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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"
Hmmm This might mod my Vista User Experience Index up to 3.0
The game.
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.
Yeah, this is why I'm waiting before upgrading my computer. I need to see better 64 bit support in the future. I always plan on doubling everything at next major upgrade. From 2GB -> 4GB, 2 cores -> 4 cores. Until there is an operating system and application support though, I don't think I'm going to go there.
Maybe in a direct x 8.1 rendering path. No way youre getting consistant 80+ fps playing tf2 or other directx 10 capable games.
Viral software licensing is not freedom, it is in fact GNU/Socialism.
That's great. No. Really!
I'm not talking about an XBox. I'm talking about a PC.
An XBox has half a gig of memory, half of which is dedicated to graphics at a relatively low-res output.
I'm talking about a gaming PC with 2+GB of RAM in it and how graphics cards with multiple gigs of memory are detrimental to overall system performance (including gaming) in a 32-bit memory map.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
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.
Well, you can use it to speed up swapping a little: http://gentoo-wiki.com/TIP_Use_memory_on_video_card_as_swap