dahuman said:
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- Tools and APIs are proprietary to Nvidia. The only GPU physics library worth anything is this. AMD's libraries aren't used in any games even though they are free which indicates they are very far behind or too hard to use.
- I don't see anyone working to change this with new tools or engines. There are some paid-for tech demos that didn't amount to much.
- Running code on the GPU is very, very hard because of poor memory access. It takes experts with PhDs in CS right now. It's incredibly expensive to hire the talent and give them the time to optimise the code. Even if it had potential savings you can do a better job with the time and money running it on the CPU.
- GPUs consume a lot of power at full load. It is more energy efficient to run CPU code right now unless the code is very good.
- Splitting the GPU between GPGPU work and rendering work is very hard and would need AMD's full support.
- AMD as a company is near bankrupt and has no time or ability to help with this.
- The code you get is very specific to that GPU. It's even less portable than Cell code was to an Xbox CPU. Devs would practically need to reimplement three times for three consoles. Unless one console has dominating share the proposition is poor.
- Budgets are constrained this gen especially. Games are increasingly limited by budget instead of hardware. Spending money to especially put calculation on the GPU has to be lower priority than merely HAVING those features in any form.
- The parts of game code that are suited to running on a GPU (physics) are low priority and frankly optional features compared to getting the game even running.
- It's been around for five years and none of the above has changed even a little bit.
The first post is wrong, it's WORSE than the Cell in terms of coding difficulty, time to optimise and being platform specific.
Did you know that the only working consumer GPGPU product right now is a video encoder, and it is incapable of producing the same quality as a CPU encode?
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@superchunk
Their 2013 plans are "delayed" because they actually cancelled the products due to their dire financial situation.
