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

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: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".