The 1GHz GPU Barrier

[Bovinicus]

Everyone over in the General Hardware forum is excited about a 2005 planned release for an Intel CPU running at 10GHz. What about GPUs? Doesn't anyone care about how they scale anymore? According to Moore's Law (If it works with GPU transistor count too), the current 500MHz mark should be doubled to 1GHz is approximately 18 months. Plus, by that time every game will be made with T&L in mind (Most of them are now, at least a little bit). I can't wait to see the results of a GPU like that. I think it will be even more amazing than a 10GHz CPU.

 

[CurtCold]

When the GPU breaks that kind of barrier and beyond, will that not decrease dependency on CPU, and Ram Latency's, or will the performance still be bound to the ram pipeline, as opposed to the rendering piplines of the gpu itself?

I can't wait for the new products coming this year! Whoo Hoo about July will be upgrade time for me again, depending on what's out, I think I'll have my first duallie machine!

 

[jiffylube1024]

meh. I'm more interested in seeing how features such as DX9 pixel and vertex shaders pan out over the next few years, plus what new features lie beyond. GPU speed is secondary to me...

 

[Ruckas]

I'm noticing a big flaw in all this futuristic talk. People say that gaming with a 10ghz cpu will be hindered by a 1ghz GPU. And vice versa. Nobody has considered the fact that the fastest hard disk drive rpm is currently 10,000. We need to find a way to speed this up before we go making Artificial intelligence bound cpu's.

Ruckas-

 

[Bovinicus]

HDDs aren't really holding us back. The only thing an HDD affects with most games is load times. Once everything is loaded into memory, the HDD doesn't really matter anymore.

 

[SickBeast]

i agree with regards to hard drive performance. unless you have about 10gb of memory, hard drive performance matters. in order to simulate real life, it will take ENORMOUS amounts of storage space for all of the textures, polygons, etc.

i notice already that in a game like ut2003 it is constantly swapping to my hard drive. i know i only have 256mb of memory, but i'm sure you can see my point.

 

[Lonyo]

Mhz aren't everything.
Just like all the AMD/Interl arguments, there are similar things with GPU's. The Radeons are clocked lower than the GF FX core/mem, and almost perform on the same level. It's not all about clock speed, the 256bit memory bus on the Radeon has removed any advantage from the GF FX faster memory.

 

[Bovinicus]

Mhz aren't everything.

True, but it will be a reasonable indicator of performance nonetheless. It seemed like everyone was a lot more excited about CPUs hitting 1GHz, and I don't understand why. At the time, we didn't really need 1GHz CPUs. By the time 1GHz GPUs are around, I have a feeling we will be able to take advantage it very soon afterwards (Granted memory bandwidth scales accordingly).

 

[sxr7171]

Originally posted by: Ruckas
I'm noticing a big flaw in all this futuristic talk. People say that gaming with a 10ghz cpu will be hindered by a 1ghz GPU. And vice versa. Nobody has considered the fact that the fastest hard disk drive rpm is currently 10,000. We need to find a way to speed this up before we go making Artificial intelligence bound cpu's. Ruckas-

You mean 15,000 rpm for over 3 years now. In any HD speed may only be an issue during loading and boot-up, since I'm sure 2GB memory will be the basic/standard memory configuration then with power users running more memory. Memory speeds however are a major issue and I wonder if they will keep up with processor speed even with all the announcements of Yellowstone and other technologies.

 

[Bovinicus]

Memory speeds however are a major issue and I wonder if they will keep up with processor speed even with all the announcements of Yellowstone and other technologies.

That's my only worry. Memory bandwidth may not be able to keep up with GPU/CPU speed. Hopefully, there will be some significant breakthroughs in the next few years.

 

[bunnyfubbles]

I can't wait for my quantum GPU

 

[zephyrprime]

Memory bandwidth may not be able to keep up with GPU/CPU speed

Memory bandwidth can scale really well if necessary but memory latency cannot unfortunately.

 

[acx]

As GPU frequencies increase, a bigger concern would be heat. The die size of the GPU will continue to shrink while frequencies ramp up. Dissipating all that heat in an efficient manner without resorting to extreme cooling like the FlowFX or watercooling will become extremely important. Reducing voltage would be one way of reducing heat but that also reduces the max frequency. Maybe by then, new nanotech and optical systems will be in place that will help solve the heat problem.

 

[jiffylube1024]

Originally posted by: zephyrprime

Memory bandwidth may not be able to keep up with GPU/CPU speed

Memory bandwidth can scale really well if necessary but memory latency cannot unfortunately.

True - just look at RDRAM. That whole standard is built on the principle of ultra-high bandwidth serial memory with high latency.

 

[Bovinicus]

As GPU frequencies increase, a bigger concern would be heat.

That's always a concern. However, engineers have been finding ways around that problem for quite some time. Even if it requires attaching a vacuum cleaner to your GPU... =)

 

[BFG10K]

MHz isn't as important for GPUs as it is for CPUs because a lot more factors come into play when determining GPU performance than they do when determining CPU performance. While the goal of GPUs is to be as fast as possible, raising the MHz will not necessarily achieve this and isn't always the best way to go about it.

Doesn't anyone care about how they scale anymore?

You don't need higher MHz to make graphics cards faster and you can do other things instead like increasing the number of rendering pipelines or making the memory bus wider.

Plus, by that time every game will be made with T&L in mind (Most of them are now, at least a little bit)

Every 3D game since Quake III has been made with T&L in mind.

People say that gaming with a 10ghz cpu will be hindered by a 1ghz GPU.

CPU MHz vs GPU MHz is completely apples vs oranges. They two things are completely different because the two pieces of hardware perform very different functions.

Nobody has considered the fact that the fastest hard disk drive rpm is currently 10,000.

Same as above except the comparison is more like apples vs watermelons.

HD speed isn't even an issue at all since the data is loaded into the system RAM before the CPU and GPU even touch it.

 

[Bovinicus]

MHz isn't as important for GPUs as it is for CPUs because a lot more factors come into play when determining GPU performance than they do when determining CPU performance. While the goal of GPUs is to be as fast as possible, raising the MHz will not necessarily achieve this and isn't always the best way to go about it.

True, but that doesn't change the fact that the 1GHz barrier for GPUs will be a good milestone. The performance of a 1GHz GPU, even if it's inefficient, should be very good. As well, it's not like other areas that affect performance will be standing still. They will be scaling accordingly (Hopefully) to keep up with others parts of this system; in this case it's the GPU. The whole point of this thread was because people seem to make such big deals about CPU clockspeed milestones, but don't care about GPUs.

 

[ScrewFace]

In the meantime I'm waiting for the R350 (RADEON 9900 Pro) which has a core of 375MHz and memory at 400MHz and has 2 texture units per pipeline. THIS is what I've been waiting for all along!

 

[Goose77]

One reason that the Mhz is not the focus on GPU's is that this is not where most of the power lays. it more important to have more pipelines and texture units per pipline then it is to have more MHZ!

 

[Bovinicus]

In the meantime I'm waiting for the R350 (RADEON 9900 Pro) which has a core of 375MHz and memory at 400MHz and has 2 texture units per pipeline.

Yeah, that will do nicely until a 1GHz GPU comes around. =)
Is it really going to have 2 texture units per pipeline? That could really help performance out, especially in newer games.