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AMD-ATI Ships Radeon 2900 XT With 1GB Memory

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the shiny-happy-hardware-holding-hands dept.

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"

6 of 132 comments (clear)

  1. Useful for 3D animation work. by Animats · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  2. Re:Useless! by DigiShaman · · Score: 3, Informative

    It's not just for frame buffering. That memory is also used to store texture maps, Z-buffers, stencil buffers, etc. Basically, Almost all of it is used for 3D games/applications. If all you needed was a 2D card, you could get away with just 64MB of on-board RAM.

    --
    Life is not for the lazy.
  3. Frame buffer? You mean video ram? by chrisl456 · · Score: 5, Informative

    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
  4. Re:Useless! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    You do realize that texture size is completely independent of screen resolution right? And that you possibly have hundreds of textures loaded at once? And they can't be stored compressed because decompression would take too long?

    Basically, other than the framebuffer for what's actually displayed on screen none of the graphics card memory is depended on screen resolution.

    Anyway, this card isn't useful *now*. That's because video game producers target the cards that are widely available. 2 years from now you're going to need *at least* 1GB to run games at their max settings.

  5. That could be viewed as a serious question by MSRedfox · · Score: 3, Informative

    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

  6. Re:But... by tux_deamon · · Score: 3, Informative

    I know you're kidding, but as a matter of fact, it is supported under Linux by a couple different drivers.

    A good review of the 2900 XT under LinuxIn fact, you have options.

    Using the proprietary driver

    Using the open source driver