The Power Party is About Over

[Reloadron]

Originally Posted by Capper

Lets go guys, lets get this story dugg!!!!!!

Been there & dugg that!

Ron

[Stormcrow]

Originally Posted by simple_inhibition

well heres my other idea. make video cards themselves upgradeable.

There's a big problem with that, and it's with the PCB board itself. Two things mainly, power management and bus width.
Notice how the 6600GT, 7600GT, and 8600GT all use the same layout? It's because they are all using the same PCB. Each of those cards has a comparable energy draw, and a bus width of 128-bits. So if your customizable PCB is capped at 128-bits, it makes no sense to buy a high power GPU or RAM. That, and the GPU itself will need to be designed to communicate on that 128-bit bus. If you wanted a higher bus width, you'd need a thicker and more expensive PCB capable of supporting it. Also, notice that a 8800GT has far more transistors and capacitors built into the PCB then a 8600GTS. They are designed to handle that specific card's power requirements.
So, in order to do this the customizable PCB needs to be able to handle the highest order of GPU first down to the low end budget GPU. It would need to have (in next gen terms) a 512-bit bus width, an electrical layout that could distribute power based on need (less to low end and more to high end based on the GPU detected, and the PCB would have to have an onboard BIOS to be able to do that...much much more expensive to implement) and a socket system that can take both RAM and the GPU itself. All the GPUs need to communicate with a 512-bit bus, even the lowly budgeters that will waste the potential and raise the overall price of the chips.
Then in the end, by the time it's all said and done you've just shelled out a ton of money on a mid-range solution that can later be swapped to a high-end of the same breed if you wanted. Kinda just like...Evga's step up program now. And due to socket limitations and BIOS incompatibilities you'll be needing to buy a new PCB about as often as a new motherboard to run newer RAM and GPUs.

It's been thought of many times before, but because of those limitations I've outlined it's just not practical. A much more economical and technologically friendly solution is already being developed, like AMD's Torrenza and Fusion, and Intel's Larrabee. A CPU-GPU hybrid could give you both a low end solution in one cheaper model and a mid-range gaming solution in another, all in one chip with a lower overall power draw. For high end, an add-on card can be placed in and the GPU cores disabled or freed up to act as a GPGPU offloading work from the CPU like in-game physics or complex calculations in modeling software.

[One4yu2c]

Originally Posted by simple_inhibition

im kinda thinking outside the box here, but what about video game developers improving the efficiency of the software itself?

Along those same lines, how about finally starting to take advantage of multiple cores? Some games already do, but by and large, developer support in the multi-threaded arena remains lackluster (not just in the gaming industry, either).

It's not an all-encompassing solution, but it would certainly help to effectively utilize idle cores.

[screwballl]

this is where AMD is looking into the system so that you will not need a separate video card, you will just have one socket for CPU and another socket with all the GPU needed components in one die. eventually it will likely be CPU+GPU on one die around the 9nm timeframe.... we will see

[RangerXLT8]

There is no doubt the software companies are behind in terms of multi -core support. Why cant M$ make office support at least 2 cores?

Companies like Crytek and a few others should be given the credit they deserve for making their games support multicores.... I noticed COD4 supports all 4 cores on my quad...