Real World Tech Article - Impressions of Kepler

[BlockheadBrown]

http://www.realworldtech.com/page.cfm?ArticleID=RWT032212172023

• Thoughts from an overall perspective?
• Thoughts on looking at this from a PC gamer's perspective?
• Thoughts regarding future consoles and PC ports?

 

[ViRGE]

It's really not a gaming article. Kanter focuses on the architecture and the compute aspects. I wouldn't look to it for trying to figure out the future of gaming.

In any case, Kanter does a good job summarizing the compute changes, and hits on a few possible reasons for why GK104's compute performance is so weak. In general the lack of internal bandwidth hurts compute performance, but in turn NVIDIA was able to maximize gaming performance on what's a relatively small die.

 

[pelov]

I love Kanter articles thanks for the link

 

[BlockheadBrown]

Thanks, ViRGE. I was curious as to if the compute advantage on AMD's side could translate into optimizations on the console side that could turn into advantages for AMD based graphics/optimizations on the PC side.

 

[ViRGE]

As it stands client GPU computing has been a wash. There are no killer applications, and in fact the pool has gotten smaller since the latest generation added dedicated H.264 encoding hardware. At this point in time I have no reason to believe AMD's compute performance advantage will translate into a gaming performance gain. Compute and gaming are similar in that they're bandwidth hungry and rely on a massive number of floating point operations, but otherwise they're different enough (due in particular to branching) that improving one does not improve the other.

As for any kind of console advantage translating into a PC advantage, that is similarly unlikely. AMD's status as the GPU supplier for the Xbox 360 never did translate into a benefit for them on the PC side of things, even though porting 360 games over to the PC is a relatively simple process.