Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…It's like the I Love Lucy famous one where the chocolates are coming down the factory pipeline and you had the CPUs to wrap each individual chocolate one and then the next one. Yes, exactly. With graphics processing, the magic of it is that it's super parallelizable. There are all these things that need to be outputted to the screen that do not depend on each other. You can do them independently so the vector that they're competing on is really like, oh, we can—and that would be years before they would really get to this—add more and more cores or find more ways to execute more instructions simultaneously to parallelize these tasks. I think at the time, people thought really the only big use case for parallelization is graphics. Let's put a pin in that for now, but it's worth knowing that the thing that they're doing is figuring out how to process more things in parallel faster. Yes. Graphics cards, like NVIDIA is making at this point in time, are really good at in-parallel lighting the pixels on a screen 30, 60, or 120 times a second with the images that are being fed to them from the game or the graphics program which is living all in the CPU land. You're a game developer and you develop in Microsoft Direct3D becomes DirectX or OpenGL, the open-source competitor to this. All that logic is really happening in the CPU realm. What that means is if you think back to games from this time, think of console games—PlayStation 1, even PlayStation 2, N64. You look at the graphics in those games or PC games from the time too, they're all the same. All the lighting is all pre-done. When you're a game developer, you set the scene. You'd never see a character running around carrying a torch and that torch impacting the rest of the environment. It's all set in advance. No intelligence is happening at the GPU level with the screen. It's just lighting up the pixels.…

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