Hi there, I want to share some thoughts and want to hear your opinions on it.
Recently, AI developments are booming also in the sense of game development. E.g. NVIDIA ACE which would bring the possibility of NPCs which run an AI model to communicate with players. Also, there are developments on an alternative to ray tracing where lighting, shadows and reflections are generated using AI which would need less performance and has similar visual aesthetics as ray tracing.
So it seems like raster performance is already at a pretty decent level. And graphic card manufacturers are already putting increasingly AI processors on the graphics card.
In my eyes, the next logical step would be to separate the work of the graphics card, which would be rasterisation and ray tracing, from AI. Resulting in maybe a new kind of PCIe card, an AI accelerator, which would feature a processor optimized for parallel processing and high data throughput.
This would allow developers to run more advanced AI models on the consumer’s pc. For compatibility, they could e.g. offer a cloud based subscription system.
So what are your thoughts on this?
Unless the AI processing is much more specialized than graphics, I think manufacturers would put that effort into making more powerful GPUs that can also be used for AI tasks.
We saw this happen a long time ago with PPUs. Physics Processing Units. They came around for a couple of years, then the graphics cards manufacturers integrated the PPU into the GPU and destroyed any market for PPUs.
They would try to alleviate the cost on running GPU by making an AI accelerator chip like Tensor Core, but it’ll get bottleneck by limited VRAM when Neural Net models require steep amount of memory. it’s more productive to have something like NPU that runs either on RAM or by it’s own memory chips offering higher amount of capacity to run such neural net and avoid the roundtrip data copying between GPU and CPU.