Opinion: AMD, Intel, And Nvidia In The Next Ten Years
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I've been a journalist/reviewer in the 3D graphics industry for over a decade. I can still remember walking through Fry's Electronics and seeing Western Digital's Paradise Tasmania 3D and actually getting excited about the Yamaha-powered graphics chip. Chris Angelini, the managing editor of Tom's Hardware US, and I go way back, with our first jobs in online journalism traced back to 3DGaming.com more than a decade ago.
Having been there from the beginning, I've seen the rise and fall of countless graphics manufacturers: S3, 3DLabs, Rendition, 3dfx, as well as board manufacturers like Orchid, STB, Hercules, STB, the original Diamond, and Canopus. But as wild and crazy as the last decade was for visual computing, the next decade is going to be even more exciting, not only in what technology will offer to consumers, but in the upcoming arms race in visual computing.
A lot has been said about the impending death of the dedicated GPU. If you look at the history of dedicated upgrade products for consumer PC technology, they all eventually reach the point of diminishing returns and then integration. However, while it is inevitable that the dedicated GPU will eventually disappear, it’s not going to happen in the next decade.
Integration of computer technology only happens after the evolutionary process of reaching the point of diminishing returns on quality and performance is reached. We can see evidence of this with sound cards, video processing, and even monitors.
What follows is a discussion on the future of 3D graphics. Is the GPU on its death bed? Will AMD, Intel, and Nvidia continue to be relevant? This is purely an opinion piece, but it is based on more than a decade of experience.
Disclosure: per FTC guidelines, I am required to disclose any potential conflicts of interest. I own no shares of any company discussed in this editorial. Additionally, although I have received free engineering samples from AMD, Intel, and Nvidia in the past for editorial purposes, I have not received any products from these companies in the last year.
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Couldn't agree more on upgrading speakers before sound-card. I use a Denon amplifier and a pair of Mission floorstanders with my PC and all of my friends tell me that they didn't realise a PC could sound so good. And this is with a P35 motherboard so it's a good few years old. I will admit though, that I am now looking at getting an Asus Xonar Essence...
Fantastic artical!
Really insightful, and with really interesting lloks back at the past. All we need now is someone to proof-read articles before they go live!
"Given that Pixar films still require 5 to 6 hours to render a single frame on large supercomputer clusters..."
If movie is all about effects, Transformers 1-2, Avatar...
2 hour movie = 7200 seconds = 518400 frames (72p frame rate)= ~3 million hours of render time with 6 hours per frame = about 350 years to render a 2 hour movie. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the 5-6 hours per frame is little too much isn't it?
Fantastic artical!Really insightful, and with really interesting lloks back at the past. All we need now is someone to proof-read articles before they go live!
+1 rep for having spelling mistakes in a comment having a go at someone for making spelling mistakes
+1 rep for having spelling mistakes in a comment having a go at someone for making spelling mistakes
haha! yeah, I noticed that as soon as I posted it but couldn't be bothered to rectify it. And in my defence, I'm not doing this for a living!
How many things can you get wrong in 1 article?! The iPod generation might be happy listening to their horribly compressed MP3s with crappy onboard sound - the rest of us will stick with dedicated sound cards and proper speakers. If the author thinks that an el cheapo chip on a motherboard that costs less than £40 is anywhere near as good as a £80 X-Fi card then he has a screw loose. Never mind the price/performance ratio - it isn't even in the same ballpark. To Asus & Creative: Please don't take this article as a template of what we all think - its not!!!
As for the Fermi architecture, it is dead in the water. It is like the author has not read any tech news from the last few months and is still going off the marketing cr*p from Nvidia produced 1 year ago.
How many things can you get wrong in 1 article?! The iPod generation might be happy listening to their horribly compressed MP3s with crappy onboard sound - the rest of us will stick with dedicated sound cards and proper speakers. If the author thinks that an el cheapo chip on a motherboard that costs less than £40 is anywhere near as good as a £80 X-Fi card then he has a screw loose. Never mind the price/performance ratio - it isn't even in the same ballpark. To Asus & Creative: Please don't take this article as a template of what we all think - its not!!!
As for the Fermi architecture, it is dead in the water. It is like the author has not read any tech news from the last few months and is still going off the marketing cr*p from Nvidia produced 1 year ago.
Whilst I disagree totally with the authors opinion on the quality of onboard sound (my NAD amp / Mission speakers come alive with my DJ friends M-Audio card compared to my onboard), the rest of the article is an interesting opinion. I do hope Fermi comes good - if only to provide competition, I'm not toally convinced by the 'ATI / AMD drivers are as stable as nVidias' arguments put here - my 4870 was awful and I ended up flogging it in a week just to go back to properly written drivers.
You don't get it david__t. The difference between a onboard sound chip and external are first of all not discernable for a large portion of the population, secondly; most of the general population do not care about the tiny relative difference between a 192MP3 to FLAC enoguh to spen the extra £200+ on teh equipment for it.
Graphics will head to a point where the differences between engines and generations are so small many people will end up not caring. The relative difference between 3000 to 500,000 polygons compared to 5million to 7million is so large eventaully we will head towards many billions of polygons with tesselation where the difference at the high levels is so small it isn't worth it.
Note the word relative used in this comment. The differnce between first generation tapes/cd players and computer systems and today's MP3/AAC players and onbaord sound chips is so large over a similar period of time it takes for us to move towards lossless and exact replication eventually we don't bother.
"Given that Pixar films still require 5 to 6 hours to render a single frame on large supercomputer clusters..."If movie is all about effects, Transformers 1-2, Avatar...2 hour movie = 7200 seconds = 518400 frames (72p frame rate)= ~3 million hours of render time with 6 hours per frame = about 350 years to render a 2 hour movie. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the 5-6 hours per frame is little too much isn't it?
I thought that to until I realised that that only 1 super computer what if they had say 40, that would be around 8 years, still a very long time but I think that's how long it takes for Pixar movies. Correct me if I'm wrong
Electron tunneling is already making things a considerable challenge. Gate oxides are already in the sub 10 nm range, which is what gives CMOS it's idle leakage current. What people usually aren't told is that it's not enough to just scale one thing between process nodes; gate length and gate metal pitch are just two of many things that need to be scaled down for each process jump. A transistor with a 5 nm channel wont work if it's gate oxide is 5 nm also. It's very difficult to make a continuos film that is only a few atoms thick.
Some roadblocks have already been reached, leading to the rise of such things as parallel computing rather than just continuing with higher GHz. I really don't see conventional CMOS transistors getting to 5 nm. We'll probably see gradual advancements in other directions which require software to adapt, etc.
I'm not a specialist in these matters but I think that the console market is having a big impact on the rate of progress in graphics technology nowadays. Usually when a console comes out a pc is almost immediately putting out better graphics and by maybe 3 years down the line pc graphics completely blow the consoles out of the water (for instance the PIII, 32mb tnt2 graphics system we got at my house in 1999 could play Quake 3 a lot better than PS2 could a year later, and by 2005 when that console generation was coming to a close Xbox was getting titles like HL2 and Doom 3 but was clearly WAY behind in terms of graphics)
In the current generation though, with rampant piracy on PCs and the continued success of consoles it is more profitable for developers to make sure their games are playable on 360 or PS3. If you consider that the current benchmark for PC graphics is still Crysis from 2007, it's clear that the PC has a lot of capability but developers would rather hold back to the spec of current consoles (for instance MW2's graphics are nothing like crysis' but it has sold much better) I even have a feeling I read that crytek have vowed never to make a pc exclusive again, and that the sequel to "it's so good it could never come out on consoles Crysis" will be on both PS3 and 360.
In this light I feel the pc graphics industry is being held back by the popularity of consoles and sony and ms's refusal to upgrade after huge investments in the current generation that is slowing down the growth in pc graphics as much as anything else. From what I've read, DX11 features should allow the pc to start pushing ahead again in graphics while still allowing the games to be console quality quite easily, but this remains to be seen and is just further proof of the supervenience of the pc graphics market on that of consoles.
Oops just signed up, first comment I made and somehow it came out 3 times. Anyone know how to delete it?
Oops just signed up, first comment I made and somehow it came out 3 times. Anyone know how to delete it?
Haha!
Welcome to Tom's hardware, the most sketchy forum/comment system in all the land!
Don't think you can delete or edit comments. Don't worry about it!
ok, you can but you have to do it through the forum rather than the comments section.
for all you guys saying this article is crap coz u run your own dedicated sound card...... there would be less than 1 in 1000 PCs out there with a dedicated sound card...
The numbers dont care about how 'passionate' you are about your soundcard.... This is a huge drop from the 486 days of requiring a sound card to play sounds....
use your brain.
wow, what an extensive article! You must've done a lot of research to get the numbers and facts to prove you points so hats off to that!!!
for all you guys saying this article is crap coz u run your own dedicated sound card...... there would be less than 1 in 1000 PCs out there with a dedicated sound card...The numbers dont care about how 'passionate' you are about your soundcard.... This is a huge drop from the 486 days of requiring a sound card to play sounds.... use your brain.
I wasn't saying the article was crap - merely the analogy
There's still a huge difference between onboard and dedicated sound cards, it's just fewer people care about it. Personally I find it very odd that someone will spend £500 on a great gfx card / monitor and £30 on speakers, but each to their own!
"There's still a huge difference between onboard and dedicated sound cards."
Please elaborate - how a SPDIF on an onboard card is worse than the SPDIF of a dedicated card? If you go thru DAC then yes, dedicated cards win. But nowdays you can just use the digital pass-thru (with an optical cable) and still have excellent sound quality...