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by tostitos1979 3718 days ago
Good point. Nvidia seems like the exciting company in this regard. I have a bad feeling they're going to tumble because the latest announcements related to Pascal have focused on deep learning instead of 4K for consumers. As far as I know, they haven't even announced their consumer Pascal cards yet. The rumor I've read online is announcements in June.
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What would it mean for Nvidia to focus on 4k? Do the new screen resolutions require architectural innovations in the GPU? (Honest question. I'm not a graphics engineer)
Me either so take this with a pinch of salt.

Mostly it's about shuttling around 4 times as much memory for each screen as well as 4 times as much processing.

1920x1080 has ~ 2 million pixels. 3840x2160 has ~ 8 million pixels.

Internally iirc this is often done as vectors before been rasterised out and having various filters and shaders applied but that step requires that you store multiple buffers etc, same reason a card that will play a game just comfortably at 1024x768 will run away crying at 1920x1080 I guess.

I can see how higher resolutions will require the GPU to have more memory or more FLOPS or both. I guess my question is, how, if at all, are the improvements required to support 4K different from improvements that target something like deep learning performance?