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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.
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.
"Look Lois, the two symbols of the Republican Party: an elephant, and a fat white guy who is threatened by change."
I seem to remember someone writing a linux kernel module that lets you use extra video mem as a very fast virtual drive.
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.
EagerEyes.org: Visualization and Visual Communication
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)
"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
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
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?
"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.
"Derp de derp."
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.
-- Alastair