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Could you imagine the graphics that are possible with a one petaflop computer? Simulation status right?

I'm praying we (humanity) don't nuke ourselves to death during some stupid WWIII type situation before we get there

Carmack said we need 5 petaflops for truly realistic graphics.

But I'm not even sure if he considered 4k+ resolutions, 120+ FPS and 3D when he said that, because all of those may play a role too in the future if we want "Matrix-like" graphics in our virtual reality goggles or holodecks. So we might need orders of magnitude more powerful hardware than that still.

If you can track the eye with low enough latency you only need to render high res in the tiny fovea region, low res everywhere else.

Oddly enough, the military will be the first customer for a one petaflop computer for tactical and strategic scenarios/simulations, which will no doubt include WWIII type situations.

For the near future, it will almost certainly be used to comply with the moratorium on nuclear testing.

Over the last ~20 years many of the biggest supercomputers on the TOP500 list were purchased to run simulations of the aging US nuclear stockpile to answer maintenance questions that formerly required active testing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerated_Strategic_Computin...

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