With CPU-integrated graphics upping their game and handling most casual gaming and HD video watching tasks without too many problems, AMD and Nvidia could find the bottom dropping out of the low-end discrete graphics market before long. The question is, how do the companies make up for it? One answer lies on the opposite end of the spectrum: high-end super-duper-computers often take advantage of the raw computational power of GPUs. That same processing efficiency is opening up new (final) frontiers -- Nvidia's helping a Lunar X team in their quest to go to the moon, Alice!
In the dark ages of PC gaming, the CPU took care of most of the graphics chores. The graphics chip did just the basics: some raster operations, dedicated text modes, and such seemingly quaint tasks as dithering colors down to 256 or 16 colors. As Windows took hold, the graphics equation began to shift a bit, with some Windows bitmap operations handled by “Windows accelerators.” Then along came hardware like the 3dfx Voodoo and the Rendition V1000, and accelerated 3D graphics on the PC took off.
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