GPUs: the next frontier in film

Technology and movie-making have always gone hand in hand but the latest breakthroughs are changing the very nature of the process.

[Nihilism]

"The advent of the GPU is really the next big frontier for us. We have seen hundreds of times improvements over the last few months. This is taking Moore's Law out the window"

There you go autofire. ( he believes moore's law has not been broken yet.....and that a dual core 2.2ghz processor= 4.4ghz) giggle giggle

[thor]

Dual core 2.2Ghz is in the BEST CASE equivalent to a single-core 4.4Ghz, but is actually not as good due to overhead, and not being able to efficiently split processes across both cores. Though architecture improvements mean that current processors with the same clock speed are faster.

The trouble is, that people take Moore's law out of context, and say that other things make up for the clock speed not increasing. But in fact, those things increased before ANYWAY, and the rate of change still is slowing.

[Nihilism]

autofire believes that all all the cores can combine and process a single thread, he things a 3ghz quad core is a 12ghz processor...that just isn't true. To say that it's the same or almost the same is an exaggeration, any program optimised for a single core will not run any faster on a dual core, and any program optimised specifically for a dual core ( but no more cores) will not gain anything from a quad core), whereas a clock speed increase will increase performance regardless of multi core optimisation, obviously you need a balance of both but 2.2 dual =/= 4.4ghz

What you say about architecture changes is true.
a p3 800mhz processor is obviously not comparable to a current cpu 3ghz ( number of cores aside) because the chip architecture has made them much more efficient. As well as the new and improved SSE instruction set that comes with new gens of cpu, allowing them to allocate and handle data more efficiently.

Anyway, on topic: i wonder what sort of setup Lucasarts would use to make games, obviously a workstation type of situation, but seeing how fast gpu's are becoming these days i image it wouldn't even be that extravagant, quad sli tesla cards or something