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The end of GPUs

Ars has a great interview with Tim Sweeney of Epic games in which he discusses the implications of his prediction (which he has been making for some time) that general purpose cpu's will soon become so powerful that we will no longer need dedicated graphics cards to render our 3D games. I am not really up to date on the current scene in either processors or graphics cards but I find this suggestion both very credible and also very appealing.

Despite all the 3D enhanced gaming pleasure that hardware accelerated graphics have given me over the last few decade or so I have to admit that a world without dedicated graphics cards would be a far better world for PC gaming. I remember a time when the only thing you needed to check on the box was whether your PC had enough megahertz to run a game. You could buy any half decent machine confident in the knowledge it would run every game out there. Contrast that to the situation today where the average PC bought on the high street has little or no hope of playing modern games and a significant level of expertise is required to set up a half way decent gaming rig. No wonder the mass market has abandoned the PC a the platform of choice for high end gaming.

The death of the gpu just might spark a new rennaissance in PC gaming.
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