Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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
... 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.
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. -
They call it i386 for a reason you know!
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
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).