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ATI's 1GB Video Card
Signify writes "ATI recently released pics and info about it's upcoming FireGL V7350 graphics card. The card features 1GB of GDDR3 Memory and a workstation graphics accelerator. From the article: 'The high clock rates of these new graphics cards, combined with full 128-bit precision and extremely high levels of parallel processing, result in floating point processing power that exceeds a 3GHz Pentium processor by a staggering seven times, claims the company.'"
Why doesn't ATi (or nVidia for that matter) make CPUs?
They obviously could make some very powerful chips.
I pretend to know more than I really do by mooching off google and wikipedia.
it would be nice not having to purchase a top-notch CPU, GPU, and PPU (Physics Processing Unit) in the future, rolling the PPU and GPU together
3D Artists, Game Developers, Scientists who do three dimensional simulations, Weather forcasting models, Engineers who do real time simulations.
They're not really for gaming as much as they are for developing stuff.
I work a lot with the visualisation end of the market and recently have been working with NASA on the CEV project(s). Some models that we deal with are in the gigabyte file size just for the geometry for a single subassembly. This card would make viewing some of these things far easier as you can preprocess and schlepp almost all the geometry to the video card as a VBO and never have to pass it over the bus again. Makes for tremendous performance gains.
Life is complete only for brief intervals in between toys or projects -- John Dalton
Try rendering medical image data as a 3D texture (well three textures actually, one for each primary image). With 300 images, 256KB per image, x3 textures, that comes out to 225MB just for the textures. I deal with datasets like these routinely, and more video memory is a welcome development.
As a fellow Pro/ENGINEER user this is not my experience. What version are you using and how big are your models? The latest version is a hog (as always). I can't imagine using it on an old Dell with a FireGL and doing anything very complicated. I have to admit I'm not a fan of ATI cards, their OpenGL support seems to be very flaky. But I like the larger memory on these new cards and the price is good. Price wise this card would seem to compare favorably to a top model WildCat Realizm or a top model nVidia Quadro.
That's 1GB of unified memory, so less than 1GB is available for textures ; (
... etc.) so I couldn't resist blabbing about high-end kit that's off topic.
It took them long enough; this is definitely the direction to go.
Almost 4 years ago Silicon Graphics gave a final revision hurrah to their best graphics product: InfiniteReality. A pipe sported 1GB dedicated texture memory, 10GB of frame buffer memory, 8 channels per pipe, and 192GB/s internal memory bandwidth.
And an Onyx system could have up to 16 pipes! That's 8.3M pixels per pipe, or 133M pixels from a full system! And all in 48-bit RGBA. And those are just the raw numbers, there were a great many high end features only found on InfiniteReality. Don't ask what it costs ; )
Sorry for the passionate post. It seems that Slashdot is very PC-ish and narrow in its viewpoint (Imagine a Beouwolf of... Can it run Doom3
I've had the pleasure of using a small Onyx system. Too bad SGI is dead dead dead. Still they provide a good target for everyone to shoot for. Some day the above power will be available for a few hundred dollars for the average person. Though I think it will be atleast 5 years before the quality and features of InfiniteReality4 are at a consumer level. And never will we have workstations like SGI's again ; (