Bofferbrauer2 said:
That went a bit differently. Graphics have always been handled by separate chips, same for audio. However in the past (mostly the 80's) , this could have been an entire array of separate chips to reach the result that was wanted. This is also why graphics and sound cards are even a thing - there were just too many chips to put them all on the motherboard and needed their own RAM (unified RAM with overlapping or same memory address spaces wasn't a thing yet), so they got put onto extension cards to create more space. With the advent of 3D graphics, they also increasingly needed more cooling, first passive, then active, along with more bandwidth, so including them in the CPU like most other parts that were external before (Floating point processing unit, Northbridge, Southbridge...) wasn't exactly feasible without massive performance losses (hello APUs!). As a result of all this, we're using extension cards for GPUs to this very day, and is probably the only extension card which will survive for a long time for all the reasons mentioned above. |
The reasons you listed for switching to expansion cards for 3d graphics can also be very true for RT. It's one of the most calculation intensive job a GPU can do and we're only at the beginning. Need for RT performance will explode in the coming decade, too much to be handled by a regular GPU.
I'm actually not too sure how long GPUs as extra cards will survive outside of the very high end and professional use cases. Integrated graphics are getting so good. I could even see a future where a PC gamer buys a RT card rather than a discrete GPU to upgrade their internal graphics.
Either way, the next decade is gonna get really exciting.
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