Computing didn't take off until it shrank from the giant, unreliable beasts of machines owned by a small number of big corporations to the home computers of the 70s.
There's a lot more of us than them.
There's a gold rush market for GPUs and DRAM. It won't last forever, but while it does high volume sales at high margins will dominate supply. GPUs are still inflated from the crypto rush, too.
The iPhone isn't exactly a consumer computation device. From that perspective, it does less work at a higher cost.
(I remember the huge window in which phone companies desperately put out feature phones with sub-par touch screens, completely missing the value to consumers. The iPod Touch should've been warning enough... and should've been (one of) my signal(s) to buy Apple stock, I guess :-)
3Dfx was not the inventor of the GPU. There’s a long history of GPU development for corporate applications.
The iPhone wasn’t the first mobile phone. Early mobile phones were very expensive and targeted as businesses who wanted their executives in touch
You’re still thinking from a consumer-centric view. Zoom out and those consumer companies were not the first to develop the products. You didn't even think about the actual originators of those types of products because you don’t see them as a consumer.
Arguably we don't. Most of the improvements these days seem to be on the GPGPU side with very little gains in raster performance this decade.
I have a flagship 7-8 year old GPU in one machine and a mid-level modern GPU in another.
It’s flat out wrong to claim “very little gains” during this time. The difference between those two GPUs is huge in games. The modern GPU also does it with far less power and noise.
I can’t understand this HN mentality that modern hardware isn’t fast or that we’re not seeing gains.
HN is strange. I have an old gaming build from 7-8 years ago and while it can do high end games on low settings and resolution, it doesn’t hold a candle to even a mid-range modern build.
“viable” is doing a lot of work in that claim. You can tolerate it at low res and settings and if you’re okay with a lot of frame rate dips, but nobody is going to mistake it for a modern build.
You’re also exaggerating how fast video cards became obsolete in the past. Many of us gamed just fine on systems that weren’t upgraded for 5-6 years at a time.
And back in the early 2000s, even bleeding edge current-year rigs would struggle with new games like Doom 3, Far Cry, Crysis, and so on. Hardware was advancing so rapidly that games were being built in anticipation of upcoming hardware, so you had this scenario where high end systems bought in one year would struggle with games released that year, let alone systems from 5-6 years prior.
Obviously if you're referencing CRPGs and the like, then yeah - absolutely anything could run them. The same remains even more true today. Baldur's Gate 3's minimum requirement is a GTX 970, a card more than 11 years old. Imagine a 1989 computer trying to run Baldur's Gate 2!
Perfectly stated. I think comments like the one above come from a mentality that the individual consumer should be the center of the computing universe and big purchasers should be forced to live with the leftovers.
What's really happening is the big companies are doing R&D at incredible rates and we're getting huge benefits by drafting along as consumers. We wouldn't have incredible GPUs in our gaming systems and even cell phones if the primary market for these things was retail entertainment purchases that people make every 5 years.