Apparently, medicine (specifically magnetic resonance imaging) is benefiting from ever advancing graphics technology which is in turn driven by higher and higher expectations from gamers and game designers.
It makes sense in the way that any technology that is brought to a mainstream market will inevitably reduce in price faster than one that is in a restricted market. For example, in the article they mention that super computers are traditionally used to improve image display times but of course - as they point out - these are expensive... but turn back the clock and look at the proprietary graphics cards that existed before 3dFX and Nvidia and microsoft etc standardised the graphics platforms (yeah there was openGL before but i think it was fragmented in its implementation).... they were prohibitively expensive. Now, imagine if there was no mass uptake of graphics cards, no standardisation of features and extrapolate that into the present day. You end up with graphics implementations that scale in power of hardware but also increase in cost as well whereas in the world we live in, we're looking at a steady level of price to hardware ratio. Some parts come in at a higher price but generally you can get a pretty powerful graphics card for between £300 and £350.
Considering i bought my Geforce 4800 128MB for £320 a few years ago (when it was new ;) ) and for the same price you can get a 8800GTX 768MB today. That's an incredible value for money and also development of the platform at the same time.
I'm looking forward to more stories like this, where multiple parallel processors and graphics cards allow for realtime imaging of these types of disciplines.
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