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?
Future cpu’s will probably feature ai accelerators (like igpus) but I don’t think local ai models will be demanding enough to require a separate card. There’s just a huge gap between the computation power needed for rudimentary ai tasks (which can run on a simple accelerator) and doing the same things more accurately (which might require more power than a gpu). I don’t think the diminishing returns would justify having separate cards for most people and games when they can just run a simpler model that’s almost as good on the cpu accelerator.