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(Image credit: Future)
When you look at the rising costs of modern graphics cards compared with their forebears, that’s maybe hard to fathom. It sure looks like the cost of a GPU has just been steadily rising to most of us when we look at the objects of our silicon desires. But when you look at just what the graphics chips of today are capable of, the level of raw computational power at the disposal of even a lowly RTX 4060 would have seemed borderline mythical 20 years back.
A GeForce 6800 Ultra from 2005 delivered a whopping 6.4 GFLOPS, while the bottom of the Ada Lovelace generation comes with 15,100 GFLOPS of processing grunt. That’s a whole world of difference from a $499 card of 20 years ago versus a $299 GPU of today.
And that’s not even a card anywhere near the top of the stack, nor close to what you’ll get from Nvidia’s most powerful enterprise GPUs.
Jen-Hsun, at today’s morning-after-keynote Q&A session, compared what Nvidia has done in developing more powerful graphics silicon, pushing down the relative price of GPU computational power, to the impact of Moore’s Law.
“So much that machine learning became logical: ‘just have the computer go figure it out.'”
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Basically, there’s so much computational power available for such relatively little cash that you might as well just start throwing it at AI to solve all our problems. Or, you know, draw us a picture of a gold fish when you absolutely, positively justhaveto have a freshly generated picture of a fish.
There’s no getting away from it, the graphics card, and its constituent component, the GPU, have become the most important pieces of silicon in our modern time. There’s also no getting away from the fact that Nvidia is responsible for some of the most important silicon of our time, however you feel about the rise and rise of artificial intelligence and its potential impact on the world and humanity.
Does Jen-Hsun’s maths add up? I don’t know, he didn’t show his workings, but what is true is that since the birth of the GPU as we know it, the cost-to-performance ratio has only been going in one direction.
Catch up withCES 2025:We’re on the ground in sunny Las Vegas covering all the latest announcements from some of the biggest names in tech, including Nvidia, AMD, Intel, Asus, Razer, MSI and more.
Catch up withCES 2025:We’re on the ground in sunny Las Vegas covering all the latest announcements from some of the biggest names in tech, including Nvidia, AMD, Intel, Asus, Razer, MSI and more.
Catch up withCES 2025:We’re on the ground in sunny Las Vegas covering all the latest announcements from some of the biggest names in tech, including Nvidia, AMD, Intel, Asus, Razer, MSI and more.
Catch up withCES 2025:We’re on the ground in sunny Las Vegas covering all the latest announcements from some of the biggest names in tech, including Nvidia, AMD, Intel, Asus, Razer, MSI and more.
Catch up withCES 2025:We’re on the ground in sunny Las Vegas covering all the latest announcements from some of the biggest names in tech, including Nvidia, AMD, Intel, Asus, Razer, MSI and more.
Catch up withCES 2025:We’re on the ground in sunny Las Vegas covering all the latest announcements from some of the biggest names in tech, including Nvidia, AMD, Intel, Asus, Razer, MSI and more.
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Epic CEO Tim Sweeney says tech leaders are ‘pretending to be Republicans’ to gain favor with Trump, skirt antitrust laws, and ultimately ‘rip off consumers and crush competitors’
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Square Enix launches new anti-harassment policy to protect its employees and partners from abusive fans
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Path of Exile 2 numberlord spends 16 straight days killing rare monsters to prove that a stat that makes loot better makes better loot
Palestinian developer raises more than $200,000 to make Dreams on a Pillow, a game about the horrors of the 1948 Nakba
Piranha Games will lay off employees after Mechwarrior 5: Clans ‘performed below projections’
Marvel Rivals’ latest update quietly killed the game’s burgeoning mod scene
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