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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."
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.
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"?
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
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.
If it's not a motherboard chipset conflict, try pointing an extra fan at it.
:-)
I had a Geforce 4Ti which suffered from nasty screen corruption in some games, which was fixed with the aid of a CPU fan from a 486 blowing air in the general direction of the graphics card.
Yeah, high tech, I know. Even better - said fan was held in place with a mounting bracket from a 386's hard disk.
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
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
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
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!
I'd make sure that puppy is cooled VERY well. I had a lot of problems with mine (9800 pro w/128MB) due to heat issues. Even blew the crap out of my first one.
I put two case fans in mine (intake at the front, outtake at the rear, and changed my power supply to an enermax (with yet another fan). This stopped all my problems (nForce2 board Asus - a78nx with an AMD 2800+ cpu). A friend has basically the same configuration and was having problems as well until he added more cooling.
I've talked to techs who repair a lot of machines in retail (yes, I can do tech too, but don't nearly have the volume of these people), and they say they would never recommend putting in any video card of this caliber without these precautions as well.
If I can't smoke and swear I'm fucked.
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
On my todo list is to tap into the 5V of my old laser printer and put the print server on the printer's power supply. I also use X-10 equipment, the power stuff bought long before their annoying Internet campaigns for those damn cameras. In that fashion I can further reduce the standby power consumption. The printer's duty cycle is very, very low on an annual basis.
So, unless you live in some sort of a situation that provides power as part of your rent or such and don't really care about overall societal power consumption, you might want to carefully consider your printer server configuration.
All my previous sigs now look like this one, I wish they were permanetly recorded when used.
I personally think ATI is horrible when it comes to support and especially when it comes to writing reliable drivers.
I decided about two years ago to purchase a Radeon 9800 with 256 MB when it first came out. I had to order it overseas it was so new. However, the graphics drivers suck. I see more artifacting than I ever have before. The same thing happens on my laptop which has a radeon 9600. It has to be ATI and not the games because the artifacting happens in every graphical application.
It's the last time I ever make the mistake of buying an ATI card over NVIDIA. I had a GeForce3 before the 9800 and it ran absolutely perfectly. The only reason I didn't go with NVIDIA this time was because their card took up 2 slots in my PC. I'm not supporting that either. If your card can't take up only one slot, what good is it?
And don't get me started on linux support from ATI. There was a period of about 1-2 months in the fall where the ati proprietary drivers caused X.org 6.8 to crash. 2 months to fix a major bug? Screw them.
With my brother's, my mom's, and my own computers all running 24/7 w/o any common household appliances(AC, Heat, etc.) being run daily, we were up to around 1.8 to 2.1kWh a month. That's a lot of power. We live on the west coast, so our power company likes to charge for electricity like the IRS likes to charge taxes. We were in probably the upper-quartile in terms of power consumption, with three computers running. The only place I can think of where that wouldnt be a problem is if you didnt own your own home, and even then, the landlord would probably raise the rent when he found out how much of a draw we were.
SRSLY.
I once had Linux running on a 4MB 386SX/16. I wanted to run one block of distributed.net, just so I could get the bottom entry in their stats page, but worked out after a while that it would take about three months.
Alas, I don't have that any more; my bottom-end 386 laptop is a 386SX/16 with 2MB, which isn't enough to run any Linux (usefully). It will run Minix, however, which prods buttock like nobody's business, and will recompile its kernel in 15 seconds. Alas, that laptop doesn't have any networking capabilities, otherwise I'd run a server on it, purely out of principle.
My current lowest-spec machine is an Amstrad NC200 laptop. 128kB of RAM upgradable to 1152kB; 720kB FDD; a beautiful keyboard with 480x128 mono screen; and the processor is a Z80 at, I think, 4MHz... it runs a custom Amstrad OS, but there is a CP/M port. One day I want to port UZI.
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.
9700/9800's do have serious quality control issues. I bought a 9700 close to two years ago here's its true actual story,
1st one > would start drawing artifacts on the screen about 30 seconds into the game.
2nd one > worked great for a week, then it started corrupting textures, and vectors (wierd protrusions would pop out of walls etc) and in 2d mode the fonts would look all sparkly, and when you typed the sparkles would change.
3rd one > DOA - didn't post at all
4th one > DOA - also didn't post at all
5th one > Its almost been a year since I bought this card. This time I sent a letter with the 4th one stating that I would never buy another ATI video card every again, and that I had bought a Nvidia 6800GT (it has never drawn one pixel incorrectly no matter how much load I put on it - works great - and I would stake my reputation against them) and they could take their sweet time to send me a card that worked perfectly fine.
They must have read that letter because like two months later (compared to a few weeks for the previous cards). I got a card that worked flawlessly - no artifacts no font corruption, nothing but perfection. I promptly sold it to some buyer in Australia on Ebay.
And before anyone accuses me of having crappy hardware. These cards I tested on a myriad of different machines (as an example I took each card to friend's pc's to have them test) including Athlon's with nforce/via chipsets and Intel P4/P3 with Intel chipsets. I even bought all new Kingston memory for my own desktop because I thought that was the issue at first - that same memory is in my current machine and works perfectly. I can't remember the last time I saw a BSOD in windows - seriously.
It is pretty neat for things that do not have a constant draw, like refrigerators, etc. in that it accumulates kWh from the time it is plugged in.
However, it is probably just a typo but if you really were running only 1.8 - 2.1 kWh _per month_ than you would be beating the hell out of 99.99% percent of the "developed" world. Might those units supposed to have been just kW instead of kWh?
All my previous sigs now look like this one, I wish they were permanetly recorded when used.
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
" 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.