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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."
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.
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Your mobo does not have a VIA chipset does it? There is a known problem with 9700/9800 and some via chipsets (and both via and ati keep pointing fingers at each other)
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.
Otherwise you get hitching in scenes when Doom 3 needs to swap out that amount of data quickly for another batch of data (opening doors, switching from rendering level to reading the PDA, etc) because it will be moving data from the AGP memory cache from the main system memory bank.
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.
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
The extra memory is to keep the CPU from having to busy itself writing graphics to backing-stores in the RAM.
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http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/macosx-10.4.ars
Actually, Mac OS X 10.4 might be one of the only places where this might make sense. From reading the ArsTechnica article recently linked here, one of the most important points of speedup on OS X is to move all the graphics work to the graphics card. It sounds like at this point there is several levels of graphics process work being stored at the graphics card, with more loaded on as more levels are available.
Then again, unless you are tiling dozens of transparent movies, you probably won't notice this level of overkill.
'Sensible' is a curse word.
Well, both HL2 and Doom 3 had renderers for old versions of DirectX. Some people even managed to run Doom 3 on Voodoo 2. Yes, any graphics card can probably handle the levels and the characters moving around. You don't need an X800 for that. But if you don't mind low-res textures, low-poly models, no bump, no shadows, no dynamic lighting, then you will be essentially playing something only slightly better than Quake 2 and Half-Life. What's the point? I probably can also watch video on a 386 (an MPEG1 in a 160x120 window), but is it the same as watching High Definition DivX?
Good videocards allow better image quality in games. If you don't need better image quality, that's fine, but most people disagree with you.
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