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ATI Announces 512MB Graphics Card
Annoyed.Gamer writes "Today ATI announced their first 512MB graphics card, the X800 XL 512MB. I have some systems that don't have more than 512MB of system memory, much less on a graphics card. According to AnandTech, the 512MB card can't outperform its 256MB counterpart and costs 50% more. ATI's favorite Half Life 2 showed the only real performance increase in the entire article. Overall a disappointment, especially because ATI for some reason didn't outfit their highest end GPUs with 512MBs, only the mid-range X800 XL."
And you have the nerve to submit articles to Slashdot?
I'd be thrilled just to have my ALL-IN-WONDER® 9800 Pro not be so damn fragile. Often it comes up with bars and artifacts and I keep rebooting until it behaves. I've tried all the driver and firmware updates and fiddled with AGP volage settings to no avail. Graphics benchmarks all pass with flying colors (no pun intended) then the PC crashes when I start up some games. Meanwhile, a $37 graphics car (with a $10 rebate) from Circuit City is 100% reliable (except I can't watch TV on it.) Time for ATI/Nvidia race to focus on quality rather than quantity.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Things are getting somewhat out of hand as far as graphics cards. It seems like every 4-6 months there is a new line of cards out with slightly better specs in the 500 or so price range. I have a GeForce Ti4800 128mb and it runs all of my games, including doom3 and halflife two just fine. I'm not sure how people even justify the cost to them selves.
But it's only going to outperform in a situation that requires more memory. Having extra memory that goes unused doesn't make a difference.
sounds like the author could use this little gem: http://kerneltrap.org/node/143 :)
Did you know that "FTW" ("for the win") is a direct translation of "Sieg Heil"?
To be the master of the obvious, of course there will be no, or limited, benefit of that much memory on your video card.
The reason is obvious: game designers target the prevalent market. Given that there are a limited number (zero) of users with 512MB of onboard memory, few video game makers are going to require 512MB of simultaneous textures (or even 256MB, and to a degree not even 128MB). Doom 3 may, as the article states, have 500MB of textures, but I highly doubt they are used simultaneously.
This is just another card for people with the money to say "just in case...".
I agree, it's about as useful as a humvee in the city.
Carmack said that you'd need a 512MB card to use the Ultra quality mode. If John Carmack is reading this, do you have any reason why Doom3 performed no better in Ultra mode with the 512MB card as opposed to the 256MB card?
Every time some manufacturer adds globs of memory, be it huge disks, huge memories, fat network pipes... we all go "no-one will ever use that, 640k is enough for anything"... ... and 24 months later we're wondering how we ever lived without it.
Somewhere, someone is thinking of a killer application that needs 512MB of video RAM to work.
I just can't, for the life of it, imagine what it could be...
My blog
$150 dollars extra to get 4.1 frames more on Half-Life 2.
Doesnt make much sense.
Mess with an engineer and youll wake up with a mess hose in your bunk
Just because some games don't use that other 256MB doesn't mean that no apps use it. The "pro" cards have been at 512MB to 640MB for a while, now. They wouldn't even bother selling them if no one knew what to do with them.
-- Microsoft is the most expensive commodity operating system and office suite vendor in the marketplace.
While this may not lead to huge increases in performance for gaming applications, scientific applications stand to gain tremendously from increased memory for visualzing large datasets.
A lot of applications in biology (3D microscopy, macromolecule interactions, MRI etc..), weather modeling, oil field visualization, to name just a few, are hungry for more onboard video memory.
If I got this I'd feel like that one dumb kid who had his score doubled because of the grade curve.
I don't get it.
I figure that they might have done this for a Mac version. 512 Mb of memory goes a long way to getting two 30" displays worth of data in a video card that is using the Apple "Core Image" technologies.
This may be a simple question - but how would the amount of memory and the performance of the card relate to each other? I can understand how having a faster GPU can be a benefit, but I fail to see how having more RAM (past a certain point) is a benefit.
Obviously if you don't have enough (e.g. 64Mb RAM when the game engine needs about 128Mb RAM) there will be a performance hit, but if the game has all the memory it needs what would the point of having more be?
Well, hopefully the performance issues are driver related and not hardware bottlenecks.
On a somewhat unrelated note, why don't these tests ever include MMORPGs? I'd like to think that a very crowded area in EverQuest during a raid with a lot of spell effects going off would challenge even the highest-end video card on the market. I think it's debatable that including some of these other types of games (MMORPG's specifically) would be more appropriate and well-rounded than 6 different FPS's.
Of course, the problem would be fair testing of what is obviously a dynamic environment. My opinion is that two identical machines attending the same event with an almost identical viewpoint could be achieved. It would just require some social coordination to get the testers included in these events.
here
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
I've always wondered, would a program like Photoshop, benefite from 512 Video RAM??? Or does it work some other way where it doesn't use video ram like that. Ofcourse, let's assume that you are working with 600+ MB PSD files....
The Digital Couture Collection
Since Apple has just released software that takes advantage of huge amounts of video memory, and they have a big ATI logo on the page describing it, perhaps the release of Tiger has something to do with the announcement of this card... If that's the case, trying to figure out what this has to do with gaming performance misses the point.
From the "Core Image" page:
When a programmable GPU is present, Core Image utilizes the graphics card for image processing operations, freeing the CPU for other tasks. And if you have a high-performance card with increased video memory (VRAM), you'll find real-time responsiveness across a wide variety of operations.
As someone whose worked at various big games companies, and writes his own stuff too, I really would rather someone at ATI attended a 'driver stability for dummies' course, rather than got all macho about 16 terrabyte RAM cards.
if ATI cards were twice the speed of nvdia, I'd still avoid them, simply because nvdia drivers are rock solid and unfussy, whereas the ATI driver 'envrionment' is usually a bug ridden barrel of unstable bloatware, that avoids standards like the plague
Your mileage may vary etc blah blah
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
Anybody wants to make a prediction?
As software makers add eye-candy, the graphics board becomes more important than the CPU. The advent of graphics card such as this suggests that perhaps the CPU and main RAM is becoming less important to system performance.
I wonder when the GPU will supplant the CPU? I'm sure it would be much easier for ATI to add a few million transistors for some general CPU performance than for Intel/AMD/IBM to replicate a high-power GPU. The CPU-needs of the core logic of basic applications are pretty minimal and could run on a modest CPU nubbin inside a GPU that does the heavy lifting of the GUI. Perhaps the hoped-for $100 PC will really be a nice GPU with a bit of CPU and a minimal set of bridge/IO chips for the system.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
that we build workstations with for GIS, Medical Imaging, and 3D Modeling
With Quartz 2D Extreme (marketing!) putting the entire rendering of the display onto the graphics card as an OpenGL surface, and lots of the display-rendering code itself being stored there as well, you can never have too much RAM - especially with the composition manager etc. all eating up gobs of it...
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
Many people have asked "What the @#$%$# would you USE 512M of Video RAM for?"
Others have responded with various games as the killer app.
And perhaps, today, they are the driver for this much VRAM.
However, there is a use for a card with that much VRAM that isn't gaming - compositing window managers.
Apple's MacOS, Microsoft's Longhorn, and *nix's various compositing WMs all operate by giving each active window its own chunk of memory sufficent to hold the whole window, and then treating that memory as a texture for a polygon and letting the 3D hardware do the final compositing onto the display. This allows for effects like translucent windows, smooth window movement, quick resizing of windows, simplified backing store (handling windows overlapping other windows), and many other useful items - these aren't just "eye candy", but things that make the system much more useful.
Now, think about how many windows you have open right now. Think about how many windows a power user may have open. Think about how much memory that can burn to give all those windows their own space.
512M of VRAM isn't overkill for such situations - it's barely enough, and video card vendors are starting to look to supporting virtualization for the card's memory needs (especially in PCI Express cards where the card can have a decent amount of bandwidth to system memory.)
www.eFax.com are spammers
A long time ago (can't find it on Google) I read an article about someone compiling some Memory Devices drivers into a linux kernel, and using GPU memory as a RAMdisk. I guess you could use one of these cards for that.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
They probaby had some extra RAM lying around and the marketing guys urged them to just put it in the card. That way they could claim...
512 MEGABYTES OF MEMORY!!!
TWICE THE MEMORY OF ANY OTHER GRAPHICS CARD OUT THERE!
NO OTHER GRAPHICS CARD COMPARES!
I expect ATI to come out with a sound card next month with a volume control that goes up to 11.
Very good Police Squad reference.
Next step: Turning the old 386 into a MythTV based PVR.
Best Slashdot Co
This card has EIGHT THOUSAND times as much RAM as my first computer had. (It was a Sanyo MBC-555 with 64KB RAM.)
Truly, we live in an age of wonders.
Insert witty sig here.
Sometimes software comes out which is "too slow", or "bloated", and doesn't become popular.
For instance, the Lotus Smartsuite products were way ahead of Microsoft's Office suite when they were released, but the entire package was took about 25 1.4MB floppies, I think, and then would hardly run on the typical system at the time. A couple of years ago I was looking for some clip-art and loaded it from CD. On modern hardware, the package was quite pleasant to use.
There were some bugs in SmartSuite, and Microsoft did a number on compatibility at the API level, but I think overall it was the bloatware aspect that hurt it the most. A few years later the package seems rather spritely and compact.
Hardware suffers from the opposite problem. The attitude "Why would I need that much?", which hardware vendors play into by offering products with overkill specs in the wrong areas. Since they can't double processor speed, doubling the amount of RAM is the next best thing, right?
No, the next best thing would be to offer rock-solid reliability in the hardware and drivers. Make it cheaper. Ship the source for your drivers. I want it to work, and if it doesn't work I want there to be a way to fix it.
I know that's not how the video card business works. If you're not at the cutting edge, you're an also-ran. I just wish it weren't that way.
Sorry for rambling. To tie it all together, I think vendors get caught up in having features their marketing department can brag about, rather than delivering products their customers can use most effectively.
sigs, as if you care.
Now - I'm just an end-user, sitting here working with a large project in Revit, an application that brings even fast PCs stacked with RAM to their knees. It's basically a database with a graphical interface and so every little operation results in refreshes and an element of regeneration of the display. It's a good tool, with great potential, yet that lag is a total patience-killer.
If the vector operations which all that rendering must involve could be usefully offloaded to a videocard well-stocked with RAM however... our little company would buy dozens today.
However, there's no good single gauge like CPU speed, though it's not truly 100% representative of performance. Now that the GPU arch. are quite different, GPU/RAM clock in there are different, and there's also driver... It's hard for regular consumer to tell the which is better than which, by how much. Even for the rest of us, we have to read all the nitty-gritty detail on review and benchmark before making a better choice than looking at model numbers and price.
The extra memory is to keep the CPU from having to busy itself writing graphics to backing-stores in the RAM.
/ 14
http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/macosx-10.4.ars
No, it does not. It shows the limitations of a benchmark which is focused solely on frames-per-second performance.
The effects of texture thrashing will be perceptible (and distracting) at times to the human player, but they won't do much at all to effect such a benchmark.
It's a noticeable flaw, every 30 seconds. Doesn't matter if all you care about is "frames per second."
Now before I get modded down, I be to remind whoever might read this that what I am saying is FACT. - bogaboga
No, I'm New Here
I've heard these kind of stories much too often for my personal comfort. You should rarely ever have to take any video card back for a defect, yet motherboards, video cards, etc. seem manufactured at such a pace that quality is only a probability variable. Failure rates on PSU's and CD/DVD ROM drives at some assembly plants are acceptable at 15% or higher because of the volume. Really. I'm happy to shell a couple hundred for something that works right off and lasts for a few years.
The fan works fine on my card, can hardly even hear it with the cover open. I've re-seated the card and cables a couple times, but no real difference achieved.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Is ATI the first to release a graphics card with 512 MB? - nYx
NVIDIA Geforce cards have had 512mb of RAM for a few months now, with similar caveats from reviewers that it really doesn't make a huge difference in performance.
when they haven't released linux drivers for it (or the X850) yet?
:-(
\me Still can't get a graphics linux interface working on his new, X800XL equipped computer
FGD 135
No noticeable performance increases with 512 megs of video ram? Who would have thought!
...
Its not like there`s many games which take into account the possibility of 512 megs of elbow room (this being the first...)
1) Bias
2)
3) Valid Opinions?
Ice Cream has no bones.
Once a Mac version of this is available, Core Image and "Quartz 2D Extreme" will put the extra vram to pretty good use.
Ars has a pretty good explanation about why the extra elbow room will make a difference, namely, the GPU won't have to hit its backing cache in RAM as often.
(There is another post, probably more along this line.... for one and for another.)
I tend to agree people will find use for the 512M memory in video cards. Of course there's the infamous Gates quote about "noone will ever need more than...." (or words to that effect)...
I have NO idea what I'd use 512M memory for on a video card.... My first inclination might be to back up the hard drives from my first three or four PC's into the video cards memory each night ;-). But I do know I'm using technology in graphics that have developed far beyond what I ever thought necessary. I remember when purchasing a computer (Ballard Computers in Washington State, now defunct) the sales rep picked out a few "candidates" for me but I had my eye on one in particular -- a PC with a 4Mb video card. The sales rep looked at me and said, "I don't know why anyone would want to buy a machine with a video card at 4Mb -- There just isn't any use at all for that kind of memory on a video card!" Needless to say, 4Mb purdy much short changes any current video cards, and the newer cards do use the memory to great effect.
I thought about modding you up, because you are right that Tiger can actually use that much VRAM, but I don't see any indication that this card will work in a Mac.
Gaming performance is hardly missing the point. The title of the press release is "ATI's Radeon® X800 XL 512 MB Graphics Card Delivers Better Performance and Image Quality For Top Games"...
I'm sure ATI will bring a Mac edition of a 512MB card someday, but I don't think this is it.
As Apple has demonstrated, and Microsoft sometime or otherwill, moving the GUI rendering into the graphics card is an on-going process. So it's no surprise to see card vendors introducing products which they can dangle in front of the vendors and hope to have included in the build of a new system.
Graphics cards aren't JUST designed for games...although it's hard to believe from what you read here.
Of course we have games to thank for great graphics cards which have allowed for the GUI to move onto the cards.
But it sounds sexy, nontheless.
Ruby Neural Evolution of Augmenting Topologies
... from bying it. There's always tons of spoiled teenagers out there in tweaktown who HAS TO HAVE TEH LATEST SH1T!
This is the real reason why ATI even does such a werd-ass thing.
-Mommy, my penis is shrinking!
-Well son, let's get you a new videocard then!
That's just my opinion and experience of dealing with teenage computer users these days.
I enjoy large posteriors and I cannot prevaricate.
so we need to supplant the CPU at all? Why can't we have current PCs operate along the lines of the old Amiga computers? If I'm remembering correctly they had a dedicated graphics chip which handled all the system graphics calls so basically the CPU said "Hey, this isn't mine! GPU you handle it and then pass it back to me when you're done." That is one of the reasons the bouncing ball effect was so amazing on the Amiga 500. No other computer system at the time could pull off that effect without needing unholy amounts of graphics RAM and general RAM and still function for other things like accessing the desktop. I've said it before and I'll say it again, it seems we're heading back towards the Amiga scheme of how things are done: each component of the computer is 'smart' and handles its fuctions that are passed from the CPU which then handles everything that is passed back to it. The tighter we integrate system bus, video GPUs, CPUs, RAM, and drives the more it looks like an Amiga. Just my humble opinion...
Dream as if you'll live forever.
Live as if you'll die tomorrow.
~Anonymous~
Ok, maybe not....
Reaching the 128MB ceiling seems to have been easy for most games ... but don't be fooled ... 256MB cards are only faster because of better processor technology associated with them and because there can be a slight overflow or memory leak that may exceed 128MB
... at least for now ... and the apps and games that could take adavantage of such memory would require better GPUs to push the bandwidth anyway.
I don't see that ANY game or CAD or rendering engine could reach this ceiling
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
from the article(emphasis mine):
Today ATI is announcing their first 512MB graphics card - the Radeon X800 XL 512MB. Priced at $449, ATI's Radeon X800 XL 512MB is identical in every aspect to the X800 XL, with the obvious exception of its on-board memory size. The X800 XL 512MB is outfitted with twice as many memory devices as the 256MB version,but ATI is indicating that there's no drop in performance despite the increase in memory devices.
Wow, really? Thanks ATI.
so is now a good time to upgrade from my 16MB ATi Radeon All-In-Wonder?
Free MacMini
Sorry, but this seems rather unlikely. Do you really think Core Image is going to use more video ram than Doom3? And if it was such an amazing breakthrough for Core Image, why wouldn't ATI have advertised that at least a little? G-d knows they've got no reason anybody else can figure out for releasing specs for this particular card.
There is also the slight matter that ATI isn't even producing cards with 512mb of RAM, and their partners are not really people Apple does business with.
So, sorry, but your thesis doesn't seem to have any real support.
-Erwos
Plausible conjecture should not be misrepresented as proof positive.
That market drives the improvements made to the rest of the video cards.... Cutting edge spenders are a very profitable business, and gives a lot of this profit to R&D.....
My little site.
I for one have learned over the past many years not to ask the question: "What would you ever need all that for?" when it comes to computers.
See the Pictures of the Flood of '08
According to AnandTech, the 512MB card can't outperform its 256MB counterpart and costs 50% more.
Can that have anything to do with texture resolution not being there yet? They'll no doubt be there in the future though, so I can only see this as the first 512 MB card with more to come. I don't think it's really "bad", just a little bit ahead of its time.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Don't you hate slashdot when stuff starts repeating or REALLY old news get pitched as new stuff? And then you wonder why people don't really respect slashdot ...
I look at large large images in 'roam' mode on the screen, so that I can view a 25Kx25K (typical scan from a Leica scanner) image.
;)
These cards, with the specialized software, stuff quite nicely that image into the card memory, which allows my system to roam with a high end display.
Course, I don't know about *this* card, just others that have 512mb.
In fact, I did inquire with one manufacturer about upgrading a card to 1gb... talk about eyeballs popping
Marketing has made RAM the mean the same thing as horsepower in the auto industry.
People see a high horse power number, and they think that car will go faster. They don't relize that there are other factors.
Now here is the gotcha - Auto industry generally pushes horspower numbers when they tlak about speed. So if you see a commercial and it quotes horsepower numbers, you can bet it will be a faster vehical within the context of that vehicals class.
Yeards of consumer training by the Auto industry is now being used(abused??) by the computer industry.
At this point I am wondering if someone has actually read this far. I have my doubts, and will probably be modded informative becasue of my verbosity, and general ability to ramble on. Back on 02 we wore an onion on our belt because it was the fashion ot the time.BAck to the topic, the auto industry soes have it's little thing it brings out to bolster sales, but doesn't really do anything. case in point, the "hemi". Theortically sound, practically unproven, but most people thing "Hemi" = "Power".
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
The result after renaming the halflife executable is?
"Think about how Windows 3.1 managed to do it with maybe 50 windows at a time on a system with 4 megs of system ram, and barely enough video ram to store a frame buffer.
As far as I am concerned, "windowing technology" hasn't much advanced since Win 3.1."
It has advanced quite a bit, however you may not know where to look to see it. Compare how much programs in 3.1 did versus what they do now. Word didn't offer spell checking, grammar checking, and hosts of other goodies. Visual Studio didn't even exist (sic?).
Offloading graphical capabilities to the video card allows the windowing system to feel and act more responsivly. The RAM which used to be used for windowing can now be freed up, and used for other tasks. Things like the spell checking, speech recognition, compiling (especially compiling), graphical editing...
Also, compositing reduces the stress on your CPU immensely, and gives you a large amount of "free" capabilities. For instance, composited windows can be zoomed up or down with almost no work done by your CPU. Window transparency occurs seamlessly, and window refresh times are practically nil.
There is a good reason why you havn't noticed these benefits. You have to have a good eye to even see it. I would not have noticed myself if I hadn't been running a good graphics card on veritably ancient hardware (Nvidia 5800 on a Pentium 1.8 with 256 RAM, with all the bells and whistles on... plus I run KDE ;)
Furthermore, many of the features I noted above are just beginning (except in the case of Macs) to be implemented in windowing systems. So, a good reason why you havn't seen the advancement is because you are living it.
The future of window compositing looks even cooler. Pixel shaded desktops with real-time lighting & particle generators, true 3d effects (wobbly windows is an example), amongst other things which havn't even been considered yet. Granted, large portions of the above are eye-candy, but even eye-candy can be but to good use when applied creatively.
I hope this was enlightening :)
What the logic in comparing CoreImage with Doom3? The usage scenarios are completely different. For every window you open in Tiger, there's potentially more to send to the GPUs memory. Doom3 pretty much have a max depending on the amount of textures and stuff you can meaningfylly fit into one scene.
They call it i386 for a reason you know!
"If the vector operations which all that rendering must involve could be usefully offloaded to a videocard well-stocked with RAM however... our little company would buy dozens today."
Go to your OPTIONS menu, and under "Current 3D Graphics Display" you can switch from the normal software renderer to an acellerated driver based on what your video card is. This will allow your CPU to work harder on the database portion of your computer, and leave all the graphics processing to your GPU.
You're welcome.
when longhorn finally arrives, IF these cards are still available, they will be a reasonably priced upgrade for the new graphical requirements. i think this is an informative article.
It's a noticeable flaw, every 30 seconds. Doesn't matter if all you care about is "frames per second."
It isn't a "flaw", and my example (or transferring an entire 512MB) was purely rhetorical. Unless the programming is terrible, which I'm sure it isn't, realistically a couple of minute, microsecond transfers would be taking place continuously and transparently. I doubt it would be noticable at all to the user.
Probably they forgot to wire the extra money to the core?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
from buying anything with ATI stamped on it.
Hell, even their tuner cards are crap now. Better tuner cards (even the low-end PCI ones) can be had for cheaper.
No thanks. I'll keep my PNY nVidia-based GF4, even if it won't render all the 1337 high-end sparkly crap that you really don't need to have to play DooM III anyway. It's like hacing Dolby 5.1 on a PC.
Pfft. \/\/hatever.
"The reason is obvious: game designers target the prevalent market."
Any smart game designer targets the prevalent market at the time of release. Which may be after 2-5+ years of development.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
for 15 years.
OTOH, these people help create a market where I can get not quite the latest things that runs everythng fine for 100 bucks. so, go early adopters! or as my friend calls them, Morons!
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Actually, I know a lot of graduate students who will be really happy about this. It turns out that for a lot of research uses, 512 MB of ram would be really useful. Examples include 3D volume data-set visualization and general purpose GPU computations (GPGPU).
I don't know where ATI expects to make the money on this (certainly not that much $$$ in the research market), but I'm personally glad that they released this card.
The big question in my mind now is how good the cache performance is on this new card.
Impossible = A fun challenge
Mac OS X Tiger loves graphics RAM. Check out the Ars Technica article to understand why on a Mac, more VRAM is always better.
Not since Marie-Antoinette played milkmaid has looking simple and honest been so fake and complicated.
I'll admit I didn't bother reading 90% of the article, but:
If (and/or when) this card is available for OSX based Mac's, I'd be interested in seeing how it ran. I'm not sure how Windows does its graphics processing, but the Mac, with every point release, seems to push more and more processing to the graphics card, so that the CPU et al does less and less. Especially with Quartz 2D Extreme (not that it's actually ENABLED in 10.4), a ton of graphics memory seems to be used, if available.
-Daniel
Can I have it to upgrade my 8 meg card?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Do you really think Core Image is going to use more video ram than Doom3?
Yes. Read the arstechnia article about OS X's new desktop rendering system. Then think about how much information is stored on the video card for that to work. Then think about how the current effects are just scratching the surface.
My 128 meg card can handle it now for most things, but when I turn on a whole bunch of real-time effects it does get bogged down because it is forced to swap with system memory.
Since no one linked to a PR from ATI, do you know if they announced a Mac version of this card? I'm considering replacing my 64MB 9600 with one of these bad boys. I knew the 512MB cards were coming and was biding my time.
mbbac
Ars Technica has an excellent presentation of how Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger" uses VRAM to store graphics processing code, cached rasterizations, and window backing buffers. And, yes, I can see how this could easily consume much more VRAM than DOOM3 does.
Section 13: Quartz
Section 14: Quartz 2D Extreme
Section 15: Core Image
Although at first sight this card may have no use, think about Apple's Quartz technology that uses the graphics card video memory to hold all viewable window elements so that they can be rendered quickly and efficiently without requiring that data be paged in and out to real memory. With the new Longhorn graphics technology being announced this week, it's probably an emerging market that ATI want to take full advantage of. Plus the scientific applications stand to benefit (but I noticed somebody already mentioned this).
"Sorry about your penis... nice graphics card, though!"
It's people who want to be able to brag that "My graphics card has more memory than your whole PC!" at their next LAN party, and whose Moms are paying for everything anyway...
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
I bet that 64MB print server uses up $20 in electricity every month.
"my office computer is a Dual 2.8 Ghz P4 machine,"
:)
i doubt the accuracy of this statement. Especially since a dual p4 machine does not exsist.
you either have:
1) a new dual core EE cpu (unlikely)
2) A dual xeon server (more unlikely)
3) a normal p4 with hyperthreading (most probably)
just because it has two cpu bars in task manager does not mean you are running a dual system my friend.
the reason you dont see a difference between a p4 2.8 and an amd 1.4 is because the 1.4 is an AMD
put a p4 1.4 and a p4 2.8 together and you would see a big difference.
I'll just use my special getting high powers one more time...
VIA chipsets are very buggy and ATI's drivers also have issues. Neither of them put out timely firmware updates or drivers. It's best to avoid them both.
I read the Anand article and the card is only available for PCI Express right now. So, we've either got to wait for Apple to add PCI Express to the Power Mac (probably WWDC) or ATI to release this as an AGP part.
mbbac
Mine croaked more than two months ago, and I still haven't been able to get it replaced. First the ATI website wouldn't let me to the RMA page, then they wouldn't send me a RMA . . . it went on and on until I threatened legal action.
Finally they sent me a RMA and I returned the card. I'm still waiting for the replacement (and this whole thing started on March the 8th) and have long since replaced it with a Nvidia card. ATI won't be getting any more of my business, I don't care how good their cards are.
*rings dell* CSR: "hello my name is 'samuel' how can i help you build your system today?" You: "ummm i would like a P-10XL Next Generation Processor with 10 GB RAM overclocked with a DVDRW/CDRW/Holodeck drive" CSR: "ok and how much RAM would you like to go with your system?" You: "i think 2 GB should be enough, thanks!!" CSR: "..and thank you very much sir"
and a decent TV-Tuner (the ATI standalone tuners are great). Not trolling, but I've never had headaches from newer ATI cards (older cards with the bugs worked out seem fine, I've got a friend with a stock of Radeon 9200s that work great). Their hardware rocks, but their software sucks, bad. I'm just too lazy to fitz with drivers/firmware and whatnot until it all decides to work for the sake of $50 dollars saved and/or 10% performance (at the lower end, I've always been too cheap to buy the highend).
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
GeForce 4 MMX 440??
:)
MMX is for Intel Pentium (1).
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
How did you get MythTV to work with an ATI Radeon 9800 All-In-Wonder cards? The last time I checked said these cards we were not supported.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Hmm, you mean like this:
http://store.apple.com/1-800-MY-APPLE/WebObjects/
Forget about the HL2, Doom3 performance. What I want to know is if I spend the $500, does it make my pr0n any more detailed? :)
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Just because Windows can't find a better use for VRAM than holding DOOM3 textures doesn't mean that 's all it's good for. It turns out that if you do your entire UI in VRAM, having more VRAM dramatically reduces the load on your CPU and massively increases the OS's responsiveness...
Yes, my bet is that these cards are targeted at Apple and Tiger.
The reason that it can be true that 1+1 > 2 is that very peculiar nonzero value of the + operator
Things are getting somewhat out of hand as far as graphics cards. It seems like every 4-6 months there is a new line of cards out with slightly better specs in the 500 or so price range. I have a GeForce Ti4800 128mb and it runs all of my games, including doom3 and halflife two just fine. I'm not sure how people even justify the cost to them selves.
People that play Everquest II will be delighted to be able to play with all the video options turned up to 11 and still run well. MMOG's stand to gain a lot from the extra ram.
I'm not saying the cost is justified for just anyone, but if I played EQ II a *LOT* it might be. And in another year it will be a lot less expensive.
You know, that's a good point that I'd never really thought about. If setup A runs at 60fps for a minute, and setup B runs at 61fps for a minute but then pauses for a full second, then the mean framerate would be identical. Maybe we should start asking for standard deviation in benchmarks?
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Too much about cutting edge technology is about bragging rights that I've got the latest greatest whatever. Personally, I can't tell the difference between HL2 running at 100 fps or 200 fps, I'm a little more concerned with the game play itself. It all turns into a big pissing contest. Yeah sure, lots of hardware improvements are good, but I pity the poor fanboys who break the bank just to get something that's better than their friends.
Does it make sense to shell out tons of cash for a hardware product that'll be obsolete by the time the software that fully utilizes it is released?
It's the land of the brave, and the home of the free
Where the less you know, the better off you'll be.
Microsoft is recommending a 256MB video card for Longhorn, and that's just to handle Windows' own GUI. Now imagine what cutting edge games in 2007 will be like, and you won't want anything less than 512 MB. I'm glad 256MB cards are coming out now so that they'll be cheap by the time Longhorn is released.
To be fair a lot of gaming sites have been showing the minimum framerates in addition to the average framerate, for exactly this reason - two cards would yield the same average framerate over a 2 minute test session, yet one slowed to 5 fps over a period, while the other pushed through it at 30 fps.
800XL
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Also from the Ars Technica article - it stores lots of stuff beyond just window buffers, like all the graphics for buttons, and even pre-rendered fonts at various sizes. So if you were working with a lot of different windows and also using a lot of fonts and different controls, you could chew into VRAM pretty quickly.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
This should really improve the performance of my favorite game!
If I may say so, life is a game, and there's so much to do and so few turns.
-Reiner Knizia
Of course the games don't run any faster with extra video RAM. Why should it? There's a false analogy here with main RAM, which does tend to increase performance, but only because it reduces virtual memory thrashing. On a video card, there's no virtual memory to thrash. The purpose of that extra video ram is to allow game designers to create more detailed graphics. Existing games won't work any better, because they're not programmed to use this RAM. Future games will.
This gives me an idea--with the phat GPUs on modern video cards, it might be possible to implement Linux that runs ON your video card. Imagine, you could run Windows/MacOS and Linux simultaneously! Or recode the kernel in DX pixel shader language...my mind is atwirl with cascading torrents of effluvia...
512M is puny. You can't even visualize a 1000x1000x1000 voxel dataset on that. Let me know when we get over 2G on the card (1G voxels at 16bit floats each).
Michael
* I still regularly use a machine equipped with 128 MB of RAM...Linux works well on it, and even Win2k is fine as long as you don't load it down with too much crap
* The poster of this article seems astonished at having as much memory on the graphics card as on the motherboard. In the late 80s and into the early 90s this was commonplace: my first PC box was a real screamer--a 25 MHz 386DX with 1 MB RAM and a Trident SVGA card...also with 1 MB RAM so I could do a whopping 1024*768 with 256 colours. It had a gigantic 40MB drive too. At the time, more than 1MB ram was not really useful unless you used OS/2 or tinkered with Windows (this was just before Win 3.0 came out so Windows was next to useless). I believe other machines like Amiga could use as much memory for video as was available for the system as well.
* I decided I was getting old when I saw 800 and XL close together and thought "what does an old Atari machine have to do with this?"
Hmm, you mean like this: "Your session has timed out after a period of inactivity. Please return to the Store Menu to continue shopping."
Yes it is a waste if you are only doing one thing like just routing/IP Masq or jusst a print server, but if you have an old PC and know Linux or BSD you can do a lot more with it than a little box.
I have an older PC that is a print server too--except that it has a big hard drive so it is a good file server too...oh yeah it also is my email server, Samba domain controller and database server too. If you are playing with all that stuff you might as well throw a printer on it--one less "wall wart", one less device on the net to configure, etc etc.
Despite all the functions it does it is quite a modest computer--the PC that fills this role is generally made of leftover parts and it started life as a Pentium 120 with 32megs of RAM. I've upgraded it since but the only new function I added was to add Samba as a domain controller. It does create a bigger single point of failure but it is suitable for home or small office.
This card is intended for and marketed towards hard core gamers. If it had something to do with Tiger's release, it would have been worthy of mention and ATI would have mentioned it in their press release.
And on the link you provided, Apple used incorrect terminology. They call the memory on the video card "VRAM", which is incorrect. The video memory on all the cards they listed is SDRAM, none of those cards have VRAM. My old Diamond Stealth 64 VRAM had VRAM on it. VRAM is a particular type of specialized high-speed memory, not used much (if at all) anymore.
http://www.pcguide.com/ref/video/techVRAM-c.html
Don't confuse the video card's video memory with VRAM. They are not synonymous. I've had a card in the past that had VRAM, but most newer cards do not. Most use standard SDRAM.
http://www.pcguide.com/ref/video/techVRAM-c.html
"Note: Don't confuse VRAM with the generic term "video RAM" or "video memory", which just refer to the memory in the video subsystem in general."
PCI-X does not equal PCI Express. Horrible naming, but not as confusing as USB 2.0 & USB 2.0.
mbbac
No, your not so new as you think.
Have a look at that guy's slashdot profile. He's been trying to do that same joke for months now.
I guess like a good dork he will try the same one funny line you can think of over and over and over until it actually gets a laugh. And since this is slashdot, it is completely reflective of his sex life.
3DLabs cards have virtual memory for the video card today, same as we have had for system memory for years. Professional-level graphics cards have been doing this for a little while now. Whatever the gamers would have you believe, nVidia and ATI are actually behind the video technology curve.
So you are new, huh?
Then why have you been trying the same joke for months now?
Here are his recent posts.
1 success out of 24 attempts? I bet that reflects your sex life too.
I'd rather not drag Longhorn into this.
Well, it might be a bit worse than that. Is there any strong reason to believe a benchmark as simple as "frames per second" can accurately convey all the perceptible stuttering that might happen when you don't have enough texture memory (for example) in all cases?
Now before I get modded down, I be to remind whoever might read this that what I am saying is FACT. - bogaboga
I wonder how they are measuring. "Frames per second" implies that you are dividing the measured work into discrete seconds, which means a full second of no screen updates could be hidden if it spans second boundaries.
Which probably wouldn't happen, but maybe it helps illustrate the problem: stuttering is effectively reducing the rate at which the screen is updated to nil for a short period of time. "Frames per second" might bury the effect of that. Even if you look at something like the "minimum framerate" you won't necessarily have a handle on how many tiny, perceptible stutters are happening. None of them nearly as long as a second, but still long enough that the user will notice them.
Now before I get modded down, I be to remind whoever might read this that what I am saying is FACT. - bogaboga
Not necessarily. They could be taking the inverse "seconds per frame" on a per-frame basis, which should be reasonably accurate.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
" Sure, I didn't get the full effects of the games, but I still played them quite nicely performance-wise. "
Thats like asking a kid who has been blind since birth how he feels about no seeing anything for his whole life. Of course he doesn't miss what he never had. Until you experience a high end system displaying high end graphics, you can speak about how good or bad you old system is. You are 'blind' to what you have never seen. How can I explain what red looks like to a blind person? How can I explain what you are missing when you have never seen it yourself. I think your jaw might just drop when you see what these new cards can pump out when fully excercised.
hmmm apple benefits from the PC graphics card competition...
news at 11.
Science : Proprietary , Knowledge : Open Source
In the recent Ars Technica review of OS X Tiger, John Siracusa goes on and on about how future OSes (and currently Tiger) will render all the 2D windows/screen elements in the graphics card and that often times you need more memory on the card to handle everything on the screen. I bet ATI is just anticipating the need from current Apple hardware and Longhorn if they ever get the same system.
I just bought a dual 2.3 G5. The manual makes mention of an ATi X850, which would likely be Apple's moniker for an X800 with twice the RAM.
As mentioned above, Tiger is the place where huge amounts of video RAM can really be used. A fast VPU with 512 RAM would be especially helpful for Motion users with dual displays.
So no this might not be the thing for gaming, but I'd love to get an X850 for Motion, assuming it's still going to be released (maybe in June?)
The reason MMORPG's arent used for benchmarking is because, unlike most FPSs, you can't record a "demo" and then benchmark from that. The FPS demo files used for benchmarking ensure that no matter how many times you run the test, the computer is doing exactly the same thing - processing the levels from the exact same angles, the exact same number of objects, etc. You can't do that in MMORPGs, so you can't possibly have an accurate benchmark from one.
That said - I wish MMORPG developers would change that. How cool would it be to record that massive PVP raid for prosperity? =)
Well, even if it sucks in terms of actual performance, this should still be great for all the rich low-IQ pseudo-geeks who judge the worth of equipment on "Gigahertz", "Megapixels", and "Gigabytes", and say "XP Pro" like it's a good thing... :-p
On the other hand, though... with a resolution range of 640x480 to 2048x1536, it's only got 10.24X "digital zoom"...
Sometimes I crack myself up.
Yeah, I guess I was thinking more about how they must arrive at the "minimum frames per second" figure. I just have a hard time thinking of a way that could be a reliable figure.
Now before I get modded down, I be to remind whoever might read this that what I am saying is FACT. - bogaboga
Of course, this is the same Amiga that failed as a business machine because for all its bouncing ball goodness (1337), it couldn't actually display a decent quality page of 80 column text without your eyes falling out after half an hour.
I had one of the first A1000s in the UK, the pathetic sidecar (8086 or 8088 or some crap) and the hideously out of tune music because the sound system was sync'd to 50Hz instead of 60Hz like in the US.
Mind you it did get it all together eventually, but thank the gods of Open Source for linux, MPlayer, VLC etc. This is a better time now, than we had during the pre-internet Amiga days.
Oh, and the preview of OOo 1.95 ROCKS !!
This sounds perfect for one of my favorite 3D programs, Celestia. My current textures directory is 8.7g. I'm sure I could use that extra RAM for the 6.5g of that that makes up Earth.
They've been in reseller catalogues for weeks, and I saw them for sale in an Australian PC Mag.
Why do people post this shit? Are we at the cutting edge or what?
Aaron
It's OK Bender, there's no such thing as 2.
.....does it run on Linux. Better question would be. Can you install Linux on it?
I'm sorry, I'm to tired to be witty at the moment so this message will have to do.
http://septor.name/colby/bttv.html
Yeah, I know, installing Linux (and compiling a kernel) just to get around Macrovision is ridiculous, but if you're used to doing it it's nice that you can. I'm not a hacker by any stretch, but it's pretty easy to do this (especially if you're using your distro's kernel sources. You just make the change, do make bzImage and copy it over the old kernel). But yeah, it does suck. Cheap internal DVD players effectively solved the problem for me (I don't use VHS anymore, these days the only thing hooked up is a PS2 for games). And yeah, they probably should be required to at least mention Macrovision, since I'm sure lots of people buy tuners to capture old VHS.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
i have it on good grounds that this memory war will not matter as much in the future when ati releases cards that have the ability to upgrade the memory and gpu unit with replacement modules. so far as i know this is only in the planning/initial development stage, but it is something to look forward to. so in the future it may not matter if your card only came with 256 MB memory. you can upgrade it to more when games come out that need the added memory.
just like motherboards are like when you think about it.
Just convince them the "small penis" is really TeXas-sized.
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.