General

[quote=BobR]It's certainly possible to design computers that far exceed the amount of input the human perceptual system can accept and process, but what's the point of it then?
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bragging rights =p

@bloodIsShed Will quantum computers be able to make the human eye see more colors than the human eye can see?
Or make the human nervous system accept more data than the human nervous system can accept?
Those are the ultimate limitations.
It's certainly possible to design computers that far exceed the amount of input the human perceptual system can accept and process, but what's the point of it then?

@MarshMallows Well, yes... if you make that leap to a completely different way of "displaying" the virtual world, (essentially "jacking in" the human brain to the data stream), then you won't need 2015 technology "Graphics Processing Units". But something will still have to be processing the visual appearance of the virtual world that will be presented to the brain stem, ie, a "Graphics Processing Unit" of some kind. And the speed and complexity of that "GPU" will probably be one of the limitations of that system, again.

@BobR: I meant integrated virtual reality :o The stuffs from science fiction (though won't be fiction in a few decades) where (conceptualized) nanobots would simply stop the signals from your brain stem and feed them into virtual reality. Everything you see, touch, feel will be "real".

whatever limitations there are, quantum computers will make such limitations a thing of the past.

It's a funny thing about "plateaus".
I ran into an article in an old PC magazine that flat out stated that 33Mhz was the fastest CPUs were going to be able to run... ever.
The reasons were based in quantum physics and the "uncertainty principle" behind electron movement and the fact that CPU fabrication had reached a "plateau" as to the smallest practical physical size for the "traces" that interconnect the elements of the microprocessor chip.
And then they invented technology that blew that out of the water.

@MarshMallows What do you think provides the input to the VR devices that display virtual reality..?
GPUs.

@GreatRomantic There IS a practical limit as to the sensory input the human senses can receive, so that might be considered a "plateau" in computer display technology.
There was a time when the "bit depth" of a color display was a thing, with "4bit color" (EGA) being the standard, allowing 16 different colors on the screen (woo hoo! ) and "16bit color" ("High Color" ) being a premo "high tech" display allowing ~65,000 colors..!
The "plateau" was reached with "24 bit color" ("True Color" ) which allowed ~16,000.000 different colors onscreen, at which point the color display technology of computer equipment exceeded the average human eye's ability to discriminate separate color tones, making further development pointless.
You -could- go to "higher" color bit depths, but it wouldn't make any difference because no one could see it, thus color depth "plateaued".

The same is true of sound reproduction. Beyond a certain sampling rate and frequency range, the human ear can't tell the difference between a high quality reproduction and a "higher quality" reproduction so further development in that area becomes pointless.

One might speculate on future advances that would bypass the limited sensory range of the human eye and ear, by connecting "display" devices directly to the human nervous system, ie: "jacking in" directly to the brain, in which case all bets are off.

Read up a bit on ray tracing and think about why it's not coming to games any time soon.

It's already predicted by Moore's law, or whatever it's called.
No one needs GPUs in the future anyway - we're going to transition to virtual reality :o

Eventually, there probably will be some kind of super-GPU that will be able to handle all of the most intense graphic processes out there. How fast we get to that point depends on the companies/people funding development of GPUs, though. They get to decide whether it will plateau or not.