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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."
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.
-Valiss
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.
For those of you planning to never buy another game, well, why ask in the first place?
Software piracy is victimless theft.
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 Next thing you'll be trying to tell me my Voodoo 3 2000 PCI is obsolete!
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.
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
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.
"This must be a Thursday, I never could get the hang of Thursdays."
And even with the slashdot 128mb we still can't take out more than 25 sites a second...
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.
---
Always standing, I am a tree awaiting the lightning. -Samael, Crown
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.
"...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.
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. :)
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
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.
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
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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". :)
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
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.
what happened to spell check? please decode the above comment to your best ability.
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.
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>
-- Mal: "Well they tell you: never hit a man with a closed fist. But it is, on occasion, hilarious."
"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!?
"Mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent present in every electron." -Freeman Dyson
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?
How to solve most of our problems: 1.Lots of nuclear plants. 2.Cure aging.
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
I gots ta ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long
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...
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.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
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).
... 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.
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?
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!
Quartz Extreme.
:-D
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
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
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.)"
My Bondi Blue iMac has ability to upgrade the video memory from 2MB to 6MB....
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..
I've got the ram sinks (the PNY version of the card).... Can't wait to push them a bit ;)
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
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.
You are only young once, but you can stay immature indefinitely.
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.
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...
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...
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
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
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?