Slashdot Mirror
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.
But I remember upgrading my Cirrus Logic video card to a whooping 2 megs in 1995.
Because it is bigger than 256.
TWICE as big!!!
If my email tells me anything, size DOES matter.
[I can picture a world without war, without hate. I can picture us attacking that world, because they'd never expect it]
"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.
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 rock, the vulture, and the chain
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.
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.
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.
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.
A programmer is a machine for converting coffee into code.
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?
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
Cue Monty Python "uphill both ways, and we liked it" skit...
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)
"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"!
"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?
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!
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.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
The most anyone would ever need for video RAM is 640 MB. You can quote me on that.
Learn to love Alaska
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.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
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?
- Just my $0.02, take with a grain of salt, your mileage may vary.
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.
http://zero-to-enterprise.blogspot.com/
"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."
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
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.
I guess then its only purpose is to help make up for other, um, shortcomings?
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
You'll never need more than 640k...
If it has 512MB of memory, and a hefty GPU, can it run Linux?
I still use a 16 MB card, you insensitive clod!!
1995 - 486 - Trident 1MB
2001 - K6II - Diamond 32 MB
2004 - Atlhon XP - ATi 128 MB
Probably I'll reach 512 MB in 2010.
-=-=-=-=
I know life isn't fair, but why can't it ever be un-fair in MY favor!?
... on higher end video cards, that is.
.... yeah. 512mb in a CONSUMER card? Sounds good. But that's really nothing new at all for professional cards....
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
Don't push it again.
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.
--pyro_dude
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
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.
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?
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.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
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.
www.eFax.com are spammers
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!
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.
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.
"Remember your ancient TNT graphics card that had 16MB of memory?"
I remember saying "One day, video cards will have 16MB of memory".
"It's too bad that stupidity isn't painful." - Anton LaVey
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
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?
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.