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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
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.
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.
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
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
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.
Next step: Turning the old 386 into a MythTV based PVR.
Best Slashdot Co
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.
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
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.
... 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.
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
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
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 :)
They call it i386 for a reason you know!
Probably they forgot to wire the extra money to the core?
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
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.
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).
"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...
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
Hmm, you mean like this: "Your session has timed out after a period of inactivity. Please return to the Store Menu to continue shopping."
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.
It's not this way anymore, but it used to be a big deal because your desktop size and color depth were limited by your video ram.
I don't play games and rarely do 3D stuff (occasionally work in wings3d, and that's been very recently). But back when I put this system together, I went out and bought a 64M radeon. Why? I run my desktop at 1600x1200 at 24 bit color, and that eats a lot of video ram.
Of course, nowdays it doesn't matter - anything more than 64 megs is a waste on me. But I can remember when we put the best video card in the house - a matrox mystique with 2M - into the alpha along with the best monitor (a 15") so I could run the gimp remotely and be able to get a decent resolution and set of colors.
Those who can't do, teach. Those who can't teach either, do tech support.