Pemalite said:
setsunatenshi said:
Don't wan't to argue this in circles, but yes, I am aware gpus had nand on them in the past, but not mainstream gaming gpus and they were extremely expensive. The price of nand is quite cheap nowadays and only going to get even cheaper, so something that didn't make sense to do it the past now might become quite affordable.
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Define "affordable". - GPU's already exceed the $1,000 price point in the high end... But lets add to that cost shall we?
Regardless of how cheap NAND gets, it's still going to increase costs and the net benefit will be relatively small, if not... Non-existent and maybe even performance impacting.
The cost isn't in the just the NAND either, you need to build the PCB and traces in such a way to accommodate the NAND, build the appropriate traces, build the SSD controller and build the controller interface on the GPU to interface with, you need to build the appropriate power delivery and re-work how your cooling works and so much more.
It's not just a simple case of "whacking some NAND on a GPU" and calling it a day... And this is *just* on the hardware side of the equation, if your competitor doesn't integrate an SSD onto their GPU's and they instead include faster/larger pools of Ram and have superior performance at a lower cost? Then you loose sales/profit.
It has never made sense to do it unless you are running a professional workload that extends towards multiple Terabytes... Even then you would often get better performance by using RAID SSD's on the motherboard anyway.
There is a reason why AMD hasn't "run with the idea" since introducing it a few years back.
SSD's are slow. Large SSD's are expensive.
setsunatenshi said:
I think you're missing my main point which is, developing for PC means developing for the lowest common denominator. Until m.2 drives are ubiquitous, every game will be created under the assumption your clients are using slow ass 7200rpm hdds. Meaning, a game that is made to take advantage of nearly instant access to assets that would be rendered on the other side of the map, would allow for new game experiences that you can't afford right now. As a hypothetical, if you have a superman game that has superman flying at pretty high speeds across a map the size of a GTA5 or bigger, you could potentially go in 2 or 3 seconds from one side of the map, with a certain amount of assets loaded to the RAM, to the complete opposite side of the map and during the trip you could actually load the new assets really quickly to the RAM for rendering, without going through a loading screen (or a narrow corridor strategically placed to hide loading screens).
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No developer worth their salt has built their game to accommodate for a "slow-ass 7200rpm" hard drive in the last few years.
A 7200rpm HDD has not been the lowest common denominator on PC in years. YEARS.
SSD's are the majority, not the exception in PC's, even low-end, netbooks.
You also frame your statement in such a way that there isn't any tangible benefits to an SSD unless a developer builds for it? Seems disingenuous, seems you are borrowing the narrative from Cerny's example demonstration, which doesn't show the use-case and advantages of every aspects of using an SSD.
setsunatenshi said:
I'm happy to wait and see how things turn out, I just find it inconceivable that the PC market won't somehow emulate the new paradigm shift the new consoles will bring. I can't say I'll bet money on Nvida/AMD applying such a solution, but at some point certain games just won't be playable in HDDs. Maybe buying a fast M.2 drive becomes mandatory in those cases, I don't know. But at the end of the day, I did find the proposed solution quite interesting and definitely in the realm of possibility :)
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The PC is the paradigm shift, the PC adopted SSD's long before the consoles.
The PC is always the cutting edge.
Ray Tracing? First on PC.
Tessellation? Yup. PC there too.
720P gaming? Also PC.
1080P gaming? Yep. PC.
4k? Also PC.
3D positional Audio? Of course, the PC.
3D accelerated graphics? Yep PC.
Hardware Transform and Lighting? Pioneered on PC.
Solid State Drives? PC as well.
Programmable Pixel Shaders? PC did that first too.
While people were drooling over the latest and greatest Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 titles off their optical/mechanical media, I was running SSD's.
And just like graphics, you *do* have diminishing returns every-time you double your SSD speed, the biggest benefit that SSD's brought to the table was the reduction in latency over mechanical hard drives, people often forget that.
I am not at that point where I feel my DDR4+PCI-E 3.0 is a limitation yet. Heck the old 3930K@5ghz backup rig with DDR3+PCI-3.0 still beats some mid-range rigs and that is almost 10 years old.
My next upgrade will likely be when DDR5, PCI-E 5.0 and USB 4.0 become the new thing.
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