Forum Overview :: American McGee's Honda Civic :: maybe

[quote name="blackwater"]You probably don't want to bother with Thunderbolt. It's only ever going to be for Macs, according to everything I've read, and Mac owners are not the type to dangle an external video card off of their laptops. It's like trying to sell "truck nuts" to BMW owners. A USB 3.0 video card might be an interesting idea. I think it's going to take a year or two to start to look smart, since in 2015, most laptops with usable USB 3.0 are new enough that their video cards aren't really a problem. And the old USB 2.0 is laughably inadequate for video... it doesn't even support DMA. I guess the real question is whether a new video card with an old ass CPU and memory will be usable for newish games in 2016 or 2017. I don't have a crystal ball, but... maybe. It seems like more and more processing is moving to the GPU, leaving the CPU as kind of a loader. CPUs spend most of their die space on cache these days. Yes, that big new CPU you paid for is a glorified giant cache of memory with puny little execution units. And about the same clock speed as last year's model. Still, I guess it's always possible that games will start to demand some new thing in 2017 that will just make 2015 hardware totally obsolete. Like if everyone developing a shooter starts assuming that they have access to 2 TB of solid state storage. It could happen. Never underestimate the laziness and greed of game studios.[/quote]