Jacob- It seems like both Nvidia and ATI are looking at unified shader architectures, instead of separate vertex and pixel do you think that is beneficial to gaming on a graphical level?
Sweeney- Having one unified shader architecture enables you to do dynamic load balancing. Some scenes have an enormous number of pixels with a small number of triangles or vertices some have huge amounts of geometry with simple pixel shaders. You really want to have all the computing power in the chip utilized all the time and that means being able to shift the resources around between any potential use pixel, geometry, vertices, or just general computation that you are happening to do on the GPU. So I think, this is just the very beginning of a long term trend in where GPU's will become more and more generalized and eventually turn into full CPU like computing devices. Obviously the problem that GPU's are optimized to solve will always be a very different problem than CPU's, but they will certainly become more and more general purposed, to the point where you can write a C program and compile it for your GPU in the future.