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Comment by abejfehr | Hacker News Reader

Based on the title I was really hoping to see how this was used for gaming, but they just ran an LLM on it

They said in the beginning that it doesn't even have a video out, so you cannot do gaming.

I thought you could run games by rendering on one GPU and outputting on another? Usually comes up with dual iGPU/dGPU setups, but could work here

I've seen things where you have multiple video cards and can use one gpu to render to a framebuffer which is transferred to the other video card to output. I'm sure it adds latency, and it's probably unsupported... But no output doesn't mean can't do gaming... It just means gaming will be iffy.

There's some virtualized desktop server stuff too. Run a bunch of desktop sessions on a beefy computer and send a video stream to desktop players. With the right codec settings, the latency is probably ok for many games.

I'm actually surprised there hasn't been a dedicated effort to support display offload to, say, the CPU's iGPU.

I'm sure manufacturers would love saving a dollar per card, and OEMs would appreciate eliminating the support calls from "I just bought a new $2500 gaming PC and no video" because they plugged the monitor into the iGPU instead of dGPU.

I have occasionally wondered the same thing.

Thinking about it more, on my setup I have a DVI port on the motherboard that I would be happy to use with a DVI cable, but I instead need to buy a DisplayPort <-> DVI converter cable to plug directly into my video card...

Yeah, seems like an obvious thing for some motherboard providers to want to provide.

This is exactly what "Optimus" and "hybrid graphics" is, the issue is that you need to configure that - laptops will provide information to OS "hey, this card has no video output" or "hey, there's an output MUX connected to output X on iGPU and output Y on dGPU", and drivers pick that up and know they have to setup transferring frames between the two or trigger the mux etc.

nVidia has also used the datacenter cards to run GeForce Now, at least for some lines of the cards, plus some of them come with license (or you can buy it extra?) for nVidia GRID that provides more flexibility for multi-instancing etc to run in virtual desktop

Never a problem. RemoteFX does (did) everything you'd want. Make your OS, log in remotely through an accelerated client. The real problem is Microsoft did something around Windows Server 2008 R2 that killed performance (literally halved it) for RemoteFX. You're only now reobtaining the virtualized video performance we used to have back in 2008.

I don't think that is even possible, every piece of silicon on that chip that is required to do gaming is ripped out in favor of more compute cores.

Same. With no new NVIDIA gaming GPUs this year, seems like an interesting problem to solve.

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