Graphics Memory Sizes Compared: How Much Is Enough?

EconolineCrush writes "Trying to decide between whether or not to get a 64MB graphics card, or spring for that 128MB version? Hit up this article, which explores the performance of ATI and NVIDIA-based cards with 64 and 128MB of memory, before swiping your credit card. Not so long ago 32MB was the top end for graphics memory on consumer video cards, but now even budget cards are available with 128MB. 128MB might seem excessive now, but a year from now 64MB cards might just be obsolete."

Comments

What are you doing with it?

[Valiss]

I have a Radeon 64 MB card and I have had no problems with it. In another box, I have a Voodoo3 3000 and it still runs Counter-Strike and Quake 3 just fine. It all depends on what you want to do with it.

Re:What are you doing with it?

[garcia]

I agree. I have been using a V33k since 1998 and I haven't had any problems but then again I am not a PC gamer.

If I were to get a new video card I would probably be using that video RAM for SWAP ;)

Re:What are you doing with it?

[El_Nofx]

Ya but how much longer are you going to be able to use that voodoo card? I have all sorts of friends with left over 3dfx cards and they have more problems then anyone I know, I know there are some people writing their own drivers for them now but these newer games seem to not be too friendly with the voodoo's.

Re:What are you doing with it?

[Valiss]

Believe it or not, many of my friends and I still play Quake 1, Doom 1 and the like. You don't need a whole lot to push those games. Even Counter-Strike runs nice and smoothly - in fact that's the card I use in matches and tournaments. Granted, if I am going to play anything that is real new (read: majorly graphically enhanced) then I'd need a new card. But again, it all comes down to what you plan to do with it...

Re:What are you doing with it?

[El_Nofx]

That is so true, I saw a guy put a voodoo 3 in a p1 120 and it played Unreal Tournament! Ya i think it all comes down to the "It is new so I need it because It must be better and I can really tell the difference between 100fps and 120fps, i really can, i mean it" syndrome. Just like a friend and I were talking about the other day, people buys these new computers with 2.5ghz procs 512 ram, 120gig hd and they run word and read email. They could of paid $400 at Walmart and go everthing they would of needed.

Re:What are you doing with it?

[MrResistor]

I have a GeForce2 GTS 32MB and it runs both of those games no problem. Come to think of it, the 16MB TNT (no, I don't mean TNT2) it replaced ran both of those games just fine, too, although the default machine gun in Q3 isn't really a usable weapon if you can't consistently hit 90+ FPS.

However, my GeForce2 seriously slows down on Morrowind. Fortunately, Morrowind is perfectly playable at low framerates, but that's not my point.

My point is, of course Counter-Strike and Quake3 run just fine on your 64MB Radeon: both of those games are older than your card!

Re:What are you doing with it?

[swillden]

If I were to get a new video card I would probably be using that video RAM for SWAP ;)

That would be a cool hack. Is there any reason why unused video RAM couldn't be utilized by the OS for other purposes? It'd be awesome to have an extra 100MB of ultra high-speed swap space for when you're not playing games.

A way to map that video RAM into your regular address space would be a really cool hack.

Re:What are you doing with it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you mean hack or regular linux thing to do. Yes you can do it, lotsa people do. Well linux people at least. Windows can bite me, (even though i bet SOMEONE has made a nice little gui app to do it)

Re:What are you doing with it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Its all too true, i experienced it myself. My friend wanted his first computer so we sat down and talked for over an hour and came out with a pretty nice system. (at the time) it was an AMD athlon 1.5gig with 256mb of ram and a Geforce 2 Deluxe (yknow, with the glasses and VIVO). WELL napster had just gotten popular (ya it took until version 2.5 for anyone to notice it). Anyways he never played a single game, never used the tv out. He uses msn and trades music. I even installed 30 games and put 10 movies on his computer. Nope, he never used em

Re:What are you doing with it?

[The Real Chrisjc]

Gawd! Don't you read slashdot regularly?
You don't?
OOhh. .

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/09/02/232121 1&tid=137

Chris :)

Re:What are you doing with it?

[?erosion]

I don't know, I personally get a headache at anything lower than 40 fps. My friends think I'm insane, but I belive that frames can never be _too_ high. It just seems to get smoother the higher they go. I have no doubt that the guy was able to play UT, but he did have a Voodoo 3, which that game was just about written for specifically. If he were to play on an 800Mhz or so proc with a recent video card (or the best possible voodoo setup) he would be able to tell the difference, I'll bet.

I think that ex-console gamers have it the worst. Since they're just used to having the game look good, the PC versions might seem choppy (since they will rarely configure themselves). Then they learn about tweaking and become obsessed or whatever. Or maybe I'm just projecting. :)

Re:What are you doing with it?

[homer_ca]

The problem is current video drivers are horribly inefficient at transferring from video RAM to main memory. Somewhere around 10MB/s compared to the theoretical 1GB/s transfer rate of AGP4X. Tech report article here

Re:What are you doing with it?

[andycat]

At work the two machines I use regularly for interactive walkthroughs of large environments (10-100 million triangles) have 64MB and 128MB of texture memory, respectively. I am constantly running up against the 64MB limit and I'm fast approaching the 128MB one. Here's how it breaks down:

Frame, depth, and stencil buffer: 1024x1024x(32 bits + 32 bits + 8 bits) = 9 megabytes

9 megabytes so far. No problem. Double that when I push the resolution up to 1600x1200 for demos, but we'll ignore that for the moment. Now, the model I'm using has 19MB of surface texture, so we're up to 28MB. The system I'm running on this poor hypothetical card uses 512x512 textures to replace distant geometry. Each one takes up 768K of memory and I've generally got a working set of between 40 and 60 textures. There's another 30-45MB, so total usage is somewhere between 58 and 73MB. Add in shadow maps and we lose another 20 or 30MB. The 64MB card is now swapping to AGP memory. The 128MB card is filling fast. It's adequate for the current generation of the system I'm running, but before I can write the next couple versions I'm going to have to implement some serious resident-texture-set cache management.

Now, you can certainly argue that this is an atypical application. You would be quite correct. However, I do need that much video memory and I do use it. Yes, it's massive overkill if you want to play Quake, Unreal, whatever, but once you start looking into more exotic applications it's easy to get into situations where you can use arbitrary amounts of texture RAM. Real-time shading can get you there in a hurry, too, once you start using textures as lookup tables for expensive-to-compute functions (e.g. light fields or factorized BRDFs) or caching the framebuffer for later re-use.

So yes, 90% of the programs 90% of users will run will currently fit neatly in 64MB of video memory, but there definitely exist systems that require more than that.

Re:What are you doing with it?

[bsharitt]

The 16mb on the ATI Rage in my iMac still works okay. My mom doesn't really seem to notice to 1 MB card she has when she plays solitare or C&C: Red Alert(the old one, but she doen't usually get the latest games).

Re:What are you doing with it?

[boomer_rehfield]

to a point, yes.... I have a little better... I have a voodoo5 5500... I took my dual voodoo2's and stuck them in my dad's deskpro 2000 (P1 166)... it was like the power came on or something... HOWEVER, my card, my nice shiny card, plays everything just B...E...A...utifully.... with two exceptions... Battlefield 1942... and UT2003.. why? T&L support. While my voodoo 5 is a badass card by any other standard, (or at least comparable to a geforce 2 of it's time that HAS T&L, and runs both games) I'm stuck with not being able to play the newer games that are coming out. A buddy even recommended I buy a geforce2 on the cheap but I'll be damned if I'm going to spend $60 on a card of the same caliber just for the T&L when I bought this a year, year and half ago for $300+...I'd rather wait and buy another card like a geforce4 TI or something when it comes down. Damn thing is only a year old. Either way, the point was that the voodoo series was an awesome line, to a point. I HATE that it's going/gone, but as long as you don't need to run the newest games, they're great....

Re:What are you doing with it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, there exist applications where > 128MB texture ram is required. However, there exist solutions specifically for those scenarios, even if they do cost $$. My poor aging SGI O2 can utelize whatever is leftover that the system and applications don't use (which is usually well under 128MB). That leaves in excess of 900MB of pretty damn fast UMA RAM to be used for textures.

Yeah, as you pointed out, you have alot of triangles, and the poor CRM graphics on my O2 don't have the muscle to crunch that many at an appreciable rate. It's a shame that SGI didn't devote more effort to the poor O2 line, give it a real GPU, and other shiny stuff for instance, because the underlaying technology is incredibly powerful. The O2 UMA architecture is indeed well suited to huge texture loads, but give it over 50k triangles and it will choke.

Re:What are you doing with it?

[Anonymous Coward]

running realtime 3d landscape... 100meter DEM data with textured overlay plus live data on top....

We render out 64 3meg textures in realtime... 256meg video cards would be of great benefit as this would allow running without dxtc compression.

Bring 'em on!

Re:What are you doing with it?

[Feanturi]

Ya but how much longer are you going to be able to use that voodoo card? I have all sorts of friends with left over 3dfx cards and they have more problems then anyone I know, I know there are some people writing their own drivers for them now but these newer games seem to not be too friendly with the voodoo's.

Yes, I'm seeing an annoying trend of games that won't run on my Voodoo cards. Fortunately my primary system sports a GForce 4 Ti4600, but it sucks when I want to try a multiplayer game with a couple players on my LAN, and I can't because the other two machines are Voodoo-driven (a 3/2000 and a 5/5500). Army Ops and Battlefield 1942 are both games that I would really like to run a private game with myself on two machines, so I can practice flying, learn distances for sniping, experiments with grenades, etc, etc.. But I can't, because these games (and several others) will only run for my GForce. The common error message is that Hardware T&L support is needed. My Voodoo 5 still has plenty of gusto for what's out there in gameland, just missing an apparently critical feature that for some reason we cannot live without.

Re:What are you doing with it?

[swillden]

I meant Linux thing to do, whether regular or hack. I'm gonna have to go google for this. Not that I have a lot of spare VRAM, but it'd be cool just to do it.

Re:What are you doing with it?

[slaker]

Buy a $30 radeon PCI that has hardware T&L. Use that for your T&L games and the V5500 for everything else.

I do the reverse. My game box has a voodoo4 PCI and a Radeon 9000 in it, so I can still play my favorite glide game, Mechwarrior 2.

3dfx was and still is a quality product, and there's no reason to get rid of your 3dfx hardware, regardless of what the "oooh! Shiny!" nvidia people tell you.

Re:What are you doing with it?

[fredrik70]

HEy, I got an old PCI nvidia TNT card in my box, and it suits me just fine! mind you, not playing games...

Re:What are you doing with it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Just imagine 1600x1200 with 4X AA in your example. AFAIK even the GeForce 4 resorts to supersampling at 4XAA (I think only 2X is multisampled), so we get: (1600x2)x(1200x2)x(32bit+32bit+8bit) = ~66MB. So a 64MB card couldn't even handle this... A 128MB card would handle it much better. Now you might say, who can run at 1600x1200 with 4xAA? Lots of people depending on the game. For example I run Half-Life and it's mods at 1600x1200 with 2xAA on my GF3, and I'm feeling the limits of my 64MB of memory. I'm sure a Radeon 9700 or the upcomming NV30 could run Quake 3-based games and it's mods/derivatives at 1600x1200 with 4xAA or more. Good thing they have 128MB and soon 256MB, no?

Regards, Guspaz.

How Much Is Enough?

[delta407]

I think I speak for all of us here:
MORE!

What's funny is that my current video card has more RAM than a nicely-equipped PC four years ago.

more more more

[gralem]

I mean, 64MB cards have been around for a while. So definately more memory is better. But perhaps most importantly is the compatibility. Look at the software you want to run. If you're considering 128MB GC, then gaming is an issue. You must find a card that is as good as possible at the games you want to play. Consider games that are about to come out soon (Doom ]I[ ?).

If games aren't what you're looking for in a card, then any card will pretty much do, unless you're looking for something with specific OpenGL compatiblity.

---gralem

Re:more more more

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, can you say "conditioned by years of exposure to marketing"? More more more, people! Nevermind what it does or why!

Re:more more more

[Rahga]

If you really want to consider games like Doom 3, I'd suggest upgrading to a comfortable level now (GeForce 4 Ti4200 64 meg.... or 128 if you really want it), and do a real upgrade ($350-level) when Doom 3 comes out, or even a few months after it.

Re:more more more

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, with that much memory, could you spare 10 bytes to learn to spell DEFINITELY?

Re:more more more

[Ozymandias_KoK]

Your advice on upgrading twice when thinking of the same game is....interesting. It might be better to think about what you want to do now vs later -- if you don't HAVE to do it now, then don't. (unless you just have the cash to burn)

What's the answer?

[RzUpAnmsCwrds]

What's the answer to the question? The answer is: it doesn't matter.

I got a GeForce 4 Ti 4200 with 128 megabytes and video input for $160. The 64 MB version with no video in was $130. So, the difference is $30. For $30, I'd get the extra 64 MB.

Re:What's the answer?

[MAXOMENOS]

If it doesn't matter, why should I blow $30 on the extra 64 MB of video RAM?

Re:What's the answer?

[_|()|\|]

For $30, I'd get the extra 64 MB.

If it was only $30, I'd agree, but I picked up the 64 MB 4200 for $100 this weekend at Best Buy. Also, for what it's worth, the 64 MB version of the 4200 ships with faster memory (3.6 ns, clocked at 250 MHz DDR) than the 128 MB version (4 ns, clocked at 222 MHz DDR).

Re:What's the answer?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's like getting the Super Extra Large soda at McDonalds because it's "only" another 20 cents. Really, it's not worth it.

Re:What's the answer?

[RzUpAnmsCwrds]

No, but for 10 cents extra you get 2x the soda at 7-11.

Is it worth it? Depends on if you want that much soda.

Re:What's the answer?

[neur0maniak]

yeah, it's good for when you're not over-filling your video-RAM. Otherwise taking a trip to your main RAM will take quite a bit longer than the benefits of the 64Mb version.

But I don't think it's that hard to decide, get an ultra-fast display on todays games, and slow for tomorrow's (64Mb), or fast on todays games, and average on tomorrow's (128Mb).

Check out this article

Memory for texures, etc.

[Noose For A Neck]

All that graphics memory is going to continue to be important as ever more complex and detailed games such as Doom III continue to be developed. With the kind of high resolution textures presented in such applications, a large amount of high-bandwidth memory is advantageous for rendering them in real time, high polygon count models worlds.

For those of you planning to never buy another game, well, why ask in the first place?

No such thing!

[MajikMan]

A powerful enough graphics card? HA!

...also nice to see not only one, but two people claiming FP when neither actually got it :-).

Bah...

[RQuinn]

a year from now 64MB cards might just be obsolete

Bah. Next thing you'll be trying to tell me my Voodoo 3 2000 PCI is obsolete!

Re:Bah...

[Ravensfire]

Pssst - it's obsolete!

Re:Bah...

[Anonymous Coward]

Good thing i got my voodoo 3 3500tv with a phat 16mb of ram. And the way of knowing when you should upgrade to a better card is when your present card just gets supported under linux. ;)

Just jokina, i love linux, thas why i just purchased a nice matrox g450 32mb for myself to replace the ol voodoo. I never had any problems running games in windows with 16mb of vram even though i run my games at 1024x768. But then again, thats good ol 3dfx power for ya.

Re:Bah...

[isorox]

Bah. Next thing you'll be trying to tell me my Voodoo 3 2000 PCI is obsolete!


Sure is, I've got a Voodoo 3 3000 AGP!

Re:Bah...

[shyster]

And I've got a Number Nine SR9 (S3 Savage4 chipset) with 8MB! And it runs Ghost Recon, Desert Siege, etc. acceptably when paired with my whopping PIII-500 and 256MB RAM!

When?

[Xtraneous]

Enough is when my graphics card starts looking like one giant *Beowulf* cluster of memory and starts overheating in 5 minutes.

Re:When?

[Anonymous Coward]

fuck off with your beowulf clusters you goddamn geek.

removable RAM?

[littlerubberfeet]

this might be offtopic, but why can't the RAM on graphics cards be modular, like the stuff we stick in computers? Is it a card manufacture conspiracy? a different type of RAM? I would be willing to buy a high end Graphics card if I could eventually stick 256, or 384 MB on the card.

Re:removable RAM?

[Xtraneous]

Defanitly conspiracy.

Re:removable RAM?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ram used to be Module based, see cards such as the Matrox Millenium and some Trident cards, however memory was hard to find and match, since each company uses there own type and speed.

Re:removable RAM?

[Milican]

By soldering the RAM directly to the board there is a better connection which allows them to run the chips faster. If you add a connector then you add a capacitive load and thus you have to slow down the memory. Thats not to say modular RAM could not be incorporated down the line, but for the latest and greatest its better and cheaper to solder the stuff right on the PCB (printed circuit board).

JOhn

Re:removable RAM?

[hike2]

In the case of NVIDIA the "value-added resellers" add their own high-speed memory as in the case of Leadtek. If they were to make the memory modular they could not charge and extra 50-100 bucks over the comptetition just so that you can gloat at your extra .5% gain over you buddies exact chipset.

Re:removable RAM?

[Anonymous Coward]

it is more likely that the companies simply don't
see any value in making the video cards upgradeable.
planned obsolesence is a feature to them.

your capacitive load sounds like some pseudo-electrical-engineering, or maybe just a load
of something else.

Re:removable RAM?

[Erpo]

I'm sure that graphics card manufacturers want to provide us with as few upgrade options as possible for the simple reason that it would mean more money for them. However, I don't think memory slots on cards would be all that useful. Usually, the bottleneck that triggers an upgrade for most consumers is a killer app that pushes more polygons and requires a faster GPU with more rendering pipelines and faster graphics memory. More sticks of DDR SGRAM isn't going to do you any good there.

Re:removable RAM?

[RandomCoil]

Nice work Beavis :), you just upped the US's trade deficit as hundreds of overclockers destroy their motherboards attempting to solder in their RAM modules.

No doubt you'll be receiving an extra bonus from the Taiwanese motherboard manufacturers this month. Of course I suppose that assumes they're able to recognize solder drips and scorch marks as good reasons to assume the board was not received DOA...

(Yes, I realize there are overclockers all over the world -- I apologize in advance for my horribly US-centric post... geez...)

Re:removable RAM?

[shird]

But then again, how many times have you thought it would be adequate to just upgrade the memory and not your entire card? The little performance to be gained by adding some memory compared to that of upgrading your entire card just doesnt seem worth it. If youve kept your card for long enough that your willing to upgrade it, then its probably obsolete by then.

Re:removable RAM?

[siskbc]

I'm calling BS on the capacitive part. Keep the metals of the contact the same and you should be fine. Regardless, CPU's are removable, and they seem to have good transfer rate. Also, the AGP transfer from your bus to the card seems OK too (obviously the card is removable), so I don't think that's a problem.

I'm betting on a combination of things. First, cost. Second, I suppose they haven't had the demand. Third, the system architecture of the GPU is about as important as the amount of RAM, and this gets outdated about as fast, it seems, than polygon loads that would eat the RAM.

But I'm just guessing. ;)

Re:removable RAM?

[John_Booty]

this might be offtopic, but why can't the RAM on graphics cards be modular, like the stuff we stick in computers?

Another reason in addition to the ones posted by other users... when are you going to upgrade the memory on your graphics card? Perhaps 12 months after you bought it? Two years?

--If you're going to stay close the cutting edge in PC graphics, you'd be buying a new card at the point. Considering the pace at which PC graphics card technology increases, your card would be fairly dated by that point anyway and you'd be looking at another one.

--If you were going to buy the extra video memory fairly soon after purchasing your card when it's still bleeding-edge, why not buy a card with that much RAM in the first place?

Of course, other posters have noted lots of good reasons as well such as the profits made by board/chip manufacturers on the extra RAM, physical RAM connection issues, etc, etc.

Re:removable RAM?

[SonOfSengaya]

Another question is: why can't a motherboard share the RAM with the graphic card. If the conection between RAM motherboard graphic card would be fast enough, the graphic card won't need any RAM at all. And you would be very flexible: 3D games take more RAM for graphic card and offíce applications for example take only very little RAM for graphics.

Is "normal" RAM so slow or are there any other problems?

Re:removable RAM?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, i think hes got it right.

Re:removable RAM?

[drinkypoo]

High end graphics cards used to use SIMMs or DIMMs for texture memory and the video memory was usually dual ported VRAM or similar.

I think the optimal situation would be to have stage 1 and stage 2 texture memory. Stage 1 would be fairly large, perhaps 32-64MB just for textures, and stage 2 would be one or two SDRAM DIMMs. Then you could swap things in from secondary texture memory as necessary, or render them directly if they're small.

Re:removable RAM?

[gooberguy]

why can't a motherboard share the RAM with the graphic card

It can. If you run out of memory on your AGP card, then normal memory is also used. The only problem is that the AGP bus and normal system memory are both much slower than graphics RAM. So if you ever run out of graphics RAM and normal RAM has to be used, you get a slide show.

D/\ Gooberguy

Re:removable RAM?

[RedGuard]

That's exactly how most motherboard graphics
chipsets (like the Intel 840) work - it's also
very slow because 3d graphics is very memory
bandwidth intensive.

Re:removable RAM?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, he's right. Connectors add capacitance, regardless of which metal is used. They also add series resistance.

Re:removable RAM?

[Anonymous Coward]

Answer: the AGP bus connecting the video card to the rest of the system is still too slow. Even the new "AGP 8X" is a hopeless bottleneck. So you need to put dedicated (with a very fast access) video memory on the graphics card.

Silicon Graphics boxen have had the unified (system/video) memory you propose, but that technology has also made them very expensive: very complex crossbar chipsets, 288-pin memory sticks, etc...

Another answer: if you have integrated graphics in the chipset, then your motherboard *is* sharing RAM with the graphic card. It's just that the graphics are slow and shitty ;-)

Re:removable RAM?

[larry bagina]

why don't you go to comp usa and look at a shitty HP or other no-name computer. They usually have shared video/main ram.

Re:removable RAM?

[Issue9mm]

Then how about upgradeable RAM AND GPUs?

I know nothing of this. It's probably a stupid idea.
I should be modded down on principle.

-9mm-

Re:removable RAM?

[shyster]

Hmmm...Yeah. We could call it, maybe, Shared Memory Architecture...that's pretty catchy. I';m sure Intel and AMD and VIA would love to talk to you about it.

Re:removable RAM?

[SonOfSengaya]

oh...I always knew that I'll be an inventor someday... ;)

Re:removable RAM?

[siskbc]

They do, but let's consider scale. Does it make that much of a difference for an Au/Au contact? Ultimately, they can make removeable system RAM that operates at higher bus speeds than GPU RAM, so I maintain that it should be reasonable to make a graphics card with removeable RAM. If we were talking about obscene speed requirements, maybe...

Re:removable RAM?

[Milican]

I appreciate the healthy skepticism. I think all of us agree that modular RAM could be added to the system. However, there are engineering tradeoffs. By soldering the RAM directly to the board the signal quality is better and therefore timing can be sped up. I went all over the net looking for specific proof that connectors, especially DIMM connectors add capacitance. The best I could find was one from Molex, one of the connector manufacturers themselves. They state in their Product Specification PDFs (hope that nasty generated link works) that the connector (part# 71736-0011) adds 1pF of load at 1MHz with a 50 Ohm impedance. Now as you increase the speed of the bus to say... 100MHz, 200MHz, etc.. it gets worse. Sorry I couldn't find a better link for ya.

Anyway... yes, engineers could design in removable RAM, but consider this. The RAM types are changing all the time! You would pay an extreme premium for the specialty RAM because it would vary from manufacturer to manufacturer, card to card, even model to model. The memory types are changing all the time and getting faster all the time and thus the connectors would have to change to keep up with the speed. For now it really is just easier to solder it on. Besides that card of yours will be worthless in two to three years anyway... ;)

Hope that helps dispel some of the skepticism.

JOhn

Re:removable RAM?

[Sycraft-fu]

I think the most likely reason is because every time I have felt the need to upgrade, it has been the GPU, not the RAM, and I suspect it's like that for most other people. The graphics industry progressess fast, much faster than CPUs. Not only that, but there are huge visible gains with new graphics cards, you notice the difference between a GeForce 3 and GEForce 2 with new software, whereas a P4 1.5 to P4 2.5 is just a little faster.

At any rate I've never found a time where I said "Wow, my GPU is just fine, but I really need more RAM!" Whenever I upgrade, it's because I need a new GPU, which also comes with more RAM. Now as apps grow they need more RAM than what a given GPU has, BUT they have also grown in other ways that simply outdo the GPU entirely, and you need a new one.

As a side note ultra high end GPUs like some of the Wildcat sieres DO have upgradable RAM, BUT only extra texture memory, the main memory is still soldered on for signaling reasons.

Re:removable RAM?

[Cuthalion]

Video RAM is way faster than system RAM generally, since: it can be relatively pricey, since you tend to have less of it, and since the video card's architecture is designed around memory bandwidth (for instance: the gf2 GTS had twice as wide a memory path as the main system did). Add to that the bottleneck of getting from system RAM to the GPU (AGP 8x is still a lot slower than the other stuff), and add to that the fact that the CPU and the GPU are then contending for the same memory, and ow, performance hit.

Re:removable RAM?

[Anonymous Coward]

Um... hello?

A ton of video cards "back in the day" (like the VLB dayz) had upgradable RAM. And guess what? Hardly anyone ever used it. They either bought the card with the RAM already or never added the RAM.

There is no point. Graphics cards are obsolete way before the average person would even think about adding more memory. It's not like more memory makes a video card faster (as opposed to a CPU/motherboard which can benefit from more RAM).

Re:removable RAM?

[Anonymous Coward]

Tell that to the giant robotic computerized penis that is piston fucking your little girlfriend into a bloody pulp of vaginal juice and tears...

Re:removable RAM?

[Comen]

Dosn't a XBOX use the same memory for the system and the video?
I thought I read that somewhere.
What type of memory do they use, I wouldnt think it could be all that expensive if it is used in the xbox.
Seems to work very well also useually. of corse all it has to do is play games, but still it is done there.
Guess its a faster BUS than a AGP bus also?

Re:removable RAM?

[cheese_wallet]

"I'm calling BS on the capacitive part."

Well, you're wrong. Capacitive loading affects the signal integrity to a great degree, and adding any metal to the conduction path will add capacitance. Then there are the reflection and EMI effects of stubs on the line (unfilled sockets).

Why do you suppose most motherboards only have three dimm sockets? Because it is too much trouble to get a 4 dimm socket design working. and the ones that do have 4 sockets only work right if you fill them in a certain way (i.e. those closest to the CPU first, etc...).

Or why do most PCI implementations only have 4 sockets? Same reason. How about AGP or PCI-X? At 133MHz, they can only work with one socket.

Re:removable RAM?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, rating in capacitive terms is a leftover from tube days when everything was voltage driven and high impedance.

It's the loop inductance you need to worry about, which is very much a function of the size and geometry of your device.

Ever wonder why CPUs went from PGA to Slot back to FPGA?

Hint: it's not capacitance.

Re:removable RAM?

[siskbc]

However, as you beautifully contradict yourself, it CAN BE DONE. Surprisingly, RAM can be made removeable. Maybe you've even done it yourself. Please, find me a fundamental reason why a graphics card is unique compared to a regular system bus with removeable RAM. Yes, the connection has capacitance, but it isn't sufficient to require hardwiring of the components. The capacitance argument is NOT compelling; the RAM becoming outdated is.

Re:removable RAM?

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean ones like these? http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.html?i=1711 &p=10

http://images.anandtech.com/reviews/video/inside gr aphics/TNTpeltier.jpg

Re:removable RAM?

[Y2K is bogus]

In response to your quotes I went and looked on Molex's site. Since we're talking about video ram here, I decided to look up the spec for the SGRAM JEDEC 144 SODIMM modules used on video cards.

The spec says that the contact resistance is 70 milliohms max, and at a test frequency of 100Khz the stray capacitance between pins is a max of 2 pF.

What this all boils down to is that it's really irrelevant.

All the communication lines of boths DIMMS (have 2 sitting in front of me) and SGRAM SODIMMs are loaded with 10 ohm resistor arrays. This means that any stray capacitance or resistance is overcome by the 10 ohm loading.

They are already doing high speed clocks to DIMMs, close to the speeds that video cards are doing on board.

The REAL crux is that it's A LOT cheaper to manufacture the board with the components already attached. Your footprint is smaller too.

Refer to these documents for further information:

JEDEC SGRAM 144PIN SODIMM video ram specification

Molex SGRAM socket specification

Re:removable RAM?

[Milican]

OK, well 2pF may not seem like alot and in most cases its not. However, what you are forgetting is the scale we are working at here. I tried to lookup the exact memory module for a GeForce card, but I couldn't so I just went to Micron's site and looked up their spec on their 256Mb DDR333 SDRAM. If you will look on page six you will see the capacitance ratings for each signal line are as low as 0.5pF for three of the signal lines and max out at 4.0pF for the I/O (data) lines on the memory module. So lets look at the 2pF number again. By adding a connector you increase your input capacitance by 400% in some cases and 50% in the best case scenario. This is very bad and will directly impact how much memory can be put on one bus and how fast the memory can be timed. The more input capacitance you have on a line the harder the output buffers of the graphics chip (or memory controller) have to work. More input capacitance directly affects how fast you can get that nice little square wave signal to look nice enough to be registered on the other side. The more input capacitance the longer it takes, and this is all very relevant at the speeds we are talking about here. Also, FYI other factors for not using a connector include trace length. By adding modules you are increasing trace length by a large amount (relatively speaking of course). This also adds input capacitance.

So now you are probably asking. How much capacitance can a typical graphics chip or processor drive? Well I tried to find the datasheet on nVidia's website for their GeForce chips, but didn't turn up a thing. So I went to Intel's site and looked up the datasheet for their 845G chipset with integrated graphics. If you look on page 525 you will see that the output drive for the Intel chip is 12pF. So now you can probably see the problem. Assuming all we drove were memory modules directly from the 845G (which we wouldn't in real life) we could put just two to three 256Mb (32MB) modules on board without connectors. If we put the Molex connector you specified in between that number changes from 1 - 2 chips. In real life we would put a nice buffer in between that has a stronger output drive in between the 845G and the memory. Like TI's 24-Bit to 48-Bit Registered Buffer. That sucker has a 30pF drive and each buffer could easily drive 6 - 7 modules for a total of 256MB of RAM without the connector. Add a connector and this number deindles to 4 - 5. Anyway, I'm sure you get the point. At this scale even a 2pF connector makes a big difference.

However, after saying all that I should mention that I do not believe that these electrical considerations are the main or only reason the cards are not expandable. I think alot of it has to do with demand. Very few people are gonna upgrade their video card with more memory. I don't know any Matrox Millenium owners, including me, that upgraded their memory on their video cards. Because the economies of scale for a specialized memory make them much more expensive to produce than consumers like myself are willing to pay. In adition, by the time I am gonna upgrade a cards memory I can probably buy a brand new one with that amount of memory for the price of the piddly module ;)

JOhn

Re:removable RAM?

[MoogMan]

Now theres a thought... how about putting the gpu on a socket while we're there? Now, if the graphics motherboard was designed properly, we may be onto a winner... upgradability

Re:removable RAM?

[cheese_wallet]

I don't think I contradicted myself. I gave examples where capacitive loading limited the number of usable sockets. Maybe I should have gone on, and said that if video ram were operating at the same speed as your motherboard dimms, then sockets would be easier to design in.

However, my system is a little old, but the ram in my video card is 4 times faster than the ram on my motherboard. And on newer systems, I'm pretty sure it is still twice as fast. That's around 600-700MHz (counting both edges).

Re:removable RAM?

[msim]

My old Trio32 (yes, the old 32 bit S3 card) had sockets to allow you to upgrade from 1mb of video mem to 2 meg of video mem by adding in 2x 512kb chips. I did it simply so i could use 16bit colours at 1024x768. ;-)

TOO MUCH...

[Shuh]

... is never enough when it comes to computers. ;c)

64Meg Card obsolete?

[gurnb]

How can you say that a 64Meg Video card may be obsolete in a year!?

If a piece of hardware is doing what you need it to do, then it is not obsolete. Not every plays/needs/wants the latest UT2003/Doom3 game.

Re:64Meg Card obsolete?

[comic-not]

My words exactly! Somebody might be led to believe that the '89 Amiga 3000 sitting on my side table is somewhere way beyond obsolete but that's not true. All the programs run as well as they did, what, 13 years ago. If I need quick and dirty subtitles on a video or just fancy a quick game of pinball, everything is running 15 seconds from power-up. And my kids seem to prefer those classic games as well :-)

Comic-not

Re:64Meg Card obsolete?

[iksowrak]

Yeah, but if the card is to be used for high-end gaming and the latest whiz-bang FPS game requires more than your 64MB card can offer it's become obsolete to you.

Re:64Meg Card obsolete?

[korgull]

right.

I still use my old Matrox cards (millenium/mistique) a lot. I basically have the whole matrox series (up to G550) still in use and they perform well for what I do.

They all got =32MB

I never played a game since I put my commodore VC-20 on the shelf and I'm not at all interested in games anymore. So why would I need such large memory on a graphics card ?

The parhelia seems a nice solution for me though :-)

Re:64Meg Card obsolete?

[second class skygod]

To me, it seems easy to make such statements. I also think horses are obsolete for transportation even though they work (almost) as well for that purpose as they did prior to the invention of the automobile.

Obsolescence of a device or technology is a subjective concept and depends a lot on the value of the alternatives.

- scsg

Re:64Meg Card obsolete?

[matto14]

yes they do

Re:64Meg Card obsolete?

[iksowrak]

So why would I need such large memory on a graphics card ?

The answer is that you don't. Why in the world do I need a 4 way SMP Xeon server in my home? Ah! I don't need it so I haven't purchased one. But that doesn't mean that there aren't people out there who need them.

Re:64Meg Card obsolete?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the discussion assumes that by "obsolete," it is implied that the hardware is insufficient to run newer software with higher requirements..I'll assume you ignored that obvious fact to make your point. By your argument a Tandy Model 200 laptop is not "obsolete," as long as the 4 AA batteries it requires allows you to create miniscule BASIC programs and type up documents. In this case you're referring to usefullness rather than obsolescence. A piece of hardware might never live out it's -usefulness-, but it'll almost certainly become obsolete..much more rapidly in the computer industry, in fact. So yes, the nameless 64MB video card may very well be obsolete within a year, six to nine months..maybe even less. Its usefulness might survive on for as long as the hardware itself survives. I think you've mixed these two concepts up somewhere along the line.

Re:64Meg Card obsolete?

[mcpkaaos]

...until some poor 16 year old kid's father buys him a Pacer for his first car, while all of his friends are racing around in Acuras and BMWs. ;)

--
[McP]KAAOS

Re:64Meg Card obsolete?

[l79327]

proliant xeon servers have gotten real cheap on the surplus market. http://www.bestpricemall.com/
$999 for a two processor xeon 6500r with room for two more. The trouble is no agp slot. If I could get a 64bit pci graphics card I think It would make a cool hot plug redundant 7u desk top.

Re:64Meg Card obsolete?

[Anonymous Coward]

I had a 8mb card in my old computer a month ago before I upgraded and it was fine except It didnt work with Warcraft 3. Hopefully my 64mb radeon will be enough for at least 3 years and the only top of the line game i plan on buying next is starcraft 2 whenever that comes out.

Re:64Meg Card obsolete?

[Anonymous Coward]

if any kids daddy buys him a car he should be pissing himself with gratitude :) some aren't so lucky and actually have to work

Re:64Meg Card obsolete?

[sedawkgrep]

Parent: +1 Insightful

Nice to see somebody can actually think before they post. Even an AC.

Re:64Meg Card obsolete?

[avsed]

Not only that, but the numbers/graphs in the article do not offer any more than tentative support for the conclusions drawn by the author! IE: I can see very little difference (less than 5%) in speed between the 64 and 128MB versions of the cards and occasionally the 64MB card was significantly faster. In fact, a better conclusion to come to from the evidence presented is that the speed improvement is marginal at best. Instead, we're presented with speculation as fact (that next years games will differentiate the cards). Don't believe this hype - the GPU / bus architecture is FAR more important than the local memory cache - unless you *need* that extra memory today, wait until the next generation of cards, or sped the money on a different feature.

Dan

Re:64Meg Card obsolete?

[Anonymous Coward]

Can you name another industry where things become obsolete when they are still usefull?

Yeah, thats what I thought.

Re:64Meg Card obsolete?

[darkgreen]

Can you name another industry where things become obsolete when they are still usefull?

cameras, radios, hmmm. tube amps and transistors, perhaps, or even diesel vs steam vs gas vs alcohol... in the sense that obselete is just "no longer efficient".

Hey, it sounded like a simple statement, but I found myself trying to come up with any answer... couldn't do it, you're right. almost

I've got it! nothing really compares to the waste of computers, except for... clothing fashions. hmm. scary thought.

Re:64Meg Card obsolete?

[Comen]

Even thought I agree with the concept of waiting to get 128 megs, cause waiting is always best, cheaper!
But i have to agree witht he writer here.
I dont think the article shows the difference very well, cause of teh apps chosen.
I dont think you will see a speed difference in 64 megs and 128 megs intil the memory on the video card runs out, and I mean that it runs out while you are playing in real time, and then you have to swap with whats in you system RAM.
For instance, take a game like EQ (everquest)
Its been around for awhile, but I know that once of the big things about this game was that if they had more video memorym teh game could hold alot more tectures per Zone.
That would mean that when you enter a zone that the number of DIFFERENT monsters and Different textures on the walls is limited by the minimum system requiments of video memory.
I know that when some people would say hey why cant my pet have this look everywhere in the game?
The reason it couldnt was because that that texture would have to be pre loaded in to everyones video memory that enters that zone just incase you happen you run into that model with that texture.
For that matter think of a game liek that, not like quake or something, that has hundred of tecture for armor and swords and hats clothes, faces. and even in that game not evything you put on your body shows, but it would be nice if it did.
And I am sure that is why more video memory would be nice. Your video card has to have loaded into it every people and every combination of cloths etc.. that could possible be show on the screen at that given time.
Most FPS hardly compare with maybe 50 skins and 10 - 20 weapons?
I think the newer online RPG's will utilize that memory alot more with the 1000's of objects that people like to see in the game.

Re:64Meg Card obsolete?

[Anonymous Coward]

AAARRGH! Did you have to remind me of how stupid I was for selling my trusty 3000 all those years ago!!!??

There's still my C128 though.

Re:64Meg Card obsolete?

[sleepycow]

Actually, I can.

Black & White televisions. Freezers that do not self-defrost. The washboard. Real 'Irons' (Made of a slab of iron). Fuel-Oil based heating.

These are just a few examples: You can still watch a B&W TV, but try to buy a new one and you will be out of luck. If you can actually find one (I think radio shack still has one in their catalouge), you will find it being no less expensive than a colour television. You can still use an old style icebox, but new ones sure do work better and more efficiently. Same with a washboard and a washing machine, and the rest of my examples.

To get back on topic, you can purchase an 8mb ATI Rage 3D Video card for about $40 cdn. through distributor channels, or a 32mb NVidia TNT2 for $44. Sure, the 8mb card might do all you need, but the production cost of that item is probably identical to that of the newer item, as demonstrated by the wholesale price. Ergo, the older, less capable is obsolete.

Re:64Meg Card obsolete?

[Schifter]

HP Visualize fx5+ and fx10+ cards made for pa-risc machines are 64-bit 66MHz PCI. No guarantees they'll work in a PC though... I can only pass along that somewhere on a HP message board, there's a message from someone who put one in a visualize workstation along with a AGP version of the same card, and made it work (dirt slow, as I recall) in linux.

Re:64Meg Card obsolete?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is an article about running UT2003/Doom3 on different video cards genius...
so for the intended audience of this artice, yes, everyone wants to run UT2003/Doom3

Re:64Meg Card obsolete?

[Reziac]

Send me your antique 64mb cards, I'll give them a good home in their old age :)

Cripes, the best video card I've got here is a 16mb G200 that just barely keeps up with a P3-500. But it does what I need of it, so who cares if it's not the latest and greatest??

Re:64Meg Card obsolete?

[Reziac]

[laughing] I've got a perfectly good XT here that I was trying to find a good home for... then one day I needed it to test some software, so it's earned its keep. And I've got a 286 you couldn't pry away from me with a crowbar, cuz it's my emergency backup machine if I *need* a computer during an extended blackout: it does everything I can't live without, AND my heavy UPS will run it for two solid hours. (Said UPS is 22 years old.)

But you make a good point. Just because hardware or software is old doesn't mean it gets any worse than when it was new!! (eyeing prominent desktop icon for WordPerfect 5.1 :)

Re:64Meg Card obsolete?

[Reziac]

You're correct about that -- the distinction between "useful" and "obsolete" has been largely lost in the average discussion of hardware or software. And as everyone knows, all computer-related materials are obsolete no later than the moment you remove them from their box. :/

Maybe we need a new term meaning "obsolete for a particular level of usefulness".

Re:64Meg Card obsolete?

[Zathrus]

For instance, take a game like EQ (everquest)

No. Don't.

EQ was designed to work with 4 MB Voodoo1 cards. For the better part of 2 years they restricted themselves to global textures that fit within those limitations. When the new engine was released they somehow divorced themselves from the original requirements on the box, but they're still using very little video memory.

Compare the textures in EQ to any modern game - UT2k3 is a good sample since it runs just fine on a 32MB card and it still has vastly improved textures.

And I am sure that is why more video memory would be nice. Your video card has to have loaded into it every people and every combination of cloths etc.. that could possible be show on the screen at that given time

Do you know how incredibly small the textures are for those weapons, clothes, etc? In EQ we're talking a few K a piece. They're really quite crappy and it shows.

I don't think EQ even uses 32MB to it's fullest extent, much less even more memory. The reason EQ is slow is that it has always had one of the most crappy engines in 3D gaming. Yes, it has drastically different design goals than a FPS engine, but it's still shitty.

Re:64Meg Card obsolete?

[fredrik70]

Wrong, most new software do not really need any whizz-bang graphics - I would consider it pretty bad design if they did need it just in order to rub a text editor, compiler, etc, etc. Hey, I can run pretty much all new software on my good ol' 16MB PCI TNT card - both linux and win stuff.
Yes, suppose I can't run any of the new 3D games, but then again that's not what I do. Maybe the old Myst or C&C, but the card is more than up for that

Maybe they should of put that memory in the server

[pwagland]

It sure looks like it could use it now...

And even with the slashdot 128mb we still can't take out more than 25 sites a second...

The three rules of memory

[HillClimber]

1) Always get as much memory as you can afford.

2) A year or two from now, it won't seem like enough.

3) Ummmm.... I forgot. See my point?

Re:The three rules of memory

[xsfo]

3rd Rule: You do NOT talk about Fight Club

Re:The three rules of memory

[Anonymous Coward]

3) Profit!

Re:The three rules of memory

[Anonymous Coward]

4)?????

5)PROFIT!

Sorry guys, just couldn't help it. >_

UT2003 / Doom 3

[PhilipChapman]

Well, I dont know if you tried the UT2003 demo, but if you want to run the game smoothly at a decent framerate, your going to need a good video card. I'm imagining that when UT2003 comes out on oct 1st, with the full textures(the demo uses low quality textures to cut down on the download side, iirc), im willing to bet that 128mb of memory on the card is going to help out quite a bit.

I have the exact setup as the previous guy

[Rooked_One]

8500 w/ p4 1.5 and it runs ut2003 pretty well. I'm sure ill have to get a new cpu and probably vid card when doom comes out, but until then, theres no reason why the 8500 is a bad card - that is before you get all the tweaks and such, otherwise the performance sucks.

I wonder if he used the same tweaks I use when he was benching his 8500.

Re:I have the exact setup as the previous guy

[plugger]

I understand that you will need the latest and greatest to get the best from these games, but turning down the detail is still an option. That's the beauty of these games, you can go some way to customizing them for your hardware.

RADEON 9700

[frooyo]

If you have the cash, buy it. It is around $399 but nothing comes close to the speed of it. It embrasses the GeForece 4. Now all we need is linux driver, OH YEAH. some specs to see the comparison: http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,3973,475966, 00.asp

Re:RADEON 9700

[tarth]

Why would you want to buy a 9700 for $400 now when any other Radeon or GeForce4 will give you awesome performance? No, you can't tell the difference between 200fps and 210fps.

And when the games that come out that will emphasize the difference between the two (which is when you'll really want one anyway), the price of a 9700 or similar card will be half what it is today.

Re:RADEON 9700

[Greebz]

No, we don't need a Linux driver.

If you're serious about games, Windows is the OS to use. If you're not serious about games, why are you buying a $400 gaming card?

Re:RADEON 9700

[Anonymous Coward]

for $400 wouldnt it be cheaper to just buy a $100 card every 6-12 months when it no longer meets your demands?

Re:RADEON 9700

[Anonymous Coward]

You're trolling, right?

Re:RADEON 9700

[damiam]

You can get an OEM version for $320, and the retail box for $350.

Re:RADEON 9700

[Anonymous Coward]

rage3d forums tells all there is need to know:
Still too many driver issues, missing standard features like fsaa in 16bit, that 8x agp issue for those planning use their $300+ card after upgrading their motherboard.

Mostly, get same sense from 9700 discussion as
it was when the 8500 and radeon came out.
driver issues, driver issues, driver issues,
nice hardware, driver issues, driver issues, driver issues, ....

enough is when winamp truly rivals LSD

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe with enough RAM, processor speed and plasma displays I could create a $50,000 virtual reality room where winamp visuals would rival a $3.00 hit of LSD.

Wouldn't that be cool. You could make your freakin trip end when you needed it to. Game Over Man. Legal too.

Re:enough is when winamp truly rivals LSD

[Anonymous Coward]

Whoa i wish i could get LSD for 3$, but then again i only pay 5$ CAN. GOOOO exchange rate!

Re:enough is when winamp truly rivals LSD

[Anonymous Coward]

Only legal if you own the cd version of the mp3 you are listening to!!!

Re:enough is when winamp truly rivals LSD

[Anonymous Coward]

well just yesterday we smoked some herb and did some geiss and milkdrop through the projector, it was almost as good as lsd. Actually I have to setup milkdrop to restrict my display to 30fps because faster than that it doesn't look nearly as good.

Re:enough is when winamp truly rivals LSD

[Anonymous Coward]

Drugs are for disco-dancing hippy trailer trash losers who still think we are living in the 1960's. Get with the program man... drugs are bad for you.

Re:enough is when winamp truly rivals LSD

[Anonymous Coward]

but.... umm you wouldn't be trippin'... just so you know... but b-rips and plasma displays, count me in

Re:enough is when winamp truly rivals LSD

[asscroft]

dude, I think the poster agrees with you. Poster was trying to create an alternative to drug use. did you miss that, just because s/he pointed out how expensive it was to use computers to create a legal alterantive to an illegal drug?

Of course after trying it you might be tempted to use the real thing, but not if you have good people like you sending them to theantidrug.com

(btw, Isn't that ironic. shouldn't the illegal drugs be harder to come by than legal things...but of course, as you pointed out, drugs keep our poor (trailer trash reference) stoned and tripping so that they don't rise up and take the country back from the small minority of elite wealthy who run the place. Convenient, isn't it, that a hit of LSD is 3-20 dollars, despite being completely banned from the country for over 20 years. better to have our hippy trailer trash losers stoned than wondering why in the hell there is so little money for their kids' school and yet so much money to bail out the utility companies, or etc. etc.)

When you say 'get with the program man'...do you mean the 12 step program, or some other program?

Perhaps you mean the program where those that don't like the way things are go home and drink until they forget ... or smoke and talk about someday...or trip and look at the pretty colors. So that those who like the way things are can continue to keep things the way they are...if you know what I mean.

I've been with that program. Both sides. One side is nicer than the other, but I feel so much dirtier. That program sucks.

for example...

Chartered Forest is a plan where the government will rent National Forest land to oil companies, timber companies and mining companies.

The stoners living in the trailers will pay taxes so that their government can use that tax money to buy forests "for them", then rent the forests to the companies - making it very difficult for the tax payers to actually enjoy the forests - and in turn the politicians behind it (Bush & co) will inevitably get huge campaign contributions from these same companies.

Luckily with $3.00 acid hits they'll be too high to be outraged about this for very long, and we (corporate loving non-drug using, home owning anti trailer trash americans) can make a quick buck at their expense.

hoo hoo ha ha haaaah haaah

There is a lot more to this drug deal than personal health.

I wish more people would just say no. Just say Hell NO while they are at it. I wish they'd stop drinking and smoking and watching tv and just stop and think about how fucked up things are...

but as soon as you do, you realize that most people don't care enough. And so neither do you.

And together you all decide to drink, or smoke, or trip instead.

And on it goes.

Think about it, what would the true anti-drug be ? If you don't get it by now, go ask someone less fortunate than yourself.

Blah

[Anonymous Coward]

It must be true, we really do need that much memory in a video card! That must be why I am sitting here typing this on RH Null beta with an 8MB ATI Mach 64 card when a simple flick of the kvm switch would have me on a GeForce 2 64MB card. This is all pointless except for games anway. My 8MB ATI is just as usable as the 64MB Nvidia for what I do. I shall purchase no more thy video card...

My 8 megs work fine...

[vigata]

I have an ATI Mobility M3 in my laptop and its 8 megs seem to be more than fine. Of course I'm not doing 3D, so I guess that's why I don't need more memory.

Does everybody else do 3D?

bye

Re:My 8 megs work fine...

[Anonymous Coward]

I have the same card in my laptop, and I despise the card. Not only do opengl applications run horribly slow on it, not even all function calls from opengl are supported.

Re:My 8 megs work fine...

[AvitarX]

No, not everyone does, but if you are not doing 3D you do not nead to even think about this question, duh. Most cards give crisp 2D now (anecdotally from other posts I have read over the last year or so) and all have enough ram and speed to drive affordable monitors.
This is like you replying to an article comparing a TI-85 and TI-89 calculator and saying my scientific calculator works, does everyon else do graphing?

Potatos and Grape Jelly

[Anonymous Coward]

These fit nicely in one's anus. I recommend both at the same time. Just don't fart in public.

Re:Potatos and Grape Jelly

[cyberdog6]

That's Potatoes Mr. Quayle

Obsolete? So what?

[iiioxx]

"...but a year from now 64MB cards might just be obsolete."

So? A year from now, 128MB might be a low-end card, too. So in a year, buy a new card. Don't invest in tomorrow's technology today at a premium, when you can get it tomorrow at a discount. That's why smart buyers invest in modular components. When your hardware gets outdated, pluck and chuck.

I never invest in the top-end. I buy in the middle ground. Why? Because components drop from high-end to mid-range very quickly, but then stay there a long time before obsolescing to the low-end (or dead-end). And when a product drops from the high-end to the middle ground, the pricetag typically gets cut in half.

Re:Maybe they should of put that memory in the ser

[halo8]

Free Mod Points to first poster who posts a Mirror

just one small mitigating fact

[FireBook]

i would have to say that texture compression will help both in terms of texture memory required, and memory bandwidth usage, alot of these more modern cards have onchip texture compression/decompression with no performance problems- and modern texture handling stops horrifically bad looking textures

I asked a similar question on the newsgroups

[antdude]

I am planning to do a major upgrade due to my slow Pentium III 600 Mhz system with a GeForce2 Pro card. You can read my newsgroup thread here. :)

Re:I asked a similar question on the newsgroups

[Anonymous Coward]

that's not slow!

idiot.

Re:I asked a similar question on the newsgroups

[antdude]

Try playing Battlefield 1942 on it then!

Getting an nvidia? 128 or 64? Read this...

[Rahga]

Here's something you should consider before buying a 128 MB GeForce Ti-series card. There are four choices you can make right now:

Ti-4600: Highest price, best features, 10.4 GB/s memory bandwidth, 650 MHz memory clock
Ti-4400: High price, excellent features, 8.8 GB/s memory bandwidth, 550 MHz memory clock
Ti-4200 (1): Decent price, great features, will handle BF1942 and UT2003, 64 MB limit, 8 GB/s memory bandwidth, 500 MHz Memory clock
Ti-4200 (2): High price, great features, slowest out of all 4 thanks to memory speeds, will handle BF1942 and UT2003, 128 MB limit, 7.1 GB/s memory bandwidth, 444 MHz memory clock.

Basicly, on the 4200's, if you go for double the memory for almost double the price, you will see a performance hit.

After my research (urged on by PNY's box), I decided that by the time I need 128 Mhz, I'll also want the features of a chip beyond the current Nvidia line.

Of course, if you want anything that performs beyond the 4200, then why bother reading anything here in slashdot? You're getting at least 128 MB on your card ;) .....

So, this weekend, I found a 64 MB Ti 4200 for $129, and it printed out a $30 rebate at the counter. Happy day, indeed. I spent the rest of the weekend playing OpenGL-boosted Doom and Hexen.

BTW, if you are completely out of the know, but love gaming, do not but the MX series of cards. They are not for you.

Re:Getting an nvidia? 128 or 64? Read this...

[Anonymous Coward]

hexen on a ti4200 ?

wtf?!! kida crack are you smokin

Hexen runs on an old Matrox Millenium with 2mb ram !!

Ive got a doom power pack cd you can have for 45$ !

Re:Getting an nvidia? 128 or 64? Read this...

[Evro]

Basicly, on the 4200's, if you go for double the memory for almost double the price, you will see a performance hit.

I purchased A GF4 4200 128MB VIVO for my girlfriend for $170 (price has since increased). Are you telling me the GeForce 4 4200 64 Meg sells for $85? Frankly, every review I read said that the extra 64 megs of ram is of far more benefit than 56 more MHz of memory speed, so I don't believe your claim of a performance hit. Which do you think is really of more value; being able to process the data 11.2% faster, or being able to store 100% more textures? (which I would guess equates to 50% fewer disk seeks?)

Re:Getting an nvidia? 128 or 64? Read this...

[Anonymous Coward]

After my research (urged on by PNY's box), I decided that by the time I need 128 Mb, I'll also want the features of a chip beyond the current Nvidia line.

128 meg of ram is complete waste of money right now. By the time games start to utalize 128meg of ram your gpu would have been obsolete for 3 years already.

The GeForce ti4200 64mb is the best card for the gamer on a budget. And I'm sorry to say but even if you buy a GeForce4 ti4600 it will be obsolete in a year too.

Re:Getting an nvidia? 128 or 64? Read this...

[Anonymous Coward]

The ability to store 100% more textures is quite worthless since hardly any games existing or in development presently can take full advantage of that potential advantage. What this means is that you won't be able to see real value on your purchase for the next 2 years, and by that time your card would have already become obsolete. So why settle for a slower card?

And yes 56mhz of speed DOES make a difference.

Re:Getting an nvidia? 128 or 64? Read this...

[tshak]

Second the MX comment:

The MX series of the GF4's do not support the full line of graphical features of even the GF3's let alone the GF4's - the "GF4MX" series is a very misleading name.

This is not, true, however, with the GF2 MX series of cards. These are a great value (esp. the 64meg ones) for light or even casual gamers.

Personally, if you want the best possible graphics on the latest game engines all for a reasonable price, I think that you should seriously consider the GF4 Ti4400. The ATI's seem to be getting better driver support as well so their higher end (8500's or 9000's) may warrent a good look as well.

Re:Getting an nvidia? 128 or 64? Read this...

[MisterBlister]

Ti-4200 (2): High price, great features, slowest out of all 4 thanks to memory speeds, will handle BF1942 and UT2003, 128 MB limit, 7.1 GB/s memory bandwidth, 444 MHz memory clock.

The Ti 4200 128 costs, on average, $20 more than the 64 MB version. That is NOWHERE NEAR double the price. And while most games out today will run just fine in 64 MB (some running a bit faster on the 64 due to the increased clock speed), the games of tomorrow with heavy polygons, large frame buffers and pixel/vertex shaders fighting for VRAM will run MUCH better on the 128, even with the slightly lower clock speed (which, as has been noted by others, can be overclocked pretty extensively).

Re:Getting an nvidia? 128 or 64? Read this...

[_|()|\|]

After my research (urged on by PNY's box)

Edward Tufte, author of Visual Display of Quantitative Information, would not be pleased with PNY's marketing. The bar graph on the back of the box implies that the 64 MB version is 150% faster than the 128 MB version, based on a 3D Mark score that is only 2% higher.

I chose 64 MB for the value ($100), because it seems silly to spend more on something that is already eclipsed by the Radeon 9700 Pro, not to mention the forthcoming NV30.

Re:Getting an nvidia? 128 or 64? Read this...

[Rahga]

Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying. If you want 128 MB of video memory, I am saying that the 4200 card does not deliver as much bang for the buck as the 4400 card. The 4200 with 64MB also delivers more value than the 4200 with 128MB.

64MB of extra memory on the 4200 is sorta like sticking monster truck tires on a Camaro. It's wasted money.

Re:Getting an nvidia? 128 or 64? Read this...

[Rahga]

To be honest, overclocking can bridge that gap, but with both types of cards overclocked, there will be a gap at those limits too ;)

Re:Getting an nvidia? 128 or 64? Read this...

[Rahga]

Amen to that.....

It is a nice try for backing up the "Stomps" claim.... a claim that could be (mostly) wiped out with a little bit of overclocking on the 128MB variant.

Still, like I've said, it's not worth the money in my case to spend that much more money on a 4200.

Re:Getting an nvidia? 128 or 64? Read this...

[Anonymous Coward]

He's talking about the full 3D-version of Hexen. Visit the damn web site, they have a new 3D engine and 3D models for Doom, Heretic and Hexen. Yay!

Re:Getting an nvidia? 128 or 64? Read this...

[Anonymous Coward]

I see not one of you god-dammned idiots read the article.

article says:

high res(1280+)
+anti aliasing
+current games
+128MB
= clear benefit.

texture memory

[phorm]

AGP will let you run the textures from your video card off of system RAM, but there is still a speed loss involved in this. More RAM is of course nicer for newer games. Older games, it doesn't mean squat. No games, squat. Games without 3d, squat. (no I'm not counting those who use the video card for system memory).

However, if you intend to play Q3 or whatever enough at superhighres, ultracolordepth, whateverwhatever, then you may want more Video RAM. Crank down the texture detail a little bit and you don't need as much, I'm sure the game is just as fun.

AGP, fast video cards and video RAM are all about games. But when you can buy a whole PS2 for the cost of an expensive video card, it makes you think a bit.

With my old 15" 1024x1024maxres monitor it doesn't matter much anyhow - phorm

Re:texture memory

[Rahga]

To be honest, messing with details (resolution aside) on Q3 is not going to make a humongous impact if you have a decent 2000-ish video card. Modern cards have no problem at all, even 64 meg or 32 meg. I've found that the the big deal there will be your processor and/or internet speed. Your average k6-2-450 tends to choke on a few bots even with a new video card and memory :)

Re:texture memory

[pclminion]

AGP will let you run the textures from your video card off of system RAM

This, by the way, has got to be one of the most useless features of AGP. Not only is the transfer from main memory to the card slow as molasses, it's also tying up the memory so that the CPU has to wait for the video card in order to get to RAM. So while the graphics card is rendering your scene out of main memory textures, it's also making it impossible for the CPU to get to RAM in order to do geometry processing for the next frame of animation.

Not to mention, these cards are coming out with enough video RAM to rival the main memory, so the entire point is moot anyway. Well, unless you've got 1 GB of RAM like I do..

Re:texture memory

[tshak]

s/PS2/XBox/ and you have a point. The PS2's graphics are more compareable to a highend Geforce or maybe a GF2MX.

Re:texture memory

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't forget CAD and 3D modelling, both needing high-end cards for the best performance.

Re:texture memory

[phorm]

I skips my normal embellishment on this. What I meant to say is:
AGP will let you run the textures from your video card off of system RAM, but you might as well go fix a can of soup, feed the cat, etc for all the good it does you speed-wise.

Ok, so maybe that's too extreme. :-)

Not to mention, these cards are coming out with enough video RAM to rival the main memory

Spending money on 256MB/512MB video cards seem ludicrous to me, when people I know are just scraping that much up in system RAM (I'm 512 myself until I get a new motherboard). If a game takes more RAM than my standard PC configuration, I think it's time to dull those pixels a bit in favor of a little decency as far as memory consumption. I imaging when these cards start toting that much RAM and CPU power, they're also going to be so hot that you could probably find a case mod that allows them to boil your morning coffee...

The newest innovation, part video card, part base heater, part toaster. Don't forget the heatsink and fan! - phorm

64MB Should be enought but.....

[jbischof]

Some games get really greedy with their textures. Latest games such as Soldier of Fortune (I think that is the one) will load up so much of the memory, that if you happen to only have 64MB then the hard drive thrashing occurs.

And any good hardware buff knows that hardware thrashing is really bad. Once that happens it doesn't matter if your running NVidia or Voodoo or even integrated graphics, its going to run SLOW. If you want to be able to see all your blood and gore, as well as explosives, and triple that up with realistic surroundings and backgrounds you better go with 128MB.

However, I suppose if you run at the lowest levels, turning off all the special effects to try and get the highest frame rate, then the extra memory won't help. You are turning off all the effects that use the memory anyway. So if your going for plain FPS and don't really care about how it looks you will be okay with 64MB.

Trollstomping...by the time I need 128 MB, not MHz

[Rahga]

Sorry. It's late, and spelling errors abound tonight ;) .

I also meant to say "do not buy the MX series". And a few other typos.... If I took time to get them all right, my post would have hit near the bottom of the list, thanks to the active troll population here on /.

G'night!

128MB ram?

[JonWan]

If your not gaming or working with heavy graphics why do you need all of that?

Shit... it's about time I upgraded my Diamond Stealth 64 w/ 2MB ram.
(no I ain't kidding, thats what I really have)

Re:Trollstomping...by the time I need 128 MB, not

[GigsVT]

I used to have a C64 text RPG type game that had that typo in the actual program. It took me forever to figure out what "You but the potion" meant. Being about 7 or 8 years old at the time, I figured it might be british slang or something I wasn't aware of.

Ridiculous for most users

[isorox]

Lets assume that you've grown tired of yet another 3D shoot-em-up. Why do you need such ridiculous ammounts of graphics memory? At 128MB of ram you can have a normal workspace screen with 44,739,242 pixels, or a resolution of arround 7680*5760 at 24bit color. Thats like a 130 inch screen at average dpi.

I'm much more interested in why I cant pick up cheap ($20) 2 head or 4 head video cards, or ones with decent video out at the same time as VGA out.

Re:Ridiculous for most users

[geekoid]

You don't. The article is not meant for you. Move along.

Re:Ridiculous for most users

[SoupIsGoodFood_42]

Why do you need such ridiculous ammounts of graphics memory? At 128MB of ram you can have a normal workspace screen with 44,739,242 pixels, or a resolution of arround 7680*5760 at 24bit color.

Unless you run OS X, which has a more advanced windowing system than most OSs at the moment. It chews up alot of RAM (a good idea, really, but annoyes me--being an iBook owner).

2 meg for me

[NineNine]

I don't run games. 2 meg is good for me. I didn't even *know* that video cards came with 64 MB on them. I can't imagine what 64 mb is used for. All I need is for windows to be painted in W2K. Hell, I don't have any clue as to howe much video memory my laptop has. Unless you play cutting edge games, really *any* VGA card works just fine.

Re:2 meg for me

[arkane1234]

Oh come on.. in order to run any decent resolution under Windows >= 95, you have to have at least 4 megs.

It's the reason I upgraded to an 8 meg card back then...

Re:2 meg for me

[NineNine]

OK, I just checked and I was wrong... I do have a 4 MB card. But really, the damn thing goes up to 1280x1024... a shitload more than I need. I generally only run it at 800x600 on my 15" monitor.
So actually, if I had a 2 MB card, that would probably be just fine, too.

Re:2 meg for me

[Anonymous Coward]

If you aren't that technically 'aware' of what is out there to know that video cards are advanced enough to have 64MB on them...I wonder what the hell you do for a living.

Beyond that, how the fuck can you be so goddamn clueless even after reading countless /. articles on the subject?

benchmark by application

[trepan]

most software (certainly all games coming out now) have not only minimal requirements, but also recommended minimums. if you're in the market to purchase a new video card soon and you're a gamer, look at the recommended minimum for the games about to be released and purchase to that specification. likewise for other applications.

i'm still running a geforce 64mb card and it handles most graphics just fine. as games progress, i'm starting to notice that i need to turn down the highest level of detail settings, but not so much that my game play experience is negatively affected.

Re:Maybe they should of put that memory in the ser

[Grama Police]

Maybe you should of learnt how to construct sentences. But have course you didn't.

what? try smoking something else

[Splork]

1600x1200x32bit = 8mb. make that dual headed you get 16mb. add a bit for local caching of data on the card and you find that 32mb is way more than you need.

if you're even questioning if the cheapest card you can find on the shelves today has enough ram, you're being silly.

video quality and number & type of outputs are all that matter. go buy a game console if you think otherwise.

--
ask not what your pocketbook can do for you but what you can do for your pocketbook.

Re:Maybe they should of put that memory in the ser

[Anonymous Coward]

When do I get my points?

Textures are more important than poly count

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow. I didn't realize how clueless most people on slashdot were about hardware.

First, using FSAA you can see graphical improvements with newer cards on older games. Graphics card memory can make a big different in FSAA performence.

Second, AGP is still a fairly slow interface. The more textures you can get into your graphics ram the better -- 128MB may be an overkill for some games but in 6-12 months it won't be.

Third, I don't see much reason to skimp $10-$20 when you're already investing $150+ on a graphics card. You might as well plan ahead.

Fourth, if you can't handle the upgrade cycle of PC gaming buy yourself a console. PC gamers demand better graphics, game makers demand we use newer hardware to do it. Very simple.

WAY OFF TOPIC Re:enough is when winam...

[Anonymous Coward]

Thats no where near true. Abusing drugs is bad. Hell, abusing tylenol is bad (yes i know its a drug) But using tylenol is good.

I'm not trying to brag or anything, but..

[kaoshin]

My 1MB trident SVGA card works just fine. Enlightenment looks great in 800x600x16bit,
and I play alpha centauri, starcraft, freeciv, etc. And I have been using it day and night since around 1993 without it melting, and with no noisy cooling fans. Considering it cost me one buck, I think that it is not a bad bargain.

Re:I'm not trying to brag or anything, but..

[haggar]

No fscking suit, you have one of those Trident SVGA cards? Is it a PCI or an ISA card? I still have this Trident SVGA ISA card among my stuff, but no ISA slot to pop it in :o) but I wish there was a way to get at least 256 colors in 600x800 mode. In theory, at least, it should be possible, but not with X11, as far as I know....

Re:I'm not trying to brag or anything, but..

[arkane1234]

So lets get this straight, in 1993 a 1MB trident SVGA card cost you 1 buck?

Re:I'm not trying to brag or anything, but..

[Cuthalion]

Even when new, that was a shitty card. But if you constrain your experience to the capabilities of your hardware, than no matter what hardware you have you can say "it works for the way I use it".

Re:I'm not trying to brag or anything, but..

[BigDaddy]

Is it one of those VL-Bus (Video Local Bus) cards? Talk about a dead technology. Even in its "hay day." I remember having one in my old 486 and when I upgraded to a pentium I was psyched because it gave me a reason to buy a 1mb PCI card. Sweet....

Re:I'm not trying to brag or anything, but..

[davew2040]

I'm going to have to say, if there's one thing I can't stand, it's the folks who chime into discussions about 3d graphics cards with the bit about how their 2d tasks work great on some dated POS hardware. I'm really fscking happy that your console-mode programs look the same as on the graphics industry's latest, and that you're damn satisfied with 800x600.

Re:I'm not trying to brag or anything, but..

[kaoshin]

It is a TGUI 9440 AGI (ISA), and it came with 2 MB, but I broke one by accident by stepping on it trying to put the first one in. Right now with the 1MB, my X Windows is running. My XF86Config says I am using depth 16, and 800x600, and it works ok in 256 too, but if I increase the resolution or color depth it goes crazy.

Re:I'm not trying to brag or anything, but..

[kaoshin]

I use console apps in an enlightenment pager window only, anything over 800x600 on a 14" monitor makes me squint, and none of the games that I have been interested in have required 3D. True, some have required direct X and such to play (such as axis and allies, which I also play in windows), but no 3D card was required.
For the record though, the card was a pain in the butt to get to work in windows. The default refresh rates were all screwed up, etc. For X it set up flawlessly. I think I've been using it in X since the hamm release of debian.

Re:I'm not trying to brag or anything, but..

[kaoshin]

I got it still in the box with instructions too. Some guy got in trouble for running like a porn BBS or something (or so they said), and some lady (I think his landlord) was selling all his stuff on the porch. My friend lived down the street from him and we found it while rummaging. Unfortunately she left most of the stuff out in the rain, and that was one of the only things still in a box that survived. I'm not positive it was 1993, but I think that is close.

Re:I'm not trying to brag or anything, but..

[haggar]

Ah, but that's advanced ;o) no, really, I have a TG9000 (or was it T9000) that's an older model than yours :o)

It came with two 5.25" floppies full of drivers, sadly, all of them totally useless today. However, my card was supported natively by PSpice for DOS, so I could have 1024x768 graphs of circuit simulations onscreen. Nice.

Re:I'm not trying to brag or anything, but..

[haggar]

No, not VLB (and it's VESA LB, not Video LB): as I said, it's an ISA card.

Re:I'm not trying to brag or anything, but..

[jonadab]

> My 1MB trident SVGA card works just fine. Enlightenment looks
> great in 800x600x16bit

Hmmm... I can see the difference between 16bit and 24bit colour.
I'd say it's worth getting a card that can do 24-bit at a decent
resolution. So, what, 2-4MB?

I _don't_ understand the value of 3D cards... they can't do
3D that looks _good_ (i.e., raytracing) anyway.

Re:I'm not trying to brag or anything, but..

[Anonymous Coward]

You payed $1 in 1993 for a Trident PCI 1MB??
Troll...

Re:I'm not trying to brag or anything, but..

[Anonymous Coward]

i can do 1024 x 768 @ 24bpp with my NeoMagic Magic Media NM256AV+ 2.5MB video card. i think it goes up to 1280 x 1024 @ 24bpp if i push it.
course it doesnt do 3D very well since it doesnt support anything more than DX1.0

Re:I'm not trying to brag or anything, but..

[kaoshin]

From a garage sale. Pay attention.

Bah 64, 128 Meg! How about 360 Meg

[xphase]

See: Sun's XVR-1000

72 Meg of frame buffer memory, and 256 Meg of texture memory with 30-bit color. Of course, it doesn't run in a PC but, we can dream can't we.

--xPhase

Memory

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm going to hold out for a 128MB card. :)

How do you know?

[vstat]

How do you find out how much memory your card has? I have never replaced the one that came with my Packard Bell. I don't play any high end games, but am just curious as to how much I have.

Re:How do you know?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're running windoze, then from the start menu select 'Run' and type in dxdiag and hit enter. This brings up all the system information that Direct X knows about, which includes your video memory somewhere on the first page, near the bottom.

Re:How do you know?

[superyooser]

These instructions are based on my Windows XP system, but I think they would be the same for Win95/98.

1. Right-click on desktop
2. Click Properties from the menu that pops up
3. Click Settings tab
4. Click Advanced button
5. Click Adapter tab
6. In the Adapter Information section, you should see Memory Size: XX MB

Since you have a Packard Bell, I would guess that your card probably has 2-4 MBs, or maaaybe 8 MBs.

64 mb cards won't be obsolete for a bit...

[cuyler]

The day I bought a Voodoo 5 was the same day they were bought out by Nvidia. The story was posted on slashdot while I was out. A week later the 3dfx linux site was down and Nvidia had said that they would not support any of the 3dfx cards. This made it really difficult to get it running well in Linux.

A week after I bought my laptop (Dell) they dropped the price by $150.

I'm considering buying a Geforce4Go around January. They should be obsolete shortly afterwards.

Um, What About Virtual Texturing?

[Anonymous Coward]

("Virtualized Texture Memory" is prolly a more instinctive nomer.)

3DLabs/Creative's new P10 uses this. It makes the on-card video memory just a cache for streaming textures: so you get unlimited texture sizes, even with just 64MB (the proposed minimum) of video memory... Or limited by your system RAM, actually. I'm not sure if you can apply the same to geometry and colorbuffer data -- could be.

This is totally unlike "AGP texturing", mind you!

Re:Maybe they should of put that memory in the ser

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't you mean "Maybe you should *HAVE* learned"?

Not just for gamers

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone running Mac OS X 10.2 ('Jaguar') would be well advised to spring for the fattest card they can afford. The new compositing engine treats every window as an OpenGL texture, so the more RAM you have the more windows you can open before your graphics card starts pushing textures into main RAM. The performance difference between a 16Mb PowerBook and a 64Mb Power Mac is noticeable (and yes, I know there are other factors in play there :).

If other windowing systems head in the same direction (and MS indicate that Windows will, in a couple of years' time - X... who knows? Anyone have a plan there?), the advice will presumably apply equally.

Re:Not just for gamers

[Stenpas]

I disagree. I have a Powermac G4/733 quicksilver with the stock ATI Radeon 7500 (32MB DDR) in it, and this machine flies. Right now I have around 17 visible windows open, ranging from around 800x600 to full screen. Quartz Debug (part of the developer tools) says that I have many more windows open, but they are invisible.

Performance is far superior to what it was in OSX 10.1.5 of course. The genie and scale effects are WAY faster. Scrolling has been improved by a lot, and the new eyecandy goes at a perfect speed. The only thing bad is resizing windows, and that is around a 4X improvement from OSX 10.1.5 . Most importantly, however, is that my load average has gone down a bit. While writing this my load average has been about at 0.60. Back in 10.1.5 It would have been about 1.35 to 1.6.

As always, your mileage may vary and speed is subjective, but I have found it zippy. You definately don't need the latest and greatest video card, but it can't hurt.

Sten

Hmm

[Anonymous Coward]

It's futile to upgrade memory on a video card if the card isn't programmed to take advantage of it.

Depends on what you do.

[Anonymous Coward]

If you run, say, EverCrack, 64 mb is obsolete now.

Re:Obsolete? So what?

[Reality Master 101]

When your hardware gets outdated, pluck and chuck.

That sound you hear is a million Macintosh zealots twitching and convulsing while they try and convince themselves that lack of upgradeability is a GOOD thing because it's "less confusing". :)

long as you can play Go... qjkx

[Anonymous Coward]

That's fine. For go you need nineteen by nineteen black and white. I think you can do that. Rather interesting using a Radeon 9700 to play Go.

I do believe I'm done with video cards.

[Anonymous Coward]

My GF4 MX will have to do. And it does. "But it's just a slightly improved GF2!"

Heh. That's why there's no noticible difference between my GF4 MX and a true GF4 on anything but EverQuest. I'm sure there'll be differences on Doom III as well, but hey.. Two games? Back when I bought it, I saved > $150 by going with it instead of a full fledged GF4.

But hey, so games of the future will slowly require outrageously more power. Few (Those from iD) will actually need it. Others will 'need' it because of crappy programming.

By the time I need a full fledge GF4, they'll be $30 from a decent online retailer, and everyone will be insisting I get a GF5. I'll probably get neither. Why?

Heat. Between my video card, my processor, and my hard drive, eh.. Let's just say that I'm surprised a bunch of hobos aren't standing around my box to warm their hands.

And the noise.. Even with supposedly quiet fans.. Argh! I can no longer stand silence, for I am always with the humming cacophony of the computer fan.

Re:I do believe I'm done with video cards.

[jonadab]

> Heat. Between my video card, my processor, and my hard drive,
> eh.. Let's just say that I'm surprised a bunch of hobos aren't
> standing around my box to warm their hands.

I've got the side of my case open and a box fan blowing in,
aimed right into the side... works wonders, let me tell you.
Nothing moves air like a twenty-inch fan...

(Normally this is not necessary, as I only have a PII/233 and
a Matrox card with 4MB WRAM, and the faster of two hard drives
is 7200 RPM, but we've had an especially warm year around here
this year, and the alarm on my CPU (which prior to this summer
I never new even _had_ such an alarm) kept going off if I ran
it over 50% utilisation (say, if I compiled anything) without
the fan. (And yes, I checked the CPU fan, and it's still
going, though I have no way to measure its speed.) Part of
the problem is that ambient temp in my room was something
like 95F for most of August.)

Re:I do believe I'm done with video cards.

[buck_wild]

Wow. To not see any difference, you must run everything in the same low resolution. Ever try running GTA3 in a higher resolution?

I would say that there are way more than just two games where you'd see a difference.

Tired of the rat race

[Arandir]

128MB might seem excessive now, but a year from now 64MB cards might just be obsolete.

I'm tired of this rat race. I'm tired of every six months some hardware company telling me I'm obsolete. I'm sick of companies telling me to buy, buy, buy. Buy until it hurts! Buy until your wallet implodes!

What? Is today's software suddenly going to disappear next year? Are KDE and GNOME suddenly going to decide to render everything in OpenGL? Will Mozilla just sit and stall if I only have 64Meg video? I think not...

Re:Tired of the rat race

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm tired of this rat race. I'm tired of every six months some hardware company telling me I'm obsolete. I'm sick of companies telling me to buy, buy, buy. Buy until it hurts! Buy until your wallet implodes!

And THIS surprises you...how? That's the way technology works, buddy! :P

Re:Tired of the rat race

[SoupIsGoodFood_42]

I'm tired of this rat race. I'm tired of every six months some hardware company telling me I'm obsolete. I'm sick of companies telling me to buy, buy, buy. Buy until it hurts! Buy until your wallet implodes!

Well don't listen to them then! But I think you will find alot of people will want, or require the latest stuff, regardless of if the companies are trying to push it ir not.

Are KDE and GNOME suddenly going to decide to render everything in OpenGL?

...Mac OS X :)

Re:Tired of the rat race

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.lowendmac.com/

Re:Tired of the rat race

[Feanturi]

I'm tired of this rat race. I'm tired of every six months some hardware company telling me I'm obsolete. I'm sick of companies telling me to buy, buy, buy. Buy until it hurts! Buy until your wallet implodes!

I've always made the practice of putting up with what I have for a long time, waiting for enough better hardware to beat the stuff that already beat me, and do a nice splurge to get more power. What leads me to keep believing that I need more power? Because I always will. I like to work with audio, effects and multi-track mixing and the like. Some video editing and playing with 3d rendering now and then.. And I love games. Ultima IX is an awesome game that ran like crap on my 300MHz Celery with 32Mb. It ran pretty well on the 1.0GHz P3 512Mb, but it is only now, on the P4 2.5GHz with 1.5Gb that the game shines in full glory, with everything cranked including stuff in the ini file that is not settable through the game itself. And I'm enjoying the hell out of it this time around, the game is something like 4 years old by now and I've just caught up to its demands. My system is *sweeeeet* and you know what? It's still not fast enough.

More! More! MORE!

Re:Tired of the rat race

[Anonymous Coward]

So go live under a bridge and suck on rocks then. Take your ludditism and go the hell away. Just use Lynx and shut up.

I'm really sick of people who are sick of advances in technology to the point that they think that it's ok that no one else ever gets to have anything beter because they don't like it!

F.U.

i don't think so.

[hahnar]

seems as though all this is for show and tell sake. 'dude, i got a 128 meg card!' seriously whats the point of going top end right now? My desktop's 32meg ddr worrk fine. i can play pretty mmuch all the new games. For the average gamer 64 wil probably be great for quiite a while. When the need arises for 128 or higher, then it should be bought, not now when there is such a premium on such technology. If it isn't broken, don't fix it.

Re:i don't think so.

[MadBurner]

I agree. The distribute these card advances on the merits of consumerism not need.

Re:i don't think so.

[Anonymous Coward]

All graphics cards are a matter of consumerism and not need. PCs are a luxury and not essential.

Re:i don't think so.

[MadBurner]

LOL so the money I make off my pc is luxery money? damn why was I paying bills with it?

Snood

[blackmonday]

I'm not upgrading to 128 megs until it's required by Snood. So there!

upgradeable RAM and GPU

[Erpo]

That would certainly be acceptable. However, I would tend to think that the cost of making those components modular would mostly negate the benefits of not having to buy a new pcb every time you upgrade. Personally, I'm all for separation of function into three separate devices (output, input, and rendering).

1. A 2D display card with DVI/VGA and TV output. Possibly multiple sets of outputs depending on how "fancy" you want the card to be and how much you're willing to spend.

2. A video input card with coax, firewire, DVI, RCA, etc... input connectors.

3. A card designed solely for 3D rending with a GPU, fast ram, and, most importantly, a standard digital interface to the RAMDAC on the 2D card.

That would allow for the optimum modularity and consumer benefit. Need support for a new kind of output device, or more output devices? Buy a new output card. Want real-time hardware support for a new video compression codec? Buy a new video input card. Want to play the lastest game at reasonable frame-rates? Buy a new 3D card. There wouldn't be any worries about forward compatibility as the video input component isn't really an integral part of the system - it's just been bundled with video cards in recent years. There's the interface between the 2D card's frame buffer and the 3D card's output, but all you need is a one-time digital interface capable of supporting, say, 2048x1536 at 32bpp. Most gamers would be willing to accept that graphics card technology will never be far enough ahead of game software to play at resolutions/bit depths greater than 2048x1536x32 at any kind of reasonable frame-rate (unless of coures you're playing GLQuake on your "GeForce 5 Palladium 400"). Given that, the bandwidth of the bus can stay constant while the memory bandwidth and core clocks on successive models of 3D cards could grow.

Re:upgradeable RAM and GPU

[vadim_t]

IIRC the first 3D cards were accelerator cards. They worked together with a 2D card and took over when 3D was required. But as you can see they weren't very popular and were replaced by the all in one ones.

A better question...

[Kashif Shaikh]

might be not how much Video ram you need 32mb vs 64 mb vs 128mb, but how well games are utilizing your video ram.

By this I mean: do games use texture compression? If so what quality v.s. space trade off compression method are they currently using?

Currently you can do just fine with games if have 32mb and enable some sort of texture compression within the game.

Or if the games don't have _any_ texture compression support, but yet it uses a lot of video memory(and you don't want to reduce texture-detail), just go from 32-bit textures to 16-bit textures. This alone will cut texture memory usage by 50%. Also reducing your resolution from 1600x1200 down to 1024x768 while playing games will reduce video memory footprint too.

So to all those people who say, "64 mb will become obsolete", I say yeah right. I have had my geforce2 for almost 3 years, and mind you the UT2k3 still runs at ~35 fps average during heavy fights.

Re:A better question...

[Anonymous Coward]

Not all implementations support texture compression.

Re:Obsolete? So what?

[Elbereth]

Apple actually uses some nice hardware in their newer PowerMacs. 64 bit/66 MHz PCI, Nvidia GeForce4 graphics, dual CPUs... I wouldn't mind having a dual G4 PowerMac.

Still, the upgrade options do kind of suck. Adaptec, Nvidia, and ATI are the only manufacturers who support the Mac. Bleh.

gonna have to agree

[jiminy]

more is definately better but i'd be especially interested to see the test repeated using a radeon 9700

Try the Radeon 7000

[HuguesT]

This is a very cheap card for ~$50, does dual head, nice video out w/ 64MB of DDR. Bit slow for gaming but works for me up to Jedi Knight II.

You can set it up for up to 4 screens (2 VGA, one DVI, one TV out) but you can only have 2 independent displays (some will be duplicated). Well supported under Linux too (everything works, including accelerated 3d).

Re:Bah 64, 128 Meg! How about 360 Meg

[Student_Tech]

I recall reading about some SGI machines (I think) that could have up to 2GB of video memory...
I know, probably not PC compatible but I nice number in any case.

Re:Bah 64, 128 Meg! How about 360 Meg

[user32.ExitWindowsEx]

Probably the Onyx/Onyx2 servers with InfiniteReality graphics.

Re:Obsolete? So what?

[kaladorn]

Don't invest in tomorrow's technology today at a premium, when you can get it tomorrow at a discount. That's why smart buyers invest in modular components. When your hardware gets outdated, pluck and chuck.

No! No! No!

Please DO invest today in the top-end graphics cards! Spend two to three hundred $ buying the best cards on the market! (Or more!)

You see, unlike the parent poster, I think this is a positively brilliant plan for each and every one of you in the high-end gaming crowd!

Look at the benefits: State of the art technology, frame rates so fast that subliminal advertising is practical, bitBLTs that could move your entire DNA encoding in one transfer, and colour depth that makes the games so close to real life you never have to leave your chaise-lounge and encounter the real world!

And as a nice bonus for those of us in the category of the less driven to best-of-the-best-damn-the-cost, there is this:

As all of the high end gamers drive the market up, some really decent hardware becomes really cost-effective and affordable for the rest of us!

So yes, Please Please Please DO buy the BEST and Most Expensive! Drive the market as hard as it can be driven! The mild and meek will quietly thank you and buy really nice (but obviously outdated) products for a bargain basement price!

Ooops.... forgot to tag the whole post <SARCASM>

Do NOT buy MX cards

[Wraithlyn]

"if you are completely out of the know, but love gaming, do not but the MX series of cards."

AMEN to that. I helped a buddy pick out a new graphics card last weekend so he could play Battlefield 1942 (which requires hardware T&L). I reccommended a GF4 Ti4200 to him, but he opted for the cheaper GF4 MX 460 instead. (I tried to warn him, really I did)

Hmm... no fan on this heat sink. Oh well.. maybe that's a blessing... no moving parts to break down. I'm sure it won't overheat.. I mean they test this stuff, and if it ran too hot, of course they'd slam a fan on it. Right? Right???

Hmm... Unreal Tourney locks up after 5 minutes.

Hmm... May Payne locks up after 1 minute.

Hmm... BF42 locks up in SECONDS.

How can they sell this shit? Doesn't it get some cursory testing?? I even UNDERclocked the damn thing to minimum speed, it still froze on absolutely everything we threw at it.. the more advanced the graphics, the faster it crashed. Anyway, we returned it and picked up a cheap Radeon 7500 which has been running like a champ. ARE YOU READING THIS, NVIDIA!?

Re:Do NOT buy MX cards

[Anonymous Coward]

No, they aren't. They didn't make the board, some crappy tiawanese company most likely did. Nvidia just makes chips. It's up to you to buy a board from a reputable company.

Re:Do NOT buy MX cards

[SectoidRandom]

Err, ever heard of a faulty product? You know when you take home that new TV/Toaster/VCR and it doesnt work? Take it back and get one that does work.. Same concept here.

btw, I purposly removed the heatsink from my gf4 mx, I like my computers quiet. It works perfectly with only a decent heatsink on it...

Re:Do NOT buy MX cards

[Dave2 Wickham]

Hmm... Unreal Tourney locks up after 5 minutes.

Hmm... May Payne locks up after 1 minute.

Hmm... BF42 locks up in SECONDS.

Hmm... on my GeForce 2MX 32MB/Pentium II 400Mhz...

Hmm... Unreal Tourney suffers from loads of "lag" on maps with loads of people, but otherwise runs fine.

Hmm... Max Payne runs fine...

Hmm... Never played BF42 :P

Re:Obsolete? So what?

[bnenning]

I wouldn't mind having a dual G4 PowerMac.

Me either. Still holding out for the possibly mythical G5/Power4 though.

Adaptec, Nvidia, and ATI are the only manufacturers who support the Mac.

For graphics ATI and Nvidia pretty much cover the bases. Hard drives aren't Mac-specific, just drop in a Western Digital or Seagate, format it using OS X's Disk Utility, and go. What else do you need?

the 128mb is useful for other things...

[erikdotla]

Like Virtual Memory. I don't need a very big swap file, having 768mb of RAM, but wouldn't it be cool to use the unused portion of 128mb as your swap file? When doing apps that don't use much VRAM but gobble lots of DDRAM, an extra 128mb would be cool.

How about a ram disk? I wonder if anyone has written utilities to leverage this extra RAM for such applications. I wonder a lot of things. Like, did I leave the iron on?

I think that it's main use is dual/quad monitors

[ModernGeek]

Because with dual/quad it will split the memory size "perscreen" into halfs/fourths, and they now have those 5 LCD's that stack on top of eachother, and for a really high resoluion project/etc.

It's mostly texture memory

[ikekrull]

These card use up to about 4MB - more like 2MB or less for 16-bit modes, for the framebuffer, and the rest is used solely for storing textures.

If you do not use OpenGL/Direct3D, then any RAM above, say 8MB (you may be doing dual or triple-head at 1600x1200 32bit or more), is completely useless.

The extra bandwith on the cards is also useless, as only 3D operations are accelerated across the super-fast busses built into these cards.

Everything else, including 2D blits in the majority of available OpenGL/Direct3D drivers are handled by the host CPU and involve reading from system RAM and passing that data across the AGP bus.

I am not aware of many (any?) games that can take advantage of more than 64MB of texture RAM, and while games that *may* take advantage of >64MB are on the horizon, the big news for games is vertex/pixel shaders, rather than the ability to texture map hundreds of megabytes of pixel data per frame.

There are applications that will benefit from the availablity of 128MB or more texture RAM, but these are typically custom-written scientific visualisation apps, or conceivably you could use 128MB of textures to do realtime previews in your lightwave/3DS Max/Maya/Blender scenes.

However, the actual utility of this RAM for most desktop users and even gamers is rather questionable. I don't doubt that the Radeon 9700 and the NVidia Ti4600 are fast cards, but they still rely heavily on the host CPU to achieve their stellar performance, as opposed to some of the professional cards which provide much more capable geometry engines and accelerate practically all of the openGL pipeline, as opposed to the consumer cards which are focussed mostly on texturing and fillrate optimization, ideal form games but not necessarily optimal for other forms of 3D activity.

That being said, the pace of development from Intel and AMD have made it more difficult to justify using dedicated hardware for these seteps, as a 2GHz Athlon will probably out-light-and-transform dedicated OpenGL hardware, which is much more costly and low-volume to produce.

The SGI O2 is a good axample of a machine that simply uses system memory to store textures, and while the SGI's graphics system is not in the same class as some of the more modern 3D boards from NVidia and 3DLabs, it is certainly sufficient to do impressive texture-mapping demos. This is really not an option on the current x86 architectures, but is a useful example of the 'other' way to handle texture memory, as it allows the user of the system to make maximum use of the resources available - i.e. when 3D graphics are not used, the 'texture memory' is available to the apps, and vice-versa.

I think it is amazing that we now have consumer cards that contain more texture memory than was typically available as system RAM in a mid-range 3D workstation a few years ago, but the unfortunate thing is that very, very few people are able to put those capabilities to real use with the current crop of system architectures, applications and games available

Re:It's mostly texture memory

[MisterBlister]

I am not aware of many (any?) games that can take advantage of more than 64MB of texture RAM, and while games that *may* take advantage of >64MB are on the horizon, the big news for games is vertex/pixel shaders, rather than the ability to texture map hundreds of megabytes of pixel data per frame.

Where do you think those vertex/pixel shaders are stored (or should be if you don't want crawling framerates)? That's right, in VRAM! And while an individual pixel/vertex shader is clearly smaller than your average texture map by a couple orders of magnitude, they really add up when you have seperate shaders attached to each polygon (not that uncommon a situation since there's no branching logic available in pixel shaders on currently available hardware).

So you still need the vram! Sucka!

Re:It's mostly texture memory

[Patoski]

Keep in mind that texture data isn't the only thing stored in GPU memory. 3D engines store all sorts of things (in signifigant amounts) other than texture data on GPU memory.

Re:It's mostly texture memory

[deppe]

In the future, I'd say less than 30% of the video memory will be used for textures.

Both OpenGL (via extensions) and DirextX allow you to allocate raw video memory today to stuff custom vertex data on the cards own memory and then use index streaming to render vertex buffers directly from the card by using DMA.

The speedup is _huge_, especially if the data doesn't change, such as for static stuff like terrain blocks of very high resolution, buildings.

Most games and demos currently use AGP memory for this, but as cards get more and more memory, they'll sure use every bit of it. The newer Unreal engines store their terrain geometry this way (Americas Army, UT2003..).

Using video memory for large 3d meshes is really the only way you can reach the theoretical limits of the graphic card, so it's not only about textures anymore.

Besides, 3d textures are also available, and they are very memory hungry :-)

Re:It's mostly texture memory

[_|()|\|]

I am not aware of many (any?) games that can take advantage of more than 64MB of texture RAM

Well, the article shows (as did Anand, and others, in June) that Jedi Knight II can use the extra memory for a 10 - 25% increase in FPS. We've heard the Unreal Tournament 2003 will use more detailed textures than the demo, so 128 MB may help there, too.

Re:It's mostly texture memory

[Anonymous Coward]

The important thing you need to keep in mind is that without a large consumer-base that owns 128mbs video cards, gaming companies (As well other types) will not be developing software that utilizes 128MB of video RAM. It costs companies money to be paying their developers to create software and features that will only be utilized by a small fraction of consumers. Of course there are exceptions, like id software. Another example is Turbine Entertainment. They will be releasing Asheron's Call 2 this Nov. 14 (an MMORPG) published by Microsoft. They developed an engine that is not only scalable downward but upwards as well, so that it is easy for it to take advantage of features that hardware designers have not even come up with yet. And as of now in it's final beta stage, setting it on high texture quality, requires a bare minimum of 128MB RAM on the graphics board.

SageMadHatter

Re:It's mostly texture memory

[Elwood P Dowd]

I realize that this is a lame nit for me to pick, and it has nothing to do with the current software situation, but:

Look at QuartzGL. Next generation *2D* compositing can use much more than the standard framebuffer. Folks have posted evidence here on /. that MS might move to a similar system in future operating systems.

Of course, this isn't a reason to go with a 128 card over a 64 necessarily. On the mac it's a reason to go with a 32MB card rather than a 16 or an 8MB card. At some point, however, they might figure out how to suck up a ton of RAM and accelerate scrolling of composited windows (which I understand they haven't done yet in QuartzGL) and all of a sudden you might want massive amounts of VRAM in your next windows machine.

Re:It's mostly texture memory

[triaxcaribdis]

If you do not use OpenGL/Direct3D, then any RAM above, say 8MB (you may be doing dual or triple-head at 1600x1200 32bit or more), is completely useless.

This is not true. I'm writing some educational software at the moment that uses DirectDraw and the 'bitmaps' are loaded into the VRAM for a large increase in blt-ing speed. Copying bitmaps from system RAM slows to a crawl at decent fps especially on older machines used in schools.

All in all I think it's a much under used area of RAM in the non gaming world.

Re:It's mostly texture memory

[vidarh]

Rendering models like Java2D, Display Postscript, Display PDF, the X Render model or SVG can all be made to make use of OpenGL with orthographic rendering (z value affect sorting only, not scaling) , as they make heavy use of things like alpha compositing, rendering of polygons, various transformations, and even lighting and other filtering effects (at least SVG). I think you'll see 3D graphics cards being increasingly utilized for normal desktop applications too.

Re:Obsolete? So what?

[ivan256]

That sound you hear is a million Macintosh zealots twitching and convulsing while they try and convince themselves that lack of upgradeability is a GOOD thing because it's "less confusing". :)

Actually it's the sound of them pointing and laughing because the only thing to do with year old PC components is "pluck and chuck" as the man said. The mac zealots are all watching their two year old hardware draw bids on ebay and taking more than half of their original purchase price to the bank. And people say macs are more expensive than PCs...

colour me surprised

[chump daddy]

good job. if it's taken you this long to realise that hardware will eventually be surpassed and made redundant, then you were just born. or you're bill gates.... "nobody will ever need more than 640k of ram"... why don't you buy what you can afford, then next year, when you KNOW your card will be obsolete buy another one.

Re:colour me surprised

[jascat]

Or just go to CompUSA or Bestbuy and get a replacement plan...when your card gets "outdated" a year or two from now, take the "broken" card in and get your store credit so you can get the latest and greatest (available on the retail sales floor)

Ti4200 == Speed Demon

[aliens]

Buy one Ti4200 64Meg version, overclock core to 305Mhz, memory to 580Mhz. Stability? No problem.

Seriously you can't forget to mention that the Ti4200's overclock like crazy. That's why they're the best budget card.

That's just my Ti4200. I'm sure with some RAM sinks on it (like other 4200's have) I could get the memory to ~600Mhz.

Re:Ti4200 == Speed Demon

[Rahga]

I've got the ram sinks (the PNY version of the card).... Can't wait to push them a bit ;)

Re:Ti4200 == Speed Demon

[Anonymous Coward]

got the MSI 64meg and the core goes to 310 stock and the mem to 605 [loops through 3dmark 2001se no problems 10 times] - the msi utility will auto adjust the mem to 596 if you don't want to experiment yourself, and that is without ramsinks!

Radeon 9000 Pro

[Anonymous Coward]

I bought the Radeon 9000 Pro, I believe its the best budget video game card out there. It supports dx 8.1, has hardware DVD decoding, and has dual monitor support. The DVD playback is superior to any geforce. Every game out right now will run fine on this card except badly coded games like GTA III. The ONLY drawback of the card compared to the Geforces is Ati hasn't and probably won't release drivers for linux until another year. The drivers in windows seem to be very stable, I haven't had any crashes or hangs in win2kpro sp3 as of yet. If XFree86 or Ati releases linux drivers soon for this card, then its a steal especially since you can get the non-pro version for under $100 online. The built by ati cards are better though because if/when drivers come out in linux they'll be tailored for the built by ati cards rather than the powered by ati cards.

Buck

[Anonymous Coward]

Q. How are deer nuts and beer nuts the same?
A. They're both under a buck!

Re:Obsolete? So what?

[Reality Master 101]

Dude, they get more money back because they start life as twice as expensive! PCs don't hold their value as much because they start at rock-bottom pricing. Sheesh, the reality distortion field is pretty strong around here.

Re:Maybe they should of put that memory in the ser

[darkgreen]

can we add a (Score : - 1 Failure to respond to baseball bat of sarcasm) mod?

Doom 3

[Anonymous Coward]

According to Anandtech's review of the Radeon 9700 (http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.html?i=1656&p=24 ), Doom 3 will require at least 80MB of graphics memory. Go get the 128MB card.

11 GB

[green pizza]

InfiniteReality 4 can be ordered with up to 11 GB of "gfx ram". 1 GB is dedicated for textures, the remaining 10 GB is for the various buffers (frambuffer, puffers, etc).

Captain Obvious to the rescue!

[Anonymous Coward]

First Tech Report tells us that AGP sucks because it does what it is designed to do, and now we learn that more RAM is better.

This is news?

The article is silly. 64MB of RAM on my video card will not be obsolete in the foreseeable future. Sorry, but not everyone considers Doom III a critical application.

And the article fails to address the fact that some 64MB cards have higher quality RAM that can run at higher clock speeds than some 128MB cards that are being sold because people want more, more, more.

I really can't stand...

[NineNine]

... all of the fucking dick comparisons. "I have a 64 MB Super mega ultra speedy card" "Yeah, well, I have the 128 MB super destructor blah blah". You know what? Any fucking idiot can walk into Best Buy and buy the best fucking video card. Hell, my father can barely turn on his computer and he buys the newest graphics card every few months for playing games. Big fucking deal.

I'm impressed by people who can get by with old, "outdated" hardware. That's REAL geekdom. Anyone who can make their old shit work and is proud of it is a real geek. People who buy the newest just to buy the newest are nothing but the new yuppies. How fucking boring.

Re:I really can't stand...

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone that makes due with old, outdated hardware is either dirt-poor, clueless, or complete idiots.

If you actually use a computer, and you don't push it's limits, wtf is the point in buying newer components or a whole new machine?

I'll bet that you're car has more than you need in the horsepower department, right? And why is that? So that should the need arise, you can get out of there in a fucking hurry. Do the brakes have just enough left on them to stop you? Of course not! Why? Just in case.

STFU, you goddamn tree-hugger wannabe.

the first 3D cards

[Erpo]

You're thinking of the Voodoo Graphics and Voodoo 2 from 3Dfx, and you're correct - they were replaced by more popular all-in-one cards such as the voodoo 3. However, the reason that all-in-one cards were preferable at that time was that the connectors between the 2d and 3d cards were analogue. Everyone using a VG or V2 had to run a short vga cable out of their 2d card and into their 3d card. Their monitor then plugged into the 3d card, which operated as a pass-through device when not in use. Needless to say, this kind of setup wasn't the best for signal quality. Also, since it was outside the case, it was prone to being kicked or knocked out of place during an energetic gaming session.

Making the interface digital, placing it inside the case, and supporting resolutions that the inevitable hardware-game performance leapfrogging will never let us approach would, in my non-hardware-developer opinion, be enough to solve those old problems and make that kind of setup popular.

On a side note, the all-in-one card that directly followed the pass-through cards in 3Dfx's line-up, the Voodoo Banshee, developed an absolutely awful reputation for performance and stability. It was so bad, in fact, that its successor which should have been called the Banshee II as it was, essentially, a bug and performance fix on the original, was renamed and marketed to great success as the Voodoo 3.

How about 1GB of RAM? (its real--see msg)

[Chirs]

Matrox has come up with a crazy-ass video card called the Odyssey Xpro.

1GB of 128-bit DDR memory at 333MHz
1GHz Motorola 7455 CPU (i.e. an apple G4 chip)
custom memory controller
SIMD vector math unit
PCI-X host interface

Yes, you can be the first on your block to have a graphics card that runs its own operating system!

Re:How about 1GB of RAM? (its real--see msg)

[jonadab]

> Yes, you can be the first on your block to have a graphics card
> that runs its own operating system!

Not enough. I want a video card that runs an entire cluster
and can raytrace frames fast enough to keep up with my monitor's
refresh rate, even with nice effects like mist, water, refraction,
and so on, and thousands of objects, fractal-generated vapour
clouds, lifelike trees and plants, ...

Yeah, that's what I'll be looking to buy... in 2050 or so...

Re:How about 1GB of RAM? (its real--see msg)

[Anonymous Coward]

You just need an array of, say, 1600x1200 graphics processors - individually they don't even have to be all that fast, since they only have to trace one ray each!

Re:How about 1GB of RAM? (its real--see msg)

[Anonymous Coward]

You know that card has got to be expensive since apple is involved...

Re: Math...

[Anonymous Coward]

Unless you're not using a double buffered window compositor. For instance my os of choice keeps all windows as seperate objects in vram and then composites them into a single image. That means I need more vram 1600x1200 + pixels for every window on screen. The advantage being that my os can update all windows in realtime with no artifacts or wait. Of couse I need a lot of memory on my video card to do that, but there again why limit an os's capabilities to yesterdays hardware. I know you don't need it but if you can have it why not use it (see gui).

Why you want 128MB.

[Tokerat]

Quartz Extreme.

Ok Ok, so it's a Mac OS X thing, so what? How long before M$ innovates this feature into Windows? How long before it's patched into XFree86?

Think of all the cool things you can do, both for visual pleasure and UI functionality by operating in an accelerated, 3D enviroment, while the main CPU is free to crunch away at whatever it is you have your CPU doing, thus improving overall speed. Yes, I realize the CPU still has to intruct the card of what to do, but at least we're not blitting as we're trying to host web pages, for example.

For that you're going to need texture memory. Lots of texture memory. When you run out of memory on the card, the framebuffers must be stored in RAM. When those framebuffers are needed, you'll need to swap them into the card's RAM. This will cause the main CPU to stutter as it pumps a couple 8-9MB buffers through the system & PCI bus, which, needless to say, will get old fast, especially if the framebuffers get paged out to a swap file. Yuck!

Of course, maybe you should wait until the other 2 of the Big Three implement this in some form (I know some work as been done on a 3D window manager for X, no idea if it's meant to take advantage of acceleration, though). I've heard rumor that M$ is working on it for Windows XP(ensive) 2005 or 6 or whatever it is, and I'm sure some Linux hacker has it working on his overclocked Athlon box already. Either way, you probably want to be ready for this. Or wait and buy a card when it finally happens, when 128MB will be standard.

Since color depths will probably never exceed 48-bit (32-bit + alpha), screen resolutions are fine at 2???X???? or whatever the current highest is, it'd take quite a few windows open at once to framebuffer all that memory up. Assuming about 8 megs per window, which is admittedly above average for most windows (sans Photoshop or web browsers), you'd get about 14 or 15 windows open at once.

Oh well, someday, you'll be sorry your card doesn't have 512MB on-board :-D

Re:Why you want 128MB.

[Ari Rahikkala]

Well, there is XDirectFB which, as far as I can see, does at least some of the things you described. Each window is an OpenGL texture whose opacity can be easily modified (creating a very cool alpha transparency effect and presumably using a whole lot of GPU power), with window movements being hardware accelerated and expose events disabled (since each window actually has its own backing store, contents never need to be redrawn upon exposure). I don't know how accelerated this is compared to your average XP box or X 4.2.0, but it does sound good to me :-).

P.S. I hereby solemnly swear that I do not know crap about this issue and might just be talking out of my ass. Since this puts me well above the average Slashdotter at -1, I think it's just fine.

Re:Why you want 128MB.

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually "M$" has been working on such a thing for a while now. And unlike the quickly hacked out "Quartz Extreme" the MS one (as ususal) is going to be FAR better as they are taking their time on doing it right.

Re:Why you want 128MB.

[Tokerat]

You need to turn on HTML formatting or the tags get stripped out, methinks.

<BLINK>:-)</BLINK>

OT but...

[Anonymous Coward]

...I'm sure I'm not the only one wondering, considering the topic: when are we going to see a Doom3 demo?

Tim Sweeney endorses texture caching.

[Vegan Pagan]

Here's what Tim Sweeney says about texture caching:

"This is something Carmack and I have been pushing 3D card makers to implement for a very long time. Basically it enables us to use far more textures than we currently can. You won't see immediate improvements with current games, because games always avoid using more textures than fit in video memory, otherwise you get into texture swapping and performance becomes totally unacceptable. Virtual texturing makes swapping performance acceptable, because only the blocks texels that are actually rendered are transferred to video memory, on demand.

Then video memory starts to look like a cache, and you can get away with less of it - typically you only need enough to hold the frame buffer, back buffer, and the blocks of texels that are rendered in the current scene, as opposed to all the textures in memory. So this should let IHV's include less video RAM without losing performance, and therefore faster RAM at less cost.

This does for rendering what virtual memory did for operating systems: it eliminates the hardcoded limitation on RAM (from the application's point of view.)"

iMac has it . . .

[qurob]

My Bondi Blue iMac has ability to upgrade the video memory from 2MB to 6MB....

Warning: Radeons unsupported, regardless of RAM

[vandan]

Yes I'm trolling. But this is also good advice.
DON'T buy an ATI.
The DRI team aren't allowed to implement S3 Texture Compression, so you won't be able to run UT2003 or any other games which use Texture compression.
The DRI team aren't allowed to implement ATI's HyperZ technology.
The Gatos team aren't allowed to implement TV-out.
Everywhere I turn ATI are advising that I am not allowed to use feature 'X' under Linux.
ATI are now releasing closed-source FireGL drivers for their newer Radeons. But I paid $AUS500 for my 64MB DDR VIVO Radeon only a year ago and I don't need to upgrade yet thankyou. And the FireGL drivers are slower and less stable than the DRI drivers.
ATI should provide closed-source binary-only modules for the DRI drivers to add features which are patented. But instead they force their customers to upgrade early and suffer inferior quality drivers. Not I! I am going back to bloody nVidia. And I swore I'd never do that..

Re:Warning: Radeons unsupported, regardless of RAM

[dwaggie]

In other words: don't buy this card if you run Linux, is that what you're saying?

Most of the gaming world will put these nice beautiful cards in their Windows machine, and play with it there. Very few games come out for the unices, anyway, so most gaming talk is about Windows compatibility.

Re:Obsolete? So what?

[ivan256]

Dude, can you do math?

The percentage of money you can get for your old PC hardware is *much* less then that of a mac.

Well, to be quite honest....

[Rahga]

For me, it was a minimum $50 difference with "Best Buy" prices. But the same card I bought for $129 (plus $30 rebate I need to cash in) at Best Buy was $199 at a nearby Circuit City.

Also, manufacturer of the card does make a difference. Just a note (look a PNY's RAM sinks. wheee doggy :) ).....

32megs?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not so long ago 32MB was the top end for graphics memory...
32 Megs! Hell, not so long ago 32 megs was the top end for hard drives! My video card had like 32k or so.

damn I'm getting old...

About Self-Defrosting Freezers

[DAldredge]

They suck.

If you store anything in them for any length of time the auto-defrost cycle will cause ice crystals to melt and reform, getting larger each time. This is not a good thing for correct food storage. Now, if all you are storing is microwaveable meals it should be fine ;->

I had an interesting experience about this.

[Elpacoloco]

Recently, I decided that my old 4MB card was too puny for my needs, and went shopping for a new video card.

I had $22.

Almost every store I went to was pushing 128MB cards with 3d acceleration and over features, for over $200.

Way overkill.

Other stores hadn't the foggiest idea what I was talking about, and tried to sell me TV tuner cards, for an average of $220.

Wrongo, buddy.

Eventually, I found *ONE* card in an obscure shelf of the nerd-store, mixed with all the super-overkill-$200+ cards. It had 8 MB of Ram, and was priced at $19.

That card now powers my video operations.

Why were they so anxious to sell me the big-cards when I so obviously could not afford it?

Re:I had an interesting experience about this.

[Anonymous Coward]

So you can stay home a view low-grade porn while your significant other gives handjobs in the park, that's why.

sorry, but that article was rediculous

[azephrahel]

Ok really. We all read the article, and it prettymuch said what we thought it would say. Only at rediculously high texture sizes did you get any bennefit from the 128 meg vs 64 meg. All of his numbers show it. After each test he comments how little difference it made... Then at the end he goes on and on about how you could get a 128meg card, cause its 1337, and really does make a difference. I'm sorry but please. He shows one thing and says another. Blahh.

How much is enough video mem? The final answer

[mrjb]

640k :)

Re:Obsolete? So what?

[Elbereth]

How about a PCI video capture card (USB sucks), SCSI host adapter (for those cheap SCSI drives on ebay), second NIC (having two NICs lets you share your broadband connection), ATA 133 IDE controller (for that new Western Digital you mentioned), sound card (Creative Labs doesn't seem to support the Mac any more...?), hardware MPEG encoder/decoder, cryptography co-processor, etc.

There's a lot more than ATI and Seagate out there. I can deal with not having Matrox video cards (kinda sucks) or Tekram SCSI cards (oh well), but paying double the PC price for your hardware -- when you can even find any upgrades -- is just outrageous. It's better to just buy a brand new Mac than try to upgrade an old Mac. I'm sure they're designed that way. :)

Quartz Extreme

[ZigMonty]

If you're a Mac user ignore the above post. Quartz Extreme really chews up VRAM: 16MB minimum, 32MB recommended. If you're buying a new card then shoot for 64MB. If you do any kind of serious OpenGL work that isn't full screen, take that into account. I think 128 MB might be overkill for the time being...

Memory Densities

[EmagGeek]

This may have been mentioned already, but as a computer designer at a large controls company, we run into the "minimum memory density" problem all the time. We might need X amount of RAM, but end up buying 4X amount of RAM because it's the smallest that is available... It's not that they're trying to see you more RAM than you need. They might just be selling the smallest RAM they can buy.

Enough?

[jonadab]

What is this strange concept, "enough"? Today's cards are so
primitive, they can't even do raytracing at _all_, much less
at a decent framerate, or with any nice effects. I want a
video card that produces such quality, I can take a screen
shot and compare it against competition-quality raytraced
images... and I want a framerate that can keep up with my
monitor's refresh rate. And I want all that by 2050, so get
cracking...

Re:Obsolete? So what?

[ratamacue]

Exactly. I always buy hardware that is currently in the sweet spot for pricing. It's the best way to ensure that you get your money's worth. You just need to do a little research on pricewatch.com, or a similar service, before you buy. Simply scan the prices and weigh the average price against performace. Just recently I put together a new system:

Gigabyte GA-7VRX ($80)
AMD Athlon XP 1800 ($80)
Crucial Micron 256MB PC2100 ($65 x 2)
Western Digital 80GB 7200RPM ($105)
ATI Radeon 7500 64MB ($62)
Antec 660AMG 330W ($100)

I could have went for the XP 2200, but it's twice the price of the 1800. (Obviously it's not twice as fast.) I could have went for the latest and greatest RAM, and the motherboard that supports it, but again, the price doesn't justify the performance. The case was expensive but that's more of a long-term investment.

It's funny to see people still dropping $1500+ on a new computer when they could get 80-90% of the performance for 50% of the price.

How Much Is Enough?

[Anonymous Coward]

What the hell kind of question is that? I mean, it's like saying how much porn is enough... The answer is obvious you can NEVER have enough.... Geesh

You are not insane.

[Vinum]

You are not insane. 40fps is nice when you are walking around, but when 50 guys walk in the room and fire rockets at you that 40fps takes a quick dive really fast. In fact, if the fps drops low enough your computer might even slow down also which would prevent you from dodging those rockets.

A good 100fps when walking around gives you a nice buffer so that when the action gets intense, your machine doesn't blink an eye.

Re:You are not insane.

[?erosion]

> 40fps is nice when you are walking around, but when 50 guys walk in the room and fire rockets at you that 40fps takes a quick dive really fast. In fact, if the fps drops low enough your computer might even slow down also which would prevent you from dodging those rockets.

Very true, all of it. I just hope that's a big room. :)

NICE!!!

[Tokerat]

Yes, that's exactly what Quartz Extreme does. It really makes a difference, espeically when you have a lot going on in the GUI.

I wish i had a video card worthy of trying this out on :-(

Last Post!

[alpg]

Day X+4 months: Microsoft ships NT 5.0 for Intel.with a big media
event on TV. IBM begins to ship Debian 4.6 as the
standard OS on all machines from mainframe to PC
and announces the move on Slashdot.
-- Christoph Lameter

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