Directx10 : No More Cpu Upgrade?

[jordibax]

Directx 9 requires that first Cpu Calculates geometric operations to make possible Gpu calculates all vertex operations needed in 3d applications , so soon or late we have to upgrade our Cpu besides the Gpu if we don´t want to have a bottleneck between Cpu and Gpu when game requirements needs so.
With directx10 almost all 3d operations will be calculated natively in the Gpu, so Cpu will be freed from the most of the operation tasks that today is involved at gaming time. Does it mean that we only have to worry mainly in upgrade our 3dcard and forget about upgrade uor Cpu?I just can´t believe that i will be able to use the cpu upgrade money to buy a much better 3dcard. Masters of 3d knowledge, post and tell me that i am not dreaming

[Mike]

Not quite...there are still lots of things the cpu has to do and it'll continue to be a bottleneck for the forseeable future. But you're correct that directx 10 gpus are less dependent on your cpu than directx 9 gpus were.

[Track]

Even if some of the things that the CPU does will now be done by the GPU, the CPU still has a major role in a PC as it has to communicate with the rest of the components, including the GPU, so ur always going to need a better CPU for at least one thing.

Mostly today the CPU is not a beneficial factor, since all it does it tell the GPU what to do and the GPU does it all, when it comes to rendering. But since rendering is most of the work, it is true that if u buy a more expensive CPU u wont see a difference in performance and that the GPU is the ONLY thing that really matters.

So when u say "soon i wont have to upgrade my CPU as much", its actually that u dont really need to upgrade ur CPU very much now either, but yes in the future the CPU bottleneck will become ever smaller because it will be doing less and the GPU will be doing more.
All u have to do in DX9.0 aswell, is buy a CPU that wont bottleneck the GPU too much and be able to pass on to the GPU around 80 FPS.

The future is of course to have a single processor with a GPU core and many CPU cores, each performing a different task. Motherboards will come with pre-determained ammounts of DDR4, etc.

[jordibax]

[QUOTE=Track]Even if some of the things that the CPU does will now be done by the GPU, the CPU still has a major role in a PC as it has to communicate with the rest of the components, including the GPU, so ur always going to need a better CPU for at least one thing.

I agree you, but the tasks you are reffering to, comunicate to the rest of the hardware and so, i think that are insignificant in comparison to the amount of work that means the whole rendering. As far I know, in a rendering operation , the aplication (game) calls to the api, the api to the driver, and the driver to the 3d card, all processes holded by the cpu and, and this happens in every frame, hard work that creates known bottlenecks. So if we free the cpu from these tasks and we leave all entire rendering work to the gpu, the amount of processes holded by the cpu are going to be extremately less than now. I am not sure about this, but i think that i read that in directx10, even files of the S.O. running in background when you are playing, are going to be kind of turned off. So, if we free the cpu from almost all rendering tasks and it only has to deal with S.O. and hardware controlling tasks, a middle range today`s cpu could be useful even in vista for a long time.

[Track]

[QUOTE=Track]Even if some of the things that the CPU does will now be done by the GPU, the CPU still has a major role in a PC as it has to communicate with the rest of the components, including the GPU, so ur always going to need a better CPU for at least one thing.

I agree you, but the tasks you are reffering to, comunicate to the rest of the hardware and so, i think that are insignificant in comparison to the amount of work that means the whole rendering. As far I know, in a rendering operation , the aplication (game) calls to the api, the api to the driver, and the driver to the 3d card, all processes holded by the cpu and, and this happens in every frame, hard work that creates known bottlenecks. So if we free the cpu from these tasks and we leave all entire rendering work to the gpu, the amount of processes holded by the cpu are going to be extremately less than now. I am not sure about this, but i think that i read that in directx10, even files of the S.O. running in background when you are playing, are going to be kind of turned off. So, if we free the cpu from almost all rendering tasks and it only has to deal with S.O. and hardware controlling tasks, a middle range today`s cpu could be useful even in vista for a long time.

No, as far as i know the CPU's greatest task is simply taking the information from the hard drive and passing it along to the GPU as commands. Then the GPU does all the work.
If the CPU is doing other things, they are less significant, but even those in-significant things will become less used once the GPU takes more of the load, until they start making multi-core processors and find a way to make it so that every application can use the GPU (as a GPU is over 40 times more powerfull than a CPU, its just that a CPU can do more things).
A bottleneck is when the CPU cannot pass enough data to the GPU, for the GPU to render 60 FPS.

[jordibax]

[QUOTE=jordibax]

No, as far as i know the CPU's greatest task is simply taking the information from the hard drive and passing it along to the GPU as commands. Then the GPU does all the work.
If the CPU is doing other things, they are less significant, but even those in-significant things will become less used once the GPU takes more of the load, until they start making multi-core processors and find a way to make it so that every application can use the GPU (as a GPU is over 40 times more powerfull than a CPU, its just that a CPU can do more things).
A bottleneck is when the CPU cannot pass enough data to the GPU, for the GPU to render 60 FPS.

Ok. if I understood you, you mean that cpu main task in gaming consists in taking game data from the hard disk and tell the gpu (by commands) how to process everything that is going to be displayed in the screen,and gpu with its specific-designed more powerfull processing engine , does the hard work. So, you mean that this task, taking data to be rendered from hdd to 3dcard, until designers don´t change this processing method, it is going to be tough enough to collapse our cpu , and consequently we are going to have to update our cpu soon or later. It seems logical, it´s just that i didn´t think that this task would ever be so tough to create a bottleneck between gpu and middle-ranged cpu even the amount of data were very high.
thanks and sorry if i didn´t catch the idea , sometimes difficoult to understand tech english if you are not so :)

[Mike]

whoa whoa whoa...CPUs do a hell of a lot more than that in games...they handle all A.I., all physics calculations, and pretty much any other moving object on the screen. You can easily crank up the graphics quality and make your GPU a limit, but the CPU is still being kept quite busy.

[jordibax]

whoa whoa whoa...CPUs do a hell of a lot more than that in games...they handle all A.I., all physics calculations, and pretty much any other moving object on the screen. You can easily crank up the graphics quality and make your GPU a limit, but the CPU is still being kept quite busy.


Yes, but A.I. and processes like that you say are also running at same level in minimum detail level in games, and at this quality level detail I have an execelent performance with a middle ranged mono-core cpu and 3dcard. I suppose that when you talk about A.I., you are talking about enemies behaviour in any game, about how they decide to move according to your moves in game. Maybe i am getting you wrong. Let me put an example. In quake4 ,for instance, enemys have the same A.I. at any graphic level detail, and therefore, for this task, we are using the same cpu resources at low level graphic detail than in high level detail. Our cpu is also running the same O.S. background tasks at any graphic level detail, so if i am using a middle range cpu like amd 3500 and an average 3d card like 6600gt and i have an excellent performance, it makes me think that any task but rendering can make my cpu run out of resources. If a directx10 game required a lot of data taken out from de hdd and somehow processed before sent to gpu, like Track suggested, all at the same time, much more than now, cpu might run out from resources, but we are talking a new situation not given in any current game. The other processes you say , seem not to be hard enough to use all of a cpu capacity , maybe you are referring to other processes and tasks that i didn´t get quite clear.