Damn, the things used to be these thin little, well, cards. Nowadays they are reaching the size of entire consoles and can more accurately be called graphics bricks. Is the tech so stagnant that they won't be getting smaller again in the future?
The high end ones are so huge, power hungry, and fucking expensive that I'm starting to think they might as well just come with an integrated CPU and system RAM (in addition to the VRAM) on the same board.
What is the general industry expectation of what GPUs are going to be like in the mid term future, maybe 20 to 30 years from now? I expect if AI continues to grow in scope and ubiquity, then a previously unprecedented amount of effort and funding is going to be thrown at R&D for these PC components that were once primarily relegated to being toys for gamers.
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.
GeForce 9500 GT was for basic, office computers in 2008?
I found a dusty old office desktop in my parents garage a few months ago from circa 2008, and I noticed it had both an AMD and Nvidia sticker on it, so I decided to open it up to take a look at what card it had. When I got the thing open I was perplexed to find there was no card in it at all, and that single core Sempron wasn't an APU, so what gives?
Found out that not only did integrated graphics exist back then on AMD platforms, but that they were built right into the motherboard and Nvidia manufactured them. It had no fan at all or really any obvious indication of its existence lol. Just an innocuous little piece of aluminum for a heat sink that was stuck on good to the chip with some kind of strong adhesive. Took a while to figure out that's what that was. Didn't know this was a thing, but that must've been a lot lower end than a 9500 GT.