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The post-GeForce era: What if Nvidia abandons PC gaming? (www.pcworld.com)
submitted 10 months ago by to c/games@sh.itjust.works
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[–] -2 points 10 months ago (2 children)

Sure, but do you need a discrete video card if you’re gaming on an ARM SoC? And we’ve seen from the struggles of x86 iGPUs that graphics APIs pretty much have to choose whether they’re going to optimize for dedicated VRAM or shared memory, cuz it has inescapable implications for how you structure a game engine. ARM APIs will probably continue optimizing for shared memory, so PCI-E GPUs will always be second-class citizens.

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  • [–] 4 points 10 months ago

    Yes, even for applications other than gaming. There are legitimate mad lads out there running steam games with discrete video cards on Raspberry Pi's and LLMs. Not to mention there are non soc arm machines. And soc Intel machines.

    Sometimes getting the integrated graphics on any of these SOCs working is a much harder prospect than getting a discrete one.

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  • [–] 1 point 10 months ago

    You need a discrete video card on ARM exactly as much as you do on x86.

    The GPU is independent of the CPU architecture, so if you don't like x86 iGPU performance expect to not like ARM iGPU performance either.

    Of course you can dump a full desktop dGPU into the same package as your CPU, like Apple did with the M4 Max, but again this can be done on x86 as well. None of that is dependent on the ISA.

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