F E A T U R E // T U R I N G - C E L E B R A T I N G T E C H N O L O G I C A L A D V A N C E M E N T
TURING
CELEBRATING TECHNOLOGICAL ADVANCEMENT
A
number of weeks
ago, NVIDIA unveiled
what it claims to
have been working
on for the last 10
years. I’m not sure if
that's in man-hours
or in actual time, i.e. they’ve been
working on this since 2007/2008.
Either way, it is an alarming amount
of time to spend on a single project
or technology.
This isn’t an RTX editorial, it’s
not a technology walkthrough or
anything of the sort. I neither have
the ability or the required insight to
write such editorial in a credible
manner, therefor I’ll deal with the
GPUs as an example of all
technological advancement.
16 The OverClocker Issue 45 | 2018
I watched plenty of videos and read
several editorial pieces of varying
quality since release. What I’ve found
in virtually all content is that, the
advancement and breakthrough that
has been made here is under
appreciated or excluded for some
reason from the conversation.
The reasons for this aren’t
necessarily tied to the GPU
technology, but rather - what I
consider a limited and narrow
appreciation of how scientific
progress works and deeper still, how
the scientific enterprise works as a
whole.
Ultimately, all scientific inquiry
begins with a question. A question I
imagine was asked by those
responsible at any tech firm and in
this case NVIDIA was, “Is it possible
to do X?” It doesn’t necessarily have
to be this exact question, but I would
imagine something analogous
to that was posed. After all - the
question of real time ray tracing is
probably as old as ray-tracing itself,
at least outside of it being a pure
mathematical exercise.
Given the vast computational power
required to do this, another avenue
for creating life like or close
approximations of life like imagery
was devised and it is what we use
today for the most part in
rasterization. One can appreciate
that the progress made here has
everything to do with the inability of
hardware - up until recently of