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AMD-ATI Ships Radeon 2900 XT With 1GB Memory
MojoKid writes "Prior to AMD-ATI's Radeon HD 2000 series introduction, rumors circulated regarding an ultra-high clocked ATI R600-based card, that featured a large 1GB frame buffer. Some even went so far as to say the GPU would be clocked near 1GHz. When the R600 arrived in the form of the Radeon HD 2900 XT, it was outfitted with 'only' 512MB of frame buffer memory and its GPU and memory clock speeds didn't come close to the numbers in those early rumors. Some of AMD's partners, however, have since decided to introduce R600-based products that do feature 1GB frame buffers, like the Diamond Viper HD 2900 XT 1GB in both single-card and CrossFire configurations. At 2GHz DDR, the memory on the card is also clocked higher than AMD's reference designs but the GPU remains clocked at 742MHz"
Does it run (on) Linux yet?
When the R600 arrived in the form of the Radeon HD 2900 XT, it was outfitted with 'only' 512MB of frame buffer memory and its GPU and memory clock speeds didn't come close to the numbers in those early rumors.
Well, that's because when they tried to build the 1GB units, a loud voice was heard saying "We require more minerals", and production was blocked.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
These cards are ridiculous. ESPECIALLY in Crossfire installs.
Wow! Now that 4GB of main system memory I installed has been pared back down to a more manageable 2GB!
WHEE!
Until 64-bit becomes more mainstream, cards like this will only become more and more detrimental to the systems they're installed in.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Hmmm This might mod my Vista User Experience Index up to 3.0
The game.
With this new hardware, will be able to run vim with some colors for syntax highlighting? :)
Unless you are running quad 32" screens at some insane resolution, there is no need for 1 GB of frame buffer RAM. I think this is more for the "OMG MI VIF CARD HAZ 1 GIGGBYTES OF MEMORYIES!11!" type.
622677120
Sounds useful for 3D animation work, where you need all that memory for textures. Remember, by the time players see a game, the textures have been "optimized"; stored at the minimum resolution that will do the job, and possibly with level of detail processing in the game engine. Developers and artists need to work with that data in its original, high-resolution form.
Question. Where are the ships? I wanted to read about video cards and ships. This article only half-delivers.
There is simply too much glass..
XBox 360 has quarter a gig of "framebuffer memory". So this is really not a big deal, since you really want a good card for next-gen development.
Umm, not to sound like a tech jargon-nazi, but "frame buffer" to me has always meant just the part of video ram that "mirrors" what you see on screen. A 1GB frame buffer would give you 16384x16384x32bit color, so unless you're doing some kind of huge multi-screen setup, 1GB of frame buffer is a bit overkill. ;)
-chris
I understand if you were doing research of any sort that would exploit this hardware - assuming you use ALL of it or can write the code to do so - the better bandwidth you have, the faster the results etc. I understand hardware like this being useful in this regard. I also understand it from the perspective of a software developer who may be developing with this hardware for a future product that will be released in a year or so, and this sort of hardware will be more standard at that time and affordable. But I am sort of baffled by people who spend hundreds upon hundreds of dollars for something that they will not use the bandwidth for until next year or later and then the thing will be down in price anyway. Its like buying terabytes of drive space, but then only filling the drive up after a year or two. I am sure that people are thinking that they actually use this stuff fully NOW, but I have to wonder if most of it is to play games with a slightly better resolution but a "lesser" card could have solved that immediate problem. Personally I think its silly to spend so much to play a $60 game, but I understand that it is a hobby and I am not necessarily criticizing that particular form of madness. I guess I am asking if folks have a practical and immediate need for this with software that is out today and that they personally use every day. I know scalability is built into most games and things, but that seems to be arrow relative to the difference in price between this sort of hardware and what is commonly available outside of specialized apps that demonstrably improve when given more powerful hardware now.
Hopefully, it will run well under Linux in the near future given AMD's recent actions. As was covered previously on here, AMD has already release quite a bit of detail to improve Linux support. http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/09/24/053252
Do the math. You don't need anywhere near 1Gb for that.
...and medical people who like to look at 3D textures from MRI scans - they can never get enough video memory. 1Gb is only enough for a single 512x512x512 texture.
What you *do* need it for is texture and vertex data, but even then games aren't really going to use it - they're designed for current hardware.
Nope, the only people who'll buy this are ignorants with too much money*.
- Not that there's any shortage of those.
[*]
No sig today...
Maivi
The memory on a video card is used for more than just simple frame buffering.
Notice how some of the newer games see less performance degradation on some of the 640MB nVidia cards than equivallently clocked 320MB versions of the same card.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
When most of that memory is unused (when you're not playing a game), I wonder if it were possible to use that as disk cache?
The mobo will be a giant video card and the cpu will reside in a board on one of the slots.
I was just wondering, since before games often used system RAM when the graphics RAM was full, do any of you think it would be possible to go the opposite way, i.e. use gfx ram as system ram? It's a lot faster, and when you're just sitting there outside of a game it's not doing anything. Ultra-fast system cache ftw? Or am I just crazy? Is PCI-e too slow for that kind of stuff? Maybe with Vista's new driver model that allows GPU virtualization something like this could become true, but I really have no idea of the technical details involved in doing something of this nature,
All your base are belong to Wii.
I have such a 1GB model from PowerColor for 2 months now and since the last linux driver release, it runs flawlessly there too. Slashdot, late as always :/
It was my understanding that ATI hardware was fine- it was the drivers that made it inferior to nVidia for performance gaming. Which would mean that if ATI and nVidia drivers were equal, ATI would win with hardware. On a side note, is it Nvidia, nVidia, or safely nVIDIA like on the website?
Do not attribute to malice that which can be easily explained by incompetence.
If enough people will pay for it to create a sustainable market, it's needed (period). Not to mention I hear what sounds like and assumption that this is going to be targeted at the enthusiast market, side-stepping the high-end (and high-cost) graphics shops and their associated market. Unless we assumed Pixar ran all their workstations on...pixie dust?
Anyway, if it finds a markets more power. Engineers do their jobs, people get paid. Welcome the open market. (:
Quack, quack.
Going once ...going twice....I need 2Gbytes to 4Gbytes video card :D
Note to self: do not feed trolls; more come over to see what's up...
Do not attribute to malice that which can be easily explained by incompetence.
All these years later, and its still no match for the original Bitchin' fast 3d! 2000 Livin' la Video loca con Puerto Para Garficios Acelerados Gigante!
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.slashdot.org Errors found while checking this document as HTML5!
When will they release their promised 3d specifications for their GPUs?
Seriously though, we're already seeing problems with PSU's that can't deliver enough on the 12volt rail (2900XT needs 24 Amps by itself) and now they want to push that up to 26-28 amps? So where is the power going to come from? The wicked fairy's curse?
Mod me up/Mod me down: I wont frown as I've no crown
Considering how much address space MMIO takes up in Windows 32-bit OS's, One can only imagine some poor sap buying two of these and wondering why he only has 1.8GB of RAM available in Windows.
"lawl"
How about one of these?
No sig today...
Frame buffers will only take a fraction of that gibibyte. Sure they'll take plenty if you are triple-buffering with FP32/component pixels, but still the vast majority of that on-card memory pool goes to local storage of textures; in comparison a minority goes to shader programs, frame buffers and the Z/Stencil buffer.
So please have some clue when posting hardware stuff on a fairly popular tech-oriented site... Technical terms aren't freely interchangeable, you know, because they are, you know, technical terms.
Sorry, surely I'm missing something, I have been running a HD2900XT 1GB (by Powercolor) for about 2 months now...
They themselves have recommended "NVIDIA" for some time, but since it's never been an acronym, "Nvidia" makes most sense. Let's not succumb to their corporate perversions of age-old spelling conventions... Otherwise it gets like the way ATI has SMARTSHADER technology enabled by their CATALYST drivers ;-P
Someone explain this to me -- I thought one of the strong points of the PCI Express bus means that, technically, a PCIe graphics card's memory is limited only by your own computer's memory, that it doesn't have to exclusively rely on its own RAM to hold textures, etc.
N/T
At some point, if they want me to keep buying new video cards, they are going to have to upgrade my eyes. Elder Scrolls V will look better than Christmas morning; but watching movies in the theater will be all choppy and hard to hear. And setting up SLi will be even more painful than it was the first time.
Imagine a beowulf cluster of these... Actually, with ATI's CTM technology which allows these to be used as stream processors, you could get alot of math done with a couple of these.
A 32bit OS can only address 4GB of RAM. If you have 1GB of video memory, that eats up 1GB of the 4GB limit, so yes, 2 1GB cards would halve the total amount of ram available to the system. That is with any cards, weather it's one card or 2 in Crossfire or SLI.
A good article on it is here: http://www.dansdata.com/askdan00015.htm