The card in the picture is of a kind that no longer exists: the basic, office computer GPU.

It got entirely displaced by integrated graphics.

So in a way they did get smaller, so small that they share a piece of silicon with the CPU. The only cards that remain are those that are so power hungry they can't share power and cooling with the CPU.

I hope every graphics card explodes and we have to go back to Sega Mega Drive

i don't think its getting much bigger than 4090. even 4090 has sagging issues. sure, there are brackets and vertical mounting but vertical mounts on most cases have three slots.

there are ways to get more gpu power, just have more GPUs. obviously not suitable for gaming (microstutters and all the issues SLI/Crossfires had) but for AI itll work just fine and is exactly whats going on

PC components that were once primarily relegated to being toys for gamers.

i've to disagree, GPUs always had uses other than gaming like video rendering and shit. Gamers were just the most marketed to.

In 30 years they'll find the remnants of computers and assume graphics cards were just funky portable heating units. Back then the planet still got cold after all, so people needed a way to stay warm.

Integrated cpu xD

I wouldn't rule that out actually. NVIDIA did buy Mellanox so they could integrate Infiniband with NVIDIA GPUs more directly so you can have fancier GPU clusters. At that point, having a powerful CPU and associated infrastructure is kind of pointless. I guess they'll end up looking like whatever SANs (storage area network, i.e. all the hard drives are separate from the compute servers) look like.

For consumer stuff, obviously idk. I think the giant GPUs are maybe because people are willing to buy them. The actual GPU itself provided by NVIDIA or AMD or Intel is actually a tiny little thing that looks like a CPU.

(GPU board without fans and plastic cover, you can see the GPU chip in the middle taking up a small part of the board)

And when they're on a laptop, it's just that actual GPU that's soldered onto the motherboard.

So GPUs themselves aren't actually getting that much bigger. I don't know if it's the memory, power, or the fans that are the cause of the massive GPU board sizes.

https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/14n4uus/why_are_graphics_cards_getting_so_big/jq5bpgr/

BmanUltima 18 points 7 months ago

Higher power consumption requires more cooling, and the easiest way to do that is to add more surface area.

I almost wonder if custom-built desktop computers will eventually go away. I feel like it would be a lot more efficient to just have the CPU and GPU soldered onto the same motherboard the same way a laptop would. Then they could both share a common cooling and power infrastructure.

And maybe liquid cooling will become more popular.

Maybe some day there will be a massive breakthrough in computer part cooling. But refrigerants are already a thing I guess, and that's what liquid cooling is.

A lot of it's heat dispersion, which goes back to how much electricity these things are using.

But the components are bigger, the first PC I assembled as a kid had 128 stream processors but the 40 series GPUs go up to 16384 cores. CUDA cores are a lot bigger too, despite die shrinks. More memory and associated components.

You can absolutely get smaller cards, they’re just less powerful.

Me in 2010: Wow the GTX 480 is pretty big

Me now:

the graphic card will grow to become the size of small capybara while the home computer will shrink down until it is no longer visible to the human eye. the size will pose a problem as a capybara is bigger than a spec of dust. such is the contradiction of technological development under capitalism

I hope so because it's funny

comically large PC part

PC components that were once primarily relegated to being toys for gamers.

somewhere along the way, they started marketing the whole PC as toys of gamers.

My understanding is that the primary reason for the size is heat limitations. The vast majority of the size on modern cards are heatsink radiator grills and fans.

All office computers need to have Wolfenstein 3D installed via Windows 3.1, so that modern dads can continue to engage with Take Your Child to Work Day, without having to do any actual parenting.

I installed a 3080 in my friends pc ages ago and I was kinda like “damn is the port gonna hold this thing up?”

Probably a good chance. Take the Steam Deck and these console "slim" versions. They take the lessons they learned, refined some aspects but basically shunk the die down 1-2 nm. allowing more space for the same power or better along with better cooling.

We're at an interesting tech time where die processes are shrinking rapidly, 6nm, 5nm...soon 3nm. We're also seeing GaN making it's debut. Faster, more power efficent, smaller space, better thermals.

I saved up to get an OC 7900 XTX and AMD is on a roll with refreshing the cards with new tech. I can run a game at 1080 or 2k and upscale it to 4k with littlee performance hit. This is negating the necessities of massive cards making do more with less. Smarter not harder. They just dropped AI frame generation which works so well I have to tune it back due to not needing 350fps ultra settings and turning my card into 100% radiant space heater. That an theres some screen tearing at that point without vertical refresh. So if it works that well with their flagship card, I'd imagine it works fairly well on their lower end cards.

So it's getting a 1-2 punch from better smarter ways of doing things and smaller more efficent chips.

Soon they will be the size of a console. You'll just have it sitting next to your PC.

I had to bend and break parts of my case to get my card to fit. I would need a bigger case if my next card were any bigger.

Yes. The same way cpu coolers got bigger and bigger until multi core cpus became the norm and cpus could just say “oh fuck it’s too hot, turn off 90% of the silicon”.