Now that Nvidea have the release dates of the 20th September for the 2080 and 2080ti Turing cards I'm wondering if any of our Palace Hol brethren are interested in upgrading their graphics cards.

Like many I'm licking my lips in expectation of some price drops on 1080ti cards and dipping my toes early next month.

Ray tracing, while an exciting technology, seems like it needs another card generation or two before it can really impress.

Any thoughts?

'Who are you and how did you get in here? I'm a locksmith. And, I'm a locksmith.' (Leslie Nielsen)

Not for everyone I know.

'Who are you and how did you get in here? I'm a locksmith. And, I'm a locksmith.' (Leslie Nielsen)

I have been learning how to use the graphics card as a pertty good parallel computing engine and for certain general computing (as well as just graphical display) tasks it can be used to blow CPU processing out of the water. This generally means work involving the same smallish bit of computation repeated for many millions of data items.

I took a set of C++ procedures involving the generation and transformation of 3D noise across a spherical space (planet generation) which was running in a couple of minutes on the CPU, ported it to GLSL and ran it as a compute shader on a reasonably decent but not bleeding-edge NVidia graphics card and it did it in a few tenths of a second. You can get software development kits like CUDA which present the GPU's parallel architecture as a pure general computing platform and run high-volume computations in massive parallel, moving the data from the CPU to the GPU beforehand and pulling the results back on completion.

Other applications would include raster image filtering (Gaussian blur, edge detection, emboss etc.), Fourier transforms, process simulation such as erosion modelling, and even neural networks (I think).

Why anyone wants to waste computing power like this on s*** like Fortnite I don't comprehend.

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The Ferret
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I never really got into CUDA to be honest. I'd have to have really hacked away at my legacy code, to the point it's probably diminishing returns. I'm aware it's really good at array functions though.

Is this procedural planet topology you're generating, incidentally?

PS: those games are driving the FLOPS, don't bash them ;-)

Maybe by the time of the 30 series VR will eached a critical mass with developer time and the specs it offers.

I see it breaking through to the mass market via the consoles first so if they stick with it....though AMD are the chip makers there.

Exciting times.

'Who are you and how did you get in here? I'm a locksmith. And, I'm a locksmith.' (Leslie Nielsen)

That's a nice one... I imagine there will be quite a few trading up, so you could grab a bargain. I ended up adding keyword alerts to [Link] so you get a notification if something is posted there.

For some games, I couldn't go back to "pancake mode" - 3D all the way :-)