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ATI's 1GB Video Card

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the choke-on-the-price dept.

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.'"

4 of 273 comments (clear)

  1. use as a cpu? by Toba82 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.
  2. follow Nvidia into Physics? by arjovenzia · · Score: 5, Interesting
    With all that beef behind them, i sure hope they will follow Nvidia (i actually have no doubt that they will) in offloading physics to the GPU. http://www.rojakpot.com/showarticle.aspx?artno=303 &pgno=0

    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

  3. 256 MB is small by emarkp · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  4. Finally! by LookoutforChris · · Score: 5, Interesting

    That's 1GB of unified memory, so less than 1GB is available for textures ; (

    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 ... etc.) so I couldn't resist blabbing about high-end kit that's off topic.

    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 ; (