Pushing The 512MB Barrier On Video Cards

Hack Jandy writes "Remeber your ancient TNT graphics card that had 16MB of memory? ATI is pushing the texture barrier by incorporating 512MB in their newest X850 video card lineup. The catch? Even ATI acknowledges there will probably be no performance benefits to bumping the memory support from 256MB to 512MB as the cards are 'intended to demonstrate the next-generation capability to gamers." An anonymous reader points out that Gainward (which sells NVidia-based graphics cards), will shortly introduce its own 512MB card, according to Hexus.net.

Comments

Never had one.

[JFMulder]

But I remember upgrading my Cirrus Logic video card to a whooping 2 megs in 1995.

Re:Never had one.

[SirXavier]

I remember when i work on my pc he have a video card S3Savage 32 but is not very good

Re:Never had one.

[mikael]

I remember the fun of removing the EPROM chips and RAM chips in order to upgrade my Hercules Graphics Station Card from 1 Mbyte to 2Mbyte. It's a pity something similar couldn't be done with graphics accelerator cards these days.

Re:Never had one.

[paganizer]

My prefered video card back in the day, yo, was the trident T9000 with 512k of RAM. simple, always worked.
Being in the Industry pipeline, as I was, I was able to get a 9680 with 4mb of Vram back in the last days of '95... I was the shit.

Re:Never had one.

[grolschie]

How much RAM did a CGA/VGA card have?

Re:Never had one.

[networkBoy]

Mine had 256 (K that is and it was VGA)
So... I'd say 32-64K for CGA would be about right.
-nB

Re:Never had one.

[simcop2387]

the newest card i know of that can do this, is my old ATI rage pro, i upgraded it from 4mb to a fscking huge 8mb

Re:Never had one.

[Anonymous Coward]

CGA had 16k of video memory (max resolution of 640x200 with 1 (on/off) bit per pixel )

Re:Never had one.

[Anonymous Coward]

Whoops, I meant CGA/EGA, not VGA.

Re:Never had one.

[Waffle Iron]

I don't remember about CGA, but the original IBM EGA cards (precursors to the VGA) had 128K. They used a stupid non-square 640x350 aspect ration to fit it into physical video RAM at 4 bits per pixel, and they used an unbelievably insane logic scheme to map it into bus memory space at 1 bit per pixel.

Re:Never had one.

[Anonymous Coward]

32k was the norm for CGA

320x200x2bpp comes out just under 16k, but the cards need a little more memory than just the frame buffer.

Re:Never had one.

[Anonymous Coward]

OH yeah, the tridents werre like the standard back then.. I think we had mostly t8900's, ISA, and a 1meg card was like golden.

Re:Never had one.

[TheToon]

CGA cards had 16KB, they didn't need more. All memory was used as a framebuffer in graphics mode. In text mode, the memory was split into four parts, each a virtual screen. 80x25 characters; one byte for the ASCII code and one for the color, 4000 bytes per virtual screen.

Using direct access you could build screens and flip them, giving you lightning fast display updates :)

Those CGA cards were pretty cool back in 1982 :)

Re:Never had one.

[Metzli]

My favorite one was built into the machine. Back in "the day", in this case the early-to-mid 90s, I had access to a NeXT Dimension. I don't remember the specs, but it was awesome watching TV on it back in 1994.

Re:Never had one.

[plover]

My 80 column mono card didn't have its own memory. It used a 2KB memory mapped area of the main system RAM. Over an 8-bit ISA bus.

You kids and your fancy-schmancy color graphics adapters. Pah!

Re:Never had one.

[name773]

certain matrox cards can do this... i have one in my server, but the extra memory slot is still open as i will never push the potential of that card running a console framebuffer

Re:Never had one.

[suckmysav]

" OH yeah, the tridents werre like the standard back then.. I think we had mostly t8900's, ISA, and a 1meg card was like golden."

True, those crappy Tridents did come as standard in most of the crappy clones of the time. They were after all the cheapest cards you could get. You could buy them for less than it would cost you to buy a happy meal at McDonalds.

The true geeks of the period had Tseng Labs ET4000 cards.

Re:Never had one.

[paganizer]

Oh yeah? well my Amiga would blow the doors off your crappy IBM!
And my Mediavision Pro Audio Spectrum totally ROCKS in comparison to your lamer sound blaster!

Heh.
As a computer store owner back in 93-95, I got to hear some of the stupidest arguments....

Re:Never had one.

[Anonymous Coward]

I still use a PCI ET6000 once in a while. But all the PCI Trident cards I've got are useless. The things are far worse than S3 Trios, which themselves aren't good for much.

I think there's still this one guy on the web who will buy Tseng Labs graphics cards via his website, because he uses the parts in standalone and embedded systems designed for resale to the industrial market. The big secret about these things is that they were always fitted with very fast RAM, making them great 2D cards. Number Nine, Matrox, and ATI all had/have a good reputation for 2D image quality on PCs, but Tseng Labs IMO really was underrated in this regard.

Re:Never had one.

[OrangeTide]

IBM MDA had 4k of memory on board. Hercules HGC had 64k of memory on board (could do high res graphics with page flipping). 4k of memory gives you exactly 1 page of 80x25 monochrome text (2 bytes per character, one for the ascii value, one for the attributes).

ISA cards can't normally bus master (unless they were rare EISA cards). And I don't think anyone made a monochrome EISA videocard. You can have a PC which has system RAM mapped at 0xB0000-0xB0FFF, and it just gets wasted if you have any sort of monochrome adapter. Newer chipsets were capable of being configured for different memory maps so you wouldn't waste ram shadowing I/O and ROMs.

Now if you said you had an 80 column card for S-100 bus or something, I would believe you that it did weird thing.

Re:Never had one.

[Jeff Albertson]

I remember upgrading to a Hercules Graphics card from an IBM MDA card.

The IBM MDA card had a block of RAM on it into which you could push values. Which location you pushed a value into determined where a character would appear on the 80x25 display. The character generator was hardware. There was one font, in one font size. There were a small collection of 'ANSI' graphics characters, to do linedraws and borders.

It was a damn crisp display, but a Hercules card was equally crisp, and had graphics capabilities.

Re:Never had one.

[Teddy Beartuzzi]

No, the *TRUE* geeks wrote to the company, and received the free Tseng ET4000 Graphics Controller Data Book, with timing diagrams, register descriptions, etc, for programming.

And the geekiest of us still have the book on our bookshelf. Though I have no idea why I still do.

Re:Never had one.

[suckmysav]

yeah, I have a ET6000 still in use as well. What you say about the RAM is correct, they were very fast, reliable and gave a really crisp clear 2D image.

One of the reasons that they were underrated was because Tseng had some sort of fued going with MS and MS refused to include ET4000 drivers for windows. This was way back when most people just used the drivers that shipped with windows because that was all that was required (games for the most part didn't run under windows and 3D was non-existant). Also they were more expensive, so all the must-have-the-cheapest-possible-PC dingbats didn't buy them. I remember they used to cost something like AU$25 at a time when a Trident could be had for AU$5. Personally I thought an extra 20 bucks on a PC that was costing me a coupla grand was nothing because the alternatives (mainly Tridents and S3's) were quite crappy and the others you mention (plus "Paradise", remember them?) were all considerably more than the ET4000, so the Tseng was a pretty good compromise.

Re:Never had one.

[Richard Dick Head]

my Mediavision Pro Audio Spectrum totally ROCKS in comparison to your lamer sound blaster!

Heh, I still use my MVPAS in my current machine. It's still making sound, and I ain't buying another card till it stops. MVPAS for life!

PS: And yes, it still totally ROCKS in comparison to your lamer sound blaster!

Re:Never had one.

[CastrTroy]

I Remember my old Voodoo 3, 3500, with 16 megs of ram. Wait, I'm still using that as my main video card. Time for an upgrade.

Re:Never had one.

[CaseyB]

I finally retired mine just last year. It was the card that finally made PC audio a commodity, as it was the first consumer card to hit the CD-quality level. Every card since has just added mostly useless bells & whistles.

Re:Never had one.

[mrjb]

2 megs, who needs 2 megs? You youngsters had it easy! I had a CGA with 16 kilobyte. 640x200 in monochrome, or 320x200 with a palette of 4 colors (3 of which had to be either cyan-purple-white or yellow-red-green), or a semi-graphical mode of 160x100 (really text mode) capable of displaying all the 16 shiny colors at the same time! Of course in the graphical mode, by swapping palette halfway the buildup of the screen, it was possible to display five colors at the same time. I think I saw a frogger-style game do that.

Re:Never had one.

[RWerp]

The true geeks of the period had Tseng Labs ET4000 cards.

Oooh, I remember myself dreaming about that one.

Re:Never had one.

[f1sh]

and I'm sitting here holding my 6M Pure3D card, oh baby.......

Re:Never had one.

[suckmysav]

"No, the *TRUE* geeks wrote to the company, and received the free Tseng ET4000 Graphics Controller Data Book, with timing diagrams, register descriptions, etc, for programming."

I stand corrected sir!

512 is better

[mrtroy]

Because it is bigger than 256.

TWICE as big!!!

If my email tells me anything, size DOES matter.

Re:512 is better

[NanoGator]

"If my email tells me anything, size DOES matter."

Seeing as how most of the 'realism' of a 3D game comes from detailed textures, yes, size of texture ram does matter.

Re:512 is better

[maglor_83]

I find most of the realism comes from the physics engine. The texture just makes it look a bit prettier, but by no means makes the game any better.

Re:512 is better

[NanoGator]

"If my email tells me anything, size DOES matterI find most of the realism comes from the physics engine. The texture just makes it look a bit prettier, but by no means makes the game any better."

I didn't say it makes the game better. And yes, I should have defined 'realism' a little more clearly. I meant the rendered visuals of it, not the motion of it. You can do a lot more to make an image 'photo-real' with greater texture resolution than you can do with faster processing etc. Ask anybody who's played Doom 3. The normal mapping in that game, love it loathe it, did a great deal more to the visual detail of the game than adding a few more polygons to the scene.

Re:512 is better

[bsharitt]

Even if the physics are realistic, if the textures look like crap, that kind of hurst the whole illusion of realism.

Re:512 is better

[gardyloo]

Call me when their dials go to 11.

Re:512 is better

[gardyloo]

The texture just makes it look a bit prettier, but by no means makes the game any better.

I have a 2-bit videocard I'd like to sell you.

Re:512 is better

[Anonymous Coward]

Those of us who occassionally do volume rendering would really benefit from the additional texture memory. The memory required to store volume data tends to increase quickly with resolution.

Re:512 is better

[orkysoft]

So it's 200% bigger?

Re:512 is better

[Ravenscall]

It is not the size of the RAM, but the motion of the engine.

Re:512 is better

[Anne Thwacks]

"You are in maze of twisty passages, all alike"

Re:512 is better

[leuk_he]

i can run it now at double the resoultaion... 512 MB is enough for 10.0000 byt 10.0000 pixels full color!

Re:512 is better

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, the size of the textures wasn't the big thing in Doom 3, but the processor capabilities. The shaders were the big deal in Doom 3, which helped use a lot less polygons and look so good. I want gigabytes or terabytes of texture memory, though, so I can use 3D textures, now *that* would be amazing. 1024 x 1024 = 1 megapixel, multiply by 1024 and you get a gigapixel (I don't say MB and GB since it depends on the format). An RGB texture with no compression, 8 bits per channel and a zie of 128x128x128 would need 6MB of memory, and 128x128 was what Quake 1 used... a 512x512x512 texture would need 400MB. That means only one such texture can be fit in these 500MB cards! Now a couple of notes, first, 8-bit and no alpha channel means this is a rather basic format. Also, no one would use an uncompressed 3D texture, a card that has that much memory has support for compression. Still, you can place 10922 128x128 textures in a 512MB card, and 85 128x128x128 textures. Quite a difference.

Re:512 is better

[Have Blue]

Current games were developed targeting 64 or 128MB graphics cards as the majority and 256MB as the high end, so there are very few scenes with more than 128MB of content in them. Adding more RAM will not increase performance or quality in this case, since it's just left empty. Games won't begin to really take advantage of 512MB of VRAM until a significant percentage of the market owns it.

Re:512 is better

[magefile]

But, uh ... couldn't you just make 256 bigger?

Re:512 is better

[superpulpsicle]

I don't think the graphics industry knows how to manufacture cards in general. The Geforce 6600GT AGP still haven't fully arrived in stores after Oct 2004 reviews. They keep pushing forward, but why?! The $5 fan is the problem, not the 256MB of RAM.

Re:512 is better

[Shaved_Beaver]

...actually sweetie bigger isn't always better.. it's how you use the thing and just how it performs... (everything, not just video-whatevers).... now take my little toy here.. it is average, uses three batteries.. but it is oh sooooo good and satisfying )

Re:512 is better

[Shaved_Beaver]

...ok, and then what?????

Re:512 is better

[crayz]

In my day, we only had one bit, and we liked it!

Re:512 is better

[d34thm0nk3y]

Re:512 is better (Score:0, Flamebait)
by gardyloo (512791)p on Wednesday February 23, @05:06PM (#11759958)
Call me when their dials go to 11.

flamebait? I mean, it wasn't funny, but it wasn't flamebait either.

Who is he trying to piss off, Spinal Tap fans?

Re:512 is better

[Anonymous Coward]

I've a sudden urge to shoot a raven.......

Re:512 is better

[jesushaces]

It is not the size of the RAM, but the motion of the engine.

...said he with a tiny RAM ;)

Re:512 is better

[mt v2.7]

Everquest 2 already has a mode designed for 512MB cards.

Kinda depressed me when my still $200 6600GT has two modes over it that it really couldn't handle :(

Re:512 is better

[Anonymous Coward]

Guess what the inputs to the shaders in DOOM 3 are? Textures. And some of the textures are normal maps rather than color maps. In fact, it's the normal maps which are in large part responsible for the game's ability to use (relatively) low poly models while still looking very detailed.

The game looks way better if you have enough video memory to store high res uncompressed normal maps. A major reason why this is important is because existing texture compression algorithms are generally oriented towards perceptual lossy compression of RGB image data, and therefore produce nasty artifacts when asked to compress normal maps. So it's a very, very big deal for DOOM 3 image quality to have enough VRAM to allow uncompressed high res normal maps.

Re:512 is better

[cbreaker]

Unfortunately, the game engine is so slow sometimes you'd think you were software rendering anyways, even on the fastest machines available today.

With a 512MB board, it would be a very pretty turn-based game =)

Re:512 is better

[rjshields]

From the teaser:

Even ATI acknowledges there will probably be no performance benefits to bumping the memory support from 256MB to 512MB as the cards are 'intended to demonstrate the next-generation capability to gamers."

I beleive that paraphrases your point quite nicely.

Re:512 is better

[Anonymous Coward]

i just hope to god your not a man :o

But what about Doom 3

[Anonymous Coward]

Doom 3 has a graphics mode that requires 512MB video card ram. And rumor has it its really swwweeeettt!

Re:But what about Doom 3

[Juice2504]

It is such a shame the game is a load of rubbish.

Re:But what about Doom 3

[Anonymous Coward]

I've got a 6600GT, the game engine auto sets medium and I get between 35-60 FPS on that setting. Turning the game upto 11 makes me want to cry even more than the random segfaults and constant ALSA errors.

I think the only advantage to a 512MB card would be reducing texture compression, how that effects performance I have no idea. Anyone?

Re:But what about Doom 3

[91degrees]

Texture compression tends not to have a performance cost. Graphics cards have dedicated circuitry for it (as well as every other operation they do), so decompressing a texture isn't stopping the card from doing anything. The compression is quite simple and takes will always take the same amount of time to unpack. In fact, the only effect on performance is the time it takes to actually read from memory. Uncompressed textures are slower here.

Re:But what about Doom 3

[niteice]

Simple. It looks better.

Re:But what about Doom 3

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks, I was thinking along these lines. I guess that having greater RAM on card eliminates copying from system RAM for larger datasets, so what kind of compression ratios are we talking?

Re:But what about Doom 3

[Anonymous Coward]

Turning off texture compression in DOOM 3 isn't about performance, it's about image quality. Just about every surface in the game has a normal map, and normal maps are butchered by S3TC compression (which was designed for image data not normal maps). So it's a big visual quality win to turn off compression of normal maps, and that's what DOOM 3's 512MB mode is about.

There will be a performance cost to this, of course -- uncompressed textures eat a greater chunk of the video card's local memory bandwidth.

Re:But what about Doom 3

[nukem996]

I have a 256meg card and I put it on the mode that said it needed 512megs of ram and it ran fine. Video memory is more for textures and when it fills up it goes onto ur system ram and that can hurt your fps. I had no problems on my gentoo AMD64 (3500+) 1 gig ram and nvidia fx 5900 ultra.

Different things pushing memory increases

[suso]

"Remeber your ancient TNT graphics card that had 16MB of memory?

Man you were lucky. I had to deal with a 1MB video card in my job workstation.

Honestly, its not all that impressive to see these high numbers for video card ram. Different needs pushes the limit nowadays. It used to be pushed to deal with higher color palettes at higher resolutions. Now its all about texture mapping.

Re:Different things pushing memory increases

[dago]

That's it, remembering that you had to "compute" the max resolution & color depth and eventually make compromises ...

Re:Different things pushing memory increases

[mizhi]

I remember when we had deal with 256 lbs of slate that we scratched with sharp pebbles. Monochrome displays that refreshed at .00075 hz. To get color, we had to go kill something.

meh.

Re:Different things pushing memory increases

[athakur999]

The worst thing I remember from back them was having to run X in Linux with only 256 colors and needing to use that "install colormap" option (or whatever it was called) so programs that displayed graphics (such as Netscape) didn't look like ass. When you brought one of these programs in focus, it made all of the other colors on the screen go psychodelic...

Re:Different things pushing memory increases

[Anonymous Coward]

Man, YOU were lucky. I had to deal with 16kilobytes on my workstation. And I liked it!

Re:Different things pushing memory increases

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude you were lucky..my first 386 had only 256K of VRAM.

"Remeber your ancient TNT graphics card that had 16MB of memory?" !!

So what does that make my card ? Prehistoric ?

Re:Different things pushing memory increases

[Anonymous Coward]

Man you were lucky. I had to deal with a 1MB video card in my job workstation.

Bah. You newbies... I remember a time when my computer didn't have that much main memory or even store that much on disk.

Re:Different things pushing memory increases

[SpongeBobLinuxPants]

My first Mac had a 512 video card... 512K that is. Which was ginormous at the time (to me).

Re:Different things pushing memory increases

[kesuki]

you're so lucky my EGA card has 64k But I got the add on 64K so I'm up to 128k. I really wish I hade the Special IBM memory module add on, then I could have 256K, but it was too darn expensive.

Re:Different things pushing memory increases

[maglor_83]

We still had that problem at uni until about halfway through last year

Re:Different things pushing memory increases

[rkelly]

Two of my systems here have 2meg ATI cards. Firefox, mozilla and openoffice all work fine. Not much good for mpegs...

Re:Different things pushing memory increases

[Tim C]

Well, my first computer was a Sinclair ZX Specturm. 16KB of RAM, with about another 4KB - 8KB(?) for the video RAM.

Re:Different things pushing memory increases

[ConnectInterrupt]

Video cards will never really need more than 640K ram anyway

Re:Different things pushing memory increases

[Anonymous Coward]

Mine was a ZX81 with full 1K of RAM, my father loaned a Z80 for me to learn on for a few weeks before he bought it. Pitiful.

Re:Different things pushing memory increases

[shippo]

The video RAM was actually part of the main memory, and was 6912 bytes in total, with 6144 bytes for the pixels, and 768 bytes for the color attributes. Once the stack, user defined graphics and the system variables were taken into consideration, there was less than 9K free for your program.

The 1K ZX81 and ZX80 models used that 1K for everything, including display RAM.

Re:Different things pushing memory increases

[madprof]

Yes they were shit even when they came out, weren't they?

Re:Different things pushing memory increases

[pete_yandell]

Well back when I was a young lad...

The TRS-80: a 64 character by 16 line screen meant a total of 1KB or video memory. Not only that, but on the model I and original model II the bytes in that memory were only 7-bit. (There were no lower case characters, and the graphics resolution of 128*48 was achieved by setting bit 6 and using bits 0-5 to represent the six pixels within the space a normal character took up.)

I remember being astounded by the 512x384 resolution of the first Mac. To think that you'd devote 24KB of memory just to the screen!

Re:Different things pushing memory increases

[Kent Recal]

Worst??

I loved that! Made me feel all guru meditation.

I have 512K Trident you insensitive clods!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

On ISA bus.

Fast and Big mem

[Fox_1]

with 16 pixel and 6 vertex pipelines clocked at 540MHz. The graphics card's 512MB of DDR3 SDRAM operate at 1180MHz speed and have 256-bit memory interface.
Kinda sad but this card is more powerful then my PC on it's stats alone

Re:Fast and Big mem

[Ironsides]

Kinda sad when your video card has more ram than first/second/third computer had disk space (combined). Your processor has more cache than your first comp had ram. And I'm waiting for the day that a processor has more cache than my first comp had disk space.

Re:Fast and Big mem

[Anonymous Coward]

my first computer didn't have a harddisk... unless you counted the tape drive as the harddisk.

Re:Fast and Big mem

[Zerth]

> And I'm waiting for the day that a processor has more cache than my first comp had disk space.

You insensitive clod! That has already happened to me with those new 2MB L2 cache pentiums.

Re:Fast and Big mem

[Grayputer]

--
And I'm waiting for the day that a processor has more cache than my first comp had disk space.
--

*sigh* you HAD to mention that, some of us are already there ...

The 8 inch floppies (pre hard drives) on some of the kits had 200K disk (180K, 160K, I forget), the pentium processors (300 mhz & 333 mhz) I just tossed out had 512K cache so I'm sure the ones running ( 1+ ghz & 3+ ghz) exceed the drive drive size.

I'm not sure what size floppy drives the C64 and Vic 20 had, I think ~180K for the 1541 model. I THINK the CBM 8032 had a 5MB hard drive option. The old Apple floppies were small too, not sure about the hard drive option where it finally arrived. So yeah, I've passed the 'first drive' level and am now waiting for first hard drive.

Re:Fast and Big mem

[The Man]

And I'm waiting for the day that a processor has more cache than my first comp had disk space.

We're pretty close, really. My actual first computer was a TI-99/4A, which could store a few hundred KB on an audio casette. So in that sense, we're there now. My first computer with a fixed disk had 10MB of storage, and there are plenty of chips sold now with 8MB secondary cache.

Re:Fast and Big mem

[maglor_83]

Haven't Pentium-Ms had 2MB L2 Cache for a while now?

Re:Fast and Big mem

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not that old, but my first computer had 64KB of ram, no hard drive and two 5-1/4" single-density floppies.

So, all those deadlines have passed for me.

Hell, my 10 year old calculator has as much RAM as my first computer.

Re:Fast and Big mem

[Angstroem]

Kinda sad when your video card has more ram than first/second/third computer had disk space (combined). Your processor has more cache than your first comp had ram. And I'm waiting for the day that a processor has more cache than my first comp had disk space.

You must be young...

The first computer I owned with a *disk* drive was the C64 offering a whopping 170kB per disk side. That's less than a tenth of what current architectures offer as on-chip L2 cache.

Actual state-of-the-art L2 caches hit 8MB which is even bigger than the first hard drive I tinkered with, a Commodore 5MB hard drive for the old CBM8000 series.

Re:Fast and Big mem

[Queer Boy]

And I'm waiting for the day that a processor has more cache than my first comp had disk space.

Real Soon Now(TM) processors are going to have the memory controller integrated with the CPU so basically ALL memory is L2.

Re:Fast and Big mem

[NeoSkandranon]

It's not sad, just means you're old ;)

Re:Fast and Big mem

[mc6809e]

with 16 pixel and 6 vertex pipelines clocked at 540MHz. The graphics card's 512MB of DDR3 SDRAM operate at 1180MHz speed and have 256-bit memory interface.
Kinda sad but this card is more powerful then my PC on it's stats alone

The real shame is how hard it is to use all this power for anything but games.

A big part of the problem has been the "one way" AGP bus. It's great for getting data to the card, but its as slow as basic PCI when getting data back. PCI-Express should help change this.

The other problem is the difficulty in getting information about low-level programming of the card's hardware and the fact that this often changes from generation to generation of card.

Still, I think eventually most computing will be done with GPU like hardware with an Intel/AMD processor as a peripheral for compatibility.

Re:Fast and Big mem

[Fox_1]

it's all about server blades. The next gen motherboard is all about pipe and your os runs either multi-threaded on all the processors avaliable, or beowulfesque. Just plug in the cards to some honking fast bus and add them into the OS. Who cares if some of the cards do specialized functions(display, video editing, sound, network) as well as contributing to the power of the system. Why not run my webserver from my suped up network card and differential equations on my display adaptor.
errr at least that is how it could be, likely we'll all wind up the lowest common denominator instead.

Re:Fast and Big mem

[silicon not in the v]

Try comparing that old 5MB hard drive to modern hard drive caches and you're there. I just bought a drive that has an 8MB cache. I'm also thinking of my dad's 486 that originally came with 4MB. I upgraded it to 8MB.

Re:Fast and Big mem

[Urchlay]

> The real shame is how hard it is to use all this power for anything but games.
> A big part of the problem has been the "one way" AGP bus. It's great for getting data to the card, but its as slow as basic PCI when getting data back. PCI-Express should help change this.

Even a PCI video card with 32M of RAM makes a decent swap device, compared to swapping to disk.

I use 16 of the 32 megs of video RAM in my old TNT card as a fast swap device, on my workstation at work. It was a pain to set up (have to use the slram module in Linux 2.6, and tell it the physical address and size of the chunk of RAM I want to use for swap), but it does work well. Unfortunately I never could figure out how to enable the video RAM in my boot scripts, so I have to let X11 do that for me (startx, then run a little script to load the modules, mkswap, swapon). Probably if I'd spent more than 10 minutes on it I could have worked it out.

I'd love to get my hands on one of these 512M cards for this use. I still would only need 16M of video RAM, since I don't use 3d at all at work, which would give me a big enough RAM-swap device that I could quit using disk swap entirely.

Of course it wouldn't be cost-effective to do this with a brand new top-of-the-line card. I'd have to wait until I could find a used one for $20, and even then the cost-per-byte would be a lot higher than a hard disk partition.

BTW, if you want to do this yourself, make sure you set the priority higher on the RAM-swap than on your disk swap, to make the kernel use the RAM device first.

Re:Fast and Big mem

[MBraynard]

Hey - Do my referral and I'll do yours. I already got a free ipod - it does work.

Re:Fast and Big mem

[ggambett]

Hey, my first computer didn't even *have* disk space! It was a ZX81, with 1 KB (yes, 1024 bytes) of RAM and loaded stuff off a cassette tape.

Re:Fast and Big mem

[itchy92]

wait... I'm confused. Why wouldn't you just upgrade the amount of RAM in your machine, thus negating the need for a swap file?

Re:Fast and Big mem

[PReDiToR]

My 486 (DX2/66) had 8MB when I bought it (£1,400 - new), I put another 4MB in to play Doom (with lots of PWADs) and I was the schiznit because I had the LSL/ODI IPX setup disk that let me go and sort everyone's 4 person BNC (cheapnet) NICs out for them so they could play it too. Was a great way to get invited to LAN parties.

That machine was running Windows 95 from early beta until OSR 2. Still with 12MB and a 300MB drive.

I only threw it out after taking all the useful bits out of it and deciding that the mobo and PSU were beyond recycling. AT has died.

Re:Fast and Big mem

[cnettel]

Can you spell Opteron? It's already here. In addition, no, integration of the memory controller doesn't turn it into L2. It's not caching another part of the address space without software involvement, it's not SRAM, it's not fast...

Re:Fast and Big mem

[Anonymous Coward]

Xeons have had 2MB L2 cache since 1998.

Re:Fast and Big mem

[NeoSkandranon]

Done- you should see a referral as serril at gmail dot com sometime soon

Re:Fast and Big mem

[Tassach]

Why wouldn't you just upgrade the amount of RAM in your machine, thus negating the need for a swap file?

Several reasons:

• Hack Value. Never underestimate the allure of doing something simply because you can.
• System limits. If you've already maxxed out your motherboard's RAM capacity and are still swapping, this is a useful hack. Some of us still have working 486's and first-gen Pentiums which can take a maximum of 128M of memory. Using an old 16M video card for swap on a box like that makes sense.

Re:Fast and Big mem

[tbcpp]

Well, the new Itainiums have about upto 12MB of cache (or is it the new SUN Niagras). Almost there!

Re:Fast and Big mem

[Urchlay]

> Why wouldn't you just upgrade the amount of RAM in your machine, thus negating the need for a swap file?

The idea is to make use of an otherwise unused resource. No matter how much system RAM I put in the machine, I have 32MB of video RAM that's mostly unused. These days, I can't buy a new video card with less RAM than that, and even the junk bin full of used cards is starting to have 32M cards in it...

I wouldn't actually buy one of these new 512M cards just for use as swap: you're right, it would be better to spend the money on more RAM. However, I expect that I'll start finding $20 `junk' used video cards with more & more video RAM on them.

Keep in mind, this is all about my workstation at work, which doesn't get used for gaming, multimedia, or anything that could possibly need more than a couple megs of video RAM. I wouldn't buy a $20 used POS for use at home :)

Voodoo

[fizz]

the reminds me of the 3d only video cards where you needed to pick a good companion for your 3dfx card. Although 16meg was a bit much for just 2d at the time, its not a needed item in a pc (a video card with more than 64 megs of ram).

Re:Voodoo

[FuturePastNow]

16 megs is still a bit much for a PC if all it is used for is office work. Hell, my dad's computer has two megabytes of Intel Extreme! graphics. You don't need any more than that unless you play games, and even that is enough for any game made before 1998.

Is there any benefit

[demonbug]

to bumping the video memory from 128 to 256? Seems silly at this point to go up to 512. Ah well - I'm sure they won't have problems finding kids whose parents will buy these for them.

Re:Is there any benefit

[koreaman]

Well there is a big difference between 128 and 512, but not that big of a difference between 256 and 512. And even though there aren't now (not counting doom3), I imagine someday in the future there will require this type of thing.

Re:Is there any benefit

[TLLOTS]

Actually there is, but you'll only like to see any real benefit in terms of games etc. at a much later date since games are typically created for the most common hardware, not the best hardware. I have no doubt that in time there will be many many games that will demand over 1GB of ram on our graphics cards, but that will be sometime off.

Of course with other applications for graphics cards being sought now as well, using them in scientific computing tasks etc. this may very well be useful even today. I guess time shall tell ultimately.

Re:Is there any benefit

[Filiks]

It will lower prices on the 256MB versions and all the cards beneath, giving me better deals when I pay $200 for a 7 month-old card that still plays the latest and greatest just fine.

Re:Is there any benefit

[TheRaven64]

High-end video cards from the likes of 3d-Labs have had 512MB or RAM for a while (one has 640MB, and 640MB ought to be enough for anyone...). And yes, people do use them, but mainly for visualisation tasks using OpenGL.

Re:Is there any benefit

[game kid]

to bumping the video memory from 128 to 256?

You've probably never played Half-Life 2. Surely any new optimizations in the card will add performance to such games and modeling tools if the megs do not...right?

Re:Is there any benefit

[stilwebm]

I imagine someday in the future there will require this type of thing.

When games require 512MB to be acceptable, this card's performance will be barely acceptable, if at all.

Re:Is there any benefit

[ad0gg]

Some games take advantage of 256M of ram by using larger textures. Doom3 is prime example, loading all your textures into video card stops the swapping from main memory thus getting you better performance. There aren't any games out that need 512 megs of video ram though, so buying it wouldn't get you any performance increase. Of course there aren't many games that take advantage of $600+ cards that are out but I guess some people need to blow their money on stuff, and $600 video card provides longer entertainment value than a couple hookers in vegas and $50 video card all which can be had at the same price. The later will be far a better gaming experience than what a $600 video card can deliver.

Re:Is there any benefit

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course there is benefit. Do you realize that for a 512x512 texture with alpha is 1mb of memory? Or that a 1024x1024 texture with alpha is 4mb? Also consider that any vertex buffers you want stored on the video card use up that same memory space. Animations can be stored on video memory. Even for something like the ground that most people think is pretty simple is probably at least 3 1024 textures layered over each other. The point being, that if you want high resolution textures and large worlds, you NEED lots of video memory. One of the slowest parts of rendering is moving data across the bus and if you can keep more of what you need present in video memory, everything will render that much faster.

A great example is any MMORPG. Wouldn't it be great to have 20 different races completely customizable and with different clothes/armor/weapons/animations present in the form of hundreds of users on the screen at one time? Tell me how you are going to accomplish that without more video memory.

Re:Is there any benefit

[Stalus]

I do some scientific vis work, and when you need 45 meg of texture of a single representation of a single slice.. well, we'll use whatever they'll give us.

Re:Is there any benefit

[Anonymous Coward]

thanks for the link bub. I doubt I'd have had any idea what you were talking about without it

translation

[British]

Even ATI acknowledges there will probably be no performance benefits to bumping the memory support from 256MB to 512MB as the cards are 'intended to demonstrate the next-generation capability to gamers."

Translation: Even though it's not practical, we'll sell it since gamers will buy it.

Re:translation

[CarlinWithers]

or con their parents into buying it.

Re:translation

[sosume]

Translation: Even though it's not practical, we'll sell it since gamers will buy it.


l4m3r> W00t, I got me new gfx :D
l0zr> What, cant be faster than my x800, lamo!
l4m3r> but wait, its got half a gig of ram!
l0zr> wooooah, joo r000lz!
l4m3r> lets play quake 1!
l0zr> yeah, th4ts sooooo 0ldsk00l!

Re:translation

[rootofevil]

"idiot" - i think you dropped this, it looks like it fits in between "since gamers"

not all gamers are stupid enough to buy a card that will give them no performance gain. just most of them.

Re:translation

[Anonymous Coward]

w4n7 70 cy83r?

Re:translation

[Anonymous Coward]

$ur3 - ¥0u Ð0n'7 m1nÐ h3rp3$, Ð0 ¥0u?

Re:translation

[_Hellfire_]

I'm not trying to be disparaging, but it seems to me that you can sell 12yo CounterStrike kiddies pretty much anything as long as it's a nice bright shiny penis that they can bring to LAN parties and show off to their 12yo CounterStrike kiddie friends.

OTOH maybe I am being disparaging...

Re:translation

[Spy Hunter]

512 MB video RAM *is* practical, for some applications. The Slashdot blurb missed the point. More video RAM doesn't have performance benefits*, it has quality benefits. It allows more and higher quality textures and innovative new rendering techniques.

Your current games likely won't use 512 MB of video RAM, so you're right that it isn't practical to buy one of these just now for gaming (and gamers will probably buy it anyway). But future games will benefit with more realistic graphics, and other 3D card applications (3D modeling, visualization, offline rendering, vector processing, accelerating next-gen GUIs like Xorg/Longhorn) could definitely use the extra room immediately.

* well, it could have performance benefits if you're already using more textures than your video RAM can hold and thus spilling over into main RAM. But games go to great pains to avoid this so you likely aren't.

Re:translation

[Evro]

I wonder how fast Quake 1 would run...

... loaded as a ramdisk ...

... on your video card ...?

joke

Re:translation

[CyberKnet]

For as long as I can remember, people have been touting the "There aren't games to fully utilize it right now, but just wait till [6,9,12] months from now!" line when trying to justify either a sale or a purchase.

I dont get it.

Historically, the price of video cards has dropped by around 50% over the course of 12 months. Why are people paying todays prices so they can play tomorrow's [or more!] games?

The only reason I can think of is penis waving. So they can say "mine is bigger than yours!".

If it were otherwise then they would have waited until the game that needed it came out.

Re:translation

[Anonymous Coward]

Gamers subsidise all sorts of useful development.
Soon I can pick up a cheap obsolete 256 meg card for my router.

Re:translation

[Queer Boy]

l4m3r> lets play quake 1!
l0zr> yeah, th4ts sooooo 0ldsk00l!

Actually, using ATI Displays you can override OpenGL settings and actually have better quality visuals than what the programmer was able to offer at the time. It doesn't affect every game but I see noticable differences with American McGee's Alice and with Harry Potter, both on my Mac.

I can't wait until I can load entire games into the graphics RAM. I was holding off on an x800 because a quarter of the price of my G5 for a graphics card was a bit much, hopefully this will drive down the price of the 256MB version.

Re:translation

[Chandon Seldon]

Don't complain. It's the people making that call who are driving the price decrease that lets you buy the card cheap 6 months later.

Re:translation

[snuf23]

About the only game I know of that would benefit from it is Doom 3. There is an "ultra high res" texture mode which uncompresses all of the game textures. This mode needs more than 256MB of RAM for texture storage.

Re:translation

[cfalcon]

Well, mostly.

When I built my machine, I grabbed the biggest bestest at the time. Part of it was to have the "biggest bestest", but more than that was to not have to upgrade for another year. Less upgrades = less mass transportation of data = less lost data = less pain in the butt.

But yea, usually the best price point to but at is 6-18 months old.

Re:translation

[MBraynard]

Hey - trade referrals with me? You do mine, I'll do yours. I got the free Ipod and the free Xbox already.

Re:translation

[bleckywelcky]

Actually, if you stay behind the leading edge a ways you can still play some of the latest games on a cheap video card. I bought a 128 MB card for $80 and used it for over 2 years before I started noticing slower frame rates at the resolutions I was using.

Re:translation

[greazer]

This is a classic "chicken or egg" problem in the graphics industry. Game developers develop games that will maximize the features on existing cards while GPU and card manufacturers design GPUs and video cards that will maximize the performance and quality of existing games.

However, the hardware companies have to occasionally produce cards that have features not used by existing games so game developers can start developing games that push the envelope.

Re:translation

[Anonymous Coward]

signed up & offer completed. Offer will show up as completed after 14 day trial elapses. I got the free iPod already, and only really want the mac mini, but hey, anything for another referral.

CK (Your comment's parent post)

Re:translation

[Anonymous Coward]

Try the new URL, btw. The old one was fubar'd and not pointing to the gratis site. :|

Re:translation

[Spy Hunter]

You're completely right; like I said, I certainly don't recommend buying one of these right now for gaming. It's obviously stupid (look, I can run doom 3 without texture compression!!!1). But again, like I said, if you do 3D modeling, visualization, offline rendering, vector processing, or work on experimental accelerated GUIs, then it's entirely possible for you to find a use for that much video RAM today.

Re:translation

[ceeam]

Uhm, sorry? The only cheap (sub-$100) cards around here are 9200s and 5200s. Well, basically the same 9000s that they were selling 2 years ago (and not much higher priced). I don't see cheap 9800s or 800s or even 9600xt's anywhere around.

Re:translation

[MBraynard]

Will you be able to cancel your subscription before you get billed?

Re:translation

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't wait until I can load entire games into the graphics RAM

I am intrigued by your ideas and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.

Re:translation

[Chandon Seldon]

Define "cheap" as "sub-$250" instead, and then you'll see things the way I do.

No performance benefits?

[Peter Cooper]

The catch? Even ATI acknowledges there will probably be no performance benefits to bumping the memory support from 256MB to 512MB

There certainly will be if you want to run Doom 3 (or Half Life 2 - I think?) with totally maxed out texture quality. From all the hoop-la I remember surrounding the Doom 3 launch, even 256MB of memory isn't as much as Doom 3 in Max mode will want to use.

Re:No performance benefits?

[sosume]

There certainly will be [performace benefits] if you want to run Doom 3

Penalties maybe, because twice the amount of ram has to be copied... but benefits? How can you tell?

Re:No performance benefits?

[Neophytus]

That's more like it - games being designed beyond current specs! I'm sick of finding a game looks "dated" not a few months after it's release because the developers capped the top specs at what I can still run on (admittedly good) 2003 hardware.

Re:No performance benefits?

[FoolishBose]

If you use uncompressed textures on Ultra setting, it tries to use 512 MB of video memory. I really doubt that the difference quality is really noticeable during actual gameplay. However, hardware review sites love to take screenshots and magnify them 1000x to analyze the lines on ceiling tiles, so I guess it will make them happy.

Re:No performance benefits?

[Peter Cooper]

For most people, most games are still like that. :) I certainly couldn't run Quake 3 at 1280x1024 in 32 bit color when it came out. Ditto for Unreal Tournament, and even still for games like FarCry. Most games are suboptimal on most people's hardware.

Re:No performance benefits?

[Anonymous Coward]

Screw ATI. Gainward's nvidia card has dynamic fan control!

Re:No performance benefits?

[mbaciarello]

IMHO Half-Life 2 did a better overall job at rendering realistic sceneries, and it's a perfect example of how artistry is as important as raw power in this field. I loved the dull coloring and details in that game.

As a side note, IIRC, I played HL2 at maxed-out texture settings on a 128 MB ATI Radeon 9700, with pretty good performance at a 1280x(?) resolution.

Re:No performance benefits?

[rmarll]

Everquest II wants 512 mb for their max setting as well. And it will probably help a *lot* performance wise as the drop off in performance as image quality improves is significant.

For games, while a little improvement of texture resolution can help some, the real benefit (IMHO) will be in variation of textures. MMORPG type games (such as Everquest II) have a much more noticeable issue with limited ram. Most of the variation in second gen titles have worked around some of this with geometry and tinting instead of textures, but there is still a lot of sameness in the games.

This is also an issue for other types of games. Repeating textures and armies of cloned combatants are a couple of examples of working with limited texture space. Developers have more of a choice in presenting even sharper images and/or greater variety of images in their games.

Re:No performance benefits?

[Nikker]

ATI called.

Their CFO just wanted to say he loves you.

Signed ATI Marketing Team

Re:No performance benefits?

[StikyPad]

EQ2, HL2, and there are others I'm sure.. 512MB cards were supposed to reach the market a while ago, and developers HAVE been creating games with that in mind.

Not that I play many games anymore. As far as I can tell, there are only 4 games on the market:

1) Ye Olde FPS
2) Ye Olde RTS
3) Ye Olde Sim
4) Ye Olde MMOG

And I've played them all. Many different times, under many different names. It's gotten to the point where it's so mundane, I feel like the pecking bird that does Homer's button-pushing job at the nuclear plant. (Sorry, nuke-u-lar).

Re:No performance benefits?

[mrbuttboy]

There is alot of truth to what you say. Much in the same vein as, "well GEEZ, thats just what shakespeare did 400 years ago. Nothing new here,move along." Basic stories get retold again and again. You may find nothing new or fresh in games today,but there is new stuff out there and the variation on a theme is also quite pleasant. Maybe people would say there is a large difference between WoW, EQII and CoH. You might disagree.

As for new game play, there are people tying things. I LOVE the natural-selection mod. The graphics arent the best and there are a few gameplay issues but it is trying to be a FPS/RTS. There must be other attempts at this but I havent heard of them. Just like I am sure many havent heard of NS - it is small by many standards.

Re:No performance benefits?

[DeadScreenSky]

(Psss....escape to the world of videogame consoles like the rest of us PC gaming expatriates have over the last 5 years or so...there's just a lot more genres there...)

Re:No performance benefits?

[StikyPad]

Consoles? I owned a PS2 once. It served it's purpose, but I have a dedicated DVD player now.

Re:No performance benefits?

[DeadScreenSky]

I'm just saying that if you are sick of the 4 genres that dominate PC gaming the game consoles are an exit. I used to predominantly play PC games, with only a little console gaming on the side - but the general decline of PC gaming (and the resurgence/evolution of console games) has reversed this in the last four or five years. The pure variety available in new games for any of the major consoles (even Gamecube if we are comparing it to the PC) is just wonderful...

Re:No performance benefits?

[swillden]

There certainly will be if you want to run Doom 3

Speaking of Doom 3, I've heard that there's a Linux version available, but I haven't been able to figure out where I can get it. I don't see any place on Id's site that I can buy it from them, and all of the on-line retailers they link to seem to offer only the Windows version. Anyone know how you buy Doom 3 for Linux?

Re:No performance benefits?

[StikyPad]

Ah, I got your comment completely backwards..

I agree, I've seen a lot more innovation in gameplay for consoles.. I just don't like 'em. Specifically, I don't like gamepads, low resolution graphics, and the load times (on the PS2 at least).

Re:No performance benefits?

[Primal_theory]

Half life 2 full settings is not that hard to achieve...

I can run full settings on half life 2 (single player, and only lag if more then 2 things explode...doom 3 is the big nasty bastard that needs the 512...but is all that money really worth 2x aa for *gasp!*6x aa? and whatever other upgrade their was (somthing about textures and such)

(computer specs) P4 3.0ghz, (hyperthreading)
1024mbs ddr(2?)400 (running in dual channel mode)
2 80gig hdds (nothing special, but im running outta room!)
MSI GeForce 6600 PCI-E (oc'd to 700mhz gpu, and 550mhz ram)

Half life 2 was so nice because even the older last-gen computers can get around 70fps on med-low settings at 1024x768 in cs:s

Re:No performance benefits?

[DeadScreenSky]

Yeah, load times on the PS2 are killer. I am contemplating throwing in that hard drive loader program into mine - I guess it massively reduces the load times. The Xbox and GC are both pretty good with load times, however (most of their games are certainly worlds better with loading than what I have been finding with recent PC games like HL2).

I really like the S Controller for the Xbox - it feels more comfortable in my non-tiny Western hands, which is just not true of stuff like the PS2 pads. Needless to say, it has a lot of very PC-like games available for it, but also with a lot of the 'exotic' game varieties you find from countries that don't release PC games in the West (ex: the Korean-made Kingdom Under Fire: the Crusaders is a truly excellent action/strategy game, very distinct from Western RTS games, but something most PC gamers would love). And though it isn't as great as the PC in this area, 99% of Xbox games at least support the lower end of HDTV resolutions, which makes the resolution "good enough" IMO. (And in case you weren't aware, make sure your consoles are connected to your television via S-video at minimum - the clarity boost from the stock composite cables they come with is astounding.) For what it's worth, I know that when a hardcore PC gaming friend of mine a couple years ago got an Xbox, he said to me, "the Xbox has restored my faith in gaming." So you might want to give it a shot.

Of course, a lot of other PC gamers seem to instead find the Gamecube a better fit, mainly because of how not PC-style most of its game are. So that might also be something to try. Maybe your problem with consoles is more the PS2 than anything.

(And you can find some decent third-party pads that are bigger, smaller, or whatever you prefer for the consoles. So that might be something to try too if you don't like the stock controllers.)

16 MB ?

[Anonymous Coward]

i still remember (and HAVE!) 1mb Cirrus Logic and 2mb S3 Virge graphics cards.

sorry, i started at 1mb ;-)

Well make it useful in a creative way

[FerretFrottage]

Why not create special drivers that allow you to use the unused vid ram as a ramdisk? If a game requires more than 256MB, then default the temp area back to file storage, but if you are only using 128-256MB for video, then let me do something useful with the remainder.

Re:Well make it useful in a creative way

[garcia]

You mean like this (2002)?

Or also seen here.

Re:Well make it useful in a creative way

[rainman_bc]

IIRC that used to exist for the old voodoo cards.

Ram is so cheap now that there's almost no point.

Re:Well make it useful in a creative way

[Anonymous Coward]

I have an even better idea: We could just add it to the main memory! This immense technological advance would mean programs, data, cache and textures would be in the same memory, balancing all the needs you'd have. The box of a motherboard would then read, e.g. "videoram: XXX MB (shared)". I only wonder if it would be as fast.

Re:Well make it useful in a creative way

[Jeff DeMaagd]

I hope that is sarcastic. Shared memory was among the dumber ideas I've ever seen. Forget gaming, it even seems to slow down standard desktop apps.

Re:Well make it useful in a creative way

[TheRaven64]

While this might be almost sensible with PCI-Express, AGP is horribly slow at transferring data from the card to the system (the screen is a write-only device, and AGP was designed taking this into account).

Re:Well make it useful in a creative way

[orion41us]

I think that's how the new Cell tech works....

Re:Well make it useful in a creative way

[kesuki]

and PCI-express was written realizing the modern GPU has 300 million transistors.. and even if they're specifically programmed for manipulating graphical data, there are a lot of Professional Graphic Content Creation programs that could benefit greatly from having a 300 million transistor co-processor when rendering. So AGP was written quite shortsightedly in making the connection primarily one directional.

Re:Well make it useful in a creative way

[Solosoft]

I have a 3DFX Voodoo 5 5500. This card has SLI that is unsupported by linux. You think that it would be possible to tap into the other 32mb of my card to actually get this to work. Have a 32mb swap or somthing. Since there is no SLI support for this card it's really only a Voodoo4 with another chip and some more RAM on it. (Since there is 2 32mb RAM Modules on the card and 2 166MHz chips on it.

Anyone have any ideas ?

Re:Well make it useful in a creative way

[owlstead]

I can make a full copy of my 3,5" floppies nowadays without turning to video ram, thank you very much. There is no need to have my screen filled up with binary garbage anymore.

A use for this

[ZWheel]

I seem to remember someone writing a linux kernel module that lets you use extra video mem as a very fast virtual drive.

Re:A use for this

[DarkTempes]

would make for some nice additional (fast) swapfile space =)

Re:A use for this

[SlayerofGods]

You mean like this (2002)?

Or also seen here.


Since the mods didn't see the first comment about this... surely they won't notice I shamelessly ripped this off the post right above this one ;)

Re:A use for this

[SlayerofGods]

Well I thought it was funny

Re:A use for this

[StikyPad]

You forgot to put "I'll probably get modded down for double posting, but..." at the beginning.

Works every time.

Won't Doom3 take advantage of 512?!

[Anita Coney]

It seems that I read that Doom3 has an high-quality option for cards with 512 megs of memory. I could be wrong, though. I can't find any information about it online.

Re:Won't Doom3 take advantage of 512?!

[Psycho77]

I thought i saw that too, Doom3 will take advantage of the 512megs, for high quality texture, or its twice faster, since with 512 they dont have to compress anything. Forgot, but yeah ! I need 512 megs now :)

Re:Won't Doom3 take advantage of 512?!

[harrkev]

Since no cards like this exist currently, how did Id test this feature while debugging?

Re:Won't Doom3 take advantage of 512?!

[Psycho77]

They exist, i remember a review of a "beta card" with 512 megs like 4 months ago. it was only an experimental card to show that 512 megs work fine. I forgot where i saw that review thought

Re:Won't Doom3 take advantage of 512?!

[Biomechanical]

Here's an example of a card with more than 512MB's of RAM, the "Wildcat Realizm 800".

And the majority of you dare to call yourselves "Uber-geeks" while drooling over commodity hardware, pah!.

Now...

[inertia187]

Even ATI acknowledges there will probably be no performance benefits...

Now if we can just get those razor manufacturers to say the same about that 5th blade.

Re:Now...

[Anonymous Coward]

But there is a performance benefit to the 5th blade . . .

it just isn't for the consumer!

Re:Now...

[Raul654]

I forget where I saw it, it might have been SNL. They had a faux-ad for the Mach 18 -- "The 17th blade scrapes off the last layer of flesh, and the 18th blade shaves the bone. "

Re:Now...

[Anonymous Coward]

Reminds me of sketch on the Dgeneration lateshow (australian comedy show from the early nineties) of a spoof advert for the "Gillette 3000" shaver.

"At last, after 5 years of laboratory testing, Gillette in conjunction
with NASA scientists presents a razor so advanced it revolutionises
shaving. The Gillette 3000 pivoting head razor with 16 blades and
a record 75 lubricating strips.

Here is how it works.

The first blade distracts the hair, while the second and third blades sneak up behind it, cutting off any escape routes. The fourth and fifth blades attempt to coax the hair from its hiding place using modern counselling techniques while the sixth blade, posing as a passing motorist, acts as a decoy, allowing the seventh and eighth blades to swoop down and quickly overpower the hair. The ninth blade, disguised as a postman, administers a small dose of chloroform, allowing blades 10 through 13 to remove the hair and escort it away for further questioning. The 14th blade informs the hair of its rights. The 15th blade handles the paperwork and the 16th blade, well, it's just along for the ride."

Ahhh, champagne comedy.

Re:Now...

[jonfelder]

I believe that was a MAD TV sketch...but maybe they did it on SNL too. Dunno. I do know they did it on MAD TV though.

Re:Now...

[cloudturtle]

Wait. 5 blades = a beowulf cluster. And everyone knows clusters are better. But i agree that using skin for your communications backbone has to create some killer latency.

Re:Now...

[Kris_J]

I remember something in Mad Magazine. The 14th blade distracts the hair and the 15th blade sneaks up on it from behind, or something like that.

Re:Now...

[Lispy]

Jeez, you american guys sure are ahead of europe. We are just beginning to see the benefits of three razors
I am starting to wonder if there is a real benefit in the 3rc razor or if they are just trying to rip us off... tsts...

Isn't it embarassing how the media are trying to pull us off sometimes??

Re:Now...

[PReDiToR]

No matter how many blades they add to a razor you will still have to scrape each square centimetre of skin in 4 directions to cut all the hairs, and usually against the grain at least three times.

This is why I went for the straight razor solution.

If I ever get so sick of shaving that I contemplate suicide, I have a relatively painless method to hand.

Re:Now...

[ldpercy]

I'm not sure about the US shows, but here in Australia the D-Generation (local comedy group) did a sketch like this about 10-15 years ago on The Late Show. Someone posted the text here: http://forums.eyo.com.au/showpost.php?p=656956&pos tcount=13

Re:Now...

[ldpercy]

The D-Generation (Australian comedy group) did this sketch about 10-15 years ago on their Late Show:

The first blade distracts the hair, while the second and third blades sneak up behind it, cutting off any escape routes. The fourth and fifth blades attempt to coax the hair from its hiding place using modern counselling techniques while the sixth blade, posing as a passing motorist, acts as a decoy, allowing the seventh and eighth blades to swoop down and quickly overpower the hair. The ninth blade, disguised as a postman, administers a small dose of chloroform, allowing blades 10 through 13 to remove the hair and escort it away for further questioning. The 14th blade informs the hair of its rights. The 15th blade handles the paperwork and the 16th blade, well, it's just along for the ride.

Re:Now...

[Galvatron]

I don't think there are any real razors with 5 blades, the guy was being facetious. There is one with 4 though (Schick Quattro). Personally, I found the Mach 3 to be a big improvement (especially for shaving my chest, which may or may not be an issue for you). I haven't tried the Quattro, but I can't imagine how it would be any better.

Re:Now...

[Kris_J]

I remember that, and I know that I saw it after I saw the mad magazine bit, because I specifically remember thinking less of them for copying Mad.

possible max

[BibelBiber]

What would actually be the possible maximum for graphic cards memory to use in terms of texture and so on. Is it depending on screen solution or on other things?

Re:possible max

[Anonymous Coward]

There is no possible max as such, same for how much RAM your PC could use. Games and software are just designed around the average card available on the market at the time.

The average texture size has been increasing for awhile and with more detail packed into your average scene you need textures loaded, so the memory space is important.

Re:possible max

[TheRaven64]

A screen resolution of 1600x1200 is about standard. In 32-bit colour this requires 7.32MB of RAM as a frame buffer. Add in 128-bit floating point colour (32-bits per channel), and that becomes 29.3MB. For smooth animation you need double buffering. This brings us up to around 60MB. Now, assume that there's another buffer for each window in your display system, and we're probably talking about 200MB - and that's just 2D. Now throw in textures and geometry information for a surface-based 3D image (e.g. Doom 3) and we have (potentially) several times that - although textures in games can often be compressed. Now comes the real fun, because we start looking at volume datasets. Let's assume we are only rendering something roughly the same dimensions as our screen, that gives us 1200x1600x1200 voxels. At 128-bit colour that means about 34GB of data on our video card (and that's quite a bit less than a CT scan of a human, for example).

Re:possible max

[harrkev]

Can you please explain to my anybody would want floating point for the frame buffer???? The whole point is to drive the DAC going to the monitor. I have NEVER seen a floating-point DAC. No silicon that I know of could handle such a large dynamic range. I also think that most people would find it quite difficult to tell the difference between 24-bit color and 30-bit color. I know that I probably couldn't.

And even if you have a LCD panel, the DVI interface still sends 8-bits per channel.

Re:possible max

[TheRaven64]

Because colour is not perceived by the eye in a linear manner, floating point values can give better colour representation. Matrox, I believe, already offer 128-bit colour support in some chips.

Re:possible max

[Rothron the Wise]

Can you please explain to my anybody would want floating point for the frame buffer

For the buffer you're looking at, floating point would be overkill, at least until we can get our hands on high dynamic range displays.

For the offscreen buffer being rendered on, floating point becomes neccessary because the the pixels you're rendering on become paramateres in pretty complex pixel shader functions. Having only 256 distinct values quickly becomes large rounding errors after a couple of divides, multiplications or trigonometric functions.

We can use this to get a dithered 32bit image to the screen, which should eliminate any banding. However high dynamic range displays may be closer than you think...

Scientific Applications

[ghoti]

This may not do much for games, but for scientific applications, especially visualization of large datasets, this is great. The visualization community has been using the advances made for gaming over the last years, and it's amazing what you can now do on the GPU: flow simulation, interactive visualization of large volumetric datasets with complex transfer functions, shading, etc.
For these applications, the more memory, the better.

Re:Scientific Applications

[Blue-Footed Boobie]

Bah, people doing scientific research and data-vis aren't going to be using consumer 'gamer' class cards. They will be using workstation class video cards with certified drivers and much higher programmability...and those have already broken the 512mb barrier.

Kinda like the Wildcat I mentioned elsewhere in this thread...

Re:Scientific Applications

[jackbird]

For offline rendering, it'll be great too. Granted, nVidia's Gelato , currently the only game in town, is, uh, unlikely to work with the ATI card, but perhaps we'll see a more platform-agnostic offering in the future.

Re:Scientific Applications

[ghoti]

Well I know a lot of people doing such research with consumber cards. The whole point is that the methods they develop will work on affordable hardware. The days when you needed an SGI to do any serious volume visualization are over, fortunately ...

Re:Scientific Applications

[graphicsguy]

You are just wrong. Consumer cards have much better price/performance. In fact, the workstation cards by NVIDIA, for example, do not offer much beyond the consumer cards. They operate at lower clock rates for much more money. Other vendors' workstation cards may offer more VRAM and certification, but generally lack the cutting edge programmability features (which are definitely used for scientific visualization).

Re:Scientific Applications

[Eric604]

Since such applications hardly use textures, how would that work? I am not up to date with the current implementations of OpenGL, is it uploading a displaylist or vertexlist to the card and then only a matrix each frame?

Re:Scientific Applications

[Anonymous Coward]

We use the consumer cards here. They're cheaper so you can keep getting the newer ones. They also have better tested drivers because they are more widely used. Besides the workstation cards are just the consumer cards with some extra random functionality accelerated (like antialiased lines on the Quadros).

Re:Scientific Applications

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, there are 1D textures, 2D textures and 3D textures. Gess which ones take huge amounts of VRAM.

Re:Scientific Applications

[tigertiger]

Nope. We are just buying a large visualization facility - and the graphics cards are either ATI or NVidia. SGI (yes, they are still there) puts ATI chips in its Prism, and the top end systems at Sun and HP come with off-the-shelf NVidia cards. Granted, they are a bit more expensive than "consumer" cards, but the technology is the same. And these systems are the absolute top when you buy as a workstation.

We do 3D image reconstruction - the biggest techbological advantage for us is 64-bit, but the extra memory might come in handy for volume visualization - basically when you try to create a translucent image of the voxels in a cube and be able to rotate it in real time. That can be done with textures.

Re:Scientific Applications

[ghoti]

Porting things to the GPU often involves "refactoring" them so that they use those aspects of the cards that are fast. You would be surprised what can be done with textures and vertex shaders - they're not confined to producing pretty images. There are libraries for dealing with sparse matrices on GPUs, etc.

Re:Scientific Applications

[DimGeo]

You are wrong, that's just what people here in Narvik are doing. My diploma thesis here will be on something similar.

And it is not like there are no contracts with actual companies and real projects going on in Norway. Interesting to see how long it will take Bulgaria to catch up...

Re:Scientific Applications

[can56]

To me, *Scientific Applications* means number
crunching. You can use any (many) programs to
view the output of a program, but for heavy duty
sci/comp jobs, like CFD computations, transforms
using FFTs or Wavelets, ..., the bottleneck is
in the FPU of the processor, not the GPU.

If you could program this (or any) graphics card
to run a FFT, or a SVD, or whatever algorithm
you need, with acceptable precision, and it runs
X times faster on the card than the native
processer (P4/AMD64/...) ... Profit!

Re:Scientific Applications

[Eric604]

For a fair comparison I assume an equal amount of texels for each texture type. I gess it doesn't differ much?

Old fart...

[stefanb]

Remeber your ancient TNT graphics card that had 16MB of memory?

Boy, was I happy when I got my Video 7 VRAM card with a whopping 512 kilobyte of RAM... but this is so long ago, it doesn't seem real anymore.

Cue Monty Python "uphill both ways, and we liked it" skit...

Re:Old fart...

[bwcarty]

640kb of Video RAM ought to be enough for anyone.

Re:Old fart...

[AxemRed]

Hell, I STILL know people using Intel boards with integrated video using 512kb of memory.

Re:Old fart...

[Reignking]

Who needs three dimensions?

Re:Old fart...

[mmkkbb]

Are you sure that wasn't just a video controller with its own on-board RAM?

*remembers the Mac IIci and IIsi where even if you had a video board, slow system RAM would be used for VRAM unless your RAM disk filled it up*

General GPU Programming

[mjinman]

The move might not matter a whole lot to the normal gamer, but those of us who are researching/using video cards as fast vector coprocessors love this as it increases the matrix (texture) size we can do operations on. (I especially love it since some of my stuff runs 40x on my Radeon X800 than my Athlon 64 - its all linear algrebra, finite difference codes)

Re:General GPU Programming

[jinzumkei]

agreed. using the GPU to process vectors is much better/faster.

For satellite imagery you can run into images that are 400-500 MB. Try using a desktop card for that!

Re:General GPU Programming

[WasterDave]

Ah, good. Someone that actually does this.

What's the precision like? Good? Good enough?

Cheers,
Dave

Re:General GPU Programming

[Anonymous Coward]

32bit, what do you expect? if floats are your thing, you're lucky; if youy need doubles ...

Re:General GPU Programming

[MarkTina]

Ha feeble!... try GIS :-)

3dfx

[Anonymous Coward]

Bah, Whatever biznitches.

The first real 3d card: Diamond Monster 3dfx Voodoo, 4MB.

Those rockets in TeamFortress had a glow around them for $300, and it was fantastic.

Re:3dfx

[SteveXE]

I had that 3d card, i bought it for Quake 2 and it ran great, a month later Unreal came out and it ran like shit...it was 4 years until i acually played Unreal and that was on a totally new pc with a Geforce 3. Never again will i let myself get so behind the times in gaming on PC.

So what was my excuse? Well i was only 16, so I couldnt afford anything new and my parents just didnt "get it"

Re:3dfx

[Anonymous Coward]

And bset of all you could play for 30 minutes at a time without it overheating and crashing your computer!

Re:3dfx

[TheRaven64]

Hardly the first real 3D card, although perhaps the first consumer-grade 3D card worthy of the name. I assume you didn't read the GLQuake release notes? It listed a number of features that only worked with real OpenGL accelerators, not with Voodoo Graphics cards.

Re:3dfx

[Anonymous Coward]

I had the 3dfx Voodoo 3 3000 AGP w/ 16 MB memory until a couple months ago. Got a Radeon 9200 w/ 128 MB of performance. Thing is that I went from Counter-Strike to Counter-Strike Source at the sametime. So I noticed 0 difference in playing, becuase of the beefed up HL2 engine.

Intel

[fembots]

Intel needs to start using this kind of marketing - pushes out a 10GHz CPU and claims users might not notice any performance improvement.

Re:Intel

[LWATCDR]

They do it is called the Prescott.

The good old days ...

[rkmath]

You kids have it all too easy now. We used to give the sysadmin the punchcards and get back a printout the next day. We did REAL programming on those days.
Who needs a video display ...

Re:The good old days ...

[Anonymous Coward]

We used to give the sysadmin the punchcards and get back a printout the next day. We did REAL programming on those days

Real punching you mean?

yeesh

[mattdm]

"Remeber your ancient TNT graphics card that had 16MB of memory?"

Okay, I knew the average age of slashdotters wasn't exactly "is allowed in most bars", but, yeesh, 1999 is now ancient?

Cue the "I remember whens"!

Re:yeesh

[game kid]

Cue the "I remember whens"!

Like the one when I played CrossCountryUSA on an Apple IIe at school? Now that was some slow graphics!

Re:yeesh

[mattdm]

Like the one when I played CrossCountryUSA on an Apple IIe at school? Now that was some slow graphics!

That's right -- with an, if I remember right, 8 K video RAM area. But there was a weird thing with the 80 column card.... see, now this counts as ancient to me. But relatively speaking, we're pretty young too. :)

Re:yeesh

[AceCaseOR]

Star Raiders on the Atari 800. That was good times.

Re:yeesh

[merreborn]

I remember thinking 16 meg of vram was a rediculous amount when those cards first came out, becuase my current computer at the time, a 486DX/33 had 8 meg of ram total. And that was pleanty enough to run windows 3.11, damnit. Hell, later, I managed to scrounge another 12 meg of ram for it, and a second 125 meg harddrive, so I installed windows 95 on that POS. Notepad was slow, but almost usable. Almost.

Re:yeesh

[sconeu]

I remember my ancient Hercules graphics card with 32KB.

Re:yeesh

[Queer Boy]

Cue the "I remember whens"!

I remember when my Macintosh used main system RAM (about 128k) as part of the graphics and my PC had 256K on the Graphics card.
Circa 96.

Re:yeesh

[Don'tTreadOnMe]

Star Raiders was so ahead of its time. I remember trying to get other kids to play it, and they couldn't ever figure it out, because it had too many steps.

Re:yeesh

[Frogbert]

I remember when my compaq did the same thing, circa 2005.

Re:yeesh

[Anonymous Coward]

The first micro computer I used was an HP with a 30 character LED screen and micro-cassette drive. Didn't have no stinkin' graphics card.

Re:yeesh

[aaronl]

Heh, I tried that on a 386 DX/40 with 4MB RAM. That sucked. The worst I ever did was a 486 SX/33 that was installed with 8MB, and then had 4MB pulled out. Significantly slower than if you had installed on the 4MB.

Re:yeesh

[Queer Boy]

I remember when my compaq did the same thing, circa 2005.

I'm sure it wasn't over NuBus at 10MHz though.

Re:yeesh

[Soldrinero]

I'm not even out of college yet, a lot of my firends had computers years earlier than I did, and I can still remember when my computer had 2 megs of RAM.

The computer I'm typing this on has a 32 meg video card in it. I got it eons ago when I came to college, back in 2001. Am I now qualified to say [geezer voice] "When I was your age..." ? [/geezer voice]

Re:yeesh

[vonsneerderhooten]

I actually had a 486dx4/100 with a 180 day trial of NT 4.0 on it. Talk about slow. That sucker had 24 MB ram, and a fancard. The fancard was full-length 16-bit ISA and had I/O and 2 bitchin 60 mm fans on it. Truly ahead of its time. That box had VLBus Video card to boot!

Re:yeesh

[Anonymous Coward]

When I bought my first 286 pc I could choose between a Hercules card and a Tseng ET3000 for about 800$. I took the Tseng VGA adapter which had 512KB.

Re:yeesh

[Tesen]

I bought my first TNT in 1997, I feel ancient ;)

Re:yeesh

[Tesen]

No wait, I am full of the icky stuff, 1999. Duh me, see I am senile too! :)

mspaint

[dassbaba]

That isn't even enough to run AA on mspaint. kekeke. ^_^

Almost Absurd

[ewhac]

"Would you like to mount unused graphics RAM as a swap device?"

Seriously, what's all that RAM used for when you're not playing games? It's still eating power; you may as well use it for something...

Schwab

Re:Almost Absurd

[Storlek]

Demo coders were using video ram for non-video back in 1992.

IIRC, they used video memory for the audio because regular memory wasn't fast enough, and then they used soundcard RAM for the video... or something like that; it's been a while.

Re:Almost Absurd

[ZX-3]

I've relocated my mouse driver into the RAM of my laser printer. When I need to load a big custom font, I simply stream the data from my CD-RW's write buffer, since I'm rarely burning and printing at the same time. However, one time I needed to, so I buffered the disc image chunks in MIDI instrument patch area in my SoundBlaster. The details are left as an exercise for the reader.

Re:Almost Absurd

[stephenisu]

Why not just use the HD Cache? I mean some of those have 8mb of space. It's not like it's doing anything THAT important.

Re:Almost Absurd

[CAIMLAS]

what would be the point of that? it's needless redundancy. It'd make more sense to allow the system to recognize it as actual memory, removing that 'extra layer'. If indeed that's how the OS treats it, at least.

Re:Almost Absurd

[sploo22]

It would, except it's slower for the CPU to access video RAM than main system memory. It only makes sense to use the video RAM for caching or when there's no other option.

Re:Almost Absurd

[Dirtside]

It's still eating power

Uh, no, it isn't. They're just sitting there. Even if the hardware is "on" in the general sense, transistors not being actively switched use up very, very little power.

Re:Almost Absurd

[Queer Boy]

Seriously, what's all that RAM used for when you're not playing games?

Compositing and texturing my windows and desktop.

Re:Almost Absurd

[Trinn]

Actually, as it is most likely DRAM not SRAM, it is actively using power every refresh cycle. DRAM is essentially capacitively stored rather than stored through transistors, which uses far more power because the value in each cell has to be refreshed every few ns/ms/whatever, so unless the video board has special power management it is using power.

Re:Almost Absurd

[ZX-3]

Why not just use the HD Cache? I mean some of those have 8mb of space. It's not like it's doing anything THAT important.

I'm already using that as a ramdisk.

consumers being deceived

[Anonymous Coward]

So many cards today are bloated with RAM that they don't utilize. Case in point: 256MB FX5200. But consumers think they are getting more, and getting people to buy your product is all that matters.

Re:consumers being deceived

[Eric604]

Not exactly deceived. They are getting what they are buying. Buying something that you don't need isn't being deceived, it just proves the buyer is stupid.

Okay...

[ndykman]

Wow. It really says something about the gaming market when you have a card whose outward specifications looks like a P3 machine (and a nice one). 540Mhz Core (CPU) Clock, 512MB of memory. And of course, lots of overclocking.

Here's a question. When will the GPU companies have to start playing tricks when the clock speeds finally give way to things like, oh, trying to cool a damn computer on a card without sounding like a jet plane is in your room becomes an issue. Like, well, now?

Re:Okay...

[Anonymous Coward]

So maybe one the x900 i will be able to play Doom3 with just the card?

Re:Okay...

[D. Book]

Here's a question. When will the GPU companies have to start playing tricks when the clock speeds finally give way to things like, oh, trying to cool a damn computer on a card without sounding like a jet plane is in your room becomes an issue. Like, well, now?

You might find this video (WMV) amusing.

Re:Okay...

[Queer Boy]

When will the GPU companies have to start playing tricks when the clock speeds finally give way to things like, oh, trying to cool a damn computer on a card without sounding like a jet plane is in your room becomes an issue. Like, well, now?

PCI express will have a cable connector that will be introduced soon that will allow manufacturers to move the devices that create heat away from the mainboard. This will increase cooling options at both ends.

In my day...

[William_Lee]

We didn't use separate memory for video processing...

We used custom video coprocessors named Denise running at 7 mhz and we liked it.

Back then we didn't need all these fancy colors, 4096 was plenty!

Re:In my day...

[Anonymous Coward]

4096? My first computer had 2. I'm 20.

Re:In my day...

[Atlantis69]

Aaah Denise, she was a gem wasn't she? Absolutely loved what she could do, and yes, at the time 4096 colours were plenty.

Remember Paula and Agnus ? ;)

Re:In my day...

[Anonymous Coward]

You didn't use separate memory? What was Chip RAM?

And HAM wasn't as useful as you make it out to be.

Re:In my day...

[Malc]

4096 colours? 7 mhz? You lucky lucky bastard! Let me introduce you to my friend 8086 with his accomplices CGA and Hercules.

Re:In my day...

[Eric604]

Sure it's sort of separate but it's also part of the 'normal' RAM address space. If there isn't (or not not enough) 'fast' RAM, the processor runs on Chip RAM. Chip RAM is used for video AND audio, so it's not separated for A/V.

This is why sound cards are no big deal!

[Anita Coney]

Ever wonder why GPUs are such a big deal and sound cards are such an after thought? It's all about numbers. ATI and nVidia can increase clock speed and double memory and make it look really impressive. Sound cards can't really do that.

If I were Creative I'd start including massive amounts of RAM on my cards. Plus, I'd throw a CPU in there too, if there isn't one already, and start hyping the clock speed. I'd even have a program to overclock both.

That way all the ignorant fanboys would start buying them simply for bragging rights.

Re:This is why sound cards are no big deal!

[Ahnteis]

Creative needs to start by working on their drivers/software. Ugh!

Re:This is why sound cards are no big deal!

[maglor_83]

It's all about numbers. ATI and nVidia can increase clock speed and double memory and make it look really impressive. Sound cards can't really do that.

That and the fact most games spend no time on the sound, so they don't make use of anything a sound-card has to offer.

Re:This is why sound cards are no big deal!

[SlayerofGods]

I bought a fancy sound card... but I didn't see any improvement over my old one. ;)

Re:This is why sound cards are no big deal!

[UWC]

Haven't most games these days abandoned the hardware accelerated sound and do their processing in software? I'm pretty sure I recall that Doom 3 was among the first true 5.1 games, with actually a good deal of attention spent on the sound, and it still did all of its sound processing in software.

As far as I can tell, if you just have 2-channel analog speakers and no need for any of the advanced multiple/digital input/output or DVD-audio high frequency type processing that newer cards offer, you'd be doing okay with a Soundblaster 16.

Re:This is why sound cards are no big deal!

[blahtree]

I think you've got things switched around a bit. The reason why video cards are such a big deal is not because of the numbers. Video card sales are pushed by gamers who need the latest and greatest video card to play the latest and greatest game. Old card, no fix.

Look at my own mother. As soon as Sims 2 came out, she had to have a new video card because it looked too choppy on the old one.

When was the last time you couldn't play a game because your sound card was too old? Creative would have a death wish if they started adding lots of RAM on their cards. Consumers are ignorant, but not that ignorant.

Re:This is why sound cards are no big deal!

[orkysoft]

Just like the way the Pentium 4 gives you FASTER INTARWEB!!11oneoen

Re:This is why sound cards are no big deal!

[Anonymous Coward]

It's all about numbers. ATI and nVidia can increase clock speed and double memory and make it look really impressive. Sound cards can't really do that. Rubbish. My 512.1 sound card will rock the audio world... They're a bugger to set up, though... "Front left. Front slightly less left. Not quite so front but still on the left"...

Re:This is why sound cards are no big deal!

[izomiac]

Well, didn't somebody make an "MP3" version of their soundcards? I didn't read the specs on it (I assume it was a decent card given the price), but how exactly was it supposed to help mp3 playing? Play them faster, louder? But I'd say that those three letters on the box helped sell more cards.

Re:This is why sound cards are no big deal!

[Anonymous Coward]

Because no one cares about audio. Audio source isn't getting better every quarter, like cg video is.

To increase your video performance and overall quality you just swap your video card. With an audio card you'd need good speakers. And then surround sound. Most people like me, don't have their computer somewhere where I can have 5.1 speakers setup around me, I am not that geeky.

And fast processors would do nothing, either it can decode the audio or it can't, that's all. What needs to be better is audio processing and output, which again... most people are using $20 altec lansing speakers and they won't see a difference.

Just look at the most popular audio device... a portable MP3 player playing lossy compressed music with acceptable audio output. I love music, I love audio and I can still bear to listen to compressed music.

And again, audio that is being played is precorded and sound real, it's not generated audio.

When we get to a point where audio has to be rendered in day to day applications (games) then we'll see audio cards with big processors and lots of memory.

Re:This is why sound cards are no big deal!

[dmwst30]

It's a matter of how good the output devices are. With a faster video card, you SEE more frames per second, at a higher resolution, with maximal detail. Monitors can easily show this. Almost everyone can see this easily.

Compare this to sound cards. Even if you have good speakers, and a quiet room, how many people can tell the difference between their onboard AC97 codec sound output or higher end cards? People still argue what bit rates are "CD-quality"!

Re:This is why sound cards are no big deal!

[saleenS281]

and your ignorance shines true. The "MP3" version came bundled with MP3 software. Just like the "Gamer" version came bundled with games. *SHOCK* Perhaps read up first next time.

Re:This is why sound cards are no big deal!

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe YOU need to check your facts, Creative makes/made an MP3 version of their card. It doesn't do mp3 decoding, but ENCODES mp3. Not sure if id trust such an encoder for quality over software encoders out there nowdays, but there were such cards.

Re:This is why sound cards are no big deal!

[izomiac]

Ah, MP3 software... because Winamp isn't good enough?

Re:This is why sound cards are no big deal!

[still cynical]

Save your money, just put a fan and heatsink on it. No one who would buy it would know better anyway.

Forget making anything idiot proof. The REAL money is in marketing directly TO the idiots.

Re:This is why sound cards are no big deal!

[Anita Coney]

But even ATI admits the extra memory is useless. Higher clock speeds and added memory do not always correspond to better performance. For ignorant fan-boys, most of the time it's only about the stats.

Re:This is why sound cards are no big deal!

[teledyne]

Adding RAM to sound cards would be great! Imagine loading 1GB of soundclips into your soundcard, relieving much stress off of your system RAM. That would be great for DJs and electronic and techno artists.

Re:This is why sound cards are no big deal!

[WasterDave]

Ever wonder why GPUs are such a big deal and sound cards are such an after thought? It's all about numbers.

Nah, nothing to do with that. The problem is that the most basic onboard soundcard you can possibly buy is fine. The AC'97 I have on my PC is fine. The Soundblaster Pro you bought in 1995 is fine. Sure there are improvements to be had, but it's not an order of magnitude is it?

The other way to look at it is to, indeed, look at the numbers. With 44.1KHz audio a soundcard has to "render" 88k samples per second. A video card pulling 50 fps on 1024x768 is doing approximately 500 times as much work, and with anisotropic filters, antialiasing and procedural textures each of those samples takes a lot more work. *This* is why video cards are such a battleground, and so damn expensive.

Dave

Re:This is why sound cards are no big deal!

[glsunder]

When I overclocked my soundcard, I thought I had broke it. The dog wasn't happy either.

Re:This is why sound cards are no big deal!

[blahtree]

That's simply how the technology develops. The extra memory is useless, for now. Within short order there will be an application that requires it. Guaranteed.

This would never happen with sound cards because there isn't any application that requires anything whizbang on the sound side.

Re:This is why sound cards are no big deal!

[ch-chuck]

Hmmm, a joke marked 'insightful'. Your card should have 360 or 720 channels. That way speaker 0 would be front, 90 right, 180 back, 270, left, etc.

I actually saw an old Wards quadra-phonic turntable/8-track system at an antique store the other day. It had a joystick for the balance control ;))

Re:This is why sound cards are no big deal!

[Anita Coney]

But I wouldn't put memory on a sound card to make it sound better. I'd put it on merely to sell them to ignorant fan-boys.

Re:This is why sound cards are no big deal!

[tsangc]

Ever wonder why GPUs are such a big deal and sound cards are such an after thought?

I think the reason why soundcards don't change very much because the fundamental methods of generating sound isn't compute intensive.

With 3D video, you're computing the display output, ray tracing, shading, whatever it is. Algorithms not samples define the visuals. Certainly there are "samples" (ie, texture maps) but these themselves need to be rendered through computation. At the same time, resolutions for display are increasing, requiring more computational horsepower. Hence a need for progressively faster CPUs to drive larger, more details and faster framerate visuals.

With audio, a lot of the audio world is still sample based--there usually aren't algorithms generating sounds from fundamental principals. If there are, it's in a highly specific use (ie, virtual instruments in something like Cubase, which uses the main CPU) or it's in some sort of environmental processing, like DSP effects, positioning etc which don't require that much performance past existing products today that have integrated DSPs. That and audio resolution in general isn't increasing--not at a rate compared to someone going from a 800x600 to 1920x1280 pixel display. Even adding extra channels doesn't seem to drive this requirement further.

As a result, I guess you just don't see the requirement to have "more powerful sound cards".

Re:This is why sound cards are no big deal!

[Anonymous Coward]

44.1KHz is 44100 samples per second.

Re:This is why sound cards are no big deal!

[Anonymous Coward]

As a result, I guess you just don't see the requirement to have "more powerful sound cards".

Tell that to these guys!

Re:This is why sound cards are no big deal!

[CAIMLAS]

if the industry were to move to vector-based audio, we might see more sound card action in the market...

Re:This is why sound cards are no big deal!

[AJWM]

You're thinking 2-dimensionally.

You want left horizontal, left up, overhead, up to the right, as well as up and forward, down and forward, etc....

(Although, to get serious for a moment, with good headphones and appropriately clever signal processing software, you really only need two channels: one for each ear. And maybe a subwoofer. The signal processing software mimics the various psychoacoustic cues you get from sounds in various directions being filtered by your external ear flaps, bouncing off your shoulders, and all the other subtle cues that let you localize a sound source in 3D.)

Re:This is why sound cards are no big deal!

[joto]

Ever wonder why GPUs are such a big deal and sound cards are such an after thought? It's all about numbers. ATI and nVidia can increase clock speed and double memory and make it look really impressive. Sound cards can't really do that.

Sure they can. Soundcards can add inputs and outputs. And they can improve quality. But only musicians need or want that.

For the typical users, modern sound cards are perfectly adequate for doing what people use them for: playing sound! (whether it is in stereo or some surround sound scheme)

For desktop users, modern graphic cards are also perfectly adequate. But gamers still want faster and better. And there are a lot more gamers than musicians.

By the way: Adding RAM or processing power wouldn't help much, though. Musicians want low-latency, not larger buffers. And software-samplers, synths, and effects have pretty much won the battle with soundfonts and on-board DSP-effects in this market. Your soundcard does I/O, your CPU does processing! A real solution to offload the CPU for DSP might be popular though, but it shouldn't really have anything to do with the sound card (the cell processor perhaps?)

Re:This is why sound cards are no big deal!

[joto]

if the industry were to move to vector-based audio, we might see more sound card action in the market...

That would result in aliasing. But how about spline-based audio? Now, that's a thought...

Re:This is why sound cards are no big deal!

[joto]

(Although, to get serious for a moment, with good headphones and appropriately clever signal processing software, you really only need two channels: one for each ear. And maybe a subwoofer. The signal processing software mimics the various psychoacoustic cues you get from sounds in various directions being filtered by your external ear flaps, bouncing off your shoulders, and all the other subtle cues that let you localize a sound source in 3D.)

And a gyro sensor so you won't be fooled when you move your head around...

Re:This is why sound cards are no big deal!

[StikyPad]

I don't really believe that's possible without taking a model of the listener's ear. Shoulders, okay, but most people's ears are different enough that I can't imagine a one-size-fits-all solution.

Re:This is why sound cards are no big deal!

[owlstead]

Well, they are not innovating as much as you would expect either. Where is that sound card with build in equali9zer already? Where is the one with dual digital out so I can hookup the stereo as well? Where is one with a phone connector to use with skype? Do we have a digital midi connector yet? Sheesh.

Re:This is why sound cards are no big deal!

[enosys]

The SoundBlaster Pro was only 8 bit. That is pretty bad for music which has significant dynamic range. You can hear quantization noise during quiet parts because there are too few possible output levels available. It was also only able to do mono at 44.1 kHz. If you wanted stereo you'd have to settle for 22.05 kHz. Clearly this isn't good enough.

Later cards could do 44.1 kHz stereo, which is CD quality, but it wasn't enough because DVD video has 48 kHz audio with more channels. The extra channels can be quite useful in games.

Now there's DVD audio with 96 khz and even higher sampling rates and 24-bit resolution. Many cards can't do that.

So if you want to hear sound any card is good enough. You can even stick a DAC on a parallel port or use a PC speaker driver. However, if you want the best quality there have been a lot of advances.

Re:This is why sound cards are no big deal!

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't the real answer that most people don't care much about audial realism as long as it's loud and sounds brutal/impressive? The sound modeling in most games is analogous to the visuals of a cheap dating sim with some filters thrown in (using samples instead of still images). Where's the realtime acoustic simulations based on scene geometry and proper sound modelling (as opposed to using looped samples)?

I guess we're stuck with aural slideshows for now :(

Re:This is why sound cards are no big deal!

[Fingalscave]

Or, to sum up: The sound our current hardware/software produces already sounds as good as or better than reality (to most of us, at least). Whereas the graphics we can produce still lack compared to reality. Faster graphics cards bring reality (slowly) closer.

Re:This is why sound cards are no big deal!

[damiam]

It doesn't seem very plausible to me either, but I've heard some CDs (the example I'm thinking of at the moment is either Pink Floyd's The Final Cut or Roger Water's Amused to Death, I'm not sure) that do some quite effective surround sound effects using only headphones. So it is possible, at least to a certain extent.

Re:This is why sound cards are no big deal!

[AJWM]

The brain adapts surprisingly well -- a very short training sequence ("this is left, this is up, this is behind" etc) will do.

I've heard a recording of a moving sound source made with microphones inserted into somebody else's ears, also with microphones in a head-and-shoulders dummy's ears. Amazingly easy to track and to adjust for the slight differnces.

Re:This is why sound cards are no big deal!

[PReDiToR]

That would result in aliasing. But how about spline-based audio? Now, that's a thought...

You could use the extra memory to reticulate the splines I guess?

Re:This is why sound cards are no big deal!

[adolf]

If I were Creative I'd start including massive amounts of RAM on my cards. Plus, I'd throw a CPU in there too, if there isn't one already

That game has already been played. Creative Labs won.

Somewhere around here, I've got a Soundblaster AWE 32 which sports an EMU 8000 DSP, and has a pair of 4-meg 30-pin SIMMs socketed on it for loading samples.

Last time I saw it, it was in the same drawer as the Ensoniq Soundscape. The Soundscape had, in addition to an EMU8k, a Motorola 68000 CPU. It was a nice card, and generally sounded better than the AWE. But it only had 2 megabytes of ROM and essentially zero useful RAM, so you were stuck with what Ensoniq thought were good samples.

It wasn't long after these two competing cards were released that Creative purchased Ensoniq, and did away with on-board RAM almost entirely as they cheapened their product lines. Creative Labs was thus victorious.

So, since they killed the RAM game years ago, now they fudge the output numbers. 8 or 9 channels of 192KHz 24-bit audio, and so on. Nevermind that it's completely useless technology for any enviroment which contains noisy devices like computers, as it does seem to be keeping the company afloat.

Re:This is why sound cards are no big deal!

[Anonymous Coward]

Plus, I'd throw a CPU in there too, if there isn't one already, and start hyping the clock speed. I'd even have a program to overclock both.

The emu10k1 is actually (apparently) a quite powerful DSP. Creative advertised this fact fairly heavily back when the SB Live cards first came out in, IIRC, 99 (98?).

Re:This is why sound cards are no big deal!

[Val314]

> Algorithms not samples define the visuals.

maybe its time to do the same with Sound?
Render it instead of faking the effects (thats you EAX).

Re:This is why sound cards are no big deal!

[lachlan76]

Pink Floyd: The Wall, in Hey You.

That sound in there is so strange, it sounds like it is coming out of the room next to me...

Re:This is why sound cards are no big deal!

[Anonymous Coward]

Audigy2 zs has a built in equalizer

Re:This is why sound cards are no big deal!

[CAIMLAS]

Classic reference. :)

I should dig that up. It'd run blazingly fast on my "modern" systems which are somewhere in the order of 20 times as fast as the systems I used to play SC2K on...

New technology is for tools

[krikat]

People say competition is good for consumers, but it really just pisses me off. All these companies try so hard to be the first person that develops something, that they make it before it's useful. Cool people wait until stuff is obsolete and then buy it.

What's the limit?

[AK Marc]

The most anyone would ever need for video RAM is 640 MB. You can quote me on that.

Re:What's the limit?

[Anonymous Coward]

Then 3Dlabs has them both beat. The Realizm 800 has 640 MB of RAM.

chicken and the egg

[Anonymous Coward]

besides pure mhz, new hardware technology rarely speeds up application performance. ie. sse, sse2, 3dnow, directx versions, etc, etc. the hardware always has to come before the software. so while this may be the case now that 512mb wont help but maybe in 2 years. who would have needed 512mb of ram on a desktop 4 years ago? chicken and the egg

Re:chicken and the egg

[Anonymous Coward]

"rarely speeds up application performance" immediately before applications are optimized to take advantage of that new hardware i meant

How much more?

[pickapeppa]

I tend to be a technological rainbow chaser when it come to video cards. Hopefully the day will come where I get a decently priced card that will run Oblivion (or other next-gen games) OK. I mean, our eye are only so good, at one point will video cards be good enough that no further major innovations are necessary? Bet it won't be long.

Could someone explain to me...

[PsiPsiStar]

... because I'm missing somthing... why would having more memory not be helpful?

Re:Could someone explain to me...

[maglor_83]

If nothing actually uses that memory. For example, if you had 15TB of RAM (I don't like over-exaggerating), the vast majority would be doing nothing, hence it wouldn't be helpful.

Re:Could someone explain to me...

[Ironsides]

Think about it in relation to normal computer usage. At some point, you have so much ram that you have already loaded all of your applications into main ram. At that point, any increase in ram will do absolutely nothing. Same thing goes for video cards. At some point, the game isn't going to be able to use that extra ram. 256 Meg is already overkill for just about all games. I don't know of any that can take advantage of 256 over 128 (yet).

Re:Could someone explain to me...

[Anonymous Coed]

I don't know of any that can take advantage of 256 over 128

Other than say, for instance, Half-Life 2 or Doom 3 on the highest detail texture settings?

Re:Could someone explain to me...

[Eric604]

That's exactly the wrong thinking that the manufacturs are hoping for. The question should be: Why would more memory be helpful?
Sum up your requirements and then decide if you need more ram.

Re:Could someone explain to me...

[mc6809e]

If nothing actually uses that memory. For example, if you had 15TB of RAM (I don't like over-exaggerating), the vast majority would be doing nothing, hence it wouldn't be helpful.

It depends on what you mean by "doing nothing".

With 15TB you could do massive pre-computation of scene details. When it came time to render, you could access some part of the 15TB for real-time display. Your interactions with the scene might mean that you never get near accessing a total of 15TB, but all the data needs to be there just in case.

So, is it doing nothing just because you might never access it?

Re:Could someone explain to me...

[PsiPsiStar]

Oh. Thanks. As someone who did video editing and 3D design, that didn't make much sense to me. Thought there might have been a problem with the hardware or somthing.

Re:Could someone explain to me...

[PsiPsiStar]

Well, I do video editing and 3D design.

The notion of more memory not being helpful is somthing I have difficulty grappling with.

And I tend to open several applications at once.

I was just wondering if there was some functional problem... such as "having memory of X capacity and processing power of Y capacity means that it would be faster to page" or somthing like that (not exactly that, but you get the idea), some physical difficulty which prevents the resource from being used.

Re:Could someone explain to me...

[Eric604]

No not at all. If you are thinking about double buffering... that only takes about 4 MB.

The amount of required videoram depends mostly on the amount of textures you use (size, resolution and colordepth). Add 32MB for framebuffers and such, any more vram will not increase performance. I suggest to first look at the CPU, normal RAM and disk usage and upgrade that.

Who had more RAM?

[dpilot]

When I first got my G400 and plugged it into my K6-3, the G400 had 32MB and the K6-3 had 64MB. That the two are in the same ballpark seems crazy.

Now the K6-3 is still in service, though upgraded to 192MB. But the new GEForce we got for the kids' computer (equipped with 512MB) came with 256MB, more than my main desktop, and half as much as it's resident machine.

On a more serious note, it would be interesting to understand how transient the data in that graphics card is, and how much main memory you need in the PC in order to pump enough data into the graphics card to really use all of that graphics ram.

Re:Who had more RAM?

[Blaskowicz]

sounds like the PC/AT I got once. It had 512KB of RAM, and I put a Trident with 512KB in it (monochrome text display wasn't cutting it :D )

Re:Who had more RAM?

[Bitmanhome]

For 3D games, I bet main memory is wasted on a duplicate copy of the textures. i.e. Textures are loaded into main mem, then uploaded to the card. If it weren't for that, a 128MB system could keep a 512MB card happy.

Ancient????

[lbmouse]

Remeber your ancient TNT graphics card that had 16MB of memory?

How rude! That is more memory than my first computer. Remember your somewhat old TRS-80 that had no graphics memory?

Re:Ancient????

[El Gordo Motoneta]

How rude!

"how rude"? 3CPO, is that you?

I can't believe I'm going to admit this, but...

[robyannetta]

I play EverQuest 2. [flame on]

In the game, I have the option of clicking an "Extreme performance" tab that will tax the hell out of my video card (if it can handle it).

Sony's software has a warning that says "...to be used on video cards with a minimum of 512MB video memory..."

I have a Geforce 6800 with 256MB of DDR3 memory and dual 400MHz RAMdacs. This "Extereme performance" option taxes the hell out of the card. I'm getting one frame per second in this mode!

It is really how much memory you have, or should they just add more processing power to the cards? Perhaps a quad RAMdac?

Re:I can't believe I'm going to admit this, but...

[be-fan]

Heh. The RAMDAC is the digital to analog converter used to drive a CRT display. The 400Mhz doesn't refer to processing power, but the bandwidth of the converter. A higher-bandwidth converter is capable of driving a display with more pixels at higher refresh rates.

Re:I can't believe I'm going to admit this, but...

[karnal]

RAMdacs don't affect a video card's ability to process frames (as in, increase the frame rate in a game from 20 to 30, based on ramdac alone).

RAMdacs only affect the output stage; it's what essentially limits what kind of resolution you can get from the VGA connector on the back. It's the stage in the card that reads the framebuffer portion (after the card has already created the "frame" of video) and pumps it out the VGA cable.

Re:I can't believe I'm going to admit this, but...

[Proc6]

You'll be interested to know that Everquest II was designed completely shittily (is shittily a word?). It uses nothing higher than Pixel Shader 1.0, and uses the GPU on your card for almost nothing.

EQ2 is almost entirely bottlenecked by the CPU of the machine. This has been proven by shader dumps, performance comparisons between card and CPUs and the fact that if you watch your GPU temp will remain idle when playing EQ2 but max out on Doom3 for example. SOE can't code a game for shit, and the fact they have the NVidia logo plastered on everything including the splash screen yet at least 1,235 posts worth of people including me get god awful frame rates at stuttering at any performance setting, proves this. Just a reminder, don't buy a new video card thinking it will help with EQ2's graphics performance. The fps difference between a Ti4200, ATI 9800, and GeForce 6800 Ultra is very small. Get a faster CPU, or better yet, spend your money on a game written by programmers who don't have "C++ for Dummies" sitting on their desk next to them as they write game engine code.

Whats taxing your system on Extreme Quality setting is all CPU related, your GFX card is still sitting idle mostly.

Re:I can't believe I'm going to admit this, but...

[shish]

Slightly offtopic, but what does this extreme mode actually do?

Re:I can't believe I'm going to admit this, but...

[robyannetta]

I spent $400 on a video card for nothing?

Damn marketing assholes...

Re:I can't believe I'm going to admit this, but...

[Spy Hunter]

What is likely happening is: the card is hardly used at all; it is sitting there idle most of the time. The bottleneck is elsewhere. Specifically, since you don't have enough video RAM to store all the textures, the rest are stored in system RAM and copied over the AGP or PCI Express bus every frame (like el cheapo video cards used to do). This is the reason video RAM exists: using main memory over an AGP or PCI Express connection is extraordinarily slow in comparison.

Re:I can't believe I'm going to admit this, but...

[geekoid]

no, damn crappy software.

No hardware will magically make a program well written.

DOOM 3

[Eisenfaust]

Might be nice for max quality settings in DOOM 3. The recommended video ram for the settings is 512MB. I guess setting enables uncompressed textures, which is nice, but larger compressed textures would probably be more exciting.

I have 256MB in my X800 Pro which does great, but going up to 512MB might allow developers to put in higher detailed textures. I still notice how poor a lot of texture look really close up, even in the newest games.

If theres anything that kills video performance its running out of video ram, so I can see why 512MB might be reasonable on the bank-buster model.

Well...

[Blue-Footed Boobie]

People who are doing serious CAD/3D-Graphics work ahve had a 640mb video card availiable to them for some time. It's not even that pricey...

It's the 3D-Labs Wildcat Realizm 800, and it's PCI-Express too.

Re:Well...

[RM6f9]

Searched the site, no mention of MSRP.

Re:Well...

[JavaMoose]

Pretty sure it is right around USD $2,500.

Shoes to fill out

[MyIS]

I think this is great. And there is already software to fill out these new specs too.

There is a next generation of engines that make the gap smaller and smaller between real-time graphics and rendered animated films. Take a look at this Unreal Engine 3 page for example.

What makes these new engines exciting is not just the fancy graphics. Increasing the resources on the hardware ultimately allows for a much more streamlined art pipeline, easier engine development and overall a faster and simpler product creation.

Re:Shoes to fill out

[Andy Gardner]

Wow! cool so EA can churn out games even cheaper and faster while charging me the same and all i have to do is buy more expensive hardware!
....Hang on, that doesnt make sens............DID YOU SAY 512Mb! quick quick where do i sign!?

Re:Shoes to fill out

[StikyPad]

Eh.. this guy still looks unnatural to me. The chains around him STILL look like the flat textures they are, as do his teeth, and the joints on the gun. I'm sure the chains will stretch unnaturally as the creature moves, and the barrel of the gun is still a hexagon.

There's still a long way to go and, in fact, I don't think we'll ever reach the point where a single processor will be capable of creating an image on the fly that matches the quality of a prerendered.

Re:Shoes to fill out

[danila]

Duh. Of course, he is unnatural, it's only 2005 and noone is saying Unreal 3 Engine is photorealistic. However, guys from both Epic and id Software believe that somewhere around 2010 it will be finally possible to render a videorealistic level fly-by of a static world in real time on commodity hardware using one of their new engines. Expect to have realistic motion (including human motion) around 2015.

Today, no matter how impressive the visuals are, they are not fully realistic, not fully natural, and the designers/programmers are fully aware of it, thank you very much.

Re:Shoes to fill out

[StikyPad]

Duh? Nice vernacular.

If you'd bothered to read the grandparent, you'd have seen that I was replying to the statement:

There is a next generation of engines that make the gap smaller and smaller between real-time graphics and rendered animated films. Take a look at this Unreal Engine 3 page [unrealtechnology.com] for example.

Nobody said anything about photorealism.

Re:Shoes to fill out

[danila]

Boo... No need to start flaming. I've read both your post and the parent. MyIS said that the gap between real-time game engine renders and pre-rendered animation (not clear whether he meant cartoonish animation as in Incredibles or realistic animation as in Advent Children) becomes smaller.

You countered it with a very expressive "Eh.." and complained that the "guy" still looks unnatural, as if anyone claimed he was already supposed to look natural instead.

I chimed in and pointed out that you don't have a clue. The graphics today are not as good as prerendered animation. We could do half-decent lighting only for a year or so. We could do satisfactory focus/blur effects for half a year. Bumpmapping is about one year old. Of course, the graphics are worse than prerendered animation. But the gap is closing. In 1984 Lucasfilm made a CGI short with motion blur, while PC could render not-so-realistic graphics of Sopwith. In 1989 Spielberg could render convincing digital water in Abyss, while on the PC the water was still usually rendered using a two-colour sprite. In 1995 Pixar made Toy Story and id Software made Hexen. But in 2001 we saw somewhat realistic Final Fantasy in the movies and somewhat realistic Max Payne on the PC. The gap is closing and it will likely be closed in less than 5 years, because, as I pointed out, in 2010 we will probably achieve not just animation quality, but videorealism in games.

So would you please stop complaining about hexagonal guns. And learn to read. The parent said the gap is getting smaller, not that it has already disappeared.

Re:Shoes to fill out

[StikyPad]

Learn to read what? The points that you omitted from your first post?

I'm not sure whose side of the coin you're arguing.

1995 - Toy Story & Hexen
2001 - Final Fantasy & Max Payne

I'd say that the prerendered quality is advancing faster than the videogame quality.

But you're missing the point. Video cards and rendering farms use different methods for creating images. The same 3D model will always look better ray traced than it will on a 3D video card. (Forgive me for not knowing the proper term for the method a video card uses to calculate the display). So the real question shouldn't be "When can we pull off enough tricks to make the image look equal in quality to the prerendered (raytraced) version," but "When will the processing power be great enough to raytrace on the fly."

It seems to me that as video cards keep adding tricks to make the image more realistic, eventually they're going to be using MORE processing power than it would take to just render it with raytracing. Sure, they can keep approaching the same levels of quality, but they'll never match it until they switch rendering methods.

Re:Shoes to fill out

[danila]

I'm not sure whose side of the coin you're arguing.

I am arguing with you, so we are on the opposite sides of coin. :)

I'd say that the prerendered quality is advancing faster than the videogame quality.

This is simply not true, and my examples from 1984-1989-1995-2001 demonstrate it. Prerendered CGI is improving very fast, but real-time PC graphics are improving even faster.

There is no point in doing raytracing if you can avoid it. But in filmmaking the cost of renderfarms is never the limiting factor, so these people are not very motivated in cutting corners. On the PC the situation is different, that's why nVidia and ATi are forced to constantly invent new ways to do the same thing faster.

Check out this and this. The gap is already very small and it's getting smaller ridiculously fast. Some things are still missing, first of all, realistic lighting and shadowing and realistic pixel shaders, but these technologies are only 1-year old on the PC, so give them some time (i.e. 2-3 years) to fully shine.

If you know the facts, there can be no doubt about it - real-time graphics will soon catch up with rendered CGI.

Not Really Pushing the Envelope....

[Anonymous Coward]

3DLabs VP990 Pro is a 512MB card that has been out awhile. They're also AGP based.

1K you damm young wipper-snappers

[ukoda]

My first video card had 1K, not 1MB. It was an ETI kit set for the S100 bus and gave 64 x 16 characters and 128 x 48 graphics.
Monty Python Quote
And you tell the young people today that and they won't believe you !

Ancient video cards

[DeadBeef]

> Remeber your ancient TNT graphics card that had 16MB of memory?

I don't think anything with 16mb qualifies as ancient. I still have cards like that in use in firewalls etc. Ugh, people put video cards in PCI slots before AGP, and ISA slots before that ( I'm sure other weird and wonderful buses before that ). Anyone else remember how many characters per second their old beasts could do?

Maybe Id's taking a year off dead for tax reasons.

[Thud457]

"It's the weird color-scheme that freaks me. Every time you try to operate one of these weird black controls, which are labeled in black on a black background, a small black light lights up black to let you know you've done it."

Working on 2-4 MB every day, you insensitive clod!

[Anonymous Coward]

SNCR

Remember your ancient TNT graphics card that had 16MB of memory?

The extra 256Mb is useless?

[winkydink]

I guess then its only purpose is to help make up for other, um, shortcomings?

Pffftt....

[Nonillion]

512k should be enough video ram for anybody..

Re:Pffftt....

[iggymanz]

Pffft, 8 bits x 80 characters x 24 lines = 1.5kB in your terminal of choice connected to your serial port at 1200 baud. or 1.3KB if you don't need lower case and use 7 bits/char.

Does this come with nicely chromed exhaust pipes?

[Zyblor]

Is it only me, or does this seem like the gpu industry is pushing the 512mb purely for the sake of selling a few more $500+ video cards. I'm waiting for the latest and greatest card with giant chromed 'cooling' fins.

640k

[Anonymous Coward]

You'll never need more than 640k...

So.....

[TrevorB]

If it has 512MB of memory, and a hefty GPU, can it run Linux?

Re:So.....

[Eric604]

Add some keyboard/mouse/ethernet connectors and you're ready to go.

Not Funny

[spin2cool]

I still use a 16 MB card, you insensitive clod!!

16 meg cards ain't THAT old!

[Anonymous Coward]

Remeber your ancient TNT graphics card that had 16MB of memory?

Better watch what you say. Some of us still use old graphics cards. I view slashdot everyday from an 8 mb video card and it works just fine. Correct me if I am wrong but isn't the linux audience quite large here? With a large audience of linux users your bound to have some if not most of them on older hardware such as video cards that old and older!

~ Nick Manley

Re:16 meg cards ain't THAT old!

[Anonymous Coward]

In terms of age for video RAM, 16MB is about 5 generations old - 32MB, 64MB, 128MB, 256MB, and 512MB.

People should maximize usage of their older hardware to reduce these things ending in landfills or rivers.

My memory increases

[famazza]

• 1992 - 286 (third world country) - Trident 256KB
• 
  1995 - 486 - Trident 1MB
  2001 - K6II - Diamond 32 MB
  2004 - Atlhon XP - ATi 128 MB
  

Probably I'll reach 512 MB in 2010.

Re:My memory increases

[Anonymous Coward]

I was just remember the feeling of *power* I had when I upgraded my 486/33 from 4MB to 16MB of *RAM* (not video, I had the 1MB trident)... for $600 for 4 x 4MB SIMMs. Man, all that memory...

And then I loaded WindowsNT 3.1, and thought "what a piece of sh*t, I can barely run Solitaire in 16MB!!". (ok, yes, it *was* a piece of sh*t, but... looking back at 16MB of memory...).

Actually, I still have a pile of old 4MB Rage3D's.. they make great little video cards to just throw in a server thats gonna go in a rack and probably never actually *have* a monitor hooked up (unless it croaks, and its more than good enough to see the BIOS messages on boot)..

Re:My memory increases

[B3ryllium]

*sob, sob* :'(

I'm still running a Voodoo Banshee 16MB AGP1x, you insensitive clod! ;)

Re:My memory increases

[Fulcrum of Evil]

Drop by later and I'll give you one of my 32M discards.

Re:My memory increases

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll take you up on that if you're serious. Just post your full home address here on Slashdot, and I'll come around.

Re:My memory increases

[kamapuaa]

Thanks for keeping us updated. Please feel free to post to a public forum when you get a new wireless mouse.

Re:My memory increases

[bjb]

Heck, I remember when I wanted to write a hack to use the unused memory from my 1MB SVGA card as main memory. Then again, my 286 only had 1MB itself..

Nothing new here... 512mb is common...

[purduephotog]

... on higher end video cards, that is.

3D Labs WildCat VP990 Pro 512mb
Quadro FX4400 PCI-EXPRESS SLI 512MB.
I think Dome makes the 3rd card I'm thinking of - 512mb there too (or maybe we asked them to, I can't remember).

So .... yeah. 512mb in a CONSUMER card? Sounds good. But that's really nothing new at all for professional cards....

Re:Nothing new here... 512mb is common...

[AlphaJoe]

Exactly, but the Wildcat Realizm 800 has the 640meg version as well.

Nothing new...

Re:Nothing new here... 512mb is common...

[fafalone]

And what's more, the Wildcat Realizm 800 has 640MB of memory. Anyone can buy it, but it costs around $2,000.

Re:Nothing new here... 512mb is common...

[MBraynard]

Trade referrals with me? You do mine, I'll do yours. I got the free Ipod and the free Xbox already.

Re:Maybe Id's taking a year off dead for tax reaso

[sport_160]

Don't push it again.

Crazy amounts of RAM

[Roger_Wilco]

Remeber your ancient TNT graphics card that had 16MB of memory?

Uh, I remember when a friend's ZX81 computer was much nicer because it had the 16 kByte RAM module, ours had only 1 kByte.

My card

[pyro_dude]

Remeber your ancient TNT graphics card that had 16MB of memory?

No. I am still using the ATI All in Wonder that I found mispriced at $30 instead of $180 at CompUSA (and they had no problem giving it to me at the lower price, even when I informed them about it). It must be from the late 90s, cause I have upgraded just about all my stuff except my speakers since I got my computer in 98, but that has remained the same. It has 8 MB of memory.

And yet I have now gotten a Viewsonic monitor, which the card can keep running at 1600x1200/87/16 bpp flawlessly, plus the card's TV tuner lets me watch all the Knicks games (or whatever I prefer, I don't watch much TV these days) I want on the 21" screen that tops out my old 13" TV set.

I see no reason to buy a new graphics card. (If I weren't a pure coder, maybe I'd upgrade it for games, but I generally dont do much gaming, certainly not anything mainstream.)

The real kicker is, if I had sent in the $20 rebate, all this would have cost me only $10.

The Difference

[eno2001]

ATI's 512 Megs of RAM makes no difference when compared to 256 Megs of RAM. NVidia's 512 Megs of RAM makes all the difference in the world to a Linux user like me. When you're dealing with a superior technology (Linux, NVidia, ALSA, etc...), hardware is always going to be the main factor. When you're dealing with inferior technology they are going to implement as much as they can in software (Hello ATI). Flame on dudes...

They're a bright bunch of people

[Bustback]

Let's all pitch in to give ATI a cookie for their uber-forethought in figuring out that adding 256 MB more RAM could help gaming. ... then take it away and eat it in front of 'em for waiting until 2005 to figure it out.

Whoooo. :P

Ancient?

[DeltaFour]

Remeber your ancient TNT graphics card that had 16MB of memory?

Remember? I still have one! It's a great little card, too -- STB Velocity 4400, Riva TNT chipset with 16MB of memory. Getting ready to put it in a Gentoo HTPC box, in fact.

Bah!

[Anonymous Coward]

Remeber your ancient TNT graphics card that had 16MB of memory?

Remember it? I'm still using it, you insensitive clod!

(Actually, it's a TNT 2 with 32MB).

Hitting the wall

[shoptroll]

Well... sooner or later we're gonna hit the point where textures are so big you can't fit any more detail into them. When that happens, I doubt there'll be much more reason to upgrade your card for Video Ram reasons.

The 512MB barrier has already been broken

[songofthephoenix]

The Wildcat Realizm 800 already broke that barrier:

640MB GDDR3 total memory

512MB GDDR3 unied memory with 512-bit-wide interface bus

128 MB GDDR3 DirectBurst memory with 128-bit-wide interface bus

Full Specs Here

Re:The 512MB barrier has already been broken

[blueworm]

That's not aimed at gamers, though. Maybe they meant it was the first card made for gamers.

Re:The 512MB barrier has already been broken

[songofthephoenix]

What is the exact specification within this card that makes this not aimed at gamers? Is it merely within the marketing team's hands when they set out to define a target audience? or is it something about the card that make's it no good for games?

Re:The 512MB barrier has already been broken

[RzUpAnmsCwrds]

3DLabs pixel shader / vertex shader implementation is broken and incomplete. Forget about DOOM3, Half-Life 2, FarCry, or other modern games rendering properly.

Re:The 512MB barrier has already been broken

[Anonymous Coward]

640 megs? no one should ever need more than 640 megs!

Re:The 512MB barrier has already been broken

[Agent Green]

It has to be said...but 640mb ought to be enough for anybody!

Re:The 512MB barrier has already been broken

[0123456]

"3DLabs pixel shader / vertex shader implementation is broken and incomplete."

Maybe you'd like to explain how it's 'broken and incomplete'?

"Forget about DOOM3, Half-Life 2, FarCry, or other modern games rendering properly."

I haven't had a chance to try it on a Realizm 800, but Half-Life 2 and Doom 3 run fine (if slow, by gamers' standards) on the Realizm 100.

The main issue is that dedicated workstation cards generally push vertex throughput, while dedicated gaming cards generally push texture throughput. So don't expect 100fps at 1600x1200 4xAA, but do expect complex CAD models to run better than a gaming card.

Not if ATI writes the drivers

[FullCircle]

ATI can't even make a remotely stable driver for anything except Windows.

I don't see them porting an OS to it...

Bigger is better!!

[erroneus]

I just got a shiny new laptop with an ATI 9600 with 128MB video... and I still ask myself why I did it... The most graphic intensive thing I've done with it so far is "fgl_glxgears" (I achieved a maximum of 292.8 FPS, by the way...glxgears gives me 1435 FPS... is that good?)

I routinely ask myself if what I have is excessive or if I ever use the things I have spent a lot of money on... the routine is scheduled for "once in a blue moon" presently and I'm considering bumping it up to "once in a while."

there are other things that take up memory...

[anti_analog]

Sure, texturemaps are useful, but there are plenty of other things that take up memory. Let alone that with color maps, spec maps, normal maps, perhaps even displacement maps, it's not hard to exceed 512 megs for us non-realtime artists. Heck, when rendering at large resolutions for print, some of our maps are bigger than 512 megs.
Geometry for instance is one. And if you start raytracing it, then you might have an acceleration grid to fit into memory somewhere (yes, I know raytracing in significant quantities isn't part of todays games, but we're already playing those at decent framerates).

Oh, and shadowmaps, or if Pixar lets us all use them, deep shadow maps. And lightmaps. Who knows who could find ways for fast lookups of irradiance information, stuff like that, maybe even photons.

And, like others have said, there's more to the life of graphics cards than games. There's scientific visualization, there's production rendering software that use graphics cards to varying degrees, and as the capabilities of the cards increase, so will their utilization, and then we'll be wanting even more RAM on board.

I could go on for hours and be boring like that, but, anyway, yeah, I think not being able to see a use for 512 megs of RAM on a graphics card shows significant lack of vision.

Re:there are other things that take up memory...

[daVinci1980]

Raytracing is not something I see getting big in the gaming arena any time soon.

Why? Resolution! Ray-tracing is a 'hard' problem. When tracing a particular element of the viewable area, the scene complexity and number of bounces allowed dictate how long that particular trace will take.

However, the number of elements in the screen is proportional to the resolution of the display. 640x480 is half as bad as 800x600. And 1600x1200 is four times worse then that.

whats next

[ein2many]

Speakers that reproduce perfect frequency responce in the 30-40 khz range?

Re:whats next

[RM6f9]

Isn't that the range that melts flesh?

What barrier? More like a milestone...

[bchernicoff]

How is 512mb a barrier? Unless we are talking about a sanity barrier.

Ancient?

[Malc]

My first graphics card hard memory measured in KB.

Doom 3 requires 512MB for highest settings

[blueworm]

Robert Duffy's 10/15/04 .plan reveals that Doom3 will already take advantage of the 512MB cards at the "Ultra" quality setting.

Use the extra memory for 3D Models

[DarrinWest]

I would like to be able to use this memory to store the 3D models. Anything to get stuff off the front side bus. If there is room for models *and* textures on the graphics card, the only thing on the FSB are camera commands and model modification requests.

I would be interested in seeing what effect that decompositoin would have on data rates. How big are the BSP trees describing a scene? What is the tipping point where it makes sense to download the models and modify them in place?

My first card had 4k IIR

[EmbeddedJanitor]

CGA. THose were the days when you had to use your imagination.

Porn was pretty poor:"Umm do you think that's a leg or part of the furniture?"

strange correlation

[__aaitqo8496]

neccesary? no

profitable? yes

i'm still hanging on to my radeon 9700 128MB

16MB ? WOW !

[Anonymous Coward]

My first computer had 704 BYTES for the display buffer. That taken from a common pool of ONE FULL KiloByte.

Once I got a memory upgrade for it, the machine had a full 16KB ( not MB !! ) memory, but the display buffer was still 704 bytes :)

Mega-bytes my grannie :P

reverse things

[Anonymous Coward]

I look forward to the day where, I
1. boot from CD rom
2. load linux into video ram
3. use the graphic card cpu for all processing
4. use the main memory for a huge disk cache
5. idle the main board cpu

I see a single board computer using the graphics card memory, graphics card cpu for everything.

Re:reverse things

[suckmysav]

"3. use the graphic card cpu for all processing"

I sure hope that was a joke or else it is the single most retarded thing I've seen on Slashdot today.

No wonder it was posted as an AC.

Re:reverse things

[Anonymous Coward]

> >"3. use the graphic card cpu for all processing"
>I sure hope that was a joke

Not really, if you can put all of the general purpose work on the graphic card cpu, then you can treat it just the same as any mainboard cpu.

This means that every machine with a decent graphic card becomes at least a 2 cpu machine.

I hope to see a java virtual machine or a CLR compatable virtual machine on a graphics card cpu soon.

The GPU is just a special case of the old machines with a dedicated numerical processing board.

Re:reverse things

[RWerp]

There are people out there who do this, for numerics. Those GPU's are pretty fast in a number of linear algebraic operations.

Boy gamers

[EmbeddedJanitor]

Are we seeing a generation of "boy gamers" equivalent to the "boy racers" that add big tail-pipes, chrome and LEDs to their cars. 512MB sounds good, but basically you're buying features - not performance.

Re:Boy gamers

[Kris_J]

Sure, 512MB looks good on paper, but it's hardly impressive when you look through that little window in the side of the case. Real "boy racers" go for things like the Gigabyte 3D1 dual-GPU card. (Posers do "normal" SLI -- losers.) Hopefully mine should arrive today.

Re:Boy gamers

[Quikah]

"Boy racers"? Never heard that term before. Is it the PC version of riceboys/ricers?

Re:Boy gamers

[iroll]

Ditto. Mod GP "WTF"

Re:Boy gamers

[Anonymous Coward]

"Boy racers"? Never heard that term before. Is it the PC version of riceboys/ricers?

It's British. Yes it means ricer but no, it's not PC; it's older than I am.

Re:Does this come with nicely chromed exhaust pipe

[Malc]

No, but it does have go faster stripes. And like any pimple-faced boy racer will tell you: that's what makes the difference.

Subject to change, but...

[ThisIsFred]

...while troubleshooting various proposed reasons for the "stutter bug" in Half-Life 2, I found that a typical HL2 level used only 50-60 MB of memory for textures. Now I'm not trying to pooh-pooh the 512MB cards, sure I'll take the extra memory, but it seems to me that the games would benefit more from the increased memory speed or anything that would allow faster application of pixel shaders.

There's no question that the increased memory will be handy at some point, but if you look at Valve's user hardware stats, for example, you can see that the typical gamer is a couple of GPU generations behind. I feel that ATI / Nvidia should concentrate more on getting their current generation of cards into users' PCs, and that means more sub-$200 cards that perform well on the current crop of DX9 games.

Re:Subject to change, but...

[Ahnteis]

Did you add in bump maps, normal maps, etc etc?

(You really should look at doom3 if you want something that pushes the limits of video card memory.)

GL based window managers

[wowbagger]

Let's see:

Assume you were to use an OpenGL based window manager, wherein each window on your screen is little more than a polygon with a texture applied to it.

Assume you are working at 1600x1200 resolution, 24 bit color depth (padded to 32 bits for possible alpha channel).

Your frame buffer alone takes 7.3 MiBytes.

If you have a 32 bit Z buffer, add another 7.3 MiBytes.

Each 2D window in use will consume texture memory, so if we assume that the remaining 497.4 MiBytes of memory on the card as window memory, that lets us open roughly 68 full-screen windows before consuming all texture memory on the card.

If some of the windows are 3D windows themselves, you are going to want them to have their own Zbuffers - so double the memory usage for them.

While 68 windows may sound like a lot, given that most GL compositing schemes I've heard of want to keep ALL windows available, even if they are not mapped, to avoid expose events to the apps and to speed window open and close events, and I could see you getting to 30 windows pretty easily. Allowing double that for headroom doesn't seem like so bad an idea to me.

And I've ignored the XVideo overlay needs.

Re:GL based window managers

[Arkaein]

All in all this is a pretty fair assessment, but I think it leans a bit to the pessemistic.

First, I doubt a window manager would actually use a 32 bit z-buffer. 8 bit would be overkill here (enought to specify a unique depth for 256 windows). Even a 3D window manager would get by on 16 bit depth no problem, I believe it's the most commonly used depth for most true 3D apps now.

Also, I doubt that in many cases more than a small number of true 3D windows would be needed. Someone who is working with 30+ windows open most likely has mostly terminals, web pages and text editors open, with maybe a few 3D apps.

Re:GL based window managers

[bnenning]

Someone who is working with 30+ windows open most likely has mostly terminals, web pages and text editors open, with maybe a few 3D apps.

Doesn't matter. The window server (Quartz in my case) treats all of them as texture-mapped polygons, where the "texture" is their actual content.

Re:GL based window managers

[takev]

And you also ignored that apple has a HD cinema display that is double that resolution.

Re:GL based window managers

[Arkaein]

Yes, but the parent was stating a difference between apps which require 3D capabilities themselves vs. those that only require 3D like capabilities from the window manager.

2D apps treated like textured polys do not need their own depth buffer, frame buffer, etc. They just need a texture buffer, and the window manager treats them like texture polys in a single, comprehensive 3D app. Conventional 3D apps require their own depth buffer, frame buffer, textures, etc. in addition to that used by the window manager. I was pointing out that while the requirements for 30+ 2D apps are fairly large, they are considereably smaller than the same number of true 3D apps, because they have needs beyond the WM overhead.

This is happening...

[Anonymous Coward]

High end soundcards are pushing up the sample rates which causes all kinds of undesirable problems. Read Dan Lavry's paper if you're interested. The clueless will always believe that bigger==better.

Re:This is happening...

[Anonymous Coward]

... and while I'm on the subject, here's a more accessable critique.

Re:This is happening...

[Anonymous Coward]

He's wrong.

The paper doesn't even claim that it "causes all kinds of undesirable problems." Once you get past the math, he's basically just ranting that "192ksps is more than you need"; probably true, but who was seriously suggesting that THAT many samples actually were needed? (Hm. Actually, probably there ARE audiophiles who think they need that, but was any non-insane person seriously claiming it?)

His arguments against fast sampling are:

* It's less accurate;
* It requires bigger files; and
* It requires more CPU.

Taking those in reverse order: CPU is cheap. You already have enough CPU to handle more audio samples than you could ever want. That's a non-issue.

Big files are also pretty close to a non-issue, because one of two things applies: either you're using lossy compression anyway, in which case you're storing things in frequency domain instead of time domain and the whole question of "sampling rate" becomes more or less hypothetical, it's just "what rate do you want to pull out of the math?"; or else you're storing uncompressed data for reasons that are really important to you, in which case you know what your reasons are and you presumably choose to make the trade-off. The rest of us store sound data in lossy-compressed format, so sampling rate only is an issue between the CPU and the DAC. Sample rate doesn't directly have anything to do with file size. And, sure, there's more uncompressed data going between the decompresser and the DAC, but BFD. In your computer, that's going over a PCI bus which has WAY more capacity than you could ever conceive of wanting for audio. Maybe your sound card is doing the decompression itself instead of the main CPU doing it, anyway. An absolute maximum, batshit insane data rate would be 24 bits by 192ksps by 6 channels; that's less than 3.5 megabytes per second, a tiny blip compared to the amount of video data you're pumping, and remember, your real sound requirements will be a lot less than that.

That leaves just one remaining claim of Lavry's: that high sample rates necessarily imply low quality, i.e. you think you're getting 16 or 24 bits per sample but really the DAC is giving you 8 or 10 bits of real data and the rest is noise. Please note that despite the many pages of pretty graphs in his article, this is the least well-supported claim in the entire document. His entire argument rests on it, but he basically just says it a bunch of times without offering any proof, test results, or even specific numbers. We're just supposed to trust him because he sounds smart and claims to have a lot of experience in the field. It is true that higher sampling rates generally translate to fewer bits per sample; but the existance of that tradeoff doesn't mean that high bit rates for audio always mean bad sound.

He seems to think that hardware manufacturers who claim to provide a high sample rate at a high sample size (like my "24 bits by 192ksps" example) are lying, because Nobody Can Do That, The Technology Just Isn't That Good. In fairness, manufacturers ARE often sleazy and DO often make false or misleading claims; that's true pretty much universally. But if your hardware does not perform to its specifications, then of course you're going to be disappointed... it does not mean there's something intrinsically wrong wanting a good specification. Furthermore, the same tradeoff (higher sampling rate means fewer bits per sample) applies to video, except sound is less demanding in terms of total information content than video... so if we can't do good sound (where "good" means "really the number of bits it claims to be, at the stated sampling rate"), why can we do video at all?

Really, the sampling rate shouldn't even matter (provided it's above the Nyquist threshold) - what matters is the total number of bits of information. Whether it's easier to provide that as shorter samples at higher frequency or longer samples at lower frequency, it's all going to amount to the same thing once the lossy compress

Re:This is happening...

[Anonymous Coward]

Every mic in my closet rolls off heavily after 15-20K which Nyquist tells us can be adequately reconstructed from sampling at 44.1KHz. When we accept that human hearing is 20Hz-20KHz or thereabouts Nyquist says that 44.1KHz is fine, taking more samples doesn't get us more accuracy because we are already fully reproducing the waveform within the required frequency range. People can percieve overtones in the upper registers above 20K but no human ear has frequency response upto the 80KHz range; microphones don't record it, speakers don't reproduce it and humans cannot hear it. As you know, any percieved improvement in quality between 96 and 192KHz is complete bullshit and needs saving for the astrology section of a low-brow daily.

Your video comparison doesn't hold up because video data doesn't have the same oversampling requirement. Antialiasing totally crushes modern GPU performance and the input rate on a modern audio converter is typically in the MHz. The point Lavry's making is that 192K is overkill, you say he's wrong, fail to properly address his arguments and then agree with him in closing. Nice job ;-)

Hey.

[Anonymous Coward]

If it gets me closer to a photoreal, buck naked, Jessica Alba/Biel than I'm likely to get in real life, it's worth every penny.

Everquest II

[neowolf]

Everquest II will use it... It was designed to work with hardware not yet released, including 512MB video cards.

L2 larger than my first disk drive already.

[raygundan]

The day my CPU cache surpassed my first machine's disk space has come and gone.

The 1541 disk drive I used with my Commodore 64 stored 170k per side. My current (laptop) Pentium M CPU has 512k of L2 cache. Up next is L1 cache larger than the old 1541 disk, followed by enough registers to out-store the 1541.

I'm sure other folks passed it a while back.

Re:L2 larger than my first disk drive already.

[swv3752]

Ha! I had a Vic20 with a tape drive.

I also had an Apple IIe clone with dual floppy 5 1/4" drives.

Of course my current GPU has better specs than my old notebook. Then again my zaurus almost has better specs than my notebook.

Re:L2 larger than my first disk drive already.

[AJWM]

The ironic thing about those old 1541 drives (and the 1540, which just had earlier firmware), was that they had more processing power than the C64 it connected to.

The C64 had (essentially) a 6502 running at 1 MHz, the 1541 had a 6502B running at 2 MHz.

Re:L2 larger than my first disk drive already.

[Jay Carlson]

The ironic thing about those old 1541 drives (and the 1540, which just had earlier firmware), was that they had more processing power than the C64 it connected to.

The C64 had (essentially) a 6502 running at 1 MHz, the 1541 had a 6502B running at 2 MHz.

That's not true. The 1541 has a 6502 at 1MHz, and that's from the service manual and the schematics therein.

The main C64 clock is close. I'm going to quote a stunning description of the C64 and its video architecture:

This clock signal is the reference for the complete bus timing. Its frequency is 1022.7 kHz (NTSC models) or 985.248 kHz (PAL models).

However, 25 times per video frame (so 1500 times a second in NTSC) the video chip needs more cycles:

For this reason, the VIC uses the mechanism described in section 2.4.3. to "stun" the processor for 40-43 cycles during the first pixel line of each text line to read the character pointers. The raster lines in which this happens are usually called "Bad Lines" ("bad" because they stop the processor and thus slow down the computer and lead to problems if the precise timing of a program is essential, e.g. for the transmission of data to/from a floppy drive).

I highly recommend the paper above for anybody interested in just how far blackbox reverse engineering of LSI chips can go, and just how many amazing ways to stretch the C64 architecture have been discovered between 1982 and 1996, when the paper was written.

Re:L2 larger than my first disk drive already.

[AJWM]

I'll have to dig my old 1540/41 out and throw a scope on it. (It started out as a 1540, I bought a firmware upgrade ROM (no EEPROM in those days) to make it a 1541 -- the 1540 was a bit flakey with the C64). I'd swear it has a 6502B in it, and while it's possible they used the faster -- and higher priced -- part in it because they were short on 6502s, I'm fairly sure it was running a higher clock speed.

Mind, that was 20+ years ago

What the...?

[pronobozo]

remember my 16 mb TNT???


I still have mine you insensitive clod.

I can now die happy.

[raygundan]

The rare occurence of this sort of profoundly geeky post is why I still come to slashdot. God bless you, crazy GPU vector coprocessor finite difference code matrix guy!

Re:I can now die happy.

[mjinman]

Why thank you, my 10 sided die are all giddy with apprecication. And to answer a below question, currently I get 24 bit precision with ati and 32 with NVidia (both of which are good enough for me)

Re:I can now die happy.

[sconeu]

I, for one, welcome our crazy GPU vector coprocessor finite difference code matrix guy overlords.

16 MB was just a dream...

[still cynical]

I can't even remember how much memory my first computer had for video. That MCGA greyscale must have been pushing a few KB at least.

Yeah.....

[Anonymous Coward]

But will it be able to play Duke Nuken Forever?

Sound cards work a little different.

[Sycraft-fu]

The Creative Live and Audigy lines do indeed have a processor, it's an Emu10k chip. It's a specialised DSP, like a GPU though more specalised, but it's still a processor.

Processor speed is a little different, since it processes audio samples. This has to happen in realtime and thus is slaved to the audio clock. Audio is clocked at 48kHz before reaching the chip, and the 10k1 executes precisely 512 instructions per sample (not sure if the 10k2 does more or not).

As for memory, they used to have it onboard. The AWE64 Gold had onboard RAM, which was expandible. I think you could whack something to the effect of 36MB on it (4 on board, 32 on the expansion). They canned that with the Live since it was a PCI card. PCI allows for the card to get at system memory, and it's cheaper just to use that, and plenty fast for audio needs.

Re:Sound cards work a little different.

[Anonymous Coward]

That DSP chip on the Sound Blaster Live & Audigy is actually a really amazing little processor, and is used a lot by musicians for low latency applications. Of course, Creative's software is worthless for that - one would need the kX Drivers (http://kxproject.lugosoft.com/index.php?skip=1) to tap into that power. Sadly, those are only for Windows, but if you have a sound board with an EMU10K processor and a Windows installation, be sure to check them out. Even if just to mess with the microphone and make your voice sound like Darth Vader or the Chipmunks. :)

Gainward.

[mollymoo]

Am I the only one to have inadvertently pronounced "Gainward" as "Gaywad"?

My video card is a whole other computer...

[NotQuiteReal]

Can I have it scan my general purpose computer for viruses before letting it boot up?

If someone patents this idea, please send me some money. Thank you.

ECC Video RAM

[Gary Destruction]

Okay, sure, the idea might sound stupid but more and stuff is being off-loaded to video cards and 512MB of RAM is alot.
There's programs you can download to test system memory, but I haven't seen any to test video memory. I know the professioal strength ones like Microscope and Troubleshooter can test video memory, but those full blown diagnostics programs.
You wouldn't believe the damage that bad video RAM can cause. And the whole time, you'd swear it was the system memory. Example, if you have a video card with bad video RAM and you increase the Iopagelocklimit on say Windows 2000, to 8000 hex (32k pages), you'll get all kinds of programs and system processes crashing. Userinit.exe might not even work when you try to log in. Services will fail, lots of em. Remember those blank windows in win98 that said the task isn't responding? It's Winoldap.mod that's hanging and I've found that faulty video RAM is usually the culprit.

Re:ECC Video RAM

[Anonymous Coward]

How?

Re:ECC Video RAM

[justins]

I imagine this will become one of the features distinguishing the high-end workstation cards from the consumer cards. Heaven knows some of those folks, like Nvidia, could use more stuff to differentiate the two. "Smarter drivers" is a slightly lame marketing tool.

Re:ECC Video RAM

[Gary Destruction]

How what? Oh and I meant win386.mod. That's the file for winoldap.

The true purpose...

[ClubStew]

...it would seem is to double the memory and more than double the cost. People will buy it, because if 256 MB is great than 512 MB must be even better! Right?

If it serves no purpose, currently - as the articles state they do - then why do it? It will increase the cost to build and, therefore, the private to consumers even if the profit margin were constant. This really just seems like a ploy to get more of your money.

When the card - and moreover the software that utilizes such features on the card - are vastly improved then bumping up the memory may be warranted.

Actually we asked for 1gb

[purduephotog]

We tried to get a manufacturer to consider stacking 1gb of ram up on their card. That got us a few eyebrows, and the fact that the ram would dissipate nearly 150 watts .... heh heh. Oh well.

Who knows, there are people that need that to stick 'tiles' in for real applications, instead of games...

Visualization

[Ossus_10]

For info on Data Vizualization, head over to www.advizorsolutions.com That will show you what you can do besides game with good cards. Ossus

"Barrier" already broken

[plasticsquirrel]

ATI is pushing the texture barrier by incorporating 512MB in their newest X850 video card lineup.

Because, as we all know, video cards never have had more than 256MB of memory before...

3Dlabs Realizm 800 with 640MB memory.

Do I remember?

[Mr2cents]

"Remember your ancient TNT graphics card that had 16MB of memory?"

I remember saying "One day, video cards will have 16MB of memory".

Re:Do I remember?

[TeknoHog]

I remember DOS programs that provided extended/expanded memory by using a part of video RAM. My video card had a mindblowing 512 KB.

Re:Do I remember?

[Alsee]

I remember my first computer, a VIC-20. It had 5KB of RAM, a 1.5 KB of that was dedicated to the OS including 1KB on-board video, leaving the classic 3583 BYTES FREE startup message. Actually it only used 1000 bytes of that 1K for a 40 by 25 character mapped screen. The last 24 bytes the K were unused. If you were creative you could steal those bytes back, getting you to 3607 bytes of userspace. Then you could also steal a quarter K from the operating system by overwriting the cassette tape buffer, a 256 byte bonaza that brought you up to a staggering 3863 bytes of RAM woohoo! If you really liked to live dangerously you could even overwrite-for-your-own-use a couple of the less-critical operating system values on the single remaining 256 byte OS page without locking up the computer.

Of course someone else will probably reply that they remember saying "One day, computers will have some sort of TV screen". Chuckle.

-

16MB? Lucky Bastard

[shish]

Remeber your ancient TNT graphics card that had 16MB of memory?

No, because I was never that lucky -- I'm still using a non-accelerated 2MB card; mplayer crashes when I go full screen because it runs out of VRAM!

(Currently using an ATI 3D Rage II+ 215GTB [Mach64 GTB], I also have ~5 S3 Virge / Trio / Things, but they didn't seem any better; I have several decent AGP cards, but my AGP slot is fuzzy and locks everything up every few minutes -- if those cards should be >2MB and / or accelerated and I'm just using the wrong options somehow, please point me at the way to make them better :)

Doom 3

[dark_requiem]

Sweet... I can finally crank Doom 3 up to ultra:)

Re:Maybe Id's taking a year off dead for tax reaso

[Anonymous Coward]

Doom 3 needs 512MB because, obviously black takes the most memory to represent.

Re:Maybe Id's taking a year off dead for tax reaso

[Holi]

Ahh gotta love a Hotblack Desiato reference.

My personal favorite "Looks like a fish, moves like a fish, steers like a cow."

Tnt2 ancient?

[Creepy Crawler]

Thats what my sisters' machine is running with right now!

And it had a cap knocked off, and still cranks frames ;)

what? 256k

[Anonymous Coward]

i remember when i got my first 256k vga card. amazing. you people are idiots.

Re:512 is better... which is newsworthy why?

[iamhassi]

when i read /. articles I usually try to find the main point of the article, a few words that sum it up, and here all I can come up with is "video cards are moving to 512megs".

So? Is this some kind of milestone or something? Does /. run a story every time video cards increase their memory capacity? I couldn't find a 256mB story or a 128mB story, so I'm wondering why reaching 512MB is "Pushing The 512MB Barrier"? Seems like a logical progression to me, we had 16mB, 32, 64, 128, 256... what did you think was the next step? I can't blame ATI for telling everyone, of course the manufactur is going to tell everyone whenever they come out with bigger, better, faster, but why is this /. worthy?

slow news day fellas?

Must Have one!

[trippyd]

But this one goes to 11!

Hmmm...

[MattHaffner]

Send that one to Budweiser for their next Bud Light ad...

Amen Brother, Amen.

[Shturmovik]

I almost feel normal when I read such posts.

invidia sli

[kcim]

A friend jest put to gether a new machine incorperating two BFG pci x graphics cards in sli mode. On an (I think)asus a8n board,totaling 512 megs, has/had heat problems.Went with water cooling,did not fix heat issue.It turns out the shark case and/or the asus board has some desine limitations. The heat issue was solved by covering up the side vents,returning the case to somewhat of the industry standered. For 250 dollers you think the company would know better.On to the asus board, the amd chip he is using has the north brige chip on the processor.(I am an intel guy )or the memory controller,the south brige chip is right in line with the second BFG card these high performance cards have the new six wire power plug on them.So with new board two new graphics cards and new power supply etc.,far cry atall look sweet till the heat issue,10 min.later or less processor heats up (we thought) .You better know what you getting into with this setup. lots of trial on error on our part,but boy does it look good.later

[Procedual] is better

[Anonymous Coward]

"You can do a lot more to make an image 'photo-real' with greater texture resolution than you can do with faster processing etc."

Procedual textures would be better. The POVRAY method is better. High-level description verses cramming bitmaps into a small space.

16MB Card? Bah!

[aztektum]

I remeber my Canopus Pure 3D which was only 4MB! You kids and your fancy 16MB gaming!

Mac Mini has a whopping 32MB video ram

[geekee]

"Remeber your ancient TNT graphics card that had 16MB of memory?"

I remember thinking a Mac Mini is obsolete the day you buy it since, among other things, it only comes with 32MB video RAM.

Re:Mac Mini has a whopping 32MB video ram

[TheNetAvenger]

I remember thinking a Mac Mini is obsolete the day you buy it since, among other things, it only comes with 32MB video RAM

Yep, and once again I call on all Mac fans to SCREAM at Apple, aren't they supposed to be the 'graphics leader'? Wait, that was back in 1991 when they started losing that title (ATI Vantage and 8514 IBM accelerated adapters on the PC were blazing fast compared to the video in Macs at that point, and Apple hasn't caught up yet.). (Even today, the video in the Macs is usually the middle of the Road ATI video card, and PC users can get a much faster version of the card.)

It is really sad considering even 99.9% of the generic video cards you can buy today have 64-128mb of RAM.

It is also really sad if these Mac people that buy them think they are going to EVER run any graphically intense game (not that there are many for the Mac).

My 4year old notebook has a more advanced video card in it than the new mini-mac. For a mini, you would think they could at least hit the PC standards for laptop video back in 2001.

Don't flag me as an Apple basher, I am someone that wants them to do great things, but Apple fans simply buying into their marketing instead of questioning what Apple is telling them isn't helping anyone but Apple make money off of ignorance and loyalty.

If people want to trust Apple as their graphics and technological leader, they need to be yelling at Apple that this is not good enough. In fact, not one Mac on the Apple site has the BEST graphics available today, why?

True Apple fans, tell Apple this is NOT acceptable.

Re:Mac Mini has a whopping 32MB video ram

[bach37]

Well, it's basically a laptop video chip. Sort of the same one that's on my iBook. Good for Quake 3, but not really for anything more than UT2004. It's not as bad as it sounds, although you are right they seem to talk it up quite a bit.

Flight Simulator

[Eric_Cartman_South_P]

For anyone who is a fan of MS Flight Simulator 2004 this card will made a HUGE difference. For most other games out now, probrably no difference at all.

Remember the days?

[scenestar]

Remember the days when you had a 486 with 16mb RAM and a localbus card?

Evolutionary theory.

[Bongoots]

It might not be useful now, but a use for it will be found shortly after they arrive on the market.

I've read comments about boy racers and others about how it's just that these companies will sell it to whoever is thickest.

I surely won't be running out to get one straight away, not because I have no dough, but because there's no need *at the moment*. This is not to say that they *won't ever be needed*.

And I quote Mr. William H. Gates III: "640K ought to be enough for anybody."

Once the technology arrives, uses will be found and then we will all say that 512 MB is not enough on a graphics card.

Dumb question: 256MB cards...

[Spoing]

Not counting Doom 3, what benifits are there to a 256MB card over a 128MB one?

They still have that today!

[Anonymous Coward]

They still have things like that.

I think it's called "Intel Extreme Graphics."

Another "barrier" getting abused.

[InvalidError]

It always irritates me to some extent when I see people use "barrier" interchangeably with "landmark".

Breaking a barrier means working around or proving wrong something that used to be considered a fundamental limit. There is no fundamental limit to how much RAM can be put on a video card other than the number of data/address lines and available physical space.

A landmark is a point bound to be crossed sooner or later. Video cards will undoubtedly get more RAM sooner or later and 1GB low-end video cards will probably be common ten years from now.

Since there are 2GB SO-DIMMs available today, ATI and nVidia would most likely be able to release a 2GB video card as soon as this year if they really wanted to and enough people actually wanted/needed them.

So, the only reason we do not have >2GB video cards yet is because nobody needs them and by the time people would, the GPU would be completely obsolete.

2 megs is not enough for office apps

[GunFodder]

Monitors that support 1280x1024 are dirt cheap these days. You need over 5 megabytes of frame buffer to support a display at 1280x1024 with 32 bit color. If you want your office graphics to look good you need double buffering, which requires twice as much memory. If you are a graphics hog like me and you use two 21" monitors running at 1600x1200 then you need 1600x1200x4x2x2 = > 30MB of memory just for frame buffer to support office applications.

Intel Extreme! graphics are integrated into the motherboard chipset and use system memory, so your frame buffer is only limited by the total amount of memory in your system. That is why your dad is satisfied with his current graphics. Unless he doesn't mind running at 1024x768 with 16 bit color.

Re:2 megs is not enough for office apps

[Urchlay]

> Monitors that support 1280x1024 are dirt cheap these days.
> You need over 5 megabytes of frame buffer to support a display at 1280x1024 with 32 bit color.

Are there people whose eyes are discerning enough to tell the difference between 16-bit and 24-bit* color depth?

If you can't tell, or if your dirt-cheap monitor can't show you a visible difference, you can cut the RAM usage in half (or double the resolution, assuming your eyes and your hardware can take it).

I can't tell 16-bit from 24-bit, even when watching DVDs... but that could be because my eyes are crappy (I already know for a fact I'm nearsighted, I might have other problems.)

* Last I checked `32-bit' color depth still used only 24 bits for color data, with the other 8 bits unused, for alignment reasons: 32-bit CPUs have an easier time dealing with memory in 32-bit chunks. Is this still the case, or do cards exist now that use the other 8 bits for something? (If so, what? Alpha channel? That'd be sweet!)

The potential for 3D textures is stunning

[emarkp]

I work on scientific visualization software (using OpenGL). We're looking into 3D textures for volumetric rendering, and trust me, the 512MB could be used easily.

Nobody Needs 512MB On A Graphics Card..

[itedo]

Well, it's just my opinion but let the kids buy it :\

I just remember the old days, when there was no 3D-gaming hype ;)

Festival year wrong

[Anonymous Coward]

Did anyone else notice that the year on the date for the Texas Gaming Festival is wrong? I guess nobody RTFA . . . .

Get a big one!

[haelduksf]

Hey! My TNT card had 32M! Don't go around bashing it- it feels inadequate enough as it is ;)

Well I guess that begs the question...

[bradleyland]

waaaait for it...

Can you run Linux on it?

Not entirely true.

[cbreaker]

A lot of games, at the time they hit the shelves, are capable of much better looking graphics then what is possible on the "average" PC install-base.

This has been happening for years. The game developers want the games to look even better when the next generation of machines appears as to increase the appeal of playing/buying the game for longer. (Unless, of course, it's an EA sports game. Those hit the shelves twice a year.)

Pro 3D vs. Consumer (Game) 3D

[pipingguy]

I've been doing realtime motion/viewing/zooming/flythroughs with a 3D nVidia 128MB card (low-end Quadro at CAN$400, I think) and it does a pretty good job on dual 21" screens. This is with fairly complex 3D piping models with all ex-refs attached. The whole model does take a while to load.

Why would I need a US$1000+ Wildcat-type card with 256+ MB VRAM? For realtime 3D animation capability? When I move the model view it converts to a simpler sort of shading, but at least the view while panning/rotating is still rendered. The software used is MicroStation-based (PDS) whereas AutoCAD-based stuff doesn't seem to be able to do real-time, rendered movement. Maybe someone can update me on ACAD's 3D abilities - I haven't used it for a few years.

razor

[Anonymous Coward]

Please tell me that the quattro is still better than the mach3. There has to be a performance gain from 3 to 4!

"Ancient" 16MB graphics card?

[Stormwatch]

My current graphics card has only 16MB, you insensitive clod!

Extra Ram looks Pretty

[Anonymous Coward]

The excess 256mb will only be epoxied to the board, it wont be wired to the gpu!

I remember the days do you?

[carl0ski]

When people bought a Voodoo II and added and estra circuit board with extra EDO ram chips. I guy i met was runing a Voodoo 2 with 128meg of EDO ram chips. this was the time standard was 8 - 16 meg It's a shame it doesnt happen anymore much SD based RAM is too difficult to manipulated. :(

Didn't you have the SB AWE32 !!!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Creative tried this with the Soundblaster
AWE32 sound card. If I remember, it did farly well (I bought 2!)
It had 2 RAM slots on the sound card that you could fill and be the envy of all of your friends, now that was awesome.
(I just threw one out 2 days ago, is that bad?)

Only 16 MB?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hah, I remember the Voodoo Graphics cards with 4 MB. When I got my Voodoo Banshee with 16 MB it was a huge amount of memory :P

And of course even before then there were the standard 2D cards with even less memory. I find the 16MB figure an amusing one to reminisce about.

"Remember your ancient P3 1GHz?"

512MB Without Working Drivers?

[Anonymous Coward]

Even 1GB RAM is useless without working drivers. Just Open your hardware specs ATI! The community will write their own drivers.

Please don't settle for closed hardware, and binary-only and DRM (Macrovision) drivers!

"Timothy Miller and the Open Graphics Project"
http://bsdnews.com/view_story.php3?story _id=4861

Also:

[Anonymous Coward]

The big new thing in graphics is HDRI. That stands for "High Dynamic Range Imaging".

With HDRI, each color channel is stored as a 32 bit floating point number. This takes up four times as much ram as a 24bit pixel, where R G and B can only have 256 discreet values.

HDRI allows you to treat a virtual camera like a real one. Look at an open doorway in a building from outside, and the room inside appears dark. But approach and enter the room, and the camera adjusts to the dark room. Now turn around and look back through the door, and everything outside is extremely bright.

Here are some example images demonstrating how HDRI can improve computer generated imagery. It also has applications with adjusting color in digital photos:

HDRI examples

Re:Also:

[prefect42]

The extra colour depth is /relatively/ unimportant. HDRI is significantly using radiosity to calculate the lighting values, which is dog slow and hideously complicated as light can be transferred from surface to surface around the scene. Think of it as an alternative to raytacing (with nice soft shadows and the like with no tricks), not an alternative to Phong/Gouraud and friends.

Who said this is only for games?

[Sulka]

Yes, games won't benefit. However everyone here seems to forget graphics accelerators aren't just for games anymore.

I'd love to see how much Apple's Core Image and Core Video benefit from the added RAM. Compositing at HD resolutions requires lots and lots of memory!

Can I start using my Video Card RAM as ...

[Peaker]

general purpose memory?

Or at least swap space instead of the hard disk?

That could be nice, when not playing a game :-)

512 has been broken for awhile now

[Gandulfy]

I am not really sure how this is newsworthy since 3dlabs created a graphics card with over 512 megs of onboard memory in september of last year.

I personally purchased my wildcat Realizm 200 in october of last year. Yes I was way too cheap to purchase the 800 which has 640MB of memory on board. These cards blow ATI and Nvidia out of the water, although the price isn't very affordible in most cases. The fact still remains 512 megs of VRAM is nothing new some of us have had it for some time now.

You can find info at there webpage
www.3dlabs.com

Beats P-III any day, dude

[KZigurs]

Let's see.

PIII ~ 133MHZ SDR SDRam (~2 gigs / s)
GPU ~ 400 MHZ puperDuper GDDR3 (~20 gigs/s)
---
PIII ~ 28M transistors
GPU (X800) ~ 160M transistors
---
I won't even compare computing abilities. X800 already has far surpassed P4 in its floating point speed.

P-III. Heh.

36 megs of cache, anyone?

[KZigurs]

Take a look at power5.

My first computer had 20 megs of mfm hdd...

Re:512 is better... which is newsworthy why?

[Ollierose]

I suppose its because you can still buy machines off the shelf (or Dell, or whatever) that come with less or equal amounts of main memory. I don't believe that that was the case at 64MB or 128MB, and I wasn't paying attention at 256MB

Video RAM as RAM disk

[Rado.hr]

I remember the old days of VLB video cards that had 4 or 8 Megs of RAM, and people used to write drivers for them to use extra RAM (because you really didn't need that much of RAM, just about 2 Megs for games) as a RAM disk. They used to store swap file on it, and it was really, really fast. And nice hack, too. These days, 4MB of swap space was suitable for running all but most intensive applications (like graphics apps). Maybe it is time for someone to reinvent the wheel. :-)

Stone Age

[Sylven_1969]

If a 16MB video card is considered "Ancient", then my old 1MB Trident VLB card and "myself" must be from the STONE AGE!

Re:Stone Age

[Anonymous Coward]

I still have my old Cirrus Logic card with a whopping 256k on it. Woohoo. Yay, look at all the 8-bit colors...

These soundcards already exist

[Fross]

there are specialist soundcards which are essentially massive DSPs on a PCI card already, such as the TC Powercore which are used to power virtual instruments - it's of course conceivable that games could make use of these cards if they were installed, but they are of course very uncommon for games.

i think the crux is that while "flat" (ie not dynamically generated) sound is "good enough" for gaming, while non-dynamic graphics are not - this would limit us to something like myst. and don't forget that there was a proliferation of FMV games when CD-ROMs first appeared (you could even count Dragon's Lair and Space Ace as examples of these!) - people just aren't as reliant and receptive to sound as they are to graphics. eg you could conceivably play most games with the sound turned off, but not with the graphics turned off.

(yes, yes, I know someone is going to post saying they can play DDR with the graphics turned off, i think that proves your worthlessness as a human being though!)

there are advances being made in audio programming for games, and certainly surround sound support is a good and recent example of this, but it probably won't ever need powerful dedicated hardware beyond what is currently available.

Not expensive enough!

[freakmaster]

I for one am not interested in a ramdisk unless I pay at least $10 per meg!

How dare you!

[Anonymous Coward]

The computer that this is being typed on runs a 8mb Nvidia Riva TNT 2, you insensitive clod!

Re:Maybe Id's taking a year off dead for tax reaso

[Alsee]

Yep. Black is all zeros, and zeros are a lot fatter than ones. You need the 512 meg of RAM to store all of that fat black.

-

This one goes to eleven (or 512 in this case)

[blakeburnworth]

This one goes to eleven (or 512 in this case)

I use a Matrox PCI card to run my 2nd Monitor

[jameskojiro]

And it works really really well, long before the days of Dual headed displays.