desperately needs.

https://www.guru3d.com/articles-pages/a ... iew,9.html

My goal is to get real time tile loading at LOD2 or beyond.  I found moving and loading to be the biggest CPU bottle neck and standing still in the upper atmosphere near auroa to GPU bottle neck so much the CPU goes to idle and results in a massive input lag.

Same thing I try to attempt too. Sometimes I'm successful .

Yeah if you are considering a new card, I would definitely look at a new CPU too.

I am cursed with a overly thorough approach to technical improvements. The only time I ever decide on a final product to sink my money into is when I exhaust all possibilities. I guess it's because I've been bitten one too many times after reckless upgrading. Probably an attitude shared by other computer nerds for the same reasons, but this means the process of buying a new CPU, GPU and card, then tying them all together seamlessly, will be months if not years in the making . 

To be honest I was seriously considering getting a Lenovo Legion Y520 gaming laptop (its specs look pretty good, though the processor performance IS characteristically slow compared to desktops), since it's been awhile since I've had a laptop and it would be cheaper in the long-run. But laptops are a whole different beast...

I have started researching monitors recently too, so hard to find one that ticks all the boxes.

Tell me about it, monitors with the right color balance, exposure and size seem to be an elusive holy grail when it comes to consumer reviews. What's wrong with your old one?

I know which monitor now.

https://www.pixiogaming.com/px329s

Only problem is I will need to find someone to cross ship it to Australia as they don't sell these outside the US yet, one of the local Australian monitor experts reviewed one and this checks every box in what I want and need without all the gamer rgb bs and fancy over the top looks.   The price is good too.  A monitor of similar specs here but uglier would easy be about 1500 AUD which there are actually none like it here.  Out choices of monitors and hardware in general is very limited and normally least desirable models.

I have looked into monitor for about 2 years with none my fancy but this one is finally it. I knew about it for a while but I was still searching to see if any can beat it in my requirement and none have so this is the one.

My old monitor is a 19" cheapo AOC. My original 28" TN screen I got in 2008 died exactly the week the warranty ran out and viewsonic would not help, they didn't even have spares for it as they already phased it out before warranty.  first and last time i ever get anything viewsonic.

I also had a Samsung after that which I got new in 2010 a 20", it died last year from LCD cancer. The LCD spontaneous self destructed starting from a single pixel and spreading all over.  Hence the AOC I have now.  The AOC is really rock solid, about 2010 vintage too and had good contrast but limited res and size and suffers dark bands at multiples of 75 fps greater than 1. It was $175 when new lol.

I was completely disinterested in getting a new monitor after my 28" died as monitors actually got smaller for a long time after which biggest being 24" and only pro 32" 3500AUD + being the next size up.   Also the monitors slowed down too, mine was 1-2ms GTG and it too almost 10 years for them to get fast and big again.   They finally caught up now.   I think the industry was focused on image colour, LED backlighting and quality over speed and other failed tech like oled before they got quality, speed, size and color, contrast all reasonable now.

I wanted to get a good VA panel this time around or IPS at the worst. The pixio is VA, a quality one which the size and good res, but importantly the speed and low lag of TN.  The cherry on top is the clean no nonsense look and price which is a massive plus to me. I also love the optional stand they got which also is function and no nonsense ascetics.  The build quality on these are reviewed as outstanding.  So I am defiantly excited about this model.

I know which monitor now.

https://www.pixiogaming.com/px329s

Looks nice. Apparently a lot of other people thought the same as you, because on my link it says that it's sold out!

it died last year from LCD cancer. The LCD spontaneous self destructed starting from a single pixel and spreading all over.

Hmmm, I have a few dead pixels on my sweet old Dell 35-inch monitor, I hope it won't devolve into this. 

I doubt it. Mine was sudden and most of the initial part happen when the monitor was off over a few hours (can even see it when off).  One time no dead pixels, came back after work and switched it on and 10's of 1000s of pixels gone and they were flickering at the dead to alive boundary and few pixels every few sec bled out and died as it continued to spread.

It also started in isolated areas on the screen shortly after independent to the fist areas that died initially.  It's like some chemical reaction breaking down the liquid in the screen.

I have seen it happen once before on my friend's brother's PC about 10 years ago.  I have googled this very thoroughly and havn't found anything on the subject.  I just call it LCD cancer as it pops up randomly and spreads like real cancer.



As for the pixio monitor you should see the Amazon reviews. Really outstanding comments on them and lots of raving about how great they are.