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."

Comments

Some of your computers don't have 512 megs?

[Anonymous Coward]

And you have the nerve to submit articles to Slashdot?

Re:Some of your computers don't have 512 megs?

[acvh]

Why?

I have a Pentium PC with 64MB that functions as a print server so effectively that I never see it.

Lots of RAM does not make up for a small penis.

Nor, apparently, does it make up for mediocre video processing. But, there is a market for this, just as there is a market for spoilers that mount on Chevy Cavaliers or Honda Preludes.

Re:Some of your computers don't have 512 megs?

[meringuoid]

You're new here, aren't you?

This is Slashdot. This is where people dig up antediluvian machines and install Linux on them out of pure masochism. I'll bet you anything you like that at least three people will follow up this post to confirm that they're installing Gentoo on an old 486DX/33 and that they're expecting it to finish compiling and be able to start up X in just another week or two...

Re:Some of your computers don't have 512 megs?

[itchy92]

I don't think he's new; I've seen him posting on here for quite some time.

And apparently he created his account before UIDs were implemented, so...

How about a focus on quality?

[ackthpt]

he 512MB card can't outperform its 256MB counterpart and costs 50% more.

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.

Re:How about a focus on quality?

[bfischer]

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)

out of hand

[Kaamoss]

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.

Re:out of hand

[TrippTDF]

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)

Re:out of hand

[DoubleD]

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.

it's funny.. laugh..

[Fry-kun]

sounds like the author could use this little gem: http://kerneltrap.org/node/143 :)

Chicken and egg

[ergo98]

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...".

Scientific Applications

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Probably has something to do with the Tiger releas

[ivan256]

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.

Possibly it will be used on the Mac

[Space cowboy]

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

Compositing Window Managers

[wowbagger]

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.)