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Comment by xyzzy3000 | Hacker News Reader

No GPU purchases means no game industry, no VFX industry, no economy of scale in production to keep unit costs anywhere near sane, and no significant profits to drive further research and development of GPUs. No government would have the will to plug that funding gap.

And besides, if you take away the bread and circuses, how long would such a government last?

The collateral damage level for this scenario is at a suicidal scale, and would just hand everything over on a platter to a competing high tech state.

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> No GPU purchases means no game industry

It would be a huge hit to AAA games, but the games industry is a lot more than that, and very little outside of AAA games require a GPU.

This is completely false. We're not living in a world anymore where CPUs do the rendering for videogames. Indie game studios use some of the same engines (Unity, Unreal) as AAA, and those engines definitely require GPUs.

> Indie game studios use some of the same engines (Unity, Unreal) as AAA, and those engines definitely require GPUs.

That's funny, because I have no GPU on any of my machines, yet I can run games using Unity, Unreal, etc. I can even run at least some AAA games, albeit poorly.

Most people I know don't have a GPU, but most do play modern games on their computers.

Edit: I think I should clarify what I'm saying, since someone downvoted me and the only reason I can think for why that is is because of this confusion. I'm talking about dedicated GPUs here, not integrated ones. The topic of conversation was around dedicated GPUs.

Most modern CPUs (really SOCs) have an integrated GPU built in, which isn't half bad. Heck, the GPU often takes significantly up more space on the silicon die than the CPU does.

You mean you don't have a dedicated GPU. You wouldn't seen anything on your screen without a GPU at all.

Yes, in the context of this discussion, we were talking about dedicated GPUs so I didn't think it was necessary to add this bit of detail. I apologize for the omission.

And I was needlessly nitpicking. I mostly found it amusing to read a few sentences about not having a GPU, when almost every piece of software that renders anything has come to depend on GPUs.

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