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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."
But it seems like this whole 'building names on each other' thing is getting out of hand.
GDDR2 SDRAM? What the hell is that supposed to mean? Sheesh. Why can't you just call it something like DDR3 or GDRAM or something simple like that?
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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.
its called the Cameron Law - it dictates that game companies and graphics cards companies are in a conspiracy together to force us buy more and more of each, and every 18 months we will have to buy a new video card, which probably coincides with new technology video game releases. (this is a joke, so don't take it that seriously)
Actually there is a difference in the way CPU and GPU see
memory.
A CPU cares a lot about latency because typical code will
have "random" accesses scattered with calculations in
between. The same data and code areas are often
accessed many times and data are small
(e.g. a Word document is small) while code
maybe quite large.
That's why CPU's don't have enormous
256-bit buses (which have the same latency as a 64-bit
bus)
A GPU performs "multimedia" calculations which typically
involve serial access to memory where caching can be of
very little help. You cannot "cache" a whole texture set
and code is of really trivial size (until now, maybe
PixelShader 2.0+++ will change all that). Therefore
a GPU needs serial access to huge areas of memory,
involving items of similar size and in regular intervals.
That's why a GPU needs BANDWIDTH (not necessarily
latency, because when the calculation starts latency
is hidden inside the calculation loop).
Considering the above, P4 is a "multimedia" design (much
more like a GPU) that's why it was made to work with
very high FSB and RAMBUS (high bandwidth) originally.
Contrary to this, AMD Athlon is a "generic" design which
does not depend on huge bandwidth but on very low
latency (hence the HUGE L1 cache). That's why P4 needs
HyperThreading : its long pipelines do not care a lot about
latency but can cause a big bottleneck if they stall. Intel
feeds them continuously by drawing instructions from 2
processes at once (so that the pipeline does not remain
empty if one process is stalled from the front side bus or
something...).
Anyway, I expect GPUs to drift slowly towards the generic
CPU design because pixelshader language has become
quite complicated with long loops etc. Gradually this
means that GPUs (esp. with DirectX9) will start being
compute-limited and not texture-fill-rate limited
(anything over 2 GTexel/s is really absurd for
typical screen sizes). This will propably become apparent
with DOOM III.
P.
Oh, it's some graphics chipset related thingy. I seriously thought the acronym was for a global standard for Dance Dance Revolution...