GTX 1060 Reviews

[Slimebeast]

JEMC said:

Slimebeast said:

Thanks a lot.

Oh yeah, asynchronous compute was the buzzword thrown around so much. Problem is I don't know what it is.

The thingy avoiding CPU bottlenecks in DX12, when that was announced I remember I thought it was totally useless and even counterproductive a couple years ago, because in the modern era nearly all games have been so clearly bottlenecked by the GPU, except for strategy games, simulation and sim-hybrids like Skyrim. But since then I've realized that CPU technology has lagged behind so much in recent years that today some even pure action games have become largely CPU dependent. Games still don't require much CPU tasks, but the graphics cards have improved so fast and the graphics engines with them that even the newest CPUs have a tough time to keep up. We just have to transfer some tasks over to the GPU.

Another thing I would like to understand better, is why CPU performance only increases by, what is it, like 25% every two years when GPU improvement is still fairly close to Moore's Law (double transistors every two years, which typically translates to perhaps 1.5-1.7x in raw performance).

I assume it has something to do with specialization versus parallellism for sure, but I wonder if there's other factors too.

Thoughts anybody?

Lack of competition.

Intel doesn't have real competition is the desktop market, but ARM is pushing hard in the low power segments. That made Intel focus mostly on lowering the power consumption of their chips and not so much in makeing them as powerful as they could. That brought to this situation.

Hopefully, Zen will bring some competition in the desktop market and push things forward. Again.

Also, some games are really CPU dependent. Fallout 4, Skyrim, Doom, GTA V and more.

Yeah. That's what I just said. Traditionally, games with lots of simulation going on have been CPU dependent, like Bethesda's RPGs, and strategy games of course, while you could count on that pure shooters and other action games were heavily GPU dependent. But today it's not that simple. All of a sudden we're seeing lots of "simple" action games being CPU-dependent. The new Doom is a great example of the new trend we have begun to see! And the main explanation is that CPUs have simply lagged behind in raw power relative to the GPU to the point that it becomes a bottleneck, it's not that Doom is designed with complex world simulation running in the background, which are typical CPU-tasks.

Interesting about ARM and the focus on lower power use by Intel. Low CPU power use really has been used as an important selling point by hardware companies in the last decade. It's funny that we see AMD and others adapt to that by changing GPU architecture in order to take over many traditional CPU tasks since these low power CPU's can't handle them anymore, instead of increasing the power use of CPUs! It's really instilled into people that a CPU is not supposed to draw a lot of power.