Every now and then, a new product will be launched, boasting a nifty bit of tech. But rather than making me think about how cool it all is, I just end up going, 'Hang on, haven't we seen this before?' One such example is a new PCIe 5.0 switch for data centers, that allows data to stream directly from SSDs to GPUs, using a system called GPUDirect. That's exactly what Nvidia's RTX IO was supposed to do, except it doesn't seem to any more, which might explain why it's pretty much disappeared from everyone's radar.
The switch in question is a HighPoint Rocket 7638D, as reported by Tom's Hardware. It's of no use to a gaming PC, as it's exclusively for Nvidia's AI GPUs that support a bit of tech called GPUDirect. It basically provides a direct data path between storage, such as an NVMe, and a GPU's VRAM, neatly bypassing the CPU and system memory. It's been around since 2019, a little earlier than RTX IO.
