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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."
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
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.
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.
I might aggree with you except if I'm going to sink money into a new graphics card it might as well be pci express so I can use it when I build a new computer. But the computer I have right now just has AGP, and I'm sure by the time I'm ready to build a new computer anything I got today would be somwhat outdated anyway. I think what I'm trying to say is that unless you can afford to keep up with the gfx card market, what's the point? Just find something reliable and decent and stick with it. The market is just changing too rapidly...at least for my budget.
Why can't more people think like the parent?? I really, really don't get it. While I like my games to look good, I am really fine with my system as it is. Are you ready for this, everyone? It's a 1.4 Ghz AMD, 512 MB DDR and a (gasp) GeForce 4 MMX 440! It ran Doom3 and HL2 quite well. Sure, I didn't get the full effects of the games, but I still played them quite nicely performance-wise.
On a side note, my office computer is a Dual 2.8 Ghz P4 machine, and I don't see a difference in normal day-today office stuff. Hell, my olf 400 Mhz. G3 laptop is just as capable as my Office machine for 95% of the work that I do. All those guys out there dropping $500 every 6 months on new cards are not showing their muscle under the hood, but rather their lack of brains. Or their large quantity of spending cash, due to the fact that they still live at home. (I'm totally getting flamed for that last comment, but that's cool)
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.
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
Shhhhh!
We should thank these people that are willing to pay for the bleeding edge graphics performance. They enable us to pay bottom dollar for yesterdays technology that performs 90% as well.
You do not have to understand a performance enthusiast to benefit from their pocketbook.
"He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep in order to gain what he cannot lose."
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
Phew, at least someone said it.
I see a lot of really sour posts on this one about how it's stupid, ridiculous, how a P3 500 is just fine, how last year's game runs great..
They say it costs twice as much but only helps one game? Then I say it's a sign of things to come. They've said this same crap about 3D video board memory for years. "You don't need 64MB!!!" "You'll never use 128!!" "256? You're stupid!"
If the video boards all have gobs of memory, then the games will all start to have gobs of high resolution, bump mapped, great looking textures. Why is this a bad thing? When the next generation of games hits the shelves in a year or so, they'll use that video memory.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
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).
There are already cards with a lot of onboard memory made for these sorts of applications. Both NVIDIA and ATI have been making workstation class cards for ages that come with loads of onboard memory.
This card is supposed to be a gamers card as its optimized for such things. Workstation cards are the opposite, most of them perform poorly on games even though their specs may lead one to believe otherwise.