Obscure hardware features should be irrelevant (Column)

Take for example CUDA technology found on Nvidia graphics cards. CUDA is “a parallel computing platform and programming model invented by NVIDIA. It enables dramatic increases in computing performance by harnessing the power of the graphics processing unit.” A nifty feature to be sure, however it remains largely irrelevant to most gamers out there.
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Not quite true, PhysX is implemented through CUDA and if you have it it's quite a nice boost to the performance of the physics engine. Although tbh I've never seen marketing which focused on the fact that nVidia cards support CUDA but maybe I just don't see that much marketing about PC hardware.

The reason you see all that stuff in marketing material is that it's very difficult to market pure performance in a way that is meaningful to most people. You can go on about how many Tera-FLOPS your card can pump out or how many pipelines it has but for the average joe that means little. Even if you put up average fps scores of popular games, can you or do you put up competitors scores?
 
If you can't afford three monitors you probably also can't afford a decent GPU which would enable you to run them all. The biggest issues that I have with marketing is how several retailers have no idea which things are actually important when they market a device. They will for example over emphasize the RAM on a GPU...
 
Wyzak said:
If you can't afford three monitors you probably also can't afford a decent GPU which would enable you to run them all. The biggest issues that I have with marketing is how several retailers have no idea which things are actually important when they market a device. They will for example over emphasize the RAM on a GPU...
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Very True... and im tired of lines like : "This ones box is prettier than this one"
 
a few degrees matters i think ... a few degrees cooler then your gfx card wouldnt have set on fire ... true story, ask R4C3
 
Not sure eyefinity and 3D are so irrelevant as they main goal is to be more immersive and part of the end goal of GPU's. but what is irrelevant is like more than standard ram aka like 3 or 4 GB on a entry level GPU.
 
MOnk said:
Not quite true, PhysX is implemented through CUDA
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That is highly unlikely. PhysX is way older than CUDA, so unless they re-wrote the entire thing from scratch it can't be.

screens that ship with built in USB hubs…
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Those aren't useless. I've got a proper USB hub sitting below my screen...because my screen doesn't have a USB hub. :(
 
Just for the record, Eyefinity is fucking awesome. Click my sig for my rig setup >>>>

Wyzak said:
If you can't afford three monitors you probably also can't afford a decent GPU which would enable you to run them all. The biggest issues that I have with marketing is how several retailers have no idea which things are actually important when they market a device. They will for example over emphasize the RAM on a GPU...
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Yes. Which is why when most people ask me for a 1 gb graphic card, I ask them what size monitor are they playing on.

They think a GT440 is the same as a 560Ti.

Luckily I'm the type of sales person that will actually sell the right product to the end user as to what they are looking for.
 
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HavocXphere said:
That is highly unlikely. PhysX is way older than CUDA, so unless they re-wrote the entire thing from scratch it can't be.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PhysX

Video games supporting hardware acceleration by PhysX can be accelerated by either a PhysX PPU or a CUDA-enabled GeForce GPU (if it has at least 32 CUDA cores), thus offloading physics calculations from the CPU, allowing it to perform other tasks instead. This typically results in a smoother gaming experience and additional visual effects.
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Considering they moved from a dedicated hardware approach to a GPU based approach, I would say the answer is yes.
 
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