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by namuol 15 days ago
> Around these parts, it's all about taking something and using for something it was never intended to be used

Is this satire? I literally was hoping the article would be about how decommissioned _data center_ GPUs were repurposed for home PC gaming, the exact thing hacker news is ostensibly supposed to be about? It opens making a point about how the only cheap GPUs with lots of ram are e.g. K80s, which are hardly meant for gaming.

1 comments

Wait a few years, and we're all gaming on decomissioned data center GPUs ;-)
Old datacenter GPUs could game, but new ones can only do OpenCL/CUDA/ROCm etc. and have no display out. Im using an MI50 right now and I would wish newer datacenter cards could also be used for everything like them.
Ah, I'm aware of the physical limitations (including cooling), but I was under impression that these days we had a good handle on rendering on one device and doing the video output on another (at the expense of some latency). Obviously I never tried that with a datacenter GPU.
If you could render fully in OpenCL and output it via another device it would probably work. But they dont have ROPS so they cant do traditional video rendering. Even something like Blender where you would use it for calculations and not for display/video doesnt work without software emulating hardware features related to textures.