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Comment by Analemma_ | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone have the GPUs to drive this tech though? I've been thinking lately that the main reason why the 2015-2016 hype about VR completely flamed out is that, on top of the ~$500 headset, you needed a new ~$1500 gaming PC to do anything with it. As a result, not enough consumers got on board to kickstart the virtuous cycle of more consumers -> more spending dollars -> more content developers -> more attractive content -> more consumers. The kind of GPU you'll need to drive a 5500x3000 display at 120 Hz certainly isn't going to help with that.

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Not just GPU but display bandwidth too, 5500x3000x120Hz requires a monstrous 59.40 Gbps according to this calculator: https://k.kramerav.com/support/bwcalculator.asp

For that you'd need multiple displayport cables.

Assuming YUV 4:2:2 at 8 bit per component you end up with about 32Gb/s, 40Gb/s for 10bits.

By the time GPUs able to render at this resolution and framerate become mainstream I'm sure we'll have the cables to connect them. The big problem with VR is that you want very long cables to be able to move around unless you manage to stuff everything into a backpack. Very high bandwidth and long cables don't always play very nice together. Worst case scenario there's always optical fiber...

The assumption is that the system would use foveated rendering to keep bandwidth demands down.

Thunderbolt 3 runs at 40Gbps, so it wouldn't require very much foveated rendering to get the bandwidth to that spec.

I believe DisplayPort 1.4 with DSC would already support this, though I think it's pretty close to the maximum.

Given the crypto mining price inflation of the kind of GPU's needed to power something like this, it's doubly dead.

Quad 1080Ti cards... Oh wait, even if you were able to afford it, they don't support it anymore do they? It's simply not possible to drive those with the current tech, I guess?

Nvidia doesn't support it, but they don't have to.

Vulkan allows game developers to spread the load across all GPUs, if they wish to. You can do SLI with 8 1080Tis, an intel iGPU and an RX VEGA all together without issues

Without issues is probably stretching the truth a bit.

Well, it’s entirely up to the developer – you won’t have any issues with the driver, or of similar nature.

In contrast to SLI, where the driver frequently was the cause of issues.

How's the reality situation? I mean, are there any games which run perfectly on a random GPU array?

AMD has usually used Ashes of the Singularity as demo to show how well a game can run with DX12 or Vulkan multi-GPU.

But many of the modern engines have started splitting their render tasks so that some can be put onto additional GPUs (or physics tasks, or animation tasks, ...)

Whatever the price crypto currency cultists will buy them all.

The people that buy GPUs for mining don't really have to believe that cryptocurrencies are the future; they just have to run the numbers and see that mining is profitable with a specific hardware, it's not belief but economics.

Participating in cults is profitable for a subset of cultists.

Providing services to cultists certainly does not make you a cultist :)

What motivates people to write these silly comments attacking cryptocurrency investors? Jealousy?

Desire to easily buy GPUs for gaming at a reasonable price!

You have to believe that it'll stay profitable for long enough to repay the investment, which is dubious at present. It definitely is a belief.

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