>So seriously, the IGP does not cost just 5 $.

Sure it does.

>>Texels are processed in quads because it is needed to calculate mip-levels for dependent texturing.
>>This of course only applies to GPUs that support dependent texturing, so anything DirectX 8+.
>
>That doesn't mean it's processed a quad at a time. You can have a single scalar
>pipeline process each operation for a quad of pixels sequentially. So there's no
>reason to assume that the IGP's samplers are really configured as a quad of samplers.

You need to run all 4 pixels of the quad in lockstep so the TMU can do finite differencing between adjacent pixels.
This is fundamental to the way it chooses what mip-levels to sample from.
And it's a state (registers) issue, not a computational issue, so changing the speed doesn't help.
You might be able to factor out the part that can be done to separate pixels and issue it off to a separate non-group-of-four unit, but it just makes things more complicated and provides no real benefit.
Which is why no one has ever done it this way and they probably never will.

But all of this is beside the point, which is: just how much much texel fillrate does this IGP actually have?
And the answer is we don't know, since the techarp link you gave has been discredited.
Gabriele Svelto suggests it is 16 texels/clock.

>As I've mentioned before on this forum, the number of pixels hasn't increased
>all that much and there's only so many texels you can slap on a pixel (plus the pre-z pass keeps shading to a minimum).

Nope. There's no limit to how many texels you can slap on a pixel. Nor should there be.

>It's not mostly texture-limited. At 1024x768 and 60 FPS, 5.4 GT/s suffices to use
>229 texels per pixel. That's insanely high for the type of games you can run on
>the IGP at this resolution and framerate.

Ok, firstly, you messed up the arithmetic. 5.4e9/(60*1024*768) is about 114.4 not 229.
Secondly, 1024x768 is kinda low. For a 1600x1050 screen it's only 53 texels per clock. For a 1900 x 1200 @ 50Hz it's only 47.
Thirdly, 114 texels per pixel isn't really a lot.

Take into account 2x-3x for for trilinear & anisotropic filtering and we're down to 38-57.
Figure in 2x-4x overdraw and we're down to 9-28 texels/pixel, which is not really so much. Consider:
-4 shadow maps, one each for 4 lights
-diffuse map
-specular map
-bump map
-reflection cubemap
That's 8 right there for a fairly basic shader.

What if you want to compute the diffuse+specular term by combining multiple textures procedurally? Then instead of 1 specular + 1 diffuse, you might have 4 or 8 of each.
Also, if a portion of your frame time is spent on non-texturing passes, such as generating those shadow maps in the first place, then you don't have the full 1/60th of a second to do your texturing in.
So you need to increase the texel fillrate further to make up for that.
Also, texture lookups are sometimes used in a shader as general table-lookup functions rather than actual textures.
And sometimes it makes sense to do multiple texture lookups into each shadow map, so as to get a better shadow edge.
And so on...

>Also note that gather/scatter typically makes no guarantees about memory ordering
>(unlike unaligned accesses which straddle a cache line). Fence instructions can be used to flush the load/store buffers.
>No, it's far simpler than you think. Let's say we have a base address of 0x0123456789ABCDEF,
>and two of the offsets are 0x00000000 and 0x00000080. Are these two elements located in the same cache line?

Ok, we went over this in another post. I mis-estimated some of this stuff.
25 bits is enough if you do base + vector_of_indices addressing.

>Also note you don't need to compare all possible pairs. You just start with the
>first element and see which other elements are on the same cache line. If one isn't
>on the same cache line, it's loaded in the next cycle and the other offsets are
>compared to this element's offset to determine which ones share this other cache
>line, etc. No need to compare everything in one cycle.

I hadn't thought of that, so I was wrong about this.

>Yes, and it's not going to get much better any time soon: http://www.anandtech.com/Show/Index/4083?cPage=23&all=False&sort=0&page=13&slug=the-sandy-bridge-review-intel-core-i7-2600k-i5-2500k-core-i3-2100-tested
>"The 82.4% increase in clock speed resulted in anywhere from a 0.6% to 33.7% increase in performance."

They increased the GPU clock but not the memory bandwidth. This resulting in poor scaling.
Increasing GPU clock but not bandwidth has always resulted in poor scaling. Nothing new here.
How this shows anything about trends in future hardware is beyond me.

>The CPU is catching up and clearly there's little point in investing more die space
>into the IGP. So CPU manufacturers should look into using the die space for something
>more interesting, or cut it out entirely.

They cannot use the die area for something more interesting, since IGPs are maximally interesting.

>>>There's not supposed to be separate market segments, other than high-end, mid-end, and low-end.
>>
>>What???
>>You must be masterly with the English longbow.
>
>I think I've clarified by now that eventually there's just 'computing'. A homogenous
>CPU with FMA and gather/scatter can handle both latency-sensitive and high-throughput
>workloads (and most applications are a complex mix of these). So the main thing separating the markets is price.

There are many market segments separated by more than price, and your refusal to see them is baffling.

>Again, most applications are a complex mix of workloads. But even if some tend

No they aren't. It's not a complex mix.

>to be hugely latency-sensitive or high-throughput, there's no telling what application(s) you'll run tomorrow.

Unless, of course, for some reason, you know what applications you'll run tomorrow. Like if it's your job or something.
Like, for example, you are evaluating the choices of what to run right now, so as to buy the necessary software.
Or maybe you bought the software and have no funds left for more software, so you will have to continue using the same software.
Or maybe they're the same apps you're running right now, and that you've been running for the past ten years.
You overestimate the uncertainty.

>>Ray-traced Super Mario sounds pretty awesome. I'd get it.
>
>Well, actually, due to the wildly varying latencies occuring in ray-tracing, you
>need an architecture capable of coping with that optimally. A homogenous CPU with
>gather/scatter can handle fine-grained dynamic balancing of the complex mix of workloads.

There's not really a problem here with varying latencies. Ray tracing on GPUs works fine.

>The casual gaming market is booming, and the potential of WebGL and Molehill is hard to overestimate. The web allows to reach a whole new market of people, who are hesitant to set foot in a game store or install Steam.
>Mark my words; the next World of Warcraft hype may very well be an HTML5 or Flash game.
>The emerging Smart TV market also consists of devices with weak graphics chips (shameless plug: http://gametree.tv/platform/).

The casual gaming market is booming, but I suspect the casual gaming market has little to do with hardware at all.
Casual gamers couldn't care less whether they have a 4-core or a 6-core.

Also, Farmville may be comparable in size to WOW, but I doubt many WOW players are quitting to play Farmville instead. (Unfortunately, I have no statistics on this.)
They will continue to play WOW for quite some time. And when they eventually stop it will be to play another WOW-like game, probably with better graphics.
I don't play WOW myself, but the impression I get is that right now, you can't really play it on any IGP, except maybe the Bobcat IGP or the Sandy Bridge IGP.
So, if you want to catch the WOW-player market, you can't aim at matching IGPs, you have to aim at matching low-end discrete GPUs.
And assuming a WOW-successor will eventually appear, your GPU performance target is a moving target.

>Don't get me wrong, there will still be lots of people
>enjoying games like Crysis 2 (me included), but they need a discrete GPU and a powerful CPU without an IGP.

The Crysis 2 developers have already stated they are aiming somewhat lower hardware-wise this time. So if you are expecting Crysis 2 to stress your GPU... it won't.
So maybe all that these people need is a CPU similar to the ones they have now, and an IGP 4 times faster than today's.

>>I think this is a big part of why so few games are being made for high-end pcs.
>>The art cost of better graphics hasn't scaled well.
>>Performance won't solve this problem.
>
>Actually that's not entirely true. Currently artists are responsible for working
>around many of the limitations of the classic rasterization pipeline. Want realistic
>foilage?

It's "foliage" not "foilage."

>Please produce 3-4 sets of geometry.

It's one mesh per leaf, for each of multiple non-identical leaves per kind of tree, for each of several kinds of tree.
You can't have a pine tree, a maple tree, and an oak tree in your game unless someone tells the computer what a pine tree, a maple tree, and an oak tree each look like.
And this has to be done by people, because they are the ones who know this stuff. And it has to be done separately for each kind of tree. There's no shortcut.
There's nothing hardware can do to help, other than to get out of the way as much as possible.
so if it was in the way before and now it's not, that's an improvement. But there's no further improvement to be made from there.

>Want realistic fight animations? Please
>motion capture every possible move.

A faster cpu wouldn't eliminate the need to motion capture every move. It still has to be done.

>Want realistic lighting? Please produce multiple
>sets of radiosity lightmaps.

This one is solveable. Want realistic lighting? Ditch the lightmaps and just run the full radiosity algorithm as your game's main renderer. Problem solved.

> Want a huge gaming world? Please place portals and occluders...

Some games do just fine with brute-force coherent worldspaces, so occluders and portals were never really needed.
But the portals are still necessary if the game-world includes non-euclidean spaces. There's no shortcut there.

>Higher (generic) computing performance does help these things. You can do more
>things procedurally, you can have advanced rigid and soft body physics, you can
>speed up offline preprocessing, you can compute visibility in real-time, etc. It
>allows the artists to concentrate more on the actual content.

But if the artist was already concentrating 97% on the actual content, then there is only a ~3% improvement possible.
Content hasn't gotten much easier, but gamers' expectations have grown at a much faster rate.