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GDDR2 Emerging As A Real Standard
An anonymous reader writes "I noticed here that EE Times is reporting that the GDDR2 standard is finally becoming a reality. Both NVIDIA and ATI's latest chips offer support. ATI helped spearhead the initiative to develop the standard. The significance of this is great, since it may very well mean that every 18 months or so a new graphics memory standard will be released."
Well, if they could get the number of vendors that offer this type of memory to increase, then they could lower the price enough to make it cost effective. Also, this would make it great for sites that benchmark various video cards - making all of the video cards have the same/very similar types and speeds of memory would be excellent for comparison.
Gotta get me one of these!
I've always wondered this, since those two patterns are the ones I've fallen in and out of for the past few years.
I still think this is why console gaming is more mainstream, either way. With a console, you might not get the best quality in graphics, but hell, you pay $200-300 and the machine lasts 5 years, and you get quite a nice selection of quality games (that's really a bias, I started out on the NES...).
"Doesn't this defeat the purpose of "Standard"?"
No because the lowend is the bulk of the market and there every penny counts.
"A new standard means the old one isn't..."
No it just means that they get the benefits of a new standard for high end and high margin devices while reaping the prior standard as well.
"Or am i missing something?"
You are missing the fact that the bulk of graphics chips sold are at the low end. This low end bulk is good for 18+ months which is an eternity in the graphics business due to the rate of change (which seems to still be at a rate of preformance doubling every six to nine months). Standardization on this low end will allow lower prices while meeting the need for faster and more specialized RAM than is required compared the more stable CPU markets. In addition the standards will insulate all parties from lawsuits or patent claims lending more stability to their ventures. Finally it may herald a change from the bad old days where a great deal of R&D had to go into reinventing the wheel for memory or relying on exclusive vendors who may not even have the capacity when the need came. I'm thinking in particular of the year with the semiconductor fire that ratched up certain graphics card vendors highend cards.
Even in this market standards are good.
"Isn't it interresting how graphics adapters use the fastest memory available these days, not the CPU. Not counting L1/2/3 caches that is..."
I used to think that this was indeed interesting or even surprising but when you look at how CPU's and GPU's (thanks Nvidia for making them equal via naming) it is not suprising because evolution in the graphics market was slower for so many years while CPU's kept chugging along. Consider the long period where the most compelling feature of a video card was it could do SVGA and had a local bus connection with maybe 8-16 megs of regular RAM.
This write-up is pretty much bogus. The first half of the article talks about how there are a zillion different companies all peddling their own versions of GDDR2. Then the second half talks about how it looks like GDDR3 will not have this problem, and will therefore be widely adopted.
A Multiplayer Strategy Game for Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux
Look at the GeForce FX. It's going to kill NVIDIA.
Why do you say that?
So the FX didn't exactly blow out the Radeon 9700 Pro like it was supposed to, it's still a very fast, very good card capable of rendering anything a game throws at it for the next couple of years.
nVidia is very smart. They don't make very much money off the highest of the high-end market. Where they make most of their money is in that lower-mid range market, where they've traditionally marketed their "MX" products.
At the GDC nVidia was talking about implementing the full DX9 feature set in a card for $79. That's where they're going to make a killing.
I honestly don't think nVidia cares THAT MUCH if they don't have the absolute fastest card in every benchmark. Like any other company, they want to stick around for awhile and make some money.
Price-performance is VERY important in the market. That's why AMD is still around, despite the fact that P4's are undoubtedly faster now. I think people just see nVidia as being the king of the hill for awhile, and would like to see them taken down a notch.
The video-card market is very healthy, we have good competition, and the FX is definitely not going to kill nVidia. I think their strategy is right on.
The interconnect speeds used on current GPUs make connecting them together almost impossible. You just cannot move data at 1/2 GB/sec over a cable, unless you go serial (ala Serial ATA). Current GPU card designs are hyper critical of trace length between the RAMs and the GPU - at those speeds even a difference of a few millimeters can make or break a card.
Until someone comes up with a radically new scheme of processing, these physical limitations will always be with us. That's why the Voodoo (3Dfx) scheme of connecting stuff no longer works - the data rates have got too high, and the limits of light speed (electrons) start applying.
I do agree that GPU will eventually become more CPU-like, but...
"anything over 2 GTexel/s is really absurd for
typical screen sizes"
Let's say the screen has 1 million pixels for simplicity (that's somewhere in between 1024x768 and 1280x1024). Let's say you really want smooth motion and target a framerate of 100fps. That means you need to produce 100 MPixels/s. At 2GTexel/s, that's 20 texels per resulting pixels. Now add a 2x overdraw (which is quite low I think) and you're left with 10 texels per resulting pixel.
Many additional effects, esp. refraction and reflection need render to texture, i.e. you basically render (parts of) the scene twice, which obviously uses a lot of additional performance.
2GTexel/s doesn't sound so absurd anymore, does it?