imaheadcase
Diamond Member
- May 9, 2005
- 3,850
- 7
- 76
Uhm, 20 years ago there really was no GPU acceleration. There was like the MACH64 and such from ATI, but it was for 2d acceleration. Mostly to aid in doing graphics work on a computer.
15 years ago 3d GPU's started to take off. 3dFX was in their hay-day, and there was about 20 other GPU companies. However, games were very simple. Quake 1 was not a game that required huge amounts of processing power. I remember playing Quake World (Damn I miss that game) on a ATI Rage Pro Turbo with 6MB of RAM. Then I upgraded to a 8MB Voodoo II and the game would peg out the 72fps game limit at 1024x768.
However, games keep getting more and more advanced. And screen resolutions keep going up and up. 1024x768 has 786,432 pixels. 1920x1080 has 2,073,600 pixels. So obviously 1080 is going to require more hardware. And so long as games keep getting better looking, they will require more GPU power to run.
However it should be noted that todays top GPU's use less power than top end GPU's from a few years ago, yet are way faster at the same time.
I realize that, but the fact remains you didn't need all the "extra" stuff that goes into a card today that you did then and still have a awesome card. Most people don't care about all the extra "fancy" stuff that game engines use nowadays, heck competitive players turn most graphic settings off. The "Problem" is that games now will require you to have a card that will use the extra features to even play it now. Which is really sad.
