Will there be AI accelerator cards in the future of gaming PCs?

Port8080@feddit.de to Gaming@beehaw.org – 15 points –

Hi there, I want to share some thoughts and want to hear your opinions on it.

Recently, AI developments are booming also in the sense of game development. E.g. NVIDIA ACE which would bring the possibility of NPCs which run an AI model to communicate with players. Also, there are developments on an alternative to ray tracing where lighting, shadows and reflections are generated using AI which would need less performance and has similar visual aesthetics as ray tracing.

So it seems like raster performance is already at a pretty decent level. And graphic card manufacturers are already putting increasingly AI processors on the graphics card.

In my eyes, the next logical step would be to separate the work of the graphics card, which would be rasterisation and ray tracing, from AI. Resulting in maybe a new kind of PCIe card, an AI accelerator, which would feature a processor optimized for parallel processing and high data throughput.

This would allow developers to run more advanced AI models on the consumer's pc. For compatibility, they could e.g. offer a cloud based subscription system.

So what are your thoughts on this?

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Your GPU is an AI accelerator already. Running trained AI models is not as resource demanding as training one. Unless local training becomes universal, AI acclerators for consumers make very few sense.

Unless the AI processing is much more specialized than graphics, I think manufacturers would put that effort into making more powerful GPUs that can also be used for AI tasks.

They would try to alleviate the cost on running GPU by making an AI accelerator chip like Tensor Core, but it'll get bottleneck by limited VRAM when Neural Net models require steep amount of memory. it's more productive to have something like NPU that runs either on RAM or by it's own memory chips offering higher amount of capacity to run such neural net and avoid the roundtrip data copying between GPU and CPU.

We saw this happen a long time ago with PPUs. Physics Processing Units. They came around for a couple of years, then the graphics cards manufacturers integrated the PPU into the GPU and destroyed any market for PPUs.

It was before my time but.. If physX cards are any indication, then no.

Absolutely, I would suggest looking into two separate devices that focuses solely on AI acceleration:

Analog Neural Accelerator

and

Neural Processing Unit

Two very interesting articles. Thank you for that!

Especially the analog processor is a game changer with having the computation directly in memory. Generally, analog computers are a very interesting subject!

The Apple silicon (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_M1#Other_features and M2 and their variants) have 16+ neural engine cores for on chip AI, separate from the GPU cores. But it’s still a package deal.

I could see them splitting it out for cases of high end AI clusters and dedicated servers for that use case, but I feel like their current goal is to make sure that those cores are included in common hardware so that everyone can leverage local AI and not worry about “does this person have hardware to do this?” Issues.

I think current industry thinking is that making those cores commonplace helps the adoption of AI for everyday software more so that requiring a separate add-on card.

Good question, but I'd say that the same train of thought went through dedicated physics cards. I'd guess that an AI card should have a great value proposition to be worth buying.

For compatibility, they could e.g. offer a cloud based subscription system.

I'm not sure where you're going with this, but it feels wrong. I'm not buying a hardware part that cannot function without a constant internet connection or regular payment.

I'd guess that an AI card should have a great value proposition to be worth buying.

Sure the card should have great value or must have an accessible price. It probably also depends on how "heavy" the tasks get. But seeing e.g. OpenAI struggling with requests, it may be useful to decentralize the processing (with running the model locally on the user's pc).

I'm not sure where you're going with this, but it feels wrong. I'm not buying a hardware part that cannot function without a constant internet connection or regular payment.

Maybe this statement was a bit confusing. What I meant was, that in a transition phase developers could choose to allow the usage of a dedicated accelerator card to run everything locally and offline. And for people who don't have or want such a card they could provide a cloud based subscription model, where the processing is done on remote servers.

Look into what Mystic AI was doing. It's effectively what you were talking about but based in reality :)