alt Hacker Newsreminds me of this remark made by Carmack on hidden surface removal
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6UKhR0T6cs&t=2315s
> "research from the 70s especially, there was tons of work going on on hidden surface removal, these clever different algorithmic ways - today we just kill it with a depth buffer. We just throw megabytes and megabytes of memory and the problem gets solved much much easier."
ofcourse "megabytes" of memory was unthinkiable in the 70s. but for us, its unthinkable to have real-time frame inferencing. I cant help but draw the parallels between our current-day "clever algorithmic ways" of drawing pixels to the screen.
I definitely agree with the take that in the grand scheme of things, all this pixel rasterizing business will be a transient moment that will be washed away with a much simpler petaflop/exaflop local TPU that runs at 60W under load, and it simply 'dreams' frames and textures for you.
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What happens when you want to do something very new, or very specific?
Agree. If you look at the GPU in an iPhone 17 and compare to the desktop GPU I had in 1998, the difference is startling.
Voodoo in 1998 could render about 3m poly/sec on a Utah teapot, which was absurd number at the time, where I was coming from software renderers that were considered amazing at 100K/sec.
A19 Pro GPU could do about 5bn/sec at about 4X the resolution. And it fits in your pocket. And runs off a tiny battery. Which also powers the screen.
25 years from now a 5090 GPU will be laughably bad. I have no idea how fast we'll be able to hallucinate entire scenes, but my guess is that it'll be above 60fps.