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Survey shows most people wouldn't pay extra for AI-enhanced hardware | 84% of people said no (www.techspot.com)

submitted 5 months ago by ForgottenFlux to c/technology

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Companies are going all-in on artificial intelligence right now, investing millions or even billions into the area while slapping the AI initialism on their products, even when doing so seems strange and pointless.

Heavy investment and increasingly powerful hardware tend to mean more expensive products. To discover if people would be willing to pay extra for hardware with AI capabilities, the question was asked on the TechPowerUp forums.

The results show that over 22,000 people, a massive 84% of the overall vote, said no, they would not pay more. More than 2,200 participants said they didn't know, while just under 2,000 voters said yes.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Found it.

https://www.neowin.net/news/powercolor-uses-npus-to-lower-gpu-power-consumption-and-improve-frame-rates-in-games/

I can't find a picture of the PCB though, that might have been a leak pre reveal and now that it's revealed good luck finding it.

[–] AdrianTheFrog 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Having to send full frames off of the GPU for extra processing has got to come with some extra latency/problems compared to just doing it actually on the gpu... and I'd be shocked if they have motion vectors and other engine stuff that DLSS has that would require the games to be specifically modified for this adaptation. IDK, but I don't think we have enough details about this to really judge whether its useful or not, although I'm leaning on the side of 'not' for this particular implementation. They never showed any actual comparisons to dlss either.

As a side note, I found this other article on the same topic where they obviously didn't know what they were talking about and mixed up frame rates and power consumption, its very entertaining to read

The NPU was able to lower the frame rate in Cyberpunk from 263.2 to 205.3, saving 22% on power consumption, and probably making fan noise less noticeable. In Final Fantasy, frame rates dropped from 338.6 to 262.9, resulting in a power saving of 22.4% according to PowerColor's display. Power consumption also dropped considerably, as it shows Final Fantasy consuming 338W without the NPU, and 261W with it enabled.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

I've been trying to find some better/original sources [1] [2] [3] and from what I can gather it's even worse. It's not even an upscaler of any kind, it apparently uses an NPU just to control clocks and fan speeds to reduce power draw, dropping FPS by ~10% in the process.

So yeah, I'm not really sure why they needed an NPU to figure out that running a GPU at its limit has always been wildly inefficient. Outside of getting that investor money of course.

[–] AdrianTheFrog 2 points 5 months ago

Ok, i guess its just kinda similar to dynamic overclocking/underclocking with a dedicated npu. I don't really see why a tiny 2$ microcontroller or just the cpu can't accomplish the same task though.